What books are you reading ?

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SETIsLady
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What books are you reading ?

Post by SETIsLady » 07-29-2007 08:42 PM

Hello All, I thought it would be fun to share what books you are reading and give a little review when you are done.

I will go first. I just picked this book up tonight and will let everyone know what I think of it when I am done.

STATIC: GOVERNMENT LIARS, MEDIA CHEERLEADERS, AND THE PEOPLE WHO FIGHT BACK

From Publishers Weekly

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and her author brother, David Goodman, follow up their bestseller The Exception to the Rulers by again synthesizing radio interviews and commentary with secondary sources on charged issues that the corporate media too often overlook. "The Bush administration is obsessed with controlling the flow of information," the authors declare, citing examples from Iraq to Katrina. One glaring hypocrisy is the president's claim that "we do not render to countries that torture"; the authors find mounds of evidence to the contrary. They also remind us of the unseemly ties between Republican Party supporters and Pentagon contracts in Iraq. In one hilarious episode—lightly reported in the U.S. media—a British activist group, the Yes Men, hoaxed the BBC regarding Dow Chemical's apparent willingness to apologize for the Bhopal disaster. On Goodman's show, a former U.S. Army interrogator acknowledged that 98% of those picked up in Iraq "had not done anything." A brief final section highlights those who fight back, including antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan, and a former British ambassador in Uzbekistan who blew the whistle on that regime's human rights abuses.

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Post by Joolz » 07-29-2007 09:03 PM

I haven't started it yet--maybe tomorrow!--but I'm going to be reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. My daughter just finished it and can hardly wait for me to read it so she has someone to talk to about it. She says it's not for the faint of heart. (And yes, I know it's an "Oprah" book, but it was recommended by two of my daughter's English profs, and she says they weren't wrong. ;) )
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Post by SETIsLady » 07-29-2007 09:06 PM

Thanks Julie for sharing. Its ok if its an Oprah book. This thread is for fun, thats all :)

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Post by Joolz » 07-29-2007 09:10 PM

SETIsLady wrote: Thanks Julie for sharing. Its ok if its an Oprah book. This thread is for fun, thats all :)

That's good, Linda, cuz I'm reading this one for FUN! :D Even though its subject is kinda dark ...mumble, mumble, mumble... but it's cuz I WANT to read it, not cuz I HAVE to read it, which is important to me and what makes it FUN! :D :D :D
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Post by SETIsLady » 07-29-2007 09:15 PM

I went to the book store to get some good old fashioned fiction, but kept being drawn to current events, or as I like to call it strange than fiction. Oh well ...lol

PS...I sent you an email yesterday ;)

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Post by Shirleypal » 07-29-2007 09:24 PM

Water for Elephants: A Novel
by Sara Gruen (Author)
N.Y. Times Bestseller

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

This is a tear jerker and must read for anyone who has an elderly parent, I just started it.

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Post by Divinorumus » 07-29-2007 09:27 PM

These days I mostly prefer to read what is unable to make it past corporate publishers and editors and other commercialized influences and decision makers. I like to read stuff that frightens government regimes and dictators and other ruling elites. Long live the Internet and the wonderful self proclaimed independent authors that are beholding to no one and no publisher, not even the almighty dollar, that keep me interested and awake and alive and hoping in this world. Thank you to you all!

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Post by racehorse » 07-29-2007 09:35 PM

"Black Jack Logan: An Extraordinary Life in Peace and War" by Gary Ecelbarger.

_______

Book Description

A new light on a major Civil War figure.


From the Back Cover

His legacy was Memorial Day. He was a dominant player in the politics of the Gilded Age, a three-term senator who was as popular as he was partisan. He was the vice-presidential candidate in the losing race in 1884. Had he not died unexpectedly at the age of sixty, he may likely have become president in 1888. He entered the political scene in 1859 with controversy, a Northern (Illinois) congressman so committed to enforcing the Fugitive Slave laws that abolitionists dubbed him "Dirty Work" Logan.
The Civil War made him a star. But more than that, it was the epiphany that changed his political and social values. He changed his philosophy, changed political parties, and fought for the rights of African Americans and for women's suffrage. He witnessed his first battle as a United States congressman, but became so impassioned with the fury of the fight that he picked up a discarded rifle and battled alongside the foot soldiers. Officially entering the war as a colonel, he served under such legends as Ulysses S.
Grant and William Tecumsah Sherman, and his ostentatious nature and solid leadership on the battlefield earned him rapid promotions and dominant roles in the decisive campaigns of the war. By 1865 he was a major general leading an army, and was considered the best volunteer soldier that the war produced.
He may be the most noteworthy nineteenth-century American to escape notice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His name is John Alexander Logan, known in his time as Black Jack Logan, and this, finally, is the book he deserves.
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Post by Joolz » 07-29-2007 09:48 PM

Got it... replied. :)
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Post by Shirleypal » 07-29-2007 09:55 PM

I bought two other books by Tess Gerritsen yesterday, haven't read them yet.

Call After Midnight

Under The Knife

Art was right about her, she is an amazing writer, I have read her first eight novels.

My favorites are
Harvest
Life Support
Bloodstream
Gravity

If you like Medical Mysteries with a big touch of truth in them these are for you.

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Post by SETIsLady » 07-29-2007 10:03 PM

You guys have thrown up some great books, and Div your right there are alot of great internet authors out there.

Shirley I am a big Robin Cook fan. Waiting for "Critical" to come out in October :)

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Post by Shirleypal » 07-29-2007 10:13 PM

The only fiction I read is Tess, on rare occasion something else. I know I should lighten up a little, I mentioned I bought two books yesterday, will have to admit it was three, the other is The Elegant Universe by Brain Greene, can't seem to stay away from theoretical physics.

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Post by Sam.I'm.Not » 07-29-2007 10:23 PM

The Republic of Plato

Translated with notes and an interpretive Essay, By Allan Bloom.

Did not get to this one well in collage it was next on the list.

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Post by joequinn » 07-29-2007 10:23 PM

I have just finished Graham Greene's The Comedians, his "entertainment" about "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti and his dreaded Tontons Macoutes. Very, very good. I did not use to like Graham Greene when I was younger, but now I recognize him as a very great writer.

Next on the agenda, Romola Nijinsky's biography of her husband Vaslav, probably the greatest male dancer of the 20th century...

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Post by joequinn » 07-29-2007 10:31 PM

And oh, Sam, be very, very careful about Allen Bloom's interpretation of Plato's Republic. There is a very, very direct line connecting Bloom's interpretation of Plato to the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children in the streets of Baghdad. Bloom was one of the students of that monster of depravity, Leo Strauss, and Paul Wolfowitz was one of Bloom's.

I will never forget when I picked up Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, expecting to read the deepest thoughts of my heart. Yes, I certainly agreed with Bloom's condemnation of the post-literate, post-articulate, post-cultural 'Merikan rabble, but as I got deep into the book, I found that I despised just as deeply what he wanted to put in its place.

It all goes back to Leo Strauss, that monster of depravity. Well, he's not the only one who knows his Plato, his Nietzsche and his Heidegger! Not by a ****ing long shot! Sam, be warned!
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