Dave's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 28 Sep 2024 07:46:41 -0700 60 Dave's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Beach House 17998541 6 Chuck Grossart 1301929174 Dave 5 3.72 2012 Beach House
author: Chuck Grossart
name: Dave
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2014/12/26
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Feed the Bear 17998526 6 Chuck Grossart 1301528323 Dave 4 4.19 Feed the Bear
author: Chuck Grossart
name: Dave
average rating: 4.19
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2015/08/02
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Flowers for Algernon 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
Ìý
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence � a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X Dave 5 4.19 1966 Flowers for Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Dave
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at: 1978/01/01
date added: 2023/08/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Crack Apple and Pop 40533483

'A bomb burst of a book.' International Times]]> 246 Saira Viola Dave 5
Viola's prose crackles as she paints a technicolor picture of London's underbelly. Dealers, layers, B-listers, wanna-be's and hangers-on all share the spotlight in this tale centered in and around a dealer's rise and eventual plan to go straight. Deals, feints, and betrayals keep the readers on their toes.

Crack Apple & Pop meets my standard of an excellent book - I found myself getting lost in the story, and as I got further into it I found myself neglecting household chores to spend more time reading.

Loved this book - can't wait for Viola's next one, whenever that will be.




]]> 4.50 2011 Crack Apple and Pop
author: Saira Viola
name: Dave
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/30
date added: 2021/11/18
shelves:
review:
Five easy stars.

Viola's prose crackles as she paints a technicolor picture of London's underbelly. Dealers, layers, B-listers, wanna-be's and hangers-on all share the spotlight in this tale centered in and around a dealer's rise and eventual plan to go straight. Deals, feints, and betrayals keep the readers on their toes.

Crack Apple & Pop meets my standard of an excellent book - I found myself getting lost in the story, and as I got further into it I found myself neglecting household chores to spend more time reading.

Loved this book - can't wait for Viola's next one, whenever that will be.





]]> <![CDATA[Dead End Girl (Violet Darger #1)]]> 34931696 Her body is broken. Wrapped in plastic. Dumped on the side of the road. She is the first. There will be more.

The serial killer thriller that "refuses to let go until you've read the last sentence."

The most recent body was discovered in the grease dumpster behind a Burger King. Dismembered. Shoved into two garbage bags and lowered into the murky oil.

Now rookie agent Violet Darger gets the most important assignment of her career. She travels to the Midwest to face a killer unlike anything she's seen. Aggressive. Territorial. Deranged and driven.

Another mutilated corpse was found next to a roller rink. A third in the gutter in a residential neighborhood.

These bold displays of violence shock the rural community and rattle local law enforcement.

Who could carry out such brutality? And why?

Unfortunately for Agent Darger, there's little physical evidence to work with, and the only witnesses prove to be unreliable. The case seems hopeless.

If she fails, more will die. He will kill again and again.

The victims harbor dark secrets. The clues twist and writhe and refuse to keep still. And the killer watches the investigation on the nightly news, gleeful to relive the violence, knowing that he can't be stopped.]]> 516 L.T. Vargus 1544172869 Dave 0 to-read 4.11 2017 Dead End Girl (Violet Darger #1)
author: L.T. Vargus
name: Dave
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Slouching Towards Bethlehem 4073199 Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America� particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.]]> 238 Joan Didion 0374531382 Dave 4 4.22 1968 Slouching Towards Bethlehem
author: Joan Didion
name: Dave
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Humans of New York: Stories 24019187 Humans of New York. In the first three years, his audience steadily grew from a few hundred to over one million. In 2013, his book Humans of New York, based on that blog, was published and immediately catapulted to the top of the NY Times Bestseller List. It has appeared on that list for over twenty-five weeks to date. The appeal of HONY has been so great that in the course of the next year Brandon's following increased tenfold to, now, over 12 million followers on Facebook. In the summer of 2014, the UN chose him to travel around the world on a goodwill mission that had followers meeting people from Iraq to Ukraine to Mexico City via the photos he took.
Now, Brandon is back with the follow up to Humans of New York that his loyal followers have been waiting for: Humans of New York: Stories. Ever since Brandon began interviewing people on the streets of NY, the dialogue he's had with them has increasingly become as in-depth, intriguing, and moving as the photos themselves. Humans of New York: Stories presents a whole new group of humans, complete with stories that delve deeper and surprise with greater candour.]]> 428 Brandon Stanton 1250058902 Dave 0 currently-reading 4.55 2015 Humans of New York: Stories
author: Brandon Stanton
name: Dave
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/04/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam: The Teachings of 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (Perennial Philosophy)]]> 282594 192 Reza Shah-Kazemi 1933316268 Dave 5
The three essays discuss the Fourth Caliph, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, who is viewed as the preeminent authority in Islamic justice. Revered for his dedication to justice and piety, he believed that obedience to God predicated any kind of justice. He also believed in displaying compassion and mercy over a rigid application of Sharia' law.

While I don't follow the Islam faith, this book had a lot to say to me. It's going back on my shelf and I plan to give it a more thorough read in the summer. ]]> 4.05 2006 The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam: The Teachings of 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (Perennial Philosophy)
author: Reza Shah-Kazemi
name: Dave
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/24
date added: 2020/04/24
shelves:
review:
I read this for a class, and I with I had given myself more time to read it. In a culture that paints Islam as a violent religion that has instigated a war against the West, it is surprising and refreshing to see the opposite argued, in depth, in this scholarly work.

The three essays discuss the Fourth Caliph, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, who is viewed as the preeminent authority in Islamic justice. Revered for his dedication to justice and piety, he believed that obedience to God predicated any kind of justice. He also believed in displaying compassion and mercy over a rigid application of Sharia' law.

While I don't follow the Islam faith, this book had a lot to say to me. It's going back on my shelf and I plan to give it a more thorough read in the summer.
]]> <![CDATA[Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress]]> 34758222
Writing in an appealing style based on first-hand accounts, Bucar invites readers to join her in three Muslim-majority nations as she surveys how women approach the question “What to wear?� By looking at fashion trends in the bustling cities of Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul―and at the many ways clerics, designers, politicians, and bloggers try to influence Muslim women’s choices―she concludes that pious fashion depends to a large extent on local aesthetic and moral values, rather than the dictates of religious doctrine.

Pious Fashion defines modesty in Islamic dress as an ever-changing social practice among Muslim women who―much like non-Muslim women―create from a range of available clothing items and accessories styles they think will look both appropriate and attractive.]]> 248 Elizabeth M. Bucar 0674976169 Dave 5 3.92 Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress
author: Elizabeth M. Bucar
name: Dave
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/24
date added: 2020/04/24
shelves:
review:
I read this for a college course, and found it fascinating. I don't pay much attention to fashion - jeans and a t-shirt has been my go-to outfit for the past 55 years - but this book did a great job tying in fashion choices to culture, politics and governance. This gets my highest praise - I learned a lot from it.
]]> If It Bleeds 46015758 If it Bleeds is a collection of four new novellas �Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, The Life of Chuck, Rat, and the title story If It Bleeds� each pulling readers into intriguing and frightening places.

A collection of four uniquely wonderful long stories, including a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider.

News people have a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads'. And a bomb at Albert Macready Middle School is guaranteed to lead any bulletin.

Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency is working on the case of a missing dog - and on her own need to be more assertive - when she sees the footage on TV. But when she tunes in again, to the late-night report, she realizes there is something not quite right about the correspondent who was first on the scene. So begins 'If It Bleeds' , a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider featuring the incomparable Holly on her first solo case.

Dancing alongside are three more long stories - 'Mr Harrigan's Phone', 'The Life of Chuck' and 'Rat' .

The novella is a form King has returned to over and over again in the course of his amazing career, and many have been made into iconic films, If It Bleeds is a uniquely satisfying collection of longer short fiction by an incomparably gifted writer.]]> 438 Stephen King Dave 0 to-read 3.99 2020 If It Bleeds
author: Stephen King
name: Dave
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/04/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry]]> 137429 "Welcome to the Wild West of American Poetry, the Hole-In-The-Wall of Blakean vision, a two-fisted saloon of New World dreams where you'll meet the greatest Outlaw voices from the post-war era to the present day. Here are the inventors of the Beat generation and the heroes of today's Spoken Word movement, poets who don't get taught in American poetry 101, yet hold the literary future in their tattooed hands." So begins The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry , a primer for generational revolt and poetic expression, and an enduring document of the visionary tradition of authenticity and nonconformity in literature. From the Beat poetry of the '50s to the spoken word of the 1990s, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry brings readers the words, visions, and extravagant lives of bohemians, beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers. This exuberant manifesto includes lives of the poets, on-the-scene testimony, seminal underground articles never before collected, photographs of clubs and cafes, interviews, and, above all, the poems.]]> 736 Alan Kaufman 1560252278 Dave 0 to-read 4.25 The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
author: Alan Kaufman
name: Dave
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Short Story of Photography: A Pocket Guide to Key Genres, Works, Themes & Techniques]]> 36205147
The design of the book allows the student or photography enthusiast to easily navigate their way around key genres, artists, themes, and techniques. Accessible and concise, the book explains how, why, and when certain photographs really have changed the world.]]> 224 Ian Haydn Smith 1786272016 Dave 0 to-read 3.90 The Short Story of Photography: A Pocket Guide to Key Genres, Works, Themes & Techniques
author: Ian Haydn Smith
name: Dave
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa]]> 40961621 King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West]]> 442 Adam Hochschild Dave 0 to-read 4.16 1998 King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
author: Adam Hochschild
name: Dave
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Faces & Places Best Images From A Bucket List Volume 1]]> 28247289 44 Steve Cohen Dave 5 Excellent photos!

A series of beautiful pics. Film adds a dimension and warmth that digital has not yet been able to reproduce.
]]> 3.75 Faces & Places Best Images From A Bucket List Volume 1
author: Steve Cohen
name: Dave
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2020/03/14
date added: 2020/03/14
shelves:
review:
Excellent photos!

A series of beautiful pics. Film adds a dimension and warmth that digital has not yet been able to reproduce.

]]> <![CDATA[The Lover (The Sufi Mysteries #1)]]> 46028371
PRAISE FOR THE LOVER

The Lover #1 Amazon Bestseller

“Completely engrossing and richly atmospheric. Tenth century Baghdad comes alive through the eyes of a dazzling cast of characters.�

� Ausma Zehanat Khan, acclaimed author of The Getty-Khattak Mysteries

“Dust and cool water; ascetism and the bonds of love. In 10th century Baghdad, Zaytuna is torn between the mysticism of Sufi practice and her need for connection to the world � and the reality of survival day to day. When a child dies in a fall, she must try to understand why, bringing her into conflict with both powerful people and her own brother, and challenging, too, her own understanding of herself and her faith.�

� Marian Thorpe, Author of the Award Winning Empire's Legacy Series

“Too often, narratives of women in Islam are told from the vantage point of the privileged, the women of the wealthy classes � this novel turns that narrative on its head.�

� Safiyyah Surtee, AltMuslimah

Dr. Laury Silvers debut novel transports the reader to 10th century Baghdad, during the city's golden age when it was one of the largest and most diverse cities in the world. Her exquisite descriptions of the city and erudite knowledge of its historical denizens render real the people of Baghdad to the reader, whether pious mystics, cynical wine merchants, or frontier soldiers turned detectives. It's a great mystery and its faithful portrayal of Baghdad makes it a compelling read for anyone interested in the history of Islam and the Medieval Middle East.
--Sherwan Hindreen Ali, a native Baghdadi and graduate student in the Institute for Islamic Studies, McGill University

This is a novel that will both entertain readers and educate them about a wide range of subjects relating to intellectual, social and cultural history of the period in which it is set. It successfully weaves together fiction with meticulous historical research.
--Michael Mumisa, Cambridge Special Livingstone Scholar

With an informed, historical view of the spiritual atmosphere in medieval Baghdad, Laury Silvers has written an exciting mystery in lucid, gripping prose, bringing to life complex individuals of the past, moral agents both layered and conflicted.
--Cyrus Ali Zargar, Al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor, UCF and Author of The Polished Mirror]]> 382 Laury Silvers Dave 5 4.06 The Lover (The Sufi Mysteries #1)
author: Laury Silvers
name: Dave
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2020/03/03
date added: 2020/03/03
shelves:
review:
I read this for a college course, and loved it. It not only reads as a very good mystery, but on another level it helps the reader not as a monolithic 'one size fits all' religion, but as a an actual 3D, kodachromatic multifaceted set of beliefs. A beautiful read.
]]> <![CDATA[Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest (Art and Imagination)]]> 271392 120 Laleh Bakhtiar 050081015X Dave 0 to-read 4.21 1976 Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest (Art and Imagination)
author: Laleh Bakhtiar
name: Dave
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Twelth Night 48840243 120 William Shakespeare Dave 5 3.71 1602 Twelth Night
author: William Shakespeare
name: Dave
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1602
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/08
date added: 2020/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Under the Wire: Marie Colvin's Final Assignment]]> 17870229 0 Paul Conroy 1480537136 Dave 4 4.00 2013 Under the Wire: Marie Colvin's Final Assignment
author: Paul Conroy
name: Dave
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/01/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights]]> 301393 Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights, by Various, is part of the Barnes & Noble ClassicsÌýseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Ìý
Modern American politicians refer to “the founders� so often that they’re in danger of becoming clichés. But Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and the other authors included in this new collection were a wholly unique—and complex—group of individuals, graced with extraordinary intellectual powers, a profound dedication to their ideals, and a striking ability to articulate those ideals in clear and passionate prose.
Ìý
This original anthology of their writings, many of them far less familiar to us than they should be, demonstrates the depth of their thinking—and of their disagreements. It covers the full range of events from 1773 to 1789: that is, from the early debates about whether the North American colonies should declare their independence from England, to the ratification of the Constitution and the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights).
Ìý
Among the documents included are papers from the first and second Continental Congresses, the Articles of Confederation, Washington’s Farewell Address to his armies, and extensive excerpts from the Federalist papers and the Madison–Jefferson correspondence on the Constitution.
Ìý

Jack N. Rakove is W.Ìý R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. He is the author of four books on the American Revolutionary era, including The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, and Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History.]]> 672 Jack N. Rakove 1593082304 Dave 0 to-read 4.02 2006 Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights
author: Jack N. Rakove
name: Dave
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction]]> 35721089
Now a Major Motion Picture

What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. David Sheff traces the first warning signs: the denial, the three a.m. phone calls—is it Nic? the police? the hospital? His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every treatment that might save his son. And he refused to give up on Nic.]]> 352 David Sheff 1328974715 Dave 0 to-read 4.27 2007 Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
author: David Sheff
name: Dave
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom]]> 38530663
Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.

In this biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers.]]> 888 David W. Blight 1416590315 Dave 0 to-read 4.14 2018 Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
author: David W. Blight
name: Dave
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West]]> 43730451



In Dreams of El Dorado , H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame-and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.

Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.]]> 544 H.W. Brands 1541672526 Dave 0 to-read 4.21 2019 Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West
author: H.W. Brands
name: Dave
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence]]> 43521561

Thomas Paine's words were like no others in they leaped off the page, inspiring readers to change their lives, their governments, their kings, and even their gods. In an age when spoken and written words were the only forms of communication, Paine's aroused men to action like no one else. The most widely read political writer of his generation, he proved to be more than a century ahead of his time, conceiving and demanding unheard-of social reforms that are now integral elements of modern republican societies. Among them were government subsidies for the poor, universal housing and education, pre- and post-natal care for women, and universal social security. An Englishman who emigrated to the American colonies, he formed close friendships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and his ideas helped shape the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.




However, the world turned against Paine in his later years. While his earlier works, Common Sense and Rights of Man, attacked the political and social status quo here on earth, The Age of Reason attacked the status quo of the hereafter. Former friends shunned him, and the man America had hailed as the muse of the American Revolution died alone and forgotten.





Packed with action and intrigue, soldiers and spies, politics and perfidy, Unger's Thomas Paine is a much-needed new look at a defining figure.]]> 336 Harlow Giles Unger 0306921936 Dave 0 to-read 4.14 2019 Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence
author: Harlow Giles Unger
name: Dave
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)]]> 469571 302 Cormac McCarthy 0679744398 Dave 5 4.04 1992 All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Dave
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/07
date added: 2020/01/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Dead and Those About to Die: D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach]]> 18667952 A white-knuckle account of the 1st Infantry Division’s harrowing D-Day assault on the eastern sector of Omaha Beach—acclaimed historian John C. McManus has written a gripping history that will stand as the last word on this titanic battle.

Nicknamed the Big Red One, 1st Division had fought from North Africa to Sicily, earning a reputation as stalwart warriors on the front lines and rabble-rousers in the rear. Yet on D-Day, these jaded combat veterans melded with fresh-faced replacements to accomplish one of the most challenging and deadly missions ever. As the men hit the beach, their equipment destroyed or washed away, soldiers cut down by the dozens, courageous heroes emerged: men such as Sergeant Raymond Strojny, who grabbed a bazooka and engaged in a death duel with a fortified German antitank gun; T/5 Joe Pinder, a former minor-league pitcher who braved enemy fire to save a vital radio; Lieutenant John Spalding, a former sportswriter, and Sergeant Phil Streczyk, a truck driver, who together demolished a German strong point overlooking Easy Red, where hundreds of Americans had landed.

Along the way, McManus explores the Gap Assault Team engineers who dealt with the extensive mines and obstacles, suffering nearly a fifty percent casualty rate; highlights officers such as Brigadier General Willard Wyman and Colonel George Taylor, who led the way to victory; and punctures scores of myths surrounding this long-misunderstood battle.

The Dead and Those About to Die draws on a rich array of new or recently unearthed sources, including interviews with veterans. The result is history at its finest, the unforgettable story of the Big Red One’s nineteen hours of hell—and their ultimate triumph—on June 6, 1944.

INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS]]> 400 John C. McManus 0451415299 Dave 5 to-read 4.17 2014 The Dead and Those About to Die: D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach
author: John C. McManus
name: Dave
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Of Mice and Men 890 “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.�

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.

While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing Of Mice and Men, creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual's existence meaningful.

A unique perspective on life's hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.]]> 107 John Steinbeck 0142000671 Dave 5 3.88 1937 Of Mice and Men
author: John Steinbeck
name: Dave
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/01
date added: 2020/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing]]> 6438611 —Pete Hamill, author of A Drinking Life Ìý In the spirit of Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style , comes The Elements of Story, by Francis Flaherty, longtime story editor at The New York Times . A brilliant blend of memoir and how-to, The Elements of Story offers more than 50 principles that emphasize storytelling aspects rather than simply the mechanics of writing—a relentlessly entertaining, totally accessible writing guide for the novice and the professional alike.]]> 320 Francis Flaherty 0061689149 Dave 5 to-read 4.12 2009 The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing
author: Francis Flaherty
name: Dave
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2019/03/18
date added: 2020/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Kill Giants 1 (I Kill Giants, #1)]]> 28020070
Brought to life with unexpected tenderness by JOE KELLY (Supergirl, Action Comics, Deadpool) and breakout talent J. M. KEN NIIMURA, I KILL GIANTS is the bittersweet story of a young girl struggling to conquer monsters both real and imagined as her carefully constructed world crumbles at the feet of giants bigger than any one child can handle.]]> 27 Joe Kelly Dave 5 4.02 2008 I Kill Giants 1 (I Kill Giants, #1)
author: Joe Kelly
name: Dave
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/04
date added: 2020/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Renia's Diary: A Holocaust Journal]]> 43263616 The long-hidden diary of a young Polish woman's last days during the Holocaust, translated for the first time into English, with a foreword from American Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt.

Renia Spiegel was a young girl from an upper-middle class Jewish family living on an estate in Stawki, Poland, near what was at that time the border with Romania. In the summer of 1939, Renia and her sister Elizabeth (née Ariana) were visiting their grandparents in Przemysl, right before the Germans invaded Poland.

Like Anne Frank, Renia recorded her days in her beloved diary. She also filled it with beautiful original poetry. Her diary records how she grew up, fell in love, and was rounded up by the invading Nazis and forced to move to the ghetto in Przemsyl with all the other Jews. By luck, Renia's boyfriend Zygmund was able to find a tenement for Renia to hide in with his parents and took her out of the ghetto. This is all described in the Diary, as well as the tragedies that befell her family and her ultimate fate in 1942, as written in by Zygmund on the Diary's final page.

Renia's Diary is a significant historical and psychological document. The raw, yet beautiful account depicts Renia's angst over the horrors going on around her. It has been translated from the original Polish, with notes included by her surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak.]]> 336 Renia Spiegel 1250244021 Dave 0 to-read 3.52 2016 Renia's Diary: A Holocaust Journal
author: Renia Spiegel
name: Dave
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Out of the Darkness: The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson]]> 1001596 348 Eric A. Shelman 0966940008 Dave 0 to-read 4.38 1998 Out of the Darkness: The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson
author: Eric A. Shelman
name: Dave
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Selected Poems of Langston Hughes]]> 7877868 297 Langston Hughes Dave 5
Though only a small sample of his entire body of work, this one gives a good argument for Hughes as the shining star of the Harlem Renaissance. His work documents the African-American experience of early-mid 20th Century, addressing everything from routine daily struggles to the violence of overt racism. In each and all, he clearly has something to say (which is sorely lacking in so many other artists' work).

The best selections - 'I, Too,' 'When Sue Wears Red,' and 'Harlem,' leave me breathless. Others, such as his poems that look unflinching as the inherent violence of racism, follow me to bed and keep me up at night.

KU KLUX

They took me out
To some lonesome place.
They said, "Do you believe
In the great white race?"

I said, "Mister,
To tell you the truth,
I'd believe in anything
If you'd just turn me loose."

The white man said, "Boy,
Can it be
You're a-standin' there
A-sassin' me?"

They hit me in the head
And knocked me down.
And then they kicked me
On the ground.

A klansman said, "Nigger,
Look me in the face ---
And tell me you believe in
The great white race."

Five stars - I wish I could give this six or more. ]]> 4.19 1959 Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
author: Langston Hughes
name: Dave
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/15
date added: 2019/12/15
shelves:
review:
I've read a few of Hughes' better-known works here an there over the years, but this was my first read of one of his collections.

Though only a small sample of his entire body of work, this one gives a good argument for Hughes as the shining star of the Harlem Renaissance. His work documents the African-American experience of early-mid 20th Century, addressing everything from routine daily struggles to the violence of overt racism. In each and all, he clearly has something to say (which is sorely lacking in so many other artists' work).

The best selections - 'I, Too,' 'When Sue Wears Red,' and 'Harlem,' leave me breathless. Others, such as his poems that look unflinching as the inherent violence of racism, follow me to bed and keep me up at night.

KU KLUX

They took me out
To some lonesome place.
They said, "Do you believe
In the great white race?"

I said, "Mister,
To tell you the truth,
I'd believe in anything
If you'd just turn me loose."

The white man said, "Boy,
Can it be
You're a-standin' there
A-sassin' me?"

They hit me in the head
And knocked me down.
And then they kicked me
On the ground.

A klansman said, "Nigger,
Look me in the face ---
And tell me you believe in
The great white race."

Five stars - I wish I could give this six or more.
]]> Good Husbandry 43822076
The Dirty Life chronicled Kimball’s move from New York City to 500 acres near Lake Champlain where she started a new farm with her partner, Mark. In Good Husbandry, she reveals what happened over the next five years at Essex Farm.

Farming has many ups and downs, and the middle years were hard for the Kimballs. Mark got injured, the weather turned against them, and the farm faced financial pressures. Meanwhile, they had two small children to care for. How does one traverse the terrain of a maturing marriage and the transition from being a couple to being a family? How will the farm survive? What does a family need in order to be happy?

Kristin had chosen Mark and farm life after having a good look around the world, with a fair understanding of what her choices meant. She knew she had traded the possibility of a steady paycheck, of wide open weekends and spontaneous vacations, for a life and work that was challenging but beautiful and fulfilling. So with grit and grace and a good sense of humor, she chose to dig in deeper.

Featuring some of the same local characters and cherished animals first introduced in The Dirty Life, (Jet the farm dog, Delia the dairy cow, and those hardworking draft horses), plus a colorful cast of aspiring first-generation farmers who work at Essex Farm to acquire the skills they need to start sustainable farms of their own, Good Husbandry is about animals and plants, farmers and food, friends and neighbors, love and marriage, births and deaths, growth and abundance.]]> 304 Kristin Kimball 1501111531 Dave 0 to-read 4.22 2019 Good Husbandry
author: Kristin Kimball
name: Dave
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Outsiders 231804 The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider. According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs for the sake of his fellow greasers--until one terrible night when his friend Johnny kills a soc. The murder gets under Ponyboy's skin, causing his bifurcated world to crumble and teaching him that pain feels the same whether a soc or a greaser.

Librarian note: This record is for one of the three editions published with different covers and with ISBN 0-140-38572-X / 978-0-14-038572-4. The records are for the 1988 cover (this record), the 1995 cover, and the 2008 cover which is also the current in-print cover.]]> 208 S.E. Hinton 0670532576 Dave 5 4.13 1967 The Outsiders
author: S.E. Hinton
name: Dave
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/01
date added: 2019/12/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Color Purple 11486
Then her husband's lover, a flamboyant blues singer, barreled into her world and gave Celie the courage to ask for more - to laugh, to play, and finally - to love.]]> 295 Alice Walker Dave 5 4.22 1982 The Color Purple
author: Alice Walker
name: Dave
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2019/11/24
date added: 2019/11/24
shelves:
review:

]]> The Institute 43798285
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.

As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King's gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good versus evil in a world where the good guys don't always win.
--front flap]]> 561 Stephen King Dave 0 to-read 4.17 2019 The Institute
author: Stephen King
name: Dave
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)]]> 43909484
From master storyteller Stephen King, his unforgettable and terrifying sequel to The Shining —an instant #1 New York Times bestseller that is “[a] vivid frightscape� ( The New York Times ).

Years ago, the haunting of the Overlook Hotel nearly broke young Dan Torrance’s sanity, as his paranormal gift known as “the shining� opened a door straight into hell. And even though Dan is all grown up, the ghosts of the Overlook—and his father’s legacy of alcoholism and violence—kept him drifting aimlessly for most of his life. Now, Dan has finally found some order in the chaos by working in a local hospice, earning the nickname “Doctor Sleep� by secretly using his special abilities to comfort the dying and prepare them for the afterlife. But when he unexpectedly meets twelve-year-old Abra Stone—who possesses an even more powerful manifestation of the shining—the two find their lives in sudden jeopardy at the hands of the ageless and murderous nomadic tribe known as the True Knot, reigniting Dan’s own demons and summoning him to battle for this young girl’s soul and survival...]]> 544 Stephen King 1982131802 Dave 0 to-read 4.25 2013 Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)
author: Stephen King
name: Dave
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/09/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them]]> 3335052 From a distinguished clinician, pioneer in working with behaviorally challenging kids, and author of the acclaimed The Explosive Child comes a groundbreaking approach for understanding and helping these kids and transforming school discipline.

Frequent visits to the principal's office. Detentions. Suspensions. Expulsions. These are the established tools of school discipline for kids who don't abide by school rules, have a hard time getting along with other kids, don't seem to respect authority, don't seem interested in learning, and are disrupting the learning of their classmates. But there's a big problem with these strategies: They are ineffective for most of the students to whom they are applied.

It's time for a change in course.

Here, Dr. Ross W. Greene presents an enlightened, clear-cut, and practical alternative. Relying on research from the neurosciences, Dr. Greene offers a new conceptual framework for understanding the difficulties of kids with behavioral challenges and explains why traditional discipline isn't effective at addressing these difficulties. Emphasizing the revolutionarily simple and positive notion that kids do well if they can, he persuasively argues that kids with behavioral challenges are not attention-seeking, manipulative, limit-testing, coercive, or unmotivated, but that they lack the skills to behave adaptively. And when adults recognize the true factors underlying difficult behavior and teach kids the skills in increments they can handle, the results are astounding: The kids overcome their obstacles; the frustration of teachers, parents, and classmates diminishes; and the well-being and learning of all students are enhanced.

In Lost at School, Dr. Greene describes how his road-tested, evidence-based approach � called Collaborative Problem Solving � can help challenging kids at school.

His lively, compelling narrative includes:

� tools to identify the triggers and lagging skills underlying challenging behavior.

� explicit guidance on how to radically improve interactions with challenging kids � along with many examples showing how it's done.

� dialogues, Q & A's, and the story, which runs through the book, of one child and his teachers, parents, and school.

� practical guidance for successful planning and collaboration among teachers, parents, administrations, and kids.

Backed by years of experience and research, and written with a powerful sense of hope and achievable change, Lost at School gives teachers and parents the realistic strategies and information to impact the classroom experience of every challenging kid.]]> 303 Ross W. Greene 1416572260 Dave 0 currently-reading 4.20 2008 Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them
author: Ross W. Greene
name: Dave
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/09/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines]]> 40046061
Jonathan Mooney blends anecdote, expertise, and memoir to present a new mode of thinking about how we live and learn―individually, uniquely, and with advantages and upshots to every type of brain and body. As a neuro-diverse kid diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD who didn't learn to read until he was twelve, the realization that that he wasn’t the problem―the system and the concept of normal were―saved Mooney’s life and fundamentally changed his outlook. Here he explores the toll that being not normal takes on kids and adults when they’re trapped in environments that label them, shame them, and tell them, even in subtle ways, that they are the problem. But, he argues, if we can reorient the ways in which we think about diversity, abilities, and disabilities, we can start a revolution.

A highly sought after public speaker, Mooney has been inspiring audiences with his story and his message for nearly two decades. Now he’s ready to share what he’s learned from parents, educators, researchers, and kids in a book that is as much a survival guide as it is a call to action. Whip-smart, insightful, and utterly inspiring―and movingly framed as a letter to his own young sons, as they work to find their ways in the world―this book will upend what we call normal and empower us all.]]> 256 Jonathan Mooney 1250190169 Dave 0 to-read 4.15 Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines
author: Jonathan Mooney
name: Dave
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/09/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test]]> 7442 416 Tom Wolfe 0553380648 Dave 4
Personally, maybe because of my age, or because we're in a different time, I had some trouble digging up sympathy for Kesey and the other Pranksters. There's something to be said for wanting to lead a cultural shift, and in many ways they did. However, their damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead mentality clearly (and I tend to think intentionally) disregarded consideration for the rights and needs of anyone not 'on the bus.' There seemed to be a complete lack of personal responsibility that wouldn't have been out of line with their goals, but just seemed to be inconvenient. ]]> 3.93 1968 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
author: Tom Wolfe
name: Dave
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/29
date added: 2019/08/29
shelves:
review:
This was an incredibly well-researched and laid out book. Wolfe probably made the right decision in using so much of the Pranksters own words and thoughts to develop the narration and tone, but in the end it was a little... much. I found it hard to get through more than a chapter or two at a time.

Personally, maybe because of my age, or because we're in a different time, I had some trouble digging up sympathy for Kesey and the other Pranksters. There's something to be said for wanting to lead a cultural shift, and in many ways they did. However, their damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead mentality clearly (and I tend to think intentionally) disregarded consideration for the rights and needs of anyone not 'on the bus.' There seemed to be a complete lack of personal responsibility that wouldn't have been out of line with their goals, but just seemed to be inconvenient.
]]> <![CDATA[Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War]]> 39855012 During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield. In Cold Warriors , Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher. Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books canÌý change the world.]]> 782 Duncan White 0062449818 Dave 0 to-read 4.21 2019 Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War
author: Duncan White
name: Dave
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy]]> 28007898 The first definitive account of the infamous 1971 Attica prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims' decades-long quest for justice including information never released to the public published to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of this historic event.

On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, during the four long days and nights that followed, the inmates negotiated with state officials for improved living conditions. On September 13, the state abruptly ended talks and sent hundreds of heavily armed state troopers and corrections officers to retake the prison by force. In the ensuing gunfire, thirty-nine men were killed, hostages as well as prisoners, and close to one hundred were severely injured. After the prison was secured, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners during the weeks that followed. For decades afterward, instead of charging any state employee who had committed murder or carried out egregious human rights abuses, New York officials prosecuted only the prisoners and failed to provide necessary support to the hostage survivors or the families of any of the men who'd been killed.

Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century, exploring every aspect of the uprising and its legacy from the perspectives of all of those involved in this forty-five-year fight for justice: the prisoners, the state officials, the lawyers on both sides, the state troopers and corrections officers, and the families of the slain men.]]> 752 Heather Ann Thompson 0375423222 Dave 0 currently-reading 4.46 2016 Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
author: Heather Ann Thompson
name: Dave
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hate U Give (The Hate U Give, #1)]]> 32075671 An alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062498533 can be found here.

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.

But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful and gripping YA novel about one girl's struggle for justice.]]> 454 Angie Thomas 0062498533 Dave 0 to-read 4.46 2017 The Hate U Give (The Hate U Give, #1)
author: Angie Thomas
name: Dave
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation]]> 108422
It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times , Newsweek , NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.]]> 528 Gene Roberts 0679403817 Dave 0 to-read 4.21 2006 The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
author: Gene Roberts
name: Dave
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow]]> 40909438 "Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history--the spot under our country's rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug. --Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review

A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked a new birth of freedom in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the nadir of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.

Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a New Negro to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age.

The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored home rule to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation.

An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.]]> 296 Henry Louis Gates Jr. 0525559531 Dave 0 to-read 4.15 2019 Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
name: Dave
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Flame 37941942 The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world. Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist.

A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work.

“This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,� writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.�

Leonard Cohen died in late 2016. But “each page of paper that he blackened,â€� in the words of his son, “was lasting evidence of a burning soul.â€]]> 277 Leonard Cohen 0374156069 Dave 5
You know the running gag that says the Professor from Gilligan’s Island can take two coconuts and some twine and make a working radio? That’s the level of mastery Cohen has over the English language. He can take a couple of nouns and a verb and create incredible imagery. The man experienced life on a different plane of existence than you and I.

Cohen’s works always seem to be part of a larger autobiography, which he filters out nothing. He writes forwardly about feelings and histories which most of us wouldn’t dare admit, even to ourselves.

His final work here is broken down into sections including Poems, Lyrics and selections from his notebook. The Lyrics have mostly, if not completely, been recorded and are best listened to while reading along.

This collection definitely holds its own against his earlier work. If you like Cohen at all, run out and buy The Flams � you won’t be disappointed.
]]> 4.06 2018 The Flame
author: Leonard Cohen
name: Dave
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/23
date added: 2019/07/23
shelves:
review:
Some random thoughts:

You know the running gag that says the Professor from Gilligan’s Island can take two coconuts and some twine and make a working radio? That’s the level of mastery Cohen has over the English language. He can take a couple of nouns and a verb and create incredible imagery. The man experienced life on a different plane of existence than you and I.

Cohen’s works always seem to be part of a larger autobiography, which he filters out nothing. He writes forwardly about feelings and histories which most of us wouldn’t dare admit, even to ourselves.

His final work here is broken down into sections including Poems, Lyrics and selections from his notebook. The Lyrics have mostly, if not completely, been recorded and are best listened to while reading along.

This collection definitely holds its own against his earlier work. If you like Cohen at all, run out and buy The Flams � you won’t be disappointed.

]]> <![CDATA[The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture]]> 146191 The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,� Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.� Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.]]> 246 Wendell Berry 0871568772 Dave 0 to-read 4.34 1977 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
author: Wendell Berry
name: Dave
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap]]> 17834864
In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends--growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration--come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime--but it's impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side.]]> 416 Matt Taibbi 081299342X Dave 0 to-read 4.24 2014 The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
author: Matt Taibbi
name: Dave
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street]]> 32740061 The Divide.

On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement.

Matt Taibbi's deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact. A husband and father with a complicated personal history, Garner was neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family, bedeviled by bad luck, and ultimately subdued by forces beyond his control.

In America, no miscarriage of justice exists in isolation, of course, and in I Can't Breathe Taibbi also examines the conditions that made this tragedy possible. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street and inside our Kafkaesque court system, Taibbi's kaleidoscopic account illuminates issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. No one emerges unsullied, from the conservative district attorney who half-heartedly prosecutes the case to the progressive mayor caught between the demands of outraged activists and the foot-dragging of recalcitrant police officials.

A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can't Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice.]]> 304 Matt Taibbi 0812988841 Dave 0 to-read 4.36 2017 I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
author: Matt Taibbi
name: Dave
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus]]> 33516776
In twenty-five pieces from Rolling Stone —plus two original essays—Matt Taibbi tells the story of Western civilization’s very own train wreck, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion.ÌýYears before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society.

Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign; the rise of the “dangerously bright� alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the “Racial Holy War� to come; and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. At the center of it all stands Donald J. Trump, leading a historic revolt against his own party, “bloviating and farting his way� through the campaign, “saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.� For Taibbi, the stunning rise of Trump marks the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement.

Taibbi frames the reporting with original essays that explore the seismic shift in how we perceive our national institutions, the democratic process, and the future of the country. Insane Clown President is not just a postmortem on the collapse and failure of American democracy. It offers the riveting, surreal, unique, and essential experience of seeing the future in hindsight.

“Scathing . . . What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase.� —San Francisco Chronicle]]> 352 Matt Taibbi 0399592466 Dave 0 to-read 4.03 2017 Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus
author: Matt Taibbi
name: Dave
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/20
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]]> <![CDATA[A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book]]> 41880598 A literary history of our most influential book of all time, by an Oxford scholar and Anglican priest

In our culture, the Bible is monolithic: It is a collection of books that has been unchanged and unchallenged since the earliest days of the Christian church. The idea of the Bible as "Holy Scripture," a non-negotiable authority straight from God, has prevailed in Western society for some time. And while it provides a firm foundation for centuries of Christian teaching, it denies the depth, variety, and richness of this fascinating text. In A History of the Bible, John Barton argues that the Bible is not a prescription to a complete, fixed religious system, but rather a product of a long and intriguing process, which has inspired Judaism and Christianity, but still does not describe the whole of either religion. Barton shows how the Bible is indeed an important source of religious insight for Jews and Christians alike, yet argues that it must be read in its historical context--from its beginnings in myth and folklore to its many interpretations throughout the centuries.

It is a book full of narratives, laws, proverbs, prophecies, poems, and letters, each with their own character and origin stories. Barton explains how and by whom these disparate pieces were written, how they were canonized (and which ones weren't), and how they were assembled, disseminated, and interpreted around the world--and, importantly, to what effect. Ultimately, A History of the Bible argues that a thorough understanding of the history and context of its writing encourages religious communities to move away from the Bible's literal wording--which is impossible to determine--and focus instead on the broader meanings of scripture.]]> 640 John Barton 0525428771 Dave 0 to-read 4.15 2019 A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book
author: John Barton
name: Dave
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/06/17
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]]> The Color Purple 1995713
The principal voice is that of Celie, who has been raped by the man she believes to be her father, robbed of her two children, and married off to a man she hates. Her sister, Nettie,e escapes the same fate and is befriended by missionaries, man and wife, who have unwittingly adopted Celie's children. Separated for thirty years, the sisters live in ignorance of each other's circumstances. Nettie's letters do not reach Celie; and so great is Celie's sense of shame that she can write only to God. But life for Celie begins to change color when her husband's lover, a remarkable woman named Shug Avery, comes to live with them.

Honest, poignant, laughing, defiant, The Color Purple is a story about heroic lives, love, and the nature of God, and it breaks new ground in fiction with its portrayal of the bonding of women.
(front flap)]]> 245 Alice Walker 0151191530 Dave 0 to-read 4.39 1982 The Color Purple
author: Alice Walker
name: Dave
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/06/17
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]]> The Fire Next Time 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Dave 0 to-read 4.55 1963 The Fire Next Time
author: James Baldwin
name: Dave
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/06/17
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness]]> 30652098 Ìý]]> 756 Richard M. Ryan 1462528767 Dave 0 to-read 4.49 Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness
author: Richard M. Ryan
name: Dave
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/05/14
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Handbook for Embedded Formative Assessment (A Practical Guide to Classroom Formative Assessment Strategies)]]> 36548770 Chapter 1: Understanding Formative Assessment
Chapter 2: Clarifying, Sharing, and Understanding Learning Intentions and Success Criteria
Chapter 3: Eliciting Evidence of Learners' Achievement
Chapter 4: Providing Feedback That Moves Learning Forward
Chapter 5: Activating Students as Instructional Resources for One Another
Chapter 6: Activating Students as Owners of Their Own Learning
Observation Tools
References and Resources]]> 128 Solution Tree 1945349506 Dave 0 to-read 3.60 The Handbook for Embedded Formative Assessment (A Practical Guide to Classroom Formative Assessment Strategies)
author: Solution Tree
name: Dave
average rating: 3.60
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/05/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The First Days of School: How to Be An Effective Teacher [with CD]]]> 74814
The book is used in thousands of school districts, in over 65 countries, and in over 1000 college classrooms. It works and it s inspiring.

Included in this 3rd edition is a free 38 minute Enhanced CD, Never Cease to Learn. This bonus CD features Harry Wong with a special introduction by Rosemary Wong. The motivational message delivered is one all educators must hear and see.]]> 338 Harry K. Wong 0962936065 Dave 0 to-read 3.92 1991 The First Days of School: How to Be An Effective Teacher [with CD]
author: Harry K. Wong
name: Dave
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/05/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Dave 5
2. I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but this book is over my head. A dictionary and working knowledge of Spanish is recommended.

3. Even with that, and more, this book is an easy five stars. Why? By the time I was halfway through, I stayed up late, woke up early, skipped lunch, stopped returning phone calls and ignored my family and pets just to make time to read this damn book. Not many are that addicting, but this one sucked me right in. Highly recommended, but maybe not for the squeamish. ]]> 4.18 1985 Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Dave
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/18
date added: 2019/04/18
shelves:
review:
1. This is the most violent book I've ever read. Zane Grey meets American Psycho.

2. I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but this book is over my head. A dictionary and working knowledge of Spanish is recommended.

3. Even with that, and more, this book is an easy five stars. Why? By the time I was halfway through, I stayed up late, woke up early, skipped lunch, stopped returning phone calls and ignored my family and pets just to make time to read this damn book. Not many are that addicting, but this one sucked me right in. Highly recommended, but maybe not for the squeamish.
]]> <![CDATA[The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West]]> 42201377
As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River.

McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough’s subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them.]]> 330 David McCullough 1501168681 Dave 0 to-read 3.75 2019 The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West
author: David McCullough
name: Dave
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/04/15
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]]> The Real Frank Zappa Book 39671 352 Frank Zappa 0330316257 Dave 0 to-read 4.14 1989 The Real Frank Zappa Book
author: Frank Zappa
name: Dave
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Outsider 42201321 Evil has many faces…maybe even yours in this #1 New York Times bestseller from master storyteller Stephen King!

An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is discovered in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens—Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon have DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.

As the investigation expands and horrifying details begin to emerge, King’s story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can.]]> 561 Stephen King 1501181009 Dave 0 to-read 4.05 2018 The Outsider
author: Stephen King
name: Dave
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/04/06
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]]> The Essential Ginsberg 23215467 448 Allen Ginsberg 0062362283 Dave 5 4.20 2015 The Essential Ginsberg
author: Allen Ginsberg
name: Dave
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2019/03/29
date added: 2019/03/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"]]> 2590136
In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.

Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.]]> 193 Zora Neale Hurston 0060921706 Dave 5 4.03 2018 Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Dave
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/03/31
date added: 2019/03/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories]]> 13624547 Chez Joyce Carol Oates, les aspects les plus triviaux de la vie quotidienne peuvent tourner au cauchemar. Ces onze nouvelles dérangeantes et inventives en offrent encore une fois la preuve, disséquant les sentiments et les actes de personnages aux prises avec un univers lisse en surface, mais toujours susceptible de basculer. L'horreur n'est jamais loin : variation autour du meurtre du célèbre Dahlia noir, colocataire de la future Marilyn Monroe; tourments d'une prof vieillissante dont le désir d'enseigner vire à la catastrophe ; angoisse d'une adolescente arrachée par la police à son cours de maths ; mésaventures d'une femme au foyer insatisfaite qui croit voir un intrus chez elle... Comme à son habitude, Oates démontre son sens aigu de l'observation et son humour noir décapant quand elle croque les réactions désordonnées d'une mère apprenant que sa fille est victime de violences ; les tribulations d'un couple d'Américains en pleine crise de la quarantaine à Rome ; la rage rentrée d'un enfant non reconnu ; ou les efforts pitoyables d'un homme en quête de rédemption... Une chose est sûre : les nouvelles de ce recueil procureront au lecteur rires nerveux et délicieux frissons.

]]> 274 Joyce Carol Oates 0062195697 Dave 5 3.31 2011 Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Dave
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2019/03/24
date added: 2019/03/24
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]]> Beautiful Days 35068855
The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.

“Fleuve Bleuâ€� exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates’s prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results.Ìý

In “Big Burnt,� set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, “Les beaux jours� examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a “master� artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic “Undocumented Alien� depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.

In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not.]]> 343 Joyce Carol Oates 0062795805 Dave 0 to-read 3.47 2018 Beautiful Days
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Dave
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/03/18
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review:

]]> Their Eyes Were Watching God 37415 238 Zora Neale Hurston 0061120065 Dave 0 to-read 3.98 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Dave
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War]]> 4820 HOW DID AMERICA BEGIN?

This simple question launches acclaimed author Nathaniel Philbrick on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. As Philbrick reveals in this electrifying new book, the story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving; instead, it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic and heroic, and still carries meaning for us today.]]> 461 Nathaniel Philbrick 0670037605 Dave 0 to-read 3.87 2006 Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
author: Nathaniel Philbrick
name: Dave
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life's Journey]]> 536955 "During my boxing career, you did not see the real Muhammad Ali. You just saw a little boxing. You saw only a part of me. After I retired from boxing my true work began. I have embarked on a journey of love." So Muhammad Ali begins this spiritual memoir, his description of the values that have shaped and sustained him and that continue to guide his life. In The Soul of a Butterfly the great champion takes readers on a spiritual journey through the seasons of life, from childhood to the present, and shares the beliefs that have served him well.

After fighting some of the fiercest bouts in boxing history against Joe Frazier and George Foreman, today Muhammad Ali faces his most powerful foe -- outside the boxing ring. Like many people, he battles an illness that limits his physical abilities, but as he says, "I have gained more than I have lost....I have never had a more powerful voice than I have now." Ali reflects on his faith in God and the strength it gave him during his greatest challenge, when he lost the prime years of his boxing career because he would not compromise his beliefs. He describes how his study of true Islam has helped him accept the changes in his life and has brought him to a greater awareness of life's true purpose. As a United Nations "Messenger of Peace," he has traveled widely, and he describes his 2002 mission to Afghanistan to heighten public awareness of that country's desperate situation, as well as his more recent meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Ali's reflections on topics ranging from moral courage to belief in God to respect for those who differ from us will inspire and enlighten all who read them. Written with the assistance of his daughter Hana, The Soul of a Butterfly is a compassionate and heartfelt book that will provide comfort for our troubled times.]]> 256 Muhammad Ali Dave 5 4.25 2004 The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life's Journey
author: Muhammad Ali
name: Dave
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2019/02/23
date added: 2019/02/24
shelves:
review:
Beautiful and inspirational. With the help of his daughter Hana, Ali wrote a memoir reflecting on the different eras of his life, sharing stories and lessons learned. Not an in-depth autobiography, but a fitting book by man who defined greatness in so many ways.
]]> <![CDATA[Building with Secondhand Stuff: How to Reclaim, Repurpose, Re-use & Upcycle Salvaged & Leftover Materials]]> 31423597
You'll encounter opportunities to upcycle usable building materials everywhere. By using Building with Secondhand Stuff,Ìý2nd edition,Ìýgood judgment,ÌýandÌýa few salvage tricks, you can take advantage of these chances to gather free (or nearly free) project supplies and put them to work in your house.

This second edition of the best-selling book includes new projects such as a pallet chair, pallet table, chalkboard message door, door-backed island, and a reclaimed window greenhouse.]]> 160 Chris Peterson 1591866812 Dave 4 3.34 Building with Secondhand Stuff: How to Reclaim, Repurpose, Re-use & Upcycle Salvaged & Leftover Materials
author: Chris Peterson
name: Dave
average rating: 3.34
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2019/02/17
date added: 2019/02/17
shelves:
review:
This is an excellent beginner's book on how to reclaim and prepare materials for a second life, with several unique project ideas. The only reason I didn't give it a full five stars is that as a complete novice, there was some terminology I'm not familiar with. A glossary in the back would have been a good idea. Otherwise, this book is a good investment for anyone who's looking to start a project.
]]> Where There's Smoke 22209063 53 Jodi Picoult 0804180792 Dave 4 3.76 2014 Where There's Smoke
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Dave
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2014/11/27
date added: 2019/02/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Writing Fiction For Dummies 20552567
So you want to write a novel? Great! That's a worthy goal, no matter what your reason. But don't settle for just writing a novel. Aim high. Write a novel that you intend to sell to a publisher.

Writing Fiction for Dummies is a complete guide designed to coach you every step along the path from beginning writer to royalty-earning author. Here are some things you'll learn in "Writing Fiction for Dummies"

* Strategic Planning: Pinpoint where you are on the roadmap to publication; discover what every reader desperately wants from a story; home in on a marketable category; choose from among the four most common creative styles; and learn the self-management methods of professional writers.

* Writing Powerful Fiction: Construct a story world that rings true; create believable, unpredictable characters; build a strong plot with all six layers of complexity of a modern novel; and infuse it all with a strong theme.

* Self-Editing Your Novel: Psychoanalyze your characters to bring them fully to life; edit your story structure from the top down; fix broken scenes; and polish your action and dialogue.

* Finding An Agent and Getting Published: Write a query letter, a synopsis, and a proposal; pitch your work to agents and editors without fear.

Writing Fiction For Dummies takes you from being a "writer" to being an "author." It can happen--if you have the talent and persistence to do what you need to do.]]> 529 Randy Ingermanson Dave 0 to-read 3.98 2009 Writing Fiction For Dummies
author: Randy Ingermanson
name: Dave
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Bluest Eye 11337 The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.]]> 216 Toni Morrison Dave 5
In the Acknowledgements, Morrison discusses how the idea for The Bluest Eye came from an elementary school classmate who wanted blue eyes. This came to epitomize the internalization of white beauty standards in which society was sold the idea that white beauty was superior, an unreachable goal that destroyed the self-image to so many African-American children.

Morrison delves deeply into the concepts of beauty, ugliness and self-loathing in The Bluest Eye. Although it takes place in 1941-42, and was published in 1970, it’s impossible not to find correlations in current society.

While the book’s message is not delivered subtly, Morrison handles the material deftly � the main characters, even the unlikable ones � are well-rounded and sympathetic. And she is able present the horrors of violence and incest without flinching, forcing the reader to see them for what they are.

Her work is by no means easy to read. Sometimes it’s downright painful, like ripping a bandage off to expose the wound underneath. In the hands of a lesser writer it would come across as clumsy, maybe preachy. In Morrison’s hands, it’s gold.]]> 4.13 1970 The Bluest Eye
author: Toni Morrison
name: Dave
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2019/02/04
date added: 2019/02/05
shelves:
review:
I’m old enough to remember when toy companies began mass-producing and advertising ethnically correct dolls. I was old enough to understand that it was important, but too young to understand why. And once the novelty wore off, we stopped thinking about it altogether. (Six-year-olds have a short attention span).

In the Acknowledgements, Morrison discusses how the idea for The Bluest Eye came from an elementary school classmate who wanted blue eyes. This came to epitomize the internalization of white beauty standards in which society was sold the idea that white beauty was superior, an unreachable goal that destroyed the self-image to so many African-American children.

Morrison delves deeply into the concepts of beauty, ugliness and self-loathing in The Bluest Eye. Although it takes place in 1941-42, and was published in 1970, it’s impossible not to find correlations in current society.

While the book’s message is not delivered subtly, Morrison handles the material deftly � the main characters, even the unlikable ones � are well-rounded and sympathetic. And she is able present the horrors of violence and incest without flinching, forcing the reader to see them for what they are.

Her work is by no means easy to read. Sometimes it’s downright painful, like ripping a bandage off to expose the wound underneath. In the hands of a lesser writer it would come across as clumsy, maybe preachy. In Morrison’s hands, it’s gold.
]]> <![CDATA[American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment]]> 38561954 351 Shane Bauer 0735223580 Dave 0 to-read 4.23 2018 American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
author: Shane Bauer
name: Dave
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Andromeda Strain (Andromeda, #1)]]> 7670
Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to collect organisms and dust for study. One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona.

Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks.
--back cover]]> 327 Michael Crichton 0060541814 Dave 0 to-read 3.92 1969 The Andromeda Strain (Andromeda, #1)
author: Michael Crichton
name: Dave
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> Night 1617 Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.]]> 120 Elie Wiesel 0374500010 Dave 5
In this book, Elie Weisel exemplifies the Hemingway quote about writing, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.� In discussing his experiences during the Holocaust, from the ghetto to Auschwitz to liberation, he bares his pain, physical and emotional, his guilt and his loss of faith. I cannot imagine sharing this much hurt with the world. But in doing do, Weisel rips the scabs off the Holocaust history and digs into the soul underneath.

This translation is excellent, very well-written. If I could give it six or seven stars, I would. Should be required reading in every scholastic history class. ]]> 4.38 1956 Night
author: Elie Wiesel
name: Dave
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/29
date added: 2019/01/29
shelves:
review:
It's not often you read a history book that gives you chills.

In this book, Elie Weisel exemplifies the Hemingway quote about writing, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.� In discussing his experiences during the Holocaust, from the ghetto to Auschwitz to liberation, he bares his pain, physical and emotional, his guilt and his loss of faith. I cannot imagine sharing this much hurt with the world. But in doing do, Weisel rips the scabs off the Holocaust history and digs into the soul underneath.

This translation is excellent, very well-written. If I could give it six or seven stars, I would. Should be required reading in every scholastic history class.
]]> The Federalist Papers 110331

Hailed by Thomas Jefferson as “the best commentary on the principles of government which was ever written", The Federalist Papers is a collection of eighty-five essays published by Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay from 1787 to 1788, as a means to persuade the public to ratify the Constitution of the United States.


With nearly two-thirds of the essays written by Hamilton, this enduring classic is perfect for modern audiences passionate about his work or seeking a deeper understanding of one of the most important documents in US history.

]]> 688 Alexander Hamilton Dave 0 currently-reading 4.05 1788 The Federalist Papers
author: Alexander Hamilton
name: Dave
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1788
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beating the Dementia Monster: How I stopped the advance of cognitive impairment from Alzheimer’s disease]]> 38616928 Later, his care team would read MRIs of his brain that showed his hippocampus volume had atrophied to the <1 percentile, and his lateral ventricles had grown to >99 percentile for men his age.Ìý The hippocampus plays a critical role in memory.Ìý The ventricles are void spaces that grow as the whole brain atrophies.Ìý These are changes that signal the advance of Alzheimer's disease.
But late in 2017, Mr. Brown was given a test with 10 words to remember, and he could confidently recall nine of them.Ìý In another memory test, he scored perfectly.Ìý In fact, his cognitive test scores improved steadily into 2018.Ìý What happened?

Mr. Brown investigated what was being shown by scientific research to actually counter cognitive decline from Alzheimer's disease.Ìý Based on his investigation, he formulated his own strategy which has worked spectacularly for him.Ìý He now wants to share that strategy with the hope that it will help others.

In Beating the Dementia Monster , he tells his personal story and describes his strategy.Ìý He also identifies scientific research that explains why his strategy has worked so well.

If you are looking for the magic dietary supplement or the exotic diet that will cure your cognitive decline, it's not here. However, if you or someone you love is facing the progression of MCI ("mild cognitive impairment") due to Alzheimer's disease, there are things that you may be able to do to slow, stop, or even reverse cognitive decline from Alzheimer's disease.
No drug has yet been found to cure Alzheimer's disease.Ìý But this book provides information that can help.Ìý It applies best to people with this diagnosis who are otherwise in reasonably good physical condition.Ìý The strategy in this book can also be applied by people who fear the development of Alzheimer's disease in the future.
"David Brown's regimen has made a remarkable difference in his cognitive impairment. What he recommends is practical, doable, and good for all aspects of your health, both physical and psychological. It is something that anyone confronting mild cognitive impairment should try."
--Tae-Im Moon, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist

"Engaging and informative."
--Carrie S. Brown, Ph.D.
Author of Rosie's Forgotten Women Workers of the First World War]]> 119 David H. Brown Dave 0 to-read 4.15 Beating the Dementia Monster: How I stopped the advance of cognitive impairment from Alzheimer’s disease
author: David H. Brown
name: Dave
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[South and West: From a Notebook]]> 32842454 The Year of Magical Thinking two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks--writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles--and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through.

And from a different notebook: the "California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage, all of which would appear later in her acclaimed 2003 book, Where I Was From.]]> 160 Joan Didion 1524732796 Dave 4
That being said, it's extremely readable, a series of insightful snapshots of the South - Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama - based on a road trip she took with her husband in the 70's, and other notes she took while covering the Patty Hearst trial.

If you've read Didion, you know what you're in for - some personal reflection, a lot of name-dropping, and a razor-sharp writing. Her recorded observations cut through everyday mundanities (is that a word?), and her insights are as, always, spot-on.

Her writing on the south is a great history of the culture still coming to terms with the modern age, stuck inbetween integration and full industrialization. The south itself was still a million miles away from the rest America.

A damn fine read.
]]> 3.69 2017 South and West: From a Notebook
author: Joan Didion
name: Dave
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2019/01/20
date added: 2019/01/20
shelves:
review:
Best to know going in that this is a collection of journal notes, not a finished story.

That being said, it's extremely readable, a series of insightful snapshots of the South - Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama - based on a road trip she took with her husband in the 70's, and other notes she took while covering the Patty Hearst trial.

If you've read Didion, you know what you're in for - some personal reflection, a lot of name-dropping, and a razor-sharp writing. Her recorded observations cut through everyday mundanities (is that a word?), and her insights are as, always, spot-on.

Her writing on the south is a great history of the culture still coming to terms with the modern age, stuck inbetween integration and full industrialization. The south itself was still a million miles away from the rest America.

A damn fine read.

]]> Jesus� Son 608287 Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.

Contains:
Car Crash While Hitchhiking
Two Men
Out on Bail
Dundun
Work
Emergency
Dirty Wedding
The Other Man
Happy Hour
Steady Hands at Seattle General
Beverly Home']]> 160 Denis Johnson 0060975776 Dave 0 to-read 4.16 1992 Jesus’ Son
author: Denis Johnson
name: Dave
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army]]> 267013
When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Vasily Grossman became a special correspondent for the Red Star, the Red Army’s newspaper. A Writer at War � based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered raw material for his articles � depicts the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front, and the lives and deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. It also includes some of the earliest reportage on the Holocaust. In the three years he spent on assignment, Grossman witnessed some of the most savage fighting of the war: the appalling defeats of the Red Army, the brutal street fighting in Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), the defense of Moscow, the battles in Ukraine, and much more.

Historian Antony Beevor has taken Grossman’s raw notebooks, and fashioned them into a narrative providing one of the most even-handed descriptions � at once unflinching and sensitive � we have ever had of what he called “the ruthless truth of war.�


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 380 Vasily Grossman 0676978118 Dave 0 to-read 4.15 2005 A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army
author: Vasily Grossman
name: Dave
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/05
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Infantry in Vietnam: Small Unit Actions in the Early Days 1965-66]]> 1866209 298 Albert N. Garland 0515080543 Dave 0 to-read 4.11 1985 Infantry in Vietnam: Small Unit Actions in the Early Days 1965-66
author: Albert N. Garland
name: Dave
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Videocracy: How YouTube Is Changing the World with Double Rainbows, Singing Foxes, and Other Curious Trends]]> 34921568
Whether your favorite YouTube video is a cat on a Roomba, “Gangnam Style,� the “Bed Intruder� song, an ASAPscience explainer, Rebecca Black's “Friday,� or the “Evolution of Dance,� Kevin Allocca's Videocracy reveals how these beloved videos and famous trends--and many more--came to be and why they mean more than you might think.

YouTube is the biggest pool of cultural data since the beginning of recorded communication, with four hundred hours of video uploaded every minute. (It would take you more than sixty-five years just to watch to watch the vlogs, music videos, tutorials, and other content posted in a single day!) This activity reflects who we are, in all our glory and ignominy. As Allocca says, if aliens wanted to understand our planet, he'd give them Google. If they wanted to understand us, he'd give them YouTube.

In Videocracy, Allocca lays bare what YouTube videos say about our society and how our actions online--watching, sharing, commenting on, and remixing the people and clips that captivate us--are changing the face of entertainment, advertising, politics, and more. Via YouTube, we are fueling social movements, enforcing human rights, and redefining art--a lot more than you'd expect from a bunch of viral clips.]]> 352 Kevin Allocca 1632866749 Dave 4
As a middle-aged guy who's been unable to get what all the fuss was about, this book was a good introduction to me. Allocca does a good job explaining the attraction of YouTube and its various offerings to its audience, complete with inside stories and humorous footnotes. ]]> 3.75 2018 Videocracy: How YouTube Is Changing the World with Double Rainbows, Singing Foxes, and Other Curious Trends
author: Kevin Allocca
name: Dave
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/01/05
date added: 2019/01/05
shelves:
review:
In contrast to a more scholarly book about the rise and impact of YouTube on modern culture, this is more of a guided tour of YouTube given by the company's Head of Culture and Trends. He hits the historical highlights, tells the stories behind them and puts them into cultural context. Naturally, this book avoids discussion of the lowlights, such as terrorists' use of the platform.

As a middle-aged guy who's been unable to get what all the fuss was about, this book was a good introduction to me. Allocca does a good job explaining the attraction of YouTube and its various offerings to its audience, complete with inside stories and humorous footnotes.
]]> <![CDATA[On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society]]> 6416083
Ìý

In World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles. In Korea, about 50 percent. In Vietnam, the figure rose to more than 90 percent.Ìý

The good news is that most soldiers are loath to kill. But armies have developed sophisticated ways sophisticated ways of overcoming that instinctive aversion. The psychological cost for soldiers, as evidenced by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. This landmark study brilliantly illuminates the techniques the military uses to help soldiers kill and raises vital questions about the implications of escalating violence in our society.Ìý
Ìý

"Powerfully argued...Full of arresting observations and insights." � New York Times]]> 416 Dave Grossman 0316040932 Dave 0 to-read 4.27 1995 On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
author: Dave Grossman
name: Dave
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity]]> 421729 “All it takes to become an artist is to start doing art.�
–f°ù´Ç³¾ On Becoming an Artist

On Becoming an Artist is loaded with good news. Backed by her landmark scientific work on mindfulness and artistic nature, bestselling author and Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer shows us that creativity is not a rare gift that only some special few are born with, but rather an integral part of everyone’s makeup. All of us can express our creative impulses� authentically and uniquely–and, in the process, enrich our lives.

Why then do so many of us merely dream of someday painting, someday writing, someday making music? Why do we think the same old thoughts, harbor the same old prejudices, stay stuck in the same old mud? Who taught us to think “inside the box�?

No one is more qualified to answer these questions than Dr. Langer, who has explored their every facet for years. She describes dozens of fascinating experiments–her own and those of her colleagues–that are designed to study mindfulness and its relation to human creativity, and she shares the profound implications of the results–for our well-being, health, and happiness.

Langer reveals myriad insights, among them: We think we should already know what only firsthand experience can teach us. . . . In learning the ways that all roses are alike, we risk becoming blind to their differences. . . . If we are mindfully creative, the circumstances of the moment will tell us what to do. . . . Those of us who are less evaluatively inclined experience less guilt, less regret, less blame, and tend to like ourselves more. . . . Uncertainty gives us the freedom to discover meaning. . . . Finally, what we think we’re sure of may not even exist.

With the skill of a gifted logician, Langer demonstrates exactly how we undervalue ourselves and undermine our creativity. By example, she persuades us to have faith in our creative works, not because someone else approves of them but because they’re a true expression of ourselves. Her high-spirited, challenging book sparkles with wit and intelligence and inspires in us an infectious enthusiasm for our creations, our world, and ourselves. It can be of lifelong value to everyone who reads it.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 304 Ellen J. Langer 0345456300 Dave 0 to-read 3.71 2005 On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity
author: Ellen J. Langer
name: Dave
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/01
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]]> Mindfulness 224786
The highly innovative findings of social psychologist Dr. Ellen J. Langer and her team of researchers at Harvard introduced a unique concept of mindfulness, adapted to contemporary life in the West. Langer's theory has been applied to a wide number of fields, including health, business, aging, social justice, and learning. There is now a new psychological assessment based on her work (called the Langer Mindfulness Scale). In her introduction to this 25th anniversary edition, Dr. Langer (now known as "the Mother of Mindfulness") outlines some of these exciting applications and suggests those still to come.]]> 256 Ellen J. Langer 0201523418 Dave 0 to-read 3.77 1989 Mindfulness
author: Ellen J. Langer
name: Dave
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility]]> 6398460
Drawing on landmark work in the field and her own body of colorful and highly original experiments–including the first detailed discussion of her “counterclockwise� study, in which elderly men lived for a week as though it was 1959 and showed dramatic improvements in their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and general well-being–Langer shows that the magic of rejuvenation and ongoing good health lies in being aware of the ways we mindlessly react to social and cultural cues. Examining the hidden decisions and vocabulary that shape the medical world (“chronic� versus “acute,� “cure� versus “remission�), the powerful physical effects of placebos, and the intricate but often defeatist ways we define our physical health, Langer challenges the idea that the limits we assume and impose on ourselves are real. With only subtle shifts in our thinking, in our language, and in our expectations, she tells us, we can begin to change the ingrained behaviors that sap health, optimism, and vitality from our lives. Improved vision, younger appearance, weight loss, and increased longevity are just four of the results that Langer has demonstrated.

Immensely readable and riveting, Counterclockwise offers a transformative and bold new paradigm: the psychology of possibility. A hopeful and groundbreaking book by an author who has changed how people all over the world think and feel, Counterclockwise is sure to join Mindfulness as a standard source on new-century science and healing.]]> 240 Ellen J. Langer 0345502043 Dave 0 to-read 3.80 2009 Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility
author: Ellen J. Langer
name: Dave
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The History of Bees (Klimakvartetten, #1)]]> 40604684
England, 1852. William is a biologist and seed merchant who sets out to build a new type of beehive, one that will give both him and his children honor and fame.

United States, 2007. George is a beekeeper fighting an uphill battle against modern farming, but he hopes that his son can be their salvation.

China, 2098. Tao hand paints pollen onto the fruit trees now that the bees have long since disappeared. When Tao's young son is taken away by the authorities after a tragic accident, she sets out on a grueling journey to find out what happened to him.

Haunting, illuminating, and deftly written, The History of Bees joins these three very different narratives into one gripping and thought-provoking story that is just as much about the powerful bond between children and parents as it is about our very relationship to nature and humanity.]]> 353 Maja Lunde 1501161393 Dave 0 to-read 3.78 2015 The History of Bees (Klimakvartetten, #1)
author: Maja Lunde
name: Dave
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/12/16
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review:

]]> Dust Tracks on a Road 58399 Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature's most compelling and influential authors. Hurston's powerful novels of the South--including Jonah's Gourd Vine and, most famously, Their Eyes Were Watching God--continue to enthrall readers with their lyrical grace, sharp detail, and captivating emotionality. First published in 1942, Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston's personal story, told in her own words.]]> 324 Zora Neale Hurston Dave 0 to-read 4.12 1942 Dust Tracks on a Road
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Dave
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1942
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/12/16
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]]> Elevation 39931828
In the small town of Castle Rock, the setting of many of King’s most iconic stories, Scott is engaged in a low grade—but escalating—battle with the lesbians next door whose dog regularly drops his business on Scott’s lawn. One of the women is friendly; the other, cold as ice. Both are trying to launch a new restaurant, but the people of Castle Rock want no part of a gay married couple, and the place is in trouble. When Scott finally understands the prejudices they face—including his own—he tries to help. Unlikely alliances, the annual foot race, and the mystery of Scott’s affliction bring out the best in people who have indulged the worst in themselves and others.

Set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. The latest from legendary master storyteller Stephen King, a riveting, extraordinarily eerie, and moving story about a man whose mysterious affliction brings a small town together—a timely, upbeat tale about finding common ground despite deep-rooted differences. ]]> 160 Stephen King Dave 0 to-read 4.01 2018 Elevation
author: Stephen King
name: Dave
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/12/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation]]> 43313 Library Journal)]]> 424 John Ehle 0385239548 Dave 5
While I learned the basics of the Trail of Tears in school, it was mind-boggling to learn what lengths the states (particularly Georgia) and eventually the Jackson administration were willing to lower themselves to rid the East of Native Americans and take their land.

Ehle frames the book through a period history of the Cherokee people, particularly the life of Chief Major Ridge, from the late 1700's through the post-migration period. I was surprised to learn the extent to which many of the tribe had already adapted to the ways and customs of the United States, building Christian churches, schools and plantations, and even drafting a constitution based on the U.S. version.

The lesson learned too late was that no matter how 'civilized' Native Americans became, they were never going to be accepted by the whites.








]]> 4.13 1988 Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation
author: John Ehle
name: Dave
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/13
date added: 2018/12/13
shelves:
review:
A thoroughly researched and horrifically detailed account of the Cherokee nation and the events leading to the Native Americans' forced migration.

While I learned the basics of the Trail of Tears in school, it was mind-boggling to learn what lengths the states (particularly Georgia) and eventually the Jackson administration were willing to lower themselves to rid the East of Native Americans and take their land.

Ehle frames the book through a period history of the Cherokee people, particularly the life of Chief Major Ridge, from the late 1700's through the post-migration period. I was surprised to learn the extent to which many of the tribe had already adapted to the ways and customs of the United States, building Christian churches, schools and plantations, and even drafting a constitution based on the U.S. version.

The lesson learned too late was that no matter how 'civilized' Native Americans became, they were never going to be accepted by the whites.









]]> <![CDATA[The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created]]> 36300609 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERÌý•Ì�From Jane Leavy, the award-winning,ÌýNew York TimesÌýbestselling author ofÌýThe Last BoyÌýandÌýSandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth—the man Roger Angell dubbed "the model for modern celebrity."

AÌý Publishers Weekly ÌýBest Book of 2018

“Leavy’s newest masterpiece�. A major work of American history by an author with a flair for mesmerizing story-telling.� �Forbes



He lived in the present tense—in the camera’s lens. There was no frame he couldn’t or wouldn’t fill. He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the biggest fines. Like all the new-fangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace—radios, automatic clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones and loudspeakers—Babe Ruth "made impossible events happen." Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh—business manager, spin doctor, damage control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one tightly buttoned double-breasted suit—Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom.

His was a life of journeys and itineraries—from uncouth to couth,Ìýspartan to spendthrift, abandoned to abandon; from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston at the end of his career for a finale with the only team that would have him. There were road trips and hunting trips; grand tours of foreign capitals and post-season promotional tours, not to mention those 714 trips around the bases.

After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927—a total that would not be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris did it with the aid of the extended modern season—he embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. Walsh called the tour a "Symphony of Swat." The Omaha World Herald called it "the biggest show since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses offered their entire performance under one tent." In The Big Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and in so doing captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth’s life and times.

Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man.]]> 640 Jane Leavy 0062380249 Dave 0 to-read 3.74 2018 The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created
author: Jane Leavy
name: Dave
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa]]> 272452
Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.]]> 238 Charles Piot 0226669696 Dave 4
In Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), author Charles Piot attempts to look at the Kabre from a different angle. Piot, Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies, at Duke University, has focused his studies on rural West Africa. After spending several months in Togo living with and studying the Kabre, Piot tries in Remotely Global to detail the meshing of the modern and traditional within the Kabre, while correcting what he believes are the basic faults of earlier studies � that 1) that prior anthropological assumptions and conclusions were filtered through observers� own beliefs and biases, and 2) the Kabre traditions are not ‘pure,� but heavily influenced by its Euroamerican interactions.

In the end, Piot delivers one of the more well-researched, if a little dry, studies on the Kabre people. Combining a multitude of prior research with his own studies, as well as personal experiences, he creates a solid in-depth look at a well-studies but misunderstood people. Definitely a worthwhile read.
]]> 3.75 1999 Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa
author: Charles Piot
name: Dave
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2018/12/05
date added: 2018/12/06
shelves:
review:
The Kabre, a minority group based in the West African country of Togo, have settled the country’s northern plains for hundreds of years. With a known history that dates back to the slave trade in the 1700’s. Having suffered through German colonization, followed by that of the French, the Kabre, primarily subsistence farmers, currently dominate Togo government. This, despite the fact that the 730,000 Kabre make up only 23% of Togo`s population. Although well-situated in the modern world, the Kabre still hold strongly to ‘traditional� ways, including ritual ceremonies, and a belief in spirits. These ways have long attracted the attention of anthropologists, yielding scores of studies of Kabre society. The majority, if not all of these, paint the Kabre’s traditions as uncontaminated by outside influences.

In Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), author Charles Piot attempts to look at the Kabre from a different angle. Piot, Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies, at Duke University, has focused his studies on rural West Africa. After spending several months in Togo living with and studying the Kabre, Piot tries in Remotely Global to detail the meshing of the modern and traditional within the Kabre, while correcting what he believes are the basic faults of earlier studies � that 1) that prior anthropological assumptions and conclusions were filtered through observers� own beliefs and biases, and 2) the Kabre traditions are not ‘pure,� but heavily influenced by its Euroamerican interactions.

In the end, Piot delivers one of the more well-researched, if a little dry, studies on the Kabre people. Combining a multitude of prior research with his own studies, as well as personal experiences, he creates a solid in-depth look at a well-studies but misunderstood people. Definitely a worthwhile read.

]]> <![CDATA[Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary]]> 37003174 The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy" --how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America.

Every working person in the United States asks the same question, how secure is my job? For a generation, roughly from 1945 to 1970, business and government leaders embraced a vision of an American workforce rooted in stability. But over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the postwar institutions that insulated us from volatility--big unions, big corporations, powerful regulators--have been swept aside by a fervent belief in "the market." Temp tracks the surprising transformation of an ethos which favored long-term investment in work (and workers) to one promoting short-term returns. A series of deliberate decisions preceded the digital revolution and upended the longstanding understanding of what a corporation, or a factory, or a shop, was meant to do.

Temp tells the story of the unmaking of American work through the experiences of those on the inside: consultants and executives, temps and office workers, line workers and migrant laborers. It begins in the sixties, with economists, consultants, business and policy leaders who began to shift the corporation from a provider of goods and services to one whose sole purpose was to maximize profit--an ideology that brought with it the risk-taking entrepreneur and the shareholder revolution and changed the very definition of a corporation.

With Temp, Hyman explains one of the nation's most immediate crises. Uber are not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer goes deeper than apps, further back than downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work.]]> 400 Louis Hyman 0735224072 Dave 0 to-read 3.91 2018 Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary
author: Louis Hyman
name: Dave
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong]]> 296662 Lies My Teacher Told Me won the American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.

James W. Loewen, a sociology professor and distinguished critic of history education, puts 12 popular textbooks under the microscope-and what he discovers will surprise you. In his opinion, every one of these texts fails to make its subject interesting or memorable. Worse still is the proliferation of blind patriotism, mindless optimism and misinformation filling the pages.

From the truth about Christopher Columbus to the harsh reality of the Vietnam War, Loewen picks apart the lies we've been told. This audiobook, narrated by Brian Keeler (The Hurricane, "All My Children") will forever change your view of the past.]]> 383 James W. Loewen 0684818868 Dave 0 to-read 3.96 1995 Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
author: James W. Loewen
name: Dave
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Economics For Dummies 570206 Economics For Dummies helps you see how your personal financial picture is influenced by the larger economic picture. When you understand how what happens on Wall Street affects Main Street and how policies emanating from the White House impact the finances in your house, you'll be able to:

Learn how government economic decisions affect you and your family Make better spending decisions and improve your personal finances Maximize your business profits Make wiser investments Written by Sean M. Flynn, PhD, Assistant Professor of Economics at Vassar College, Economics For Dummies covers all the basics of micro- and macroeconomic theory. The next time you need to understand an economic theory or calculation, whether it's on the nightly news or on a spreadsheet at work, you'll no longer be in the dark. Economics For Dummies covers all the history, principles, major theories, and terminology, including:

How economics affect governments, international relations, business, and even environmental issues like global warming and endangered species How the government fights recessions and unemployment using monetary and fiscal policy How and why international trade is good for you even if you don't appreciate French champagne, Irish crystal, or Swiss watches How the law of supply and demand can explain the prices of everything from comic books to open heart surgeries How the Federal Reserve controls the money supply, interest rates, and inflation Basic theories such as Keynesian economics, the Laffer Curve, and Adam Smith's Invisible Hand Presenting complex theories in simple terms and helping you decode the jargon, understand the equations, and debunk the common misconceptions, Economics For Dummies could be a big boon to your personal economy!]]> 384 Sean Masaki Flynn 0764557262 Dave 5
My head still hurts.

That being said, this is a great introduction to economics, both micro and macro. It's written clearly and concisely, and hits all of the basics. For me, it took a little while to wrap my head around some of the graphs, so I recommend taking this slow.

]]> 3.73 Economics For Dummies
author: Sean Masaki Flynn
name: Dave
average rating: 3.73
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2018/11/10
date added: 2018/11/11
shelves:
review:
I read this while cramming for my teaching certification test.

My head still hurts.

That being said, this is a great introduction to economics, both micro and macro. It's written clearly and concisely, and hits all of the basics. For me, it took a little while to wrap my head around some of the graphs, so I recommend taking this slow.


]]> <![CDATA[Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey along the Cherokee Trail of Tears]]> 264904 258 Jerry Ellis 0803267436 Dave 0 to-read 3.72 1991 Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey along the Cherokee Trail of Tears
author: Jerry Ellis
name: Dave
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Generation Z (Generation Z #1)]]> 38392331 332 Peter Meredith 0999287354 Dave 0 to-read 3.76 2018 Generation Z (Generation Z #1)
author: Peter Meredith
name: Dave
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts]]> 35957157
Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there is always information that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making?

Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it's difficult to say "I'm not sure" in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don't always lead to bad outcomes.

By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate and successful in the long run.]]> 288 Annie Duke 0735216355 Dave 0 to-read 3.80 2018 Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
author: Annie Duke
name: Dave
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1) 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]> 325 Toni Morrison Dave 5
Be forewarned, this ain't no beach read. This is a hard read, literally and figuratively.

Hard in that the book can be dense linguistically, forcing the reader to pick through the vernacular of late 1800's. Hard in that the brutality and inhumanity of slavery is bared here, and isn't breezed past or glossed over. Hard in that Morrison doesn't talk down to her audience, doesn't spoon-feed the answers to questions, if she answers them at all. Hard in that symbolism is heavy here - I actually called up teaching aids to refer to while I read this.

Hard, but to paraphrase Tom Hanks, the hard is what makes it great. For me, the hard was never a chore. This was the first book in quite awhile that kept me this enthralled. I brought the book out to dinner with me, reading as I ate; woke up in the middle of the night to read a chapter (or two); skipped Thursday Night Football to read.

In Beloved, Morrison expertly lays out detailed, fascinating characters, settings and situations. It's rich textually - layered. Definitely worth the effort. Tomorrow I'm heading to B&N and stocking up on her other novels. Going to be a busy fall her.
]]> 3.96 1987 Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)
author: Toni Morrison
name: Dave
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2018/10/07
date added: 2018/10/07
shelves:
review:
I gave this five stars, only because I can't give six.

Be forewarned, this ain't no beach read. This is a hard read, literally and figuratively.

Hard in that the book can be dense linguistically, forcing the reader to pick through the vernacular of late 1800's. Hard in that the brutality and inhumanity of slavery is bared here, and isn't breezed past or glossed over. Hard in that Morrison doesn't talk down to her audience, doesn't spoon-feed the answers to questions, if she answers them at all. Hard in that symbolism is heavy here - I actually called up teaching aids to refer to while I read this.

Hard, but to paraphrase Tom Hanks, the hard is what makes it great. For me, the hard was never a chore. This was the first book in quite awhile that kept me this enthralled. I brought the book out to dinner with me, reading as I ate; woke up in the middle of the night to read a chapter (or two); skipped Thursday Night Football to read.

In Beloved, Morrison expertly lays out detailed, fascinating characters, settings and situations. It's rich textually - layered. Definitely worth the effort. Tomorrow I'm heading to B&N and stocking up on her other novels. Going to be a busy fall her.

]]> <![CDATA[1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus]]> 39020 In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

]]> 563 Charles C. Mann 1400032059 Dave 0 to-read 4.04 2005 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
author: Charles C. Mann
name: Dave
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/10/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Reckoning 38389488
Pete Banning was Clanton, Mississippi's favorite son--a decorated World War II hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed his pastor and friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder weren't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it--to the sheriff, to his lawyers, to the judge, to the jury, and to his family--was: "I have nothing to say."

Pete was not afraid of death and was willing to take his motive to the grave.

John Grisham takes us on an incredible journey, from the Jim Crow South to the jungles of the Philippines during World War II; from an insane asylum filled with secrets to the Clanton courtroom where Pete's defense attorney tries desperately to save him. Reminiscent of the finest tradition of Southern Gothic storytelling, 'The Reckoning' would not be complete without Grisham's signature layers of legal suspense, and he delivers on every page.]]> 420 John Grisham Dave 0 to-read 3.62 2018 The Reckoning
author: John Grisham
name: Dave
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/09/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches]]> 225073 240 Clayborne Carson 0446678090 Dave 5
This collection captures many of MLK's most notable speeches, from the Montgomery bus strike to his final speech, 'I've Been To The Mountaintop,' presented the day before his assassination. Along the way, it displays his transition from focusing on civil rights to including focuses on the Vietnam War and economic disparity. Along the way his voice also became bolder, more willing to demand the justice he sought.

This is also an invaluable read for those interested in the history of those times. The speeches detail the battles fought to achieve an end to legal segregation - African Americans trying to register to vote were beaten, mauled by attack dogs and sometimes killed. Birmingham became a war zone, seeing dozens (if not more than 100) of bombs thrown against black businesses and churches. The historical power structure had no hesitation to kill black protestors in order to maintain the status quo.

In that light, it is of more credit to Dr. King that he never wavered on his call for non-violence, which he believed was a self-defeating course of action. “I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that," he wrote in his speech known as 'Where Do We Go From Here?"

My personal favorite works here - outside of 'I Have A Dream," are 'Beyond Vietnam,' in which he lays out his reasons to oppose the ongoing Vietnam War, and his eulogy for the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.
]]> 4.61 1969 A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches
author: Clayborne Carson
name: Dave
average rating: 4.61
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2018/09/20
date added: 2018/09/23
shelves:
review:
Like many others, I listened to recordings of these speeches while reading along. The written speeches, by themselves, are rewarding. But hearing Dr. King's voice adds another dimension to them, and brings history to life.

This collection captures many of MLK's most notable speeches, from the Montgomery bus strike to his final speech, 'I've Been To The Mountaintop,' presented the day before his assassination. Along the way, it displays his transition from focusing on civil rights to including focuses on the Vietnam War and economic disparity. Along the way his voice also became bolder, more willing to demand the justice he sought.

This is also an invaluable read for those interested in the history of those times. The speeches detail the battles fought to achieve an end to legal segregation - African Americans trying to register to vote were beaten, mauled by attack dogs and sometimes killed. Birmingham became a war zone, seeing dozens (if not more than 100) of bombs thrown against black businesses and churches. The historical power structure had no hesitation to kill black protestors in order to maintain the status quo.

In that light, it is of more credit to Dr. King that he never wavered on his call for non-violence, which he believed was a self-defeating course of action. “I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that," he wrote in his speech known as 'Where Do We Go From Here?"

My personal favorite works here - outside of 'I Have A Dream," are 'Beyond Vietnam,' in which he lays out his reasons to oppose the ongoing Vietnam War, and his eulogy for the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

]]>