My sisters Girl Scout Troop went to DC many years ago. I was an older scout and considered chaperone material. I assumed (right or wrong) the girls just saw it as a time to get away from school (considering how young they were and being typical kids). I was thinking “OMG I’m going to see the White House! I’m going to see the Vietnam Memorial” (those were my two “must see” items). While seeing the White House was fun (though we missed the last tour) […]
I kept expecting a wizard, but all I got was Richard Nixon.
The aura that surrounds John F. Kennedy is, by itself, worthy of enough attention to warrant a book all by itself. From his familial history to his infamous relationship with women to his storied political career and untimely, traumatizing assassination, few Americans are both so well known and mysterious. I’ve stated before my intention to read a biography on every president. This goal grew out of a plan to rank every president (plus Jefferson Davis) by various criteria. I generally have that done already, but […]
Disposable tin soldiers
A child of the 80s, I grew up on a distorted view of Vietnam. Free love was a whispered aphorism that seemed almost impossible in the age of Ronald Reagan, televangelism, and HIV. Peace on earth, a barely remembered dream amidst the bluster of Cold War bravado and the cinematic blood lust of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The 60s were dead. But in its place, like some perverse cosmic satirist with a zeitgeist-altering pen, was a hyper-visualized mirror image that exaggerated its […]
Founded on a tautological proposition that no one challenges.
It’s easy to pick on Richard Nixon. The list of his crimes, aspersions against his character, and embarrassments he forced on this country is long enough that it could take up this entire review. He was a blight on the office he felt so entitled to. He is the avatar for nefarious public officials limited by a base cunning and furtive guile. His promise was ambrosia; his delivery: brinksmanship. Richard Nixon savored attention, but skulked in the darkness of public derision. Every friend was an […]
The Actually-Very-Loud American
I took a graduate seminar in Graham Greene when I was getting my MA, and so I’ve read a LOT of Graham Greene. My project for that class was examining Greene’s relationship with film and cinema. One of the books I was interested in reading (but ultimately lacked the time to explore) was The Quiet American, which was made into a film in the mid-to-late 1990s. I finally got around to reading it, thanks to an audiobook request I put in through my library. Thomas […]
A book about the American character and the ties that bind
Thompson opened up an unfamiliar world for me inside my very own country, the world of the mid-West where change comes more slowly … but inexorably. Jean Thompson’s book reminded me a bit of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in that it offers a long view of a mid-western family’s trials and tribulations. And yet Thompson treats her characters with the poignancy and compassion that real, if flawed, people deserve, while Franzen’s characters were too often caricaturized and mocked for my taste. The Ericksons are a […]
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