Haiku Book Review - Rocket Man by William Elliott Hazelgrove

A well written book,
Tale of suburban ennui.
I quite liked this book.

Look Who's Been Knighted

How did I miss this news. Sir Terry Pratchett, how awesome is that (and if you don't know how awesome that is, then you clearly haven't read any of the Discworld books, so you should get right on that)?

Of course, the article isn't all good news. Apparently Sir Terry was recently diagnosed with a form of early-onset Alzheimer's (another bit of news that I appear to have missed).

So, to recap: Ridiculously happy about knighthood but very sad about the Alzheimer's.

Figurative Language

There's a sixth grader I tutor some evenings and tonight we were reading a book for his reading homework. The book was "Bridge to Terabithia," and there was a line I came across tonight that caught my eye:

Jess drew the way some people drank whiskey.

It's a nice line. I'm actually a little jealous of it to be honest. However, this is a book aimed at kids, so I question the appropriateness of it. Don't get me wrong, my questioning doesn't stem from the line refering to alcohol. Kids know what whiskey is, talking about it is no big deal. What I wonder, though, is how many kids can really decode this particular metaphor; hopefully there aren't too many of them that are whiskey drinkers.

Honestly, not being a whiskey drinker myself, I'm not sure I understand what it means. How can the way someone draws be like drinking whiskey? Any whiskey drinkers out there want to help me out?

A Word From Our Sponsors

Well, not really. I don't actually have any sponsors. I wish I had sponsors. For that matter, I wish I had a large enough audience to justify a sponsor.

LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!

Sigh.

At any rate, I do want to plug something. There's a site I've been using called BookMooch that I adore. Basically, the site facilitates the swapping of books between users. Here, I'll let the founder explain:



Cool, huh? So, why am I bringing it up here? Well, I've got a few credits burning a hole in my account, but despite the large selection of books already available, I'm having trouble finding books to mooch. The books I know I want to read are just too damn popular (and other users seem to be faster on the mooch than I am).

My hopes are two-fold. First, if I can get more people signing up and adding books, maybe I can catch one of the ones I've been looking for. Second, maybe some folks here will be good enough to recommend some books for me to look for over on BookMooch that I haven't thought of.

So, you've got your orders, now get to it.

Review: Franklin and Lucy by Joseph E. Persico

I've always found Franklin Roosevelt to be the most interesting of our former presidents. He presided over not one, but two national crises (the Depression and World War II), was elected to an unprecedented four terms, was a powerful and inspiring speaker, and he did all of this while concealing the fact that he was crippled as a result of a bout with polio. In Franklin and Lucy, Joseph Parsico looks at FDR's relationships with the women in his life. This, of course, includes his mother, his wife, and his eldest daughter, Anna, but equally important to him it seems was Lucy Rutherford. Persico, through the use of letters and other documents, that theirs was clearly an affair of the heart even if it is unclear if there was every any physical infidelity. It would be easy to judge Roosevelt harshly for the long term relationship he had with Lucy, and certainly the hurt he caused Eleanor was unconscionable, but Persico doesn't offer us any villains in this story, just human beings with the regular compliment of needs and foibles. It just so happens that two of these human beings, Franklin and Eleanor, were major historical figures. That's really the strength of this book, the way it depicts the Roosevelts, for all their power and influence and greatness, as people and not the icons they've become. I'm left wondering, if Eleanor had found happiness in her marriage, would she have been half as accomplished a person as she ultimately was? What of Franklin? Persico does a fair job exploring why FDR needed the other women in his life, that Eleanor, while being an ideal match intellectually, was incapable of providing him with the emotional nourishment that he needed, but for as much genuine affection as he shows to Lucy and others such as Missy LeHand (sometimes called his "surrogate spouse), there's also a selfishness to it all, he doesn't seem to be able to give all that much back. Does he get a pass, as some quoted in the book seem willing to give him, because of the suffering he endured or the great pressure he was under? It's not for me to judge, but it was certainly interesting to read about.

The Vast Wasteland

So, it was 3 am the other night (or morning, whatever) and I was still awake, my mind still winding down from the day. I wasn't quite ready to go to sleep, but I wasn't up to start working on anything productive that would keep me up until dawn either. That left me with one option...TV. However, at 3 am I found my choices severely limited. Unless I wanted to watch an infomercial for "male enhancement" products (same infomercial on six different channels, I hope someone's alerted the CDC about this apparent epidemic of need for "enhancement", sounds like a public health disaster in the making), my only choices were a soul-killing dating show on MTV or an author discussing his new book on the Bush administration on C-SPAN. Naturally, I picked the dating show.

After a couple of minutes, though, I could feel my brain cells committing suicide in protest, so I switched back to C-SPAN. The book in question is titled "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder." Cheery title, eh? The author, a former prosecutor, suggests that President Bush can be tried for the murders of all the American troops that have died in Iraq. You can find more information at the book's website here.

He makes a novel argument, but ultimately trying to suggest that the President is guilty of murder for exercising his power as Commander in Chief is foolish and unhelpful. Admittedly, the current administration has used the role of Commander in Chief as a justification to ignore any laws or conventions that it finds inconvenient, but that's precisely why the overblown rhetoric of a book like this drives me up the wall. There is plenty to criticize with how this administration went to war, but an accusation of murder is overreaching and distracts from legitimate criticism. It just seems like more of the trend of politics as bloodsport, and that doesn't do anything to make the country better, it just drags us all down into the dirt.

Admittedly, putting the word "Murder" in the title is certainly sexier than a more reasonable title involving words like "Misled" or "Incompetent", so I'm sure it will sell well to the angry left.

Historical Trivia

I've been reading a book about FDR recently (Franklin and Lucy by Joseph E. Persico). It's a very interesting book as a whole, but my eye was caught by a tiny piece of trivia that was mentioned in passing and not particularly important, but it was something that I had never known before. Apparently FDR had a miniature pig collection. That just blows my mind. Sometimes it's easy to forget that these larger than life historical figures, like Roosevelt, were people and had the usual human compliment of quirks, like collecting pig miniatures.

Book Review: The Translator by Daoud Hari

I received an advance reader's copy of the book The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's Program, and in the spirit of the program posted the following review on my LibraryThing account:

I'm at a bit of a loss for words to talk about The Translator. I could say that it is moving, powerful, and deeply personal, all of which is true, but those words all feel a little cliched, and don't adequately describe what makes this book so special. Reading this book felt different than most other reading experiences that I've had; Daoud Hari's style made it feel like we were having a conversation, and that, it seems to me, is memoir in its purest form. The skill of the writing coupled with the importance of the subject matter make this book an essential read.