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1250276578
| 9781250276575
| 1250276578
| 4.32
| 320
| Jul 11, 2023
| Jul 11, 2023
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it was amazing
| On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the-------------------------------------- …good intentions have rarely paved such a direct route to hell.Back in World War II there was a small bit of graffiti that appeared in many places across the world. It showed a nose, the fingers of two hands and eyes peeking over a wall, or a fence, along with the words “Kilroy was here.” It was meant to show that American soldiers had been in a particular place, and that they had been everywhere. If Dickey Chapelle had wanted to, she could have left her graffiti across the world as well, not just to show that she had been there, but that she had been the first woman, the first reporter, the first woman reporter who had done the job in many, many dangerous places. She slept in Bedouin tents in the Algerian desert, and in the foxholes she dug herself in the hills overlooking Beirut. She rode in picket boats between battleships off the coast of Iwo Jima and flew in a nuclear-armed jet stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Aegean sea. On New Year’s Eve 1958, she patrolled the Soviet border with the Turkish infantry. On New Year’s Day 1959, she photographed Fidel Castro’s army as they entered Havana. She jumped out of planes over America, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. She heard bullets flying over her head in Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa, and knew that they all sounded the same.[image] Engraving of Kilroy on the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C. - image and descriptive text from Wikipedia It is likely you have heard of Margaret Bourke-White, famed for her coverage of World War II. You may have heard of Marguerite Higgins, noted for reporting on the Korean War. It is very unlikely you have heard of the subject of this book. Go on Wikipedia, or most other places that aggregate such information, and look up World War II correspondents. Chapelle, whose full name was Georgette Louise Marie Meyer Chapelle, is unlikely to appear. Yet, she did seminal work covering diverse elements of the war, including battles on the front lines. She even trained as a paratrooper, so she could jump into battle zones with American military units, which she did. Lorissa Rinehart seeks to correct that oversight. [image] Lorissa Rinehart - Image from Macmillan She tracks Dickey from her brief stint as a student of aeronautical engineering at MIT. Soon after, she was a journalist in Florida, covering a tragic air show in Cuba. It was her first real reporting “at the front” of a deadly event. And the way ahead was set. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, she saw that war was coming with United States. Although Congress did not agree to declare war, it did ramp up production of airplanes and other war materials to support the effort against Nazism. [image] Dickey Chapelle - Image from Narratively, courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society She learned that she would have to become a photographer if she wanted to cover the war. So she took photography classes. Among her teachers was the man she would marry, Anthony “Tony” Chapelle. Their relationship was never a natural. He was much older, controlling, with a temper, described by some as a consummate con man. He would be jealous of her successes, and seemingly always eager to undermine her confidence. But he was a very successful war photographer and taught her the skills that would enhance her natural eye, helping make her the great photojournalist she would become. [image] Dickey Chapelle photographs marines in 1955 - image From Wall Street Journal – from Wisconsin Historical Society Rinehart tracks not only Chapelle’s adventures on the front lines of many military conflicts, but the skirmishes in which she was forced to engage to gain permission to be there at all. Sexism, as one would expect, forms a major portion of those struggles, but some had to do with her being a journalist at all, regardless of her gender. There is a string of firsts next to her name in the history of journalism, and the word “female” does not appear in all of them. Sadly, she was the first female correspondent killed in Viet Nam. [image] Chapelle with Pilots - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society Dickey was tough as nails, enduring some of the same training as the GIs she was covering. In addition to her considerable coverage of World War II, she was on the front lines of the major hot spots in the Cold War. Not only embedded with marines, Chapelle spent considerable time with troops from Turkey, Castro’s rebels in Cuba, anti-Castro plotters in Florida, secret American forces in Laos, Laotian anti-communist fighters, Algerian revolutionaries, Hungarian rebels, and more. The list is substantial. She would keep diving in, wanting to get the immediate experience of the fighters, the civilians caught in the crossfire, the human impact of war. No Five o’clock Follies for Dickey. She was not interested in being a stenographer for brass talking points, seeing that approach as the enemy of truthful reporting. [image] Dickey Chapelle sits and drinks coffee with the FLN Scorpion Battalion Rebels in the Atlas Mountains in Algeria - image and descriptive text from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle Chapelle was captured, imprisoned, and tortured in Hungary by Soviet forces. It gave her a particularly pointed perspective on the treatment of prisoners by Western militaries, and the greater implications of the USA not holding to the highest international standards. One of her greatest gifts was a respect for local cultures and particularly local fighters. She was quite aware of how hard they trained, how hard and far they pushed themselves, how much deprivation they willingly endured. Yet she encountered attitudes from American officers and leaders that regarded non-white fighters through a self-defeating racist lens. Chapelle tried to get the message across to those in command how wrong they were in their regard for the locals the USA was supposedly there to support. Despite occasionally breaking through the brain-truth barrier, that engagement proved a demoralizing, losing battle. [image] Iwo Jima Medical Facilities - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle Another example of her analytical capability was fed by her time with a community in Laos, led by a cleric, possessed of superior tactical and political approaches. She tried to bring her knowledge of this to American military leaders. It was not a total failure. Although her ideas were not implemented to a meaningful extent, she was eventually brought in by the military to teach what she knew to new officers. Through much of her work, which included extensive coverage of the on-the-ground Marshall Plan in Europe, her marriage to Tony was seemingly in constant crisis. It was an ongoing war, with dustups aplenty, advances and retreats, damage incurred, but resulted, ultimately, in a separation of forces, which freed Chapelle to pursue her front-line compulsion unimpeded by contrary wishes. [image] Fidel Castro with cigar, and five other men - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle Her employers were not always news outlets. She was employed by the Red Cross to document the need for blood in the war zone. She covered a hospital ship, and medical units on the battlefield. It was hoped that her coverage would give a boost to a national blood drive encouraging Americans to give blood for wounded soldiers. It was a huge success. She worked for the American Friends Service Committee covering military behavior in the Dominican Republic. Other non-profits paid for her to report from other parts of the world. And sundry magazines provided enough employment to keep her working almost constantly. [image] A woman in a headscarf crosses an improvised bridge in the vicinity of the village of Tamsweg, escaping from Hungary to Austria - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle This is an amazing book about an amazing woman.The story of Dickey Chapelle reads like fiction. Even though we know this is a biography, and that what is on the page has already occurred, Rinehart makes the story sing. Her story-telling skill brings us into the scenes of conflict, sometimes terror, so we tremble or gird along with her subject. She taps into the adventure of Dickey’s life, as well as the peril. This is the life that Dickey had sought, and which would be her undoing. The book reads like a novel, fast, exciting, eye-opening, frustrating, enraging, sad, but ultimately satisfying. Dickey Chapelle’s was a life that was as rich with stumbling blocks as it was with jobs well done, but ultimately it was a life well lived, offering concrete benefits to those who were exposed to her work, and an inspiration for many who have followed in her bootsteps. I side with prisoners against guards, enlisted men against officers, weakness against power. Review posted - 10/6/23 Publication date – 7/11/23 I received a copy of First to the Front from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Lorissa Rinehart’s personal, FB, and Instagram pages Profile - from Women Also Know History Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and their points of intersection.Interviews -----Writers Talking – Season 2 Episode 7 - Talking to Lorissa Rinehart - podcast – 50:30 -----Hidden History Podcast - A Conversation with Lorissa Rinehart with John Rodriguez - video – 40:18 – begin at 1:43 – there is a transcript on the side -----Cold War Conversations - Dickey Chapelle – Trailblazing Female Cold War Journalist - audio – 1:01:50 Items of Interest from the author -----The War Horse - excerpt -----Facebook reel - Rinehart on Dickey Chapelle showing incredible guts -----FB - The Top 10 Books She Read to Prepare -----The History Reader - Escaping Algeria - excerpt -----Narratively - The Parachuting Female Photojournalist Who Dove Into War Headfirst Item of Interest -----Milwaukee PBS - Behind the Pearl Earrings: The Story of Dickey Chapelle, Combat Photojournalist - video documentary- 56:05 -----Political Dictionary - Five o’clock Follies ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 30, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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Hardcover
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1250281903
| 9781250281906
| 1250281903
| 3.80
| 944
| Oct 18, 2022
| Oct 18, 2022
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it was amazing
| Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy. Almost pathologically, they normalized the abnormal and sensa Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy. Almost pathologically, they normalized the abnormal and sensationalized mundane.------------------------------------- These days, we can clearly see the fallout from decades of declining public trust, the result, at least partly, of so many years of the press being undermined and of undermining itself. What is that fallout? Americans no longer share a common basis of reality. That’s dangerous because American democracy, government by the people, simply can’t function this way.My parents were both readers, which should come as no surprise. Mom, a homemaker, consumed a steady stream of mysteries her entire life, as least the part of it that included me. Dad worked at night, but would set aside some reading time every day, particularly on his days off. He was not much of a book reader, though. His preferred material was the newspaper. Well, newspapers. There was a flood of them coming in, the New York Post (pre-Rupert), the Daily News, The Herald Tribune, The Mirror, the Telegram, the Times. Not saying that we had all of these coming in every day, but all were well represented. And if you wanted to see what he was reading, it was not hard to figure it out. Next to his living room easy chair there was always a stack. If it were books, today, we would call it a TBR. But the stack had a life of its own, and a sorting that was inexplicable. He must have read a fair bit as he kept the pile from overwhelming the room, hell, the entire apartment. I cannot say that I was a big news-reader as kid. More sports than anything. I wanted to keep up with the teams I cared about, the baseball Giants, the Yankees, and eventually the Mets. [image] Margaret Sullivan - image from PBS I was very fortunate to have been raised in an environment in which reading the news, every day, was just a normal part of living. Even though my parents were not well-educated—Mom finished high school. Dad did not.—they valued staying informed. There was no talk at home about reporters slanting stories, although I am sure they did. The news was like the water supply, presumed to be potable, and universally consumed. But there was one exception. It was not until later in life that I began to read the news with a more critical eye, but even as a kid, I could see that sportswriter Dick Young was a mean-spirited son-of-a-bitch, flogging right-wing bile that had nothing to do with sports. I guess that was my first real exposure, consciously anyway, to journalistic political bias. Young was not a person who could be trusted, even though he held a very public position at a major New York newspaper. I doubt, if Dad were still with us, that he would accept what he’d be reading today as revealed truth. But back then, mostly, though, we took the news at face value. Margaret Sullivan, a doyen of media self-reflection, has not been happy with American news reporting for quite some time. The news media, in her view (and in the view of anyone with a brain) is far too concerned with the horserace aspect of political competition, far more than they are with the actual policy substance that differentiates candidates and parties. One of the most respected journalists of her generation, having led a major regional newspaper, and having held two of the most widely read and respected writing posts in contemporary American journalism, she has had a ring-side view of this in action. She worked for thirty-two years at The Buffalo News, rising to be their top editor and a vice president. In 2012 she moved on to be the Public Editor at The New York Times, and in 2016 headed to The Washington Post as a media columnist in the high-powered Style section. She retired from that gig in August of 2022, and is currently teaching part time at Duke while working on a novel. (01/2023 MS announced that she would write a weekly column for The Guardian) She won a Mirror award for her writing on Trump’s first impeachment, served on the Pulitzer Prize board, and was a director of the American Society of News Editors. She has also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous sexism, as she worked her way through her share of glass ceilings. She knows a thing or two, because she has seen a thing or two. Newsroom Confidential is not just a personal memoir of her career in the newsroom, but a look at the changes that have taken place in journalism and in our view of journalism over her career. It’s high time to ask how public trust in the press steadily plummeted from the years following the Watergate scandal and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s—when seven of ten Americans trusted the news—to today’s rock-bottom lows.The high point may have been the inspirational impact of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting on the Nixon administration’s corruption, Watergate most particularly. It was seeing that journalism was a way to impact the world, to improve it, that moved her to pursue a career in the news. We follow her through the career travails at The Buffalo News. She tells a bit about her full dedication to work conflicting with the demands of having a family, exacerbated by having to cope with the extra resistance of gender bias in her struggle to advance her career. But while Buffalo may have occupied the bulk of her professional life, it does not occupy a proportional piece of the book. The real meat begins with her move to The New York Times. As Public Editor, her role was to be an outsider, looking critically as the work of Times reporters. Not exactly a recipe for making friends. Most editors were not particularly receptive to criticism, constructive or not. The sexism presented straight away, as a Times obituary about a very accomplished woman opened with a description of her cooking skills. Her job was not only to write about wrongs, but to offer recommendations for improvement. It would prove a Sisyphean task. She writes about her personal conflict in taking on a Public Editor investigation into a story written by a Times mentee of hers. While it may have been an important and high-profile position, it was a very tough job at times. One thing I learned back in my twenties is that it is not only the content of articles that merits attention. Their placement is also significant, as is the heading given to those articles. These are often provided by an editor, not the reporter, and are often misleading. Sullivan writes about the most egregious example of the Times doing this, in its treatment of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. The paper saw Clinton as a “pre-anointed” candidate, presuming that she would win. They wanted to be seen as tough, and were very defensive about being seen as too soft on Democrats. The Times had certainly treated the FBI’s two investigations of the 2016 presidential candidates very differently. It shouted one from the rooftops, and on Trump and Russia the paper used its quiet inside voice, playing right into the Republican candidate’s hands. With a little more than a week to go before the election, the Times published a story with the headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” If anyone was concerned about Trump’s ties to Vladimir Putin, their fears might be put to rest by that soothing headline, though the story itself was considerably more nuanced. Even that reporting, not very damning for Trump, appeared on an inside page of the paper, a far cry from the emails coverage splashed all over the front page, day after day. We now know, of course, that Russia had set out to interfere with the election, and did so very effectively.That sort of selective exposure was not exactly new. The Times had been aware, back when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, of a domestic spying program. They sat on the story for thirteen months, finally posting the information when the reporter who dug up the story threatened to scoop them with his book. The potential impact was considerable, as revelation of the program during the campaign might have impacted the election result. One collateral result of this was that when a later major leaker of government secrets was looking for a trustworthy outlet, the Times was bypassed, because there was no confidence that the paper would publish the material. The Washington Post and The Guardian received the materials instead. She writes about the transition of the news business from paper to digital, the decline in readership overall, and the national decline in news outlets, noting some who railed against the change, and others who saw the future early on and climbed on board. Sullivan’s real reporting bête noire is excessive reliance on anonymous sourcing, aka access journalism. Sure, there are instances in which getting on-the-record quotes is impossible, or even dangerous. But the over-reliance on anonymity has resulted in reporters being played for fools, being fed self-serving tidbits, often intended to dishonestly manipulate public perceptions, often aimed at using reporters as ordnance in internecine political battles, and far too frequently serving no public good. The classic example of this was Judith Miller at the Times, reporting inaccurate intel given to her by members of the Bush Administration in order to build support for a war that was already being planned. In the digital age another piece of this is a compulsion to generate clicks. This creates an incentive for reporters to sometimes hold on to maybe-less-exciting policy stories in favor of pieces that are likely to raise a reader’s temperature. The old trope If it bleeds it leads has been translated into the age of digital journalism as favoring heat over light. It is not really breaking news why people’s trust in journalism has declined. The news was once considered a realm in which professionals investigated and reported stories with an eye toward what was considered newsworthy. But with the demise of the Fairness Doctrine regarding broadcast news, the gates were opened for full-time partisanship in the airwaves. The concentration of media ownership into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations has diluted, if not entirely removed, local news reporting. Now, many local stations broadcast what their distant owners tell them to, including the airing of political puff pieces for favored candidates and issues, and hit pieces for those they oppose. With so many places in the nation reduced to a single newspaper or local news channel, local news has become more and more a mouthpiece of national corporate views. The availability of diverse perspectives in any small market papers or broadcasts, has been considerably reduced. The rise of the internet has had a huge impact on how we receive and perceive news. But a major reason, maybe the biggest, for a loss of faith in the media is the relentless assault on mainstream media by the right. Bias in the media is hardly new, but the unceasing emotionally-charged torrent of lies from right-wing media has raised dishonesty to a new, steroidal level. Every article that portrays Republicans or their supporters in a less than flattering light is attacked as evidence of some imaginary left-wing bias. One result of this relentless attack machine is that many outlets have become reluctant to report actual facts, lest they be attacked as biased. The Times, for example, took years to finally come around to describing Donald Trump’s blatant lies as just that. Can you fully trust a paper that is so weak-kneed about reporting the facts? Even regular Times readers must wonder. And, of course, those on the right now attack any media outlet that does not totally support the GOP party line. Even where no bias is present, many, if not all, on the right claim to see unfairness because they have been told thousands of times that such bias is always present. And the right is fond of using the threat of lawsuits to harass their targets. Trump is notorious for suing the objects of his ire, not expecting to win in court, but hoping to cost the sued large sums of money in legal fees, thus intimidating them, and, he hopes, deterring them from crossing him again. At least the Times has the resources to stand up to such bullying, but there are many media outlets that do not. Thus, MSM reporting slants away from truth. Sullivan’s experiences writing for the Times and Post are fascinating, offering a view from inside the fishbowl, of the cultures, and some of the personalities, the battles that were fought against external attackers and the internecine conflicts that occur everywhere. If Dad were around today, I expect he would approve of the many news subscriptions my wife and I share, the Times, the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily Beast, our local paper, et al. Our stacks of unread material may not accumulate next to chairs in our living room, but reside instead in a black hole of unread materials and a digital TBR of things we intend to get to. We have come to view news reporting with critical eyes, sensitive to biases that creep into (or are on full display) the text of pieces, aware of how those pieces are presented, where, when, and why. The sort of trust in the news that was extant in the middle twentieth century is gone. But that does not mean that all trust has been lost. For those willing to do the work, it is possible to discern good from bad, both in publications and reporters. But it takes a lot more effort today than it ever did. We are aware, as our parents’ generation was less likely to be, of a reporter’s bent. As the world has forced us to look closer at all sorts of informational input (think ingredient lists on food packages), we have become more discriminating consumers of news. This reporter can be relied on. That one cannot. The fracturing of the news into a galaxy of providers has made it easier than ever to choose only the news that that fits preconceived perspectives. But it is not exactly a news-flash that it remains possible to find quality reporting. It just takes a bit of digging. As for Sullivan’s look back at her career and the shift in public perceptions, it is revelatory, informative, and engaging. If you know anything at all about Sullivan’s writing, this will not come as a shock. The bad news? The decline in public trust of media is very real, as is the reduction in local reporting. The good news? (I believe) people are becoming more aware of bias in supposedly neutral news media. Trust in journalism can be rebuilt, but it is clear that many outlets rely on readers/watchers accepting their reporting with uncritical eyes. After you read Newsroom Confidential you will have a greater sense of what the journalistic challenges are today, both for readers and producers of news. You will not be able to say That’s news to me. Review posted – 11/18/22 Pub dates - 10/18/22 (hc) - 05/12/23 (tp) I received an ARE of Newsroom Confidential from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair and balanced review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Sullivan's FB and Twitter pages Interviews -----Time - Margaret Sullivan Can Only Indulge in So Much Nostalgia About Journalism - by Karl Vick -----Vogue - Local Journalism Is Dying, and Margaret Sullivan Is Sounding the Alarm in Ghosting the News - by Michelle Ruiz – not for this book but a fascinating interview -----The Problem with Jon Stewart- also from 2020 – also very good -----PBS - Trump’s Showdown – Margaret Sullivanby Michael Kirk – from 2018 – good stuff Items of Interest from the author -----Sullivan pieces for the Washington Post ----- Sullivan pieces for the New York Times -----The Washington Post - If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way: A Journalist’s Manifesto an adapted excerpt ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 31, 2022
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Oct 31, 2022
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Hardcover
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B098PDDZW3
| 4.09
| 18,987
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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it was amazing
| Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the govern Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden.-------------------------------------- Milley summarized and scribbled. “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.”The title, Peril, is drawn from President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, in which he says “We have much to do in this winter of peril…” It is the epigraph for the book. Winter is not coming. It is bloody well here, and has been here a lot longer than most folks realize. Woodward and his much younger partner, Bob Costa, national political reporter for the Washington Post, look over some of what we have endured, consider the peril we face today, and give us plenty to think about concerning what lies ahead. Biden’s speech addresses not only the threat to our democracy, but the threat to our safety from COVID variants, the cry for racial justice, and the threat to our planet from global warming. This book focuses on the threat to American democracy. [image] Bob Woodward and Robert Costa - image from CNN It rolls along on two parallel tracks. One is Trump’s attempt to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election. The other is Joe Biden’s determination to preserve the soul of our nation, focusing on his campaign, and the first few months of his administration. The chapters alternate, more or less between Trump and Biden. “Was that from this book?” One peril to be faced in reading this book is that of fixing what one read, when, where, and by whom, given the firehose flood of books on the Trump era. I addressed that in my review of I Alone Can Fix It. If this is of interest you can click here for a look. [image] Trump’s mob assaults the Capitol on January 6, 2021 - image from Business Insider January 6, 2021 is a date which will live in infamy. That was the day on which American democracy was nearly bombed into surrender by a sneak attack on the citadel of our national values. That was the day on which a failed Trump-led coup could easily have made moot the election he had just lost, and rendered American elections, certainly presidential elections, meaningless. It was the coming out party for an American brand of fascism that has long been an undercurrent, and sometimes much more, in our political life as a nation, a dark but always-present element in our population that Trump had recruited and encouraged for years, even before he ran for office. It is clear that, to the extent that we will ever know all the details of the coup plot, it is likely to come from the Congressional January 6 Committee’s final report, in combination with unredacted testimony given to that committee, testimony given at what we hope will be very public trials of those in charge of the effort, and intrepid reporters. The authors count among that final group. While offering far from a complete portrait of the plot, they have given us an insider’s look at what people in the administration and the government beyond that faced on 1/6 (which I personally think should be called Desecration Day.) And what they had to deal with in the months leading up to it. [image] Milley speaking with Trump - image from DNYUZ It was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley whose intercession with his Chinese counterpart talked the Chinese military down from a concern that Trump might launch an attack on China in order to remain in office, not once but twice. As the Chinese were again concerned what our imbalanced president might do after his coup attempt failed. There was also concern that Trump would attack Iran in an attempt to secure his own position. I doubt Israel would have appreciated the incomings such an action would have surely generated. He also floated the idea of evacuating troops from Afghanistan in January, 2021, with minimal planning. Thankfully he was dissuaded from that impulse as well. Milley is the official most in the limelight here. He was appointed to that post by Donald Trump. In Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s book I Alone Can Fix It, Milley told them of his concerns about the dangers of a right-wing coup. There is plenty more of that in this book as well. We hear a lot from Trump-whisperer Lindsey Graham about his conversations with Trump, who appears to have actually convinced himself of the truth of his own lies. He is a fine representative of those who, while remaining loyal to Trump, try to counsel him to sane courses of action. [image] Donald Trump pretends to check his watch as Senator Lindsey Graham speaks at the White - image and text from The Guardian We get a look at the conversations among the cabinet level officials, unwilling to allow him to use the US military as his private army. We learn what analyses they shared about the dangers facing the nation, what agreements they came to among themselves, what steps they took, and what mistakes they made. We get a look at how these and other level-headed adults in the administration did whatever they could to keep Trump from causing irreparable harm to the nation with his impulsive-driven, self-serving, poorly-informed decision-making. Part of all this included making certain that proper chains of command would be followed should Trump decide to start a war as a Wag the Dog self-preservation move, or command the military to take actions that were illegal. Days after the election, Trump fired Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, in large part for his public opposition to the use of the military to suppress BLM protests. It was certainly clear to those tracking Trump’s actions that Trump wanted the US military to be his personal security force, and Esper was an impediment. In fact, it was appropriate for the military to be brought to bear to battle an insurrection, and the delays in the military’s response can be traced to the Department of Defense, by then Esper-free, sitting on its hands for far too long. [image] Defense Secretary Mark Esper – fired after the election - image from Reuters via BBC One item that becomes clear from the telling here is that Mike Pence did his best to find a way to Yes for Trump, but was unable. It is also clear that Trump pushed Pence a step too far when he issued a press release claiming that the Vice President agreed with Trump’s lie that the VP had the legal right to refuse to accept the electoral votes of any state. It was the only thing, apparently, in four years in office, that generated a spine in the relentlessly invertebrate Pence, driving him into bunker mode. It is unfortunate that Pence will likely be remembered more for this single act than for his years of pathetic subservience to and enabling of an American Mussolini. It is chilling to consider that had there been alternate slates of electors ready to bring to bear, Pence might have actually done the deed. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi called him repeatedly after the insurrection, wanting him to invoke the 25th amendment. He refused to take their calls, calling a quick halt to his vertebrate moment. [image] Mike Pence flees the mob on 1/6 - image from The Guardian The book will (it certainly should) make your blood boil. The Founders put together a guiding document and a set of rules that presumed they would be carried out by honorable officials. They did not count on the possibility of a sociopath being elected president. Someone with not only no respect, but outright contempt, for the rule of law. He really claimed, and maybe even believed in his diseased mind, like Louis XIV, who famously said “L’etat est moi,” that he, personally, was the state. Bottom line is that when you see Woodward and Costa being interviewed about this book, or talking about the events they covered, their hair is on fire. They understand what it was that happened, namely that not only did the nation narrowly avoid a fascist coup that would have made the USA a dictatorship, but that the party of the guy who ordered it is all lined up and ready to goose-step their way to another try. We may have survived Trump’s 2021 coup attempt, but it is clear that he will try again, and there are far too many who are more than willing to go along, whether actively or passively. [image] Trump with Steve Bannon - image from CNN Now, as for the other part of this book. It should come as a salve for the angst generated by the reporting on Trump. They follow Biden’s decision to run, following the Charlottesville “good people on both sides” outrage, convinced that the very soul of the nation was imperiled, and that he could offer a way out of this very dark cloud, more so than other extant or potential candidates. We get to see a very human Biden, sincere, knowledgeable, willing to listen to well-informed and well-meant advice, willing to make needed adjustments, willing to talk to anyone, anywhere, and unwilling to be baited by Trumpian taunts and lies. We are let in to some of the family troubles the Bidens have endured, that they continue to endure. Biden is shown as the anti-Trump, an incredibly decent person, gifted at making personal contact with people, caring about people, remembering them, willing to spend unheard of amounts of time with people who could offer him nothing but their shared pain. It shows candidate Biden behaving in a presidential manner when the actual president would not. It is a warm portrait of a man the authors have certainly seen enough of to know. They also show him getting tough in legislative negotiations, and showing his exasperation when sanity, and decency, seem insufficient to accomplish a goal. The book continues into March 2021, so shows Biden as president as well as merely a candidate. But, of course, being Washington reporters, they feel it necessary to take a swing or two. In one instance they report on Biden snapping at a reporter who was being particularly dickish as if there was something wrong with that. That Biden later apologized was the real fault here. The reporter merited being smacked down. Their portrayal was that this was a kind of gaffe. Take a moment to roll your eyes here. The Beltway media have particular story lines that they adhere to, regardless of the facts. Reporting Biden as particularly gaffe-ridden is among them. He is no more so than most other people. We all misstate things at times. But they seem eager, drooling even for a chance to catch another one and reinforce the image. Their treatment of Biden’s entirely appropriate reaction to a hostile reporter is of a cloth with that mindlessness. [image] Presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden takes a picture with the Downs family after campaigning in Rehoboth Beach. - image and text from the Cape Gazette Gripes (in addition to the one above) As happens far too often in books of this sort, namely political history books put together largely through personal interviews, the authors sometimes slip into stenography mode. They report, presumably straight-faced, about Senate Majority, now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trotting out his spin about tax cuts for the rich being “tax reform” and crediting Trump for an economy that had been humming along quite nicely when he took office. I call BS. They continue in this mode about McConnell working with cabinet members trying to push Trump to some semblance of normal. Take nothing McConnell reports himself saying at face value. Second-party confirmation is always needed there. Ditto for Lindsey Graham. Former Republican and Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt issued a statement about Graham…saying that many people have tried to understand Graham over the years. He encouraged people not to look at it "through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things he used to believe and what he's doing now."Graham is quoted at length here, and it is all self-serving. Douse that with salt before consuming. Gripes, notwithstanding, Peril is an important book, another in a large library of reporting on the workings of the Trump administration, and particularly at how close Trump’s attempted coup came to succeeding. There are many lessons to be learned here. One is that the January 6th Committee should interview, whether via subpoena or not, all the players involved in orchestrating the insurrection, including Trump, and that they need to complete their report and make all necessary criminal referrals to the Department of Justice before Republicans have a chance to regain control of the House and shut them down. We learn that the norms and rules of American government are fatally flawed, allowing the dark-hearted to game the system for their political and personal advantage. We learn that even in dark times there are officials willing to put their careers, and even their lives on the line to stand up for the ideals and institutions, that Americans claim to admire and respect. We learn that there need to be fixes made to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to make sure that each state’s electors truthfully represent the decision of the voters. [image] Attorney John Eastman, left, speaks next to Rudy Giuliani at Donald Trump’s rally on 6 January - Image and text from Reuters, by way of The Guardian – photo by Jim, Bourg The book’s epigraph cut short Biden’s inaugural statement. The full sentence reads We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility. Despite the subsequent COVID variants that have killed or damaged so many in our nation, and the world, a major relief bill made it through a very marginally Democratic Congress. Other measures are needed, but hope that more can be done remains alive, despite Joe Manchin. There are hopeful signs in many parts of the nation that democracy is on the rise… [image] Hmmm, reviewus interruptus. Looks like we have run out of space here on Goodreads. Despair not, the full review, including EXTRA STUFF, is on my site, Coot’s Reviews. See you there. [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
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it was amazing
| It became clear quickly that suburban kids feared violence inside their school—once in a lifetime, but horrific—and the Chicago kids feared violenc It became clear quickly that suburban kids feared violence inside their school—once in a lifetime, but horrific—and the Chicago kids feared violence getting there. At the bus stop on their porch, walking out of church. It could happen anywhere, and it did… Martin Luther King had preached six principles of nonviolence…The Parkland kids were embarking on #4: “Suffering can educate and transform.”After the seminal Columbine shootings in 1999, Dave Cullen undertook to research the event deeply, to find out what the truth was of the shooters, their motivations, planning, and outcomes, and to dispel the many false notions that had made their way through the media like a Russian virus after the event. In a way it was a whodunit, and a whydunit. His book, Columbine, was an in-depth historical look, examining what had happened, after the fact. This included following up with many of those who survived the attack, for years after. [image] Dave Cullen - image from GR Columbine and Parkland may have been similar events, but they are very different books. This time, with his reputation as the go-to reporter on stories having to do with mass-shootings, particularly mass school-shootings, Cullen had the credentials to ask the Parkland survivors for access as they worked through it all. Four days after the shooting he called, and spoke with the entire early MFOL (March For Our Lives) group on speakerphone. The next day he was there. Cullen proceeded to cover the emerging stories in person, when possible, and by phone, on-line, and via diverse media, when not, continuing through 2018. What he has produced is a you-are-there account of the birth of a movement. Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu described March for Our Lives as one of the most significant youth movements in living memory. “The peaceful campaign to demand safe schools and communities and the eradication of gun violence is reminiscent of other great peace movements in history,” he said. “I am in awe of these children, whose powerful message is amplified by their youthful energy and an unshakable belief that children can—no, must—improve their own futures.One could do worse, if looking at how to begin a movement, than to pore through Cullen’s reporting, as the kids of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School pivot from the physical and emotional carnage of a brutal armed attack on their school to organizing a regional, then national call for gun sanity. Parkland tells two stories, the personal actions of the teenagers involved and the broader view of the movement that they helped solidify. Cullen offers not only a look at some of the central people who built this movement, Emma Gonzalez, Jackie Corin, Alex Wind, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Dylan Baierlein, and others, but shows how their sudden rise to fame impacted both their movement and them, personally. There are just so many hours in a day. In very concrete ways, committing large swaths of one’s time to political action meant that there was less time for other parts of what had been their lives. Extracurriculars was the obvious first hit. Theater, music, sports all suffered. But academic ambitions were close behind. Tough to keep up with multiple AP classes, for example, if you are stretched thin organizing a national political bus tour. And tough to maintain perfect grades when you keep getting home on the red-eye after an interview in LA or New York. Friendships suffered, or at the very least shifted. If you were one of the cool kids, but were now hanging out with the nerds, odds are you would get ditched. Of course, the upside is that you replace as friends a bunch of people of low value with people who are actually worth something. And you might imagine that, this being an adolescent-rich environment, jealousy might rear its ugly head. For example, Emma Gonzalez was transformed from just one of the kids at school to a national icon, as Emma and the other MFOL leaders were regularly having meetings with national figures and celebrities to discuss gun control. Might just make the other kids think you have gotten too big for your britches. Some of the organizers even dropped out of school to complete their studies on line. And that does not even begin to touch on PTSD, or death threats. Hogg, in fact, was frequently not on the bus but traveling separately in a black SUV accompanied by bodyguards. If he were a politician, one of the staffers told me, the intensity of interest in him would merit 24-hour Secret Service surveillance. “We get people armed to the teeth showing up and saying, ‘Where’s David Hogg?’ ” Deitsch told me. An outfit called the Utah Gun Exchange had been following the kids on tour all summer — on what it called a pro–Second Amendment “freedom tour” — sometimes in an armored vehicle that looks like a tank with a machine-gun turret.What does it take to build a movement? Why did this movement catch on, and grow? Was it a propitious confluence of events, right time, right place? If Parkland had happened a year or two years earlier, would it have had the same impact? Would the MFOL movement have gained the traction it has garnered? [image] The March for Our Lives rally in DC drew 800,000, the largest rally crowd in DC history – image from USA Today The core group was blessed with a considerable concentration of talent. One element was media savvy. Just three days after the shooting, Emma’s ”We call B.S.”speech was a call to…well…arms, a call for those being victimized by our national gun fetish to stand up and demand that the adults in the nation start behaving like they are actually grown-ups, a call to legislators to act. It resonated, and went viral. Cameron came up with the #NeverAgain hashtag (although it had been notably used before) as an appropriate motif for the movement. He was also a natural performer, who had been comfortable in stage settings in front of adults since he was seven. David Hogg’s realtime video of the shooting from inside the school during the attack gained the shooting even more national coverage than it might otherwise have gotten. Jackie Corin was preternaturally adept at organizing the details of the movement, coping with scheduling, getting permissions, learning who needed to be contacted, all the office-manager-plus-organization-leader skills that are totally required but rarely available. Less than a week after creating her Twitter account, Emma would surpass a million followers—about double that of the NRA. By the summer, Cameron would amass 400,000 followers, David twice that, and Emma at 1.6 million towered over them all.Another element was the availability of supportive adults. This began, of course, with the parents of the organizers, but also some parents of the shooting victims. And beyond the immediate there was input from interested adults from outside the area, people able to offer not only money but media access. George Clooney got in touch, offering not only a sizeable contribution, but a connection to a high-end PR agency. State and national political people got involved as well. One particularly meaningful connection was made with the Peace Warriors in Chicago, local activists whose work in trying to fend off violence dovetailed particularly well with the Parklanders. The relatively wealthy suburban kids were worried about violence in their schools. The Peace Warriors lived in a world in which getting to and from school unharmed was the challenge. The joining of the school safety movement with an urban gun safety movement, was seminal, changing the focus of the Parklanders from school safety to gun safety. Bet you did not hear much about that in the papers. The Peace Warriors arrived at just the right moment. They helped shape the MFOL policy agenda and the tenor of their approach. They all kept talking: by email, phone, and text. The Parkland kids peppered the Peace Warriors with questions about the six principles, and then burrowed deeper on their own. The more they learned, the more they found it was like listening to themselves—a better, wiser version of the selves they were fumbling toward. How liberating to discover Martin Luther King Jr. had already done all that work. Brilliantly. He had drawn from Gandhi, and it was amazing how well the principles stood up across time, space, and cultures.The stages involved in the group’s growth and how the movement shifted focus makes for fascinating reading. Beginning with the initial rally, growing to larger memorials, then a rally at the state capital, then the nation’s capital, then a cross country bus tour in Summer 2018, from coverage in local news media to national, even global news coverage. Cullen gives us enough without overwhelming with too much detail on the challenges involved in the logistics of making rallies, tours, and marches happen, and the upsides and downsides of ongoing national exposure. Some of MFOLs core leaders even decided to keep away from any coverage that might focus on personal portrayals, as media stardom was seen as distracting from the group’s message. [image] Emma Gonzalez is distraught while giving her “We Call B.S” speech in Fort Lauderdale days after the shooting – image from the NY Times I do not really have any gripes about the book. It was well written, engaging, informative and moving. It also offers up the odd surprise here and there, like the source of national disunity over using April 20th, the date of the Columbine attack, as the day for a national student walkout. As for why this movement caught fire when it did, the jury is out. It may have to do with the national backlash against the excesses of the Trump-led right, disgust, finally, with expressions of “thoughts and prayers” absent any attempt to address the underlying problem. But yeah, it definitely helps that the victims were mostly white kids in a well-to-do suburb. Of course, this is hardly the first time mostly white suburban children have been so murdered. But maybe it was a final straw. In a way this strikes me as an echo of larger social trends. As the middle class becomes more and more squeezed by flat wages, declining benefits, increasing taxes (it is not our taxes that get cut), and a threatened safety net, the miseries that have long troubled working-class people, particularly urban people of color, have been, more and more, visited on middle class white people. (See Automating Inequality) Just as the opioid epidemic was once a feeder of three-strikes legislation, and widespread carnage, the current opioid crisis, the one visited on more and more white people, portrays addiction as less a failure of personal morality and more a manifestation of biological addiction, or at the very least, predisposition. When black people are getting shot in ghettoes, it’s business as normal, but when white kids are getting mowed down in their schools, it is a national crisis. It will be interesting to see how the MFOL movement sustains going forward. While there is no certainty of success, in the long or short terms, there is cause for hope. Even though changes in gun regulations MFOL wrested from Florida lawmakers were modest, getting any change at all was a huge success. Wins, of any sort, have been as rare as brave legislators, and this definitely counted as a win. The road ahead, though, remains long, hard, and fraught with impediments and peril. And people keep dying early, wasteful deaths. In his Broadway show one night in Summer 2018, Bruce Springsteen reached back fifty years, and drew a straight line to Martin Luther King Jr., assuring us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but tends toward justice”—but adding a stern corollary” “That arc doesn’t bend on its own.” Bending it takes a whole lot of us, bending in with every ounce of strength we’ve got. Review first posted – February 22, 2019 Publication date – February 12, 2019 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I usually move it to the comments section directly below, which I did. However, in 2021, GR further constrained reviewers by banning external links from comments, so to see the full EXTRA STUFF part of this review you will have to continue on to my site, Coots’s Reviews, where the review is posted in its entirety. [image] Coot’s Reviews [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
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| Mar 12, 2019
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really liked it
| The war over press freedom was not going to be a fight about changing America’s laws. It was going to be a fight about the very nature of truth…I The war over press freedom was not going to be a fight about changing America’s laws. It was going to be a fight about the very nature of truth…I should have seen it coming. In a decade and a half at The Times I had had my moments with Trump and his lawyers. I knew how they played the game.All the News That’s Fit to Print (which should be changed, BTW, to add “or Post” or substitute “Fit to Run”to accommodate the fact that materials these days might be posted without ever being actually printed) does not usually include the doings of its in-house counsel. But in October 2016, at the height of the presidential election campaign, The New York Times had just published an article titled Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately. The accompanying video was quite compelling, the stories from both women believable. It did not take long for a standard response to bad coverage to arrive. Donald Trump Threatens to Sue The Times Over Article on Unwanted Advances. It was typical for Trump to threaten to sue anyone who printed or planned to print anything unflattering about him. But this was at the peak of a presidential campaign, when the damage from bad press could be devastating. In-house counsel David McCraw was charged with preparing a response. He went above and beyond, his reply going viral. In his response he wrote “Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself…if he believes that American citizens had no right to hear what these women had to say and that the law of this country forces us and those who would dare to criticize him to stand silent or be punished, we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.” Oh, snap! For the full text, check out The New York Times’s Lawyer Responds to Donald Trump [image] David E. McCraw - Image from Columbia Journalism Review – photo by Santiago Mejia, of The Times That was the most widely known piece of work self-described “raging moderate” David McCraw did while working at The Times, where he has toiled since 2002, and where he is currently Deputy General Counsel. His story has a lot more to it than fighting back against America’s #1 bully, but dealing with issues Trumpian whether directly or by implication makes up the majority of the book. In addition to the kerfuffle noted above, there is a Trump tax return that entered over the transom, leading to an informative discussion of legal culpability re leaks. (The leaker is at risk, not the publisher, as long as the publisher did not do anything to encourage the leaker, but was a passive recipient.) This leads to a look at the very real responsibility publishers take on of checking with the government before printing information that might conceivably endanger lives. Pretty compelling stuff. For much of the past half-century, a balance had been struck. Both sides lived in an imperfect world of discretion…News organizations tried to make informed decisions about what to publish, weighing the risks to the nation and the benefits to the public, and the government held back from tracking down and prosecuting leakers except in the rarest of cases.There are the attempts by the White House to exclude unfriendly news organizations from public briefings, while allowing in journalists of the lap-dog variety. You will learn the difference between a “gaggle” and an official press conference. Of greater concern is the impact Trump is having with his daily attacks on the press, both domestically and internationally. McCraw became very familiar with such concerns as he wound up taking on the job of trying to get back Times people who had been kidnapped by diverse sorts abroad, or had been picked up by local governments. Some of this reads like a thriller. It doesn’t really matter how much freedom the press has in a society if the press is not believed. A distrusted press is little different from a shackled press. It lacks the authority to mobilize public opinion against wrongdoing, corruption and misguided policy. It has no voice to hold governments accountable. It gets ignored. And I was pretty sure that at some point a disregard for the press would translate into a disregard for the law of press freedom.In addition, foreign autocrats are more than happy to chime in about “fake news” and the press being “the enemy of the people” whenever coverage of their questionable doings becomes too energetic, feeling that they not only have cover provided by the journalism-hostile US president, but that attacking the press will gain them points with the White House. This also presents added challenges to protecting American journalists abroad, when the State Department cannot be counted on to help. And then there is the Trumpian fondness for using the courts as a blunt weapon with which to attack any who would criticize him, suing for libel whenever is heard a discouraging word. Other frequent filers are noted, and we learn about the tradition of “lawyer letters” the paper receives in abundance, threats of one sort of lawsuit or another, most of which are, thankfully, ignored. You will learn the proper process for “doing” sex tapes, that is, getting them into the public venue, pick up some info on a law that protects American publishers from being subjected to legal judgments made in nations where press freedom is not valued as highly as it is here, and discover “little guy” lawsuits in which reputations might be devastated simply by appearing in the same news article as someone infamous. You will learn some very unwelcome news on the effectiveness of FOIA legislation. You will learn about the very significant danger involved in going to court to enforce First Amendment press freedoms. You will learn about the dangers inherent in the current downsizing of the newspaper business, and plenty more. The reputation of newspaper lawyers is that they tend toward finding reasons not to publish. McCraw’s rep is more one of making sure the paper can print what it wants, and offering a solid defense when the paper is challenged in court. I did have one particular gripe that merits mentioning. In writing about the issue of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server, it is pretty clear that McCraw presumes the worst, that she was up to no good of one sort or another and sought to hide her activities from public scrutiny. He makes no mention of other government officials having done the same thing, with no vast outcry about their activities, and he makes no mention of the fact that HC had been under non-stop right-wing assault since her days as the wife of the governor of Arkansas. She has been, arguably, the most attacked public figure of our era, and, despite many congressional investigations led by the opposition party, has been found to have done nothing illegal. Any person in such a position could be forgiven for feeling a bit paranoid about her normal communications being intercepted and weaponized for use against her. I would have done the same thing. Yet there was no mention of any mitigating possible circumstances. I expected a degree of balance from someone who works for such a great paper. It’s absence was disappointing. That said, this book is a wonderful source of information and well-defined concerns about the newspaper biz today, and about overarching issues that are already impacting freedom of press in America. McCraw’s journey from his opening view of the Trump administration as just another day at the office to something considerably more alarming is more powerful for the distance McCraw had to travel. I heartily recommend Truth in Our Times. It may not be all the news that’s fit to print about the legal concerns of journalism today, but it will certainly do. I had resisted, in my raging moderate style, all those overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany that too many of my liberal friends offered up much too easily. Now I was no longer sure. Review posted – April 5, 2019 Publication date – March 12, 2019 I received this book from St. Martin's, at least I think it was St Martin's. Just found it outside my door one day, so I am pretty sure the Justice Department cannot come after me for anything in this review. =============================EXTRA STUFF The initial article - Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately Trump’s response - Donald Trump Threatens to Sue The Times Over Article on Unwanted Advances. McCraw’s viral smack-down - The New York Times’s Lawyer Responds to Donald Trump There is a excellent profile of McCraw in the Columbia Journalism Review - Getting the story out: The lawyer standing between the Times and a hostile world - by Andrew McCormick “A distrust of power is the ultimate conservative value,” McCraw says. “It used to be, at least.” In high school, McCraw attended a speech by Peter Arnett, the famed Vietnam war correspondent, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Listening to what the reporters were going through to overcome disinformation coming from the Pentagon and military commanders, I found that really inspiring,” McCraw says. NPR’s Fresh Air - 'Times' Deputy Counsel On Fighting For Press Freedom In The Trump Era - by Terry Gross In the time that he's president, he has really taken a different strategy, or expanded on a strategy he had used outside of lawyer letters before, and that is simply challenging the facts, and doing so publicly. As much as Donald Trump has talked about changing libel laws so it would be easier for people to sue, in fact, I think the greater danger is his attempts at delegitimizing the press, at encouraging people not to believe....more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 20, 2019
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Mar 25, 2019
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Feb 13, 2019
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0062684922
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| 3.96
| 17,320
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| Sep 12, 2017
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it was amazing
| Prologue:I so wish she had said “I think I’m gonna barf Prologue:I so wish she had said “I think I’m gonna barf,” but we can’t have everything. NBC reporter Katherine Bear “Katy” Tur was not alone in feeling that way. In fact, a wave of nausea has been crisscrossing the nation ever since November 8, 2016, a date that will live in infamy, trapped in a seemingly endless back and forth sloshing. Tur had more reason for gastrointestinal distress than most. She had been assigned to the Trump campaign for the duration of the seemingly endless electioneering season. Seeing this guy elected president of the United States would turn your stomach too if you had been seeing what he was really like for over 500 days. [image] Image by Sasha Arutyunova for the NY Times We want our campaign-book reportage to show us something we have not seen before. Of course, it was not always the case that every microsecond of a campaign was undertaken under klieg lights. So, really, what’s left, but the reporter’s experience, things that are not told in her thousands (more than 3800 through the campaign) of on-air reports. What can we learn from Tur’s book that we did not know before? What can we learn about campaigning that did not make the broadcast? What can we learn about the personalities involved, the candidate, the candidate’s team, the candidate’s followers that occur off camera? [image] Tur interviewing you-know-who in July 2015 – image from MSNBC What stands out most, chillingly, is the atmosphere of intolerance and menace promoted by candidate Swamp Thing, toward foreigners, democrats, minorities, but perhaps most importantly, toward the press. Politicians have often, even usually, taken umbrage at the reporters writing about or broadcasting stories about their less-than-perfect aspects. What is unusual is having a candidate who encourages his people to go after them. What is unusual is having a candidate who lies so relentlessly that he attempts to deny reality entirely, a candidate who, by proclaiming every day that reporters are nothing but merchants of fake news, is attempting to delegitimize the major media of our nation from their role as the fourth estate, that entity charged with holding public feet to the fire of revelation. If there is no one left to tell the truth about him, and fewer and fewer consumers of news who accept what the media reports as truth, Trump can go about his vast array of crimes with no fear of being held accountable. Campaign reporters were held in pens at Trump rallies. Trump went out of his way to point them out to his followers, calling them names, accusing them of lying about him, tacitly encouraging his followers to scream at, intimidate, and threaten them. “Look back there! ‘Little Katy,’ she’s back there. She’s such a liar, what a little liar she is!” She was often singled out as the focus of his rage against the media. It was not out of character. Tur notes the growing aura of menace at his rallies, as Trump repeatedly encouraged his followers to brutalize protesters. Katy knew she would have to endure. “I don’t know why he did it,” she said, shrugging. “But I will say this: I know that had I exhibited any sign that I was intimidated or scared of him, he would have rolled over me.”It seems likely that Trump focusing so much on Tur may have been a manifestation of his epic misogyny. [image] KT at NH rally on election eve – Getty Image Tur contends that the rally attendees who screamed “Cunt” at her would never think of doing that anywhere else. She made an effort to talk with Trump supporters. She thinks they are probably decent people who are frustrated at the excesses of political correctness on the one hand and their economic immobility, or even descent on the other. It is not a view I share. What is not really surprising is that there are so many in our country who care so little for facts, and so much for their biases, that they are perfectly fine with Swamp Thing’s relentless lies and bigotry. While frustrations are real, unfairness rampant, and maybe getting worse, what has been let loose is not a rally-sparked mob mentality. I expect the mob is real and more permanent than Kur believes. It was on display in full force in Charlottesville. This IS the dark undercurrent in American society, the undercurrent that thought slavery was fine and dandy, the undercurrent that was cool with Jim Crow, the undercurrent that thought the guys in white sheets were doing the right thing, and that certain people should know their place, the undercurrent that thought Tail-Gunner Joe was the cat’s meow, and that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, the undercurrent that listen to the know-nothing, paranoid demagoguery spewed by the likes of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News as if it is revealed wisdom. Not all Trump supporters are climate deniers, but all climate deniers are Trump supporters. Not all Trump supporters are nativists, but all nativists are Trump supporters. Not all Trump supporters are white supremacists, but all white supremacists are Trump supporters. Not all Trump supporters are fascists, but all fascists are Trump supporters. And it is these darker portions of Trump’s supporters who seem to have been heavily represented at Trump rallies. Having so public an approving mouthpiece as Swamp Thing crying havoc gave them a feeling of license to let slip the dogs of hatred, and now they roam in rabid packs. [image] In the field – image from peanutchuck.com If you want to know what it might have been like on the campaign trail with Mussolini, Hitler, or any of the many other demagogues who have fouled and others who continue to pollute our planet, Tur give you a pretty good taste. She offers first hand, up close and personal witness to mass hatred, stoked by a master demagogue, as monumentally skilled in the arts of theater as he is amazingly incapable in the business of governing. [image] image from MarieClaire.com – shot by Rebecca Greenfield Tur portrays a Bizarro world, in which a rope line of Trump lackeys works to ramp up reporters’ stress by accusing them pre-emptively of bias in order to gain the best possible coverage. This appears to be SOP for Trump, always pressuring the ump to try to gain a sympathetic call some time later in the game. She also lets us in on how disorganized the Trumpzis were, constantly being off message when talking with the press. And it would have been tough to remain on message in any case as Swamp Thing had a habit of contradicting himself only constantly. Another continuing point in the book is the numbing endurance of day after day, hell, minute after minute non-stop, sociopathic dishonesty. It has got to be tough to keep on message, though, with having to remember the lies du jour. We get a very clear sense that Swamp Thing was not really in it to win it. This was the presumption of most of the world at the beginning of his campaign, that he was in the race as a publicity stunt on steroids. That would go a long way toward explaining why he continued trying to make real estate deals in Russia all the way through the campaign. Like Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in The Producers, he figured he could get away with dirty dealings, in this case playing footsie with the primary enemy of the United States, because he did not expect to win. He intended to produce a flop. [image] Image from The New York Daily News The tweeting was a whole other thing. Never before had there been a candidate whose favorite means of communication was the tweet. He was, and remains, compulsive about his tweeting, often tweeting dramatic pronouncements, accusations, and lies at all hours of the day. This impacted campaign reporters, who used to be able to get a break from campaign events. Not anymore. Tur gives you a real sense of what it means to be a campaign reporter, the late nights, early mornings, constant interruptions, competition from other news pros, demands from the bosses, more demands from the bosses, even more demands from the bosses, the challenge of getting to a plane in the middle of a snow hazard to get to a campaign stop half a country away, with single-digit minutes so spare, the need to find clothing and coiffure presentable on air when you are a mess, the need to function at peak efficiency and presentation when you have had next to no sleep for what feels like a lifetime. She also talks about the toll this assignment had on her personal life. Illuminating stuff for those of us on the other side of the TV screen. [image] December 2015 – image from Peanutchuck.com And then there are the personal dealings with Swamp Thing and his minions. She reports on the schizoid way Trump treated her, publicly saying she was a great reporter one day and the next calling her out to his brownshirts at a rally, by name, as unfair, third rate, and worse, to the point that NBC had to provide her with a security detail. It is a good thing that she has, as she calls it, the hide of a rhinoceros. But she also tells of her one-on-one interactions with him, offering passing charm one minute, but angling, always, always angling for favorable coverage. You really get a sense of how creepy a guy he is in person. Tur stays mostly away from Trump’s staff, focusing her recollections on those she had with the candidate himself. Although she does report on a senior, married, Trump campaign staffer who asked her where he could meet single 30-something women. Sadly, no name is revealed. She is too much of a pro to come right out and say that Donald Trump is a world-class asshole, maybe one of the biggest assholes who has ever lived, an amoral monster who puts not only all the people around him but the very planet at risk in service of his tiny mind and incredibly inflated ego, but we get the picture. She is a master of showing without telling. It comes across pretty clearly here that Swamp Thing is not exactly presidential material. [image] image from Marie Claire – shot by Anthony Terrell The book alternates between election night at Trump’s victory party and Tur’s tale of covering the campaign, from being assigned in May 2015. In addition to telling of her reporting experiences, she offers autobiographical details that include some pretty lively material. Mom and Dad were news people, had the first private helicopter covering breaking news in Los Angeles, making a living and a name for themselves breaking new reportorial ground. If you are thinking OJ, yep, they were right on that. The Rodney King riots? Yep again. That was them shooting the beating of Reginald Denny. It is fascinating material. And certainly argues that having a nose for news may have a genetic element. If you are looking for a kiss and tell, dirt-driven spill-all, with juicy scandals aplenty and dark secrets revealed, you will have to try another network. Unbelievable does not offer the sort of anarchic LOL reportage of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72. It is not one of those reportorial coups d’etat that will revolutionize how we perceive campaigns, like Theodore White’s The Making of the President. But it certainly does offer us insight into what it means to be a reporter in this new 24/7/365 age of campaign coverage. It gives us a you-are-there feel for what may be the most important campaign of the twenty-first century, an eyewitness account of a particularly dark turn taken in American politics, a sea change in what is considered decent in public discourse and behavior, and a close, alarming look at the man now twitching in the oval office. Hopefully we can learn from what has been going on, and what Tur has seen, and find ways to stem the rise of know-nothing absolutism. But the coming years should be good ones for bucket makers because there are millions of us who, faced with the horrors of a Donald Trump presidency, will find ourselves keeping one near at hand for those all too frequent moments when we announce to the world, “I think I’m gonna barf.” Election night. …don’t misunderstand me. The Hilton is nice. It’s been host to many grand events. But it can’t hold the kind of ten-thousand-person rallies that Trump has built his campaign around…There isn’t even free booze. The bar is charging seven dollars for sodas, eleven dollars for beers, and thirteen dollars or mixed drinks. Trumps advisers claim that Trump is just superstitious. He doesn’t want to jinx himself with a big show event. Cynics—or, as Trump calls them, “haters”—say he’s just cheap. About that cash bar: Red State calls it an “abomination.” GQ rates it pure Trump. “Let history show that up until the moment his fate became official, Donald Trump remained true to himself, a serial grafter and shameless carnival barker who let nothing come between him and the opportunity to get his grubby hands on a few more dollars.” Review first posted – September 14, 2017 Publication -----Hardcover - September 12, 2017 -----Trade Paperback - August 28, 2018 (view spoiler)[I felt this needed to be tucked safely under a spoiler tag, because I have an uncontrollable need. There are some sentences that I feel compelled to write, but which I am ashamed to own. So here goes, the ending to the review my inner child really, really wanted to use. I am very much looking forward to future such reporting from this outstanding journalist, because, of course, one good Tur deserves another.Ok, there. I’ve done it. Don’t judge me. I have a problem and I accept that. (hide spoiler)] =============================EXTRA STUFF Tur’s Twitter feed Trump’s response to the release of Unbelievable was boilerplate. Fascinating to watch people writing books and major articles about me and yet they know nothing about me & have zero access. #FAKE NEWS!Typical September 9, 2017 - A thoughtful, if frightening, opinion piece by Tur - The Trump Fever Never Breaks Articles worth checking out -----Boston Globe - 7 Books on Presidential Campaigns – by Katharine Whittemore -----GQ - Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter - by Michael Hastings -----Rollingstone - Matt Taibbi’s New Book: ‘Insane Clown President’ - an excerpt -----NY Times - Old Page Turners for a New Presidential Campaign – by John Williams -----Politico - The Book that Changed Campaigns Forever – by Scott Porch Excerpts -----MSNBC -----MarieClaire - My Crazy Year With Trump Interviews -----Wonderful interview with Rachel Maddow -----Brian Williams talks with Tur on November 2, 2016 about Trump taunting her by name at a rally Other items of interest -----Madeline Albright’s book, Fascism, is definitely worth a look -----March 14, 2019 - NY Times - Donald Trump’s Bikers Want to Kick Protester Ass - building a brownshirt militia - this is really bad -----But Lawrence O'Brien Lawrence O'Brien thinks it's just gas. Sure hope he's right. November 9, 2017 - Unbelievable is among the nominees for Amazon's book of the year - History PS - In the book, Tur tells of a Trump rally at the Mohegan Sun arena in Wilkes Barre, PA. It was the usual rabid event. Following which, Tur and her crew went to the mall across the road, stopping at a Panera for a quick bite. The vibe from the rally followed them into the restaurant. They felt so uncomfortable there that they left in a hurry. One might even say they fled, concerned about physical harm. That location was one of the casualties when an EF2 tornado touched down here on June 14, 2018. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 12, 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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Aug 30, 2017
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Hardcover
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1137048387
| 9781137048387
| 1137048387
| 3.91
| 638
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| May 22, 2012
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it was amazing
| Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffe Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffered personally slanderous and falsely prurient attacks in the media. Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [United States government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths. Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold, and activity against our locally engaged Russian staff continues at a record pace. We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB.There is a spectre loose in the world. An all too material force that has been making headway across the planet. The 21st century has seen a spike in the establishment of kleptocratic regimes. These tend to be autocratic governments in which power is centralized in one or at most a few individuals. The power of the state is then turned into a weapon with which the rich and powerful increase both their wealth and control, and intimidate or eliminate challengers. We have seen this in Erdogan’s Turkey, Zuma’s South Africa, Jinping’s China, to a lesser degree in Berlusconi’s Italy, and plenty more. It seems clear that the current (well, current when this was written in 2017) US president, Donald Trump, would like nothing more than to institute the form in the states. It is pretty clear that he is modeling himself on the top kleptocrat on the planet, the richest man in the world, with a worth estimated at over eighty billion dollars. That would be Vladimir Putin, of course. Garry Kasaparov, Russia’s chess legend, has said that if “you really want to understand the Putin regime in depth . . . go directly to the fiction department and take home everything you can find by Mario Puzo.” I have not seen this sort of thing referred to by this term, but if it has been, I apologize for my unintended theft. We are being haunted, night and day by a rising Mafiacrocy. You walk into your Moscow flat, and something is off. A window you know you closed, the one in your son’s room, in this 10th floor apartment, is ajar. When you watch a videotape you had recently brought home you find that parts have been mysteriously erased. Maybe the door lock has scratch marks that were not there when you left. A book you never bought appears on a coffee table. When you write pieces that are deemed critical of the regime, the frequency of these oddities increases, sometimes with a bit more physical damage being added. You can never know security. At any moment your home can be invaded. You never know what might be waiting when you turn the key in the lock. You never know when you will be prevented from doing your job by hard men in leather jackets, when you will be denied admittance to the country after a few weeks back home in England, when you will be accused of a mythical crime and expelled from the country for doing your job. You also never really know when people might spirit you away to places that are dark, cold and deadly. [image] Luke Harding - image from Interpreter Magazine Luke Harding was the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian. He tells us about working in the Russian capital from 2007 to 2011, reporting on the dark goings on there, political killings, a sophisticated form of state-sponsored terror, Russia’s relationships with its near abroad neighbor nations. He interviews some of the oligarchs for which Russia has become famous, visits depopulating rural areas, finds himself in war zones a bit too often, and checks out a market intended exclusively for the uber rich. One core of what Harding describes is the ongoing harassment to which he was subjected by the FSB (KGB 2.0) Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target’s private or family life so they are unable to continue their “hostile-negative” activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim’s private life. They would then devise a strategy to “disintegrate” the target’s personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children.Clearly there are levels in this methodology beyond the prankish disruptions practiced on Harding. He reports on the experience of others who had been subjected to this treatment. A lot can be done to make someone’s life a living hell, and the worst part, for many, is that they are never aware that they have been targeted. The other, and primary notion of the book, which was originally named Mafia State, is that Vladimir Putin has made himself, essentially, a Russian Czar for life. Having come up in the KGB, he learned well the techniques of state intelligence, and uses them at will on his opponents. Political competitors find themselves arrested and convicted on trumped up charges, if they are lucky. The unlucky face far more permanent downsides. Putin has all but killed off free media, and has allied with oligarchs, who rely on him to protect their assets. But when an oligarch fancies himself powerful enough to oppose Putin, he does not long remain at large. The government of Russia has been filled with Putin loyalists, who are well compensated for their loyalty. As a master manipulator of the media, and with the ability to stifle opposing (fake?) news, he has gained considerable popularity. With the demise of the USSR, and the obvious corruption and incapacity of Yeltsin, a strong man who could get the nation back on a straight path was welcomed. Putin has made the most of this, consolidating personal power, while selling off state assets for a pittance to his allies. The structure of the book is a stringing together of articles about diverse elements of Russian life, while weaving in his personal tales of Zersetzung and the stunning corruption that pervades the nation. For example, he writes of the murder of Alexander Litvitenko, an FSB officer who had specialized in organized crime. He dared to accuse his superiors of assassinating oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and was subsequently hounded out of the country. Asylum in England was not sufficient, however, as Putin’s people murdered him there. Harding visits relations of Litvitenko, living in Italy, where, one would expect, they would feel free to speak their minds. Turns out not so much, and for surprising reasons. He reports on Russia engaging in the ethnic cleansing of a piece of Georgia in order to incorporate it into an expandable, Russia-loyal, South Ossetia. While in Georgia he hears reports of atrocities by Russians, also by bands of Ossetian, Chechnyan, and Kossack thugs who follow the Russian troops and engage in widespread murder, kidnappings, rape and looting. He looks into the murders of several human rights activists, and checks out corruption in the lead up to the Sochi Olympic games. In addition he reports on what was probably an FSB atrocity, the false flag bombing of several apartment blocks, killing over 300 people, in order to fan outrage against Chechnyans, and offer justification for military action. There is plenty more. I think there are very few of people in the west who do not recognize that Vladimir Putin is a monster. Whatever one may think of the actions of other nations, Russia has, under Putin, become a dictatorship in which human rights are virtually non-existent. Luke Harding has done us all a service to offer an on-the-ground look at what this horror looks like up close. It contains the chill one might have felt visiting Germany when you-know-who was on the rise. His book also offers a large flapping red flag. Although this was written long before Donald Trump was anything more than an insignificant shade in the American political scene, one can look at the elements of Putin’s Russia and get an idea of what may lie ahead for the United States if enough people do not get wise to what Swamp Thing is all about. He may be doing Putin’s bidding because Puti has justiceable goods on him (almost certainly true). He may be overseeing the dismantling of America because he is smitten with Puti’s power (also probably true) and wants that for himself. Whether or not he can stand alone, once he absorbs enough of government into his control (questionable), it seems likely that the US president is eager to follow the Russian model. Accusing mainstream media, the ones who tell us about his crimes, of propagating fake news, is a step toward muzzling if not eliminating them. Threatening to sue (and suing) smaller media outlets is another step in this direction. Imagine an America in which the primary news outlets are Fox News and Breitbart, and it starts to look more and more like Russia. In her study [of Zersetzen, Sandra] Pingel-Schliemann concludes: “These days a total dictatorship doesn’t need to use methods of open terror to subdue people for years and make them weak. Moreover, developments in technology and communications offer future dictators ever more subtle possibilities for manipulation.” Her comments strike me as prescient. In Herr J.’s case Stasi operatives had to creep round at night hanging individual notes in his village with the words: “Whore,” “Drunkard,” “Speeder” and “Bigmouth.” Today’s Kremlin bloggers and faceless state patriots have it much easier. They need only reach for their mouse.When calls are made by Trump surrogates to purge our considerable population of federal employees of those not put in by Trump, we can see the trail being marked from the state as a theoretically disinterested arbiter of public conflicts to the state as a weaponized mechanism for pushing through programs desired by our not so dear leader. When Trump insists that his reality is the only one that matters, he reminds us that Putin has been peddling a lie to his own people about how he has been modernizing the economy. Unfortunately, he really has not. The ruble is in decline and increasingly, people in Russia are more interested in using dollars. It has certainly been no stretch for Trump to build on his considerable base of daily misdirections and total falsehoods to grace us with larger ones. Like maybe how Mexico really will pay for the wall, or that the countries subjected to the Muslim ban are a real danger to our security, or that the proposed health care bill atrocity is better than the ACA. Beware most of all the big lie about our security, probably in the form of a false flag attack, like those committed by the FSB against apartment blocks in Moscow. If he opts to go in that direction, he will use the event as an excuse to eliminate any of the civil rights left unviolated by the Patriot Act. The right-wing minions of the Republican Party (with a few notable exceptions) will happily go along. Luke Harding has given us not only a picture of Russia as a dark, dangerous place, but has also let us know that this might be what lies in store for the USA if we are not strong enough to push back. Marginalization of legitimate media, staffing government agencies solely with workers loyal to him, accusing all who oppose him of lying, and denying any facts that do not correspond with what he wants us to hear. You may not be afraid of no ghosts, but you should be. There is every possibility that America’s phantoms are becoming more and more corporeal. (Paul Manafort, the erstwhile Trump campaign manager was outed as having been on Putin's payroll, at $10 million per annum, to promote Putin's agenda in the USA. He did not report himself as an agent of a foreign power. Failure to do so is a crime. I guess he was a ghost lobbyist.) It will not be long before it is the spirit of democracy that gets proton-pack-zapped into a gold plated box, and the apparitions declare victory. Putin’s Russia is nothing to aspire to. Heed the warnings. Recognize Putin for the dark force he is. And attend to the signs in the USA. Trump and his allies must be stopped before they make a gulag of America. First Published – September 29th, 2011 under the title Mafia State Review first Posted – March 17, 2017 May 2021 - I left the above review as it was written, leaving in place things like references to "current US president Donald Trump." (I changed that in a minor February 2022 edit) Harding’s portrait of Putin’s Russia is a chilling look at what the USA was headed towards under the Swamp Thing presidency. Thank God, and committed Democratic campaigners, Trump is no longer in office. But the madness persists, as the GOP has been busy purging all dissenters from the Trump-uber-alles, stop-the-steal, Big Lie party platform. It will take some time to remove all the hacks Trump installed into our governing apparatus. Hopefully, that process can be completed before further, irreversible damage is done to our economy and our democracy. Unfortunately, insurrectionist-friendly, pro-sedition, voting-rights-hostile elected Republicans, which is most of them, cannot just be fired. But the image of the mafiacrocy that is Russia is the goal of today’s GOP, even without Trump. God help us if they find a charismatic leader with the moral vacuity of Trump, but with some brains to go along with it. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 28, 2016
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Mar 12, 2017
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Mar 13, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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159420537X
| 9781594205378
| 159420537X
| 4.34
| 12,706
| Feb 05, 2015
| Feb 05, 2015
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it was amazing
| “Sahafi! Media!! He yelled to the soldiers. He opened the car door to get out, and Quadaffi’s soldiers swarmed around him. “Sahafi!” “Sahafi! Media!! He yelled to the soldiers. He opened the car door to get out, and Quadaffi’s soldiers swarmed around him. “Sahafi!”Click! [image] Lynsey Addario - from CBS News You may not recognize the name Lynsey Addario, but if you read newspapers, check out magazines or are aware at all of the imagery that accompanies major events in the world, you have seen her work. Addario is one of the premier photojournalists on the planet and has the portfolio, the Pulitzer and a MacArthur award to prove it. In 2014, American Photo named her one of the five most influential photographers of the last quarter century. In 2012, Newsweek magazine cited her as one of 150 Women Who Shake the World. Thankfully, she does not shake her camera when she is shooting (unless of course it is for intended effect). Although no one could blame her if she did. Addario has spent a large portion of her career as a conflict photographer, working for extended periods on the scene in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Congo, Sudan and other garden spots. Wherever people have been shooting at each other in the last two decades there is a good chance that Lynsey Addario has been there. The one place she declares she will not go these days is Syria, which says something. She has been kidnapped in the field twice and has felt her life to be in danger more times than that, so when she says she won’t go to a place, it must be something really special. [image] US Soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan It’s What I Do is Addario’s tale of her journey from growing up in a Connecticut suburb as part of a Bohemian family, to finding and developing a talent for capturing life through a lens, to pursuing a career in photography. While working in New York in 1999, she got a big break, being asked to work on an Associated Press project looking into transgender prostitution in the city, and the spate of homicides with which that community was being afflicted. It turned into a months-long undertaking and brought her work to public notice for the first time. Click! [image] A shot from that series In 2000 a family friend invited her to go India. Everything that made India the rawest place on earth made it the most wonderful to photograph. The streets hummed with constant movement, a low-grade chaos where almost every aspect of the human condition was in public view. Click!It was while there that she was encouraged to go to Afghanistan to shoot the lives of women living under the Taliban. She was able to gain access to a half of Afghani society barred to her male counterparts. Click! [image] Women and girls study and recite the Koran in Peshawar, Pakistan, 2001 - from the Women’s Eye 9/11 brought on a whole new era of conflict. Addario was on the scene when the USA invaded Iraq, having set up shop in Kurdistan when Saddam Hussein was toppled. Of course that required some extra planning. At the time she got the assignment she was in South Korea covering refugees from the north, and enduring the extraordinary humanitarian horrors of the extended karaoke the refugees enjoyed. She needed to get tooled up for the job and it proved challenging. One thing she had to arrange for was body armor. She found herself befuddled by the on-line offerings. She wrote to her editor. I have checked out the websites you recommended, and am not sure if I just tried to read Korean. Basically, I have no idea what I am looking at—ballistic, six-point adjustable, tactical armor, etc. Please understand that this language is not familiar to me—I grew up in Connecticut, was raised by hairdressers. [image] A woman prays at dawn after the 2010 earthquake that nearly destroyed Haiti She was kidnapped for the first time while en route to Ramali with other journalists. And was subsequently jarred when Life magazine declined to publish her photographs, because they were too real for the American public. (The New York Times Magazine would later publish some of the work.) The experience of working in the Iraq war zone and coping with the politics of news publishing provided valuable life lessons. ...something in me had changed after three months in Iraq. I was now a photojournalist willing to die for stories that had the potential to educate people. I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq so they could decide if they supported our presence there.Her work has often demonstrated the power of the image. When she got shots of a Sudan massacre she made it impossible for President Bashir to continue denying that the war crime had taken place. [image] Addario’s image of armed boys and men near the Afghan border won her a Pulitzer – from The Women’s Eye Addario pooh-poohs any notion that she is an adrenalin junkie. She says that she has come to recognize that the photos she takes have the power to inform the public and influence people, so feels a responsibility, a calling to bear witness to much of the awfulness of the world in order to shine some light on it, to bring it to the world’s attention. [image] Addario stopped to help when one of these women was in labor, miles from a hospital. She gave them a ride. – From Itswhatidobbook.com When Addario first submitted her manuscript, she was advised to make it more personal, as in writing about her off-the-field life as well as her experiences behind the lens. She includes in the final version a bit of her love-life history, which entailed some admittedly bad choices. As a dedicated career-woman, sustaining relationships has always taken second place to her work. She says she even walked out on dinner dates when she got an assignment. Recently, a young photographer asked her how to get into the business. She told him to start traveling, shooting and contacting editors for assignments. When he told her that he didn’t want to travel much because of his girlfriend, Addario told him to break up with her.The book contains many amazing shots Addario has taken over the course of her career. They add significantly to the aura of outsized accomplishment that Addario has earned. One significant thing about the shots Addario takes is that they are not only journalistically effective but expose an impressive artistic talent. She is able to tell troubling stories while at the same time making outstanding art. The book is printed on very high-quality paper, images and text, which adds a very tactile richness to both the visual power on display and the engaging text. [image] An Iraqi woman fleeing a massive fire in Basra in 2003 Although one can piece together information by reading diverse articles about her, and watching sundry videos in which Addario does presentations and is interviewed, those connections are not always spelled out in the book. Particularly in the earlier parts of her photographic sojourn, it was somewhat murky why and how she decided to uproot and move to Argentina, and later to India. [image] Syrian refugees in Northern Iraq It’s What I Do is not a photography book. You will not get any technical tips there. While you will see some very nicely printed photographic images, those are there to enhance, to illuminate the text. The main thing here is her story. Lynsey Addario is a rock star in the world of photographic journalism. She takes us frame by frame on her journey from suburban origins as the child of hairdressers to becoming a world traveler covering important events everywhere on the planet in an attempt to illuminate the darkness. It is quite clear that her achievements have come at considerable personal cost, and that she is possessed of a rare personal fire that has driven her to take large risks in order to fulfill what she perceives as her mission in life. For those of us not familiar with the names that appear under all those news photos, It’s What I Do offers particular insight into just how important it is to have photographic boots on the ground wherever important events are occurring. Real-world photography is Addario’s contribution to the world. We are all enriched by her efforts, her sacrifices, her courage and her talent. This book will be an eye-opener for many. It is a perfectly focused, well-framed look at a life well lived, a life that has benefited and promises to continue to benefit us all. Click! Publication -----2/5/2015 - hardcover -----11/8/2016 - paperback Review posted – 4/22/2016 BTW, a deal has been struck to turn this into a major film, with Jennifer Lawrence as Addario, to be directed by Steven Spielberg ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 25, 2016
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Feb 29, 2016
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Jan 16, 2016
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Hardcover
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0385529988
| 9780385529983
| 0385529988
| 4.07
| 18,974
| Jan 27, 2015
| Jan 27, 2015
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it was amazing
| Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from both bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate… This is a book about a very simple idea where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.There is a plague loose in the land. A dark, long-time resident that deals in sudden death, trimming the upper number in the life expectancy range with a meataxe. The truth is not easy. It is not the sort of uni-dimensional flat surface that some politicians and most mainstream media find so attractive. It is not good vs bad, although there is plenty of both to go around. It is not lazy versus industrious although there is a plentiful supply of both sorts of people. The truth is multifaceted, reflecting light from and to diverse directions. It is comprised of the accretions of time and experience, and is held in place by ignorance, greed, and expectation. But unless one can get a handle on the truth, appreciate its reality, its many facets, see past its PR, there can never be any hope of replacing it with a better truth, a less desperate truth, a less murderous truth. How’s this for a truth? Black men make up 6 % of the population, yet make up 40% of murder victims. [image] Jill Leovy - from NPR Jill Leovy has been digging at the truth for a long time. She began as a crime reporter for the LA Times in 2002, and had a front row seat for the wave of homicide that washed over the southern parts of the city of angels. So many murders, yet so little reportage. Even to many of the cops involved, the victims were considered less than human, not worthy of much notice. Leovy decided that attention needed to be paid, beginning an on-line Homicide Report at the LA Times that provided the specifics of every homicide in the city, putting faces to the relentlessly growing numbers of murder victims. Leovy spent years embedded with LAPD homicide detectives and maintained close contact with the families of victims. Focusing on one particular killing, from 2007, she uses this as a narrative core around which she builds her description and analysis. It is an insightful, surprising, and enlightening view into a very dark reality. Forty years after the civil rights movement, impunity for the murder of black men remained America’s great, though mostly invisible, race problem. The institutions of criminal justice, so remorseless in other ways in an era of get-tough sentencing and “preventive” policing remained feeble when it came to answering for the lives of black murder victims. Few experts examined what was evident every day of John Skaggs’s working life: that the state’s inability to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers in black enclaves such as Watts was itself a root cause of the violence, and that this was a terrible problem—perhaps the most terrible thing in contemporary American life. The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.Leovy offers perspectives from both sides of the blue line. Her primary focus is on a detective who gets it. John Skaggs, a big Mic of a cop, with a brain to match his large frame. Understanding that as long as black lives were held cheap, the killing would continue, Skaggs made it his mission to make “black lives expensive.” Instead of blowing off the killing, he took it on himself to dig in, find ways, and take killers off the street. Leovy tells the story of Skaggs’ pursuit of truth and justice, if not exactly the American way. [image] John Skaggs - from The Telegraph One of the many strengths of Leovy’s book is her use of historical context. How did this or that come to be? Where did it come from? What keeps it afloat? What are the forces that keep it from changing? Another is her consideration of why it is so difficult to prosecute violent crimes in lawless places, and why the police are so ready to employ tactics like stop and frisk, and neighborhood sweeps. And why there are some places the police prefer to avoid. This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions.When effective law enforcement no longer applies in a place, local law steps in to fill the vacuum, whether that law is gang-based or a manifestation of a religious movement, as in Iraq or Afghanistan. It is no puzzle why a part of the Windy City is called Chi-raq. When your business dealings are illegal, you have no legal recourse. Many poor “underclass” men of Watts had little to live on except a couple hundred dollars a month in county General Relief. They “cliqued up” for all sorts of illegal enterprises, not just selling drugs and pimping but also fraudulent check schemes, tax cons, unlicensed car repair businesses, or hair braiding. Some bounced from hustle to hustle. They bartered goods, struck deals, and shared proceeds, all off the books. Violence substituted for contract litigation. Young men in Watts frequently compared their participation in so-called gang culture to the way white-collar businessmen sue customers, competitors, or suppliers in civil courts. They spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes. Other people call the police when they need help, explained an East Coast Crip gang member. “We pick up the phone and call out homeboys.”There are other sources for what happens to innocent victims caught up in such sweeps. I recommend Matt Taibbi’s The Divide for that. But that is not what Leovy is attending to here, and it is indeed only one part of the larger story. [image] Bryant Tennelle - from The Telegraph I was amazed by the level of detail Leovy brought to bear, informing the thrust of her argument. Not only police blotter data, but on the scene reportage, interviews with people affected by the crimes, and by the structure of life lived in what is, in a way, a walled-off community. Her information is not merely statistical, and analytical. It is personal. Her people are very much living, breathing individuals, not catalog entries. There are both residents and cops who are trying to cope with a huge challenge in a system that is not all that amenable to change. Change costs money, and we all know how much politicians love to boast about keeping costs down. The politics of policing is also given some attention. Why do cops work here rather than there? Why do detectives choose this assignment over that. Do they even have a choice? What motivates the uniformed police, the detectives? What do they hope to accomplish? What do they think they can accomplish. How do they go about their business? How are policing resources allocated? If I have any gripes about the book, it might be that Leovy traces a bit of a halo around Skaggs. He may be a bit too good to be real. But then again, he may not. What sort of world is it in which a portrayal of actual decency is considered suspect? Other cops are given attention as well. This is not all the Detective Skaggs show. Jill Leovy has written a must-read tour de force, a brilliant look into a deadly, intractable problem that not only plagues black urban areas, but that challenges the very rule of law itself. The next time you see local news in the daily tabloid or yellow-dog nightly coverage on the tube (If it bleeds, it leads) ascribing the death of a black man to gang violence, you might think twice about taking that at face value. The next time you see statistics on the number of deaths in a year for a given location, you might wonder how many of those were actually reported on, how many of those were truly investigated or how many times the local PD might blow it off as NHI, No Human Involved. You will learn something new here. You will see a reality that has been there for a long time, but that has been kept out of sight by a combination of indifferent law enforcement, inattentive media, and cheapskate politicians. Leovy offers the faceted lenses you need to gain a better focus on the reality. One of Skaggs’s colleagues picked up a word a Watts gang member used to describe his neighborhood: ghettoside. The term captured the situation nicely, mixing geography and status with the hustler’s poetic precision and perverse conceit. It was both a place and a predicament, and gave a name to that otherworldly seclusion that all violent black pockets of the country had in common—Athens, Willowbrook, parts of Long Beach, Watts. There was a sameness to these places and the policing that went on in them. John Skaggs was ghettoside all the way.Some people care. Black lives do matter. But it is important to find specific places where the notion can be applied to the levers and gears of reality to effect a desired result. Some people are trying to change things. Some people are trying to push down on the lever of prosecuting the killers of black men. But this is a huge mountain, and it will take a lot of pushing to make it move. Ghettoside could just as easily have been titled “Ghetto-cide,” and that really is what it is all about. Review first posted – 12/18/15 Publication dates ---1/27/15 – hardcover ---10/27/15 – Trade Paper =============================EXTRA STUFF Ghettoside is named a 2015 notable non fiction book by the Washington Post Ghettoside is named to the NY Times 100 Notable Books list for 2015 Interviews -----The Daily Show - extended -----NPR - Weekend Edition - audio -----NPR – Fresh Air - with Dave Davies - audio -----PBS - Tavis Smiley - video -----New Republic - Dan Slater - print -----LA Weekly - Joe Donnelly – from 2008 re her Homicide Report project In light of the recent spate of killings, Greg Howard's 7/8/16 piece in the NY Times is worth reading - How Police See Us, and How They Train Us to See Them In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.August 10, 2016 - an alarming NY Times piece on a Justice Department study that looked into police bias - Findings of Police Bias in Baltimore Validate What Many Have Long Felt This 9/30/16 NY Times Op-ed piece by Matthew Desmond and Andrew Papachristo illustrates a particular element of what goes into police-community relations - Why Don’t You Just Call the Cops? This 10/7/16 NY Times report by Benjamin Mueller and Al Baker looks at how crime in a poor neighborhood, affecting minority people, is not given the same treatment as crimes against white people in middle-class areas. Also on how the unwillingness of witnesses to speak up contributes to a cycle of violence. Powerful, and depressing. - A Mother Is Shot Dead on a Playground, and a Sea of Witnesses Goes Silent 12/14/16 - NY Times - A Man Is Shot in the Back, and Only the Police Are Kept in the Dark - By James C. McKinley Jr., Ashley Southall and Al Baker - another tale of a murder unsolved because witnesses fear retaliation. 8/28/17 - NY Times - Trump Reverses Restrictions on Military Hardware for Police - by Adam Goldman – as if we need for people to feel even more as if they are living in an occupied territory 3/8/2018 - Buzzfeed - an in depth report on how secret NYPD files show that many NYC police guilty of serious crimes are left unpunished - dark stuff and not all that surprising - BUSTED - by Kendall Taggert and Mike Hayes 3/21/19 - The Daily Beast - Florida Cops Under Fire for Violent Incidents With Black Women - by Pilar Melendez - This is why people turn to non-police solutions to criminal problems ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 18, 2015
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Jun 21, 2015
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Jun 18, 2015
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Hardcover
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0062265423
| 9780062265425
| 0062265423
| 3.92
| 108,924
| 2014
| Mar 11, 2014
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really liked it
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Dan Harris is a bit of a jerk. You don’t have to take my word for it. He says it himself, more than once, in his book. A lot of 10% Happier is about H
Dan Harris is a bit of a jerk. You don’t have to take my word for it. He says it himself, more than once, in his book. A lot of 10% Happier is about Harris trying to be less of a jerk. Among his other journalistic accomplishments, which include more than a few in-country assignments in hot-fire war zones, hosting gigs on Good Morning America and Nightline, and scoring interviews with some very scary people, Harris is known for a live on-camera meltdown that was seen only by close family members, co-workers and oh, maybe 5 million viewers. I have added a link at the bottom. This is a road trip of self-discovery tale, and the path Harris takes is extremely interesting. Of course the self he discovers is still a self-centered jerk, but a jerk who can really, really tell a story, fill it with fascinating, meaningful information, add in considerable dollops of LOL humor, much at his own expense, and emerge with what, for himself and many others, is a life-changing way of going about his life. [image] Dan Harris - photo from 2Paragraphs.com One of the nifty things about the book is that Harris is a seasoned media pro and can deliver a snappy line with the best of them I might have disagreed with the conclusion reached by people of faith, but at least that part of their brain was functioning. Every week, they had a set time to consider their place in the universe, to step out of the matrix and achieve some perspective. If you’re never looking up, I now realized, you’re always just looking around.Of course this presumes that everyone who is looking up is seeking something celestial and not doing so merely to fit in with the pack, or being distracted by a passing drone. Still, my cynicism notwithstanding, the man has a way with words. And that makes this a very easy book to read. He is a charming guide on this search for a better way and you will meet some familiar names and learn of some others who should be. Harris offers small bits on Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer, among other ABC news folks. No surprises are to be had there. Jennings assigned the young Harris to the religion beat, over his (silent) objections, just in time for the post 9/11 world to give a damn about religion as news fodder. Harris covered a range of stories while on this gig, and met many interesting people, but was very impressed with Ted Haggard, who, off-camera, comes across as a pretty reasonable sort, which was surprising. Of course Haggard, who publicly preached against same-sex relationships, was practicing the fine art of total hypocrisy, as he was enjoying the company of a paid male escort. But he comes across as having much more substance than his gawker-headline downfall would lead one to suspect. Harris meets with a few more folks in the self-help biz, whether of the religious, secular, or woo-woo sorts. The up-close and personal here is riveting. But the business at hand is not just about getting a fix on people like Deepak Chopra, it is about Harris trying to find his way past his personal limitations. He does a bit of a pinball route, bouncing among several of today’s self-help gurus in search of a way to quiet the inner anchorman who offers running commentary during every waking moment. The first step, of course was to realize that the ego was on camera all the time, offering a live feed, an internal, personal, and less than wonderful 24/7 personal news channel. One of the first people whose work he found illuminating was a weird but compelling German, Eckhart Tolle, who offered a take on how to live in the now. It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, This guy gets me. But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.He finds elements of Deepak Chopra illuminating as well, but with reservations. Chopra was definitely more fun to hang out with than Tolle—I preferred Deepak’s rascally What Makes Sammy Run? style to the German’s otherworldly diffidence—but I left the experience more confused, not less. Eckhart was befuddling because, while I believed he was sincere, I couldn’t tell if he was sane. With Deepak it was the opposite; I believed he was sane, but I couldn’t tell if he was sincere.What he arrives at is meditation. In particular a state called “mindfulness”, in which one observes the thoughts and feelings that are occurring, but at a remove, so that one can respond without relying on immediate, visceral and ego-driven reactions. There are different forms of meditation, but he finds one that does the trick for him. And puts it into practice. How he goes about this is sometimes LOL funny, particularly when we are privy to the snarky ramblings of his ego while he is attempting to not lose his mind during a lengthy meditation retreat. At end he learns a very useful skill, and even offers a very accessible step-by-step set of directions for having a go yourself. No beads, sandals, incense or robes required, really. Corporations and even the Marines are promoting meditation among their people. Turns out there are real-world benefits. It is probably worth at least a try. There is an old saw that goes “Sincerity, if you can fake that you’ve got it made.” I do not think that Harris is faking anything here. He is definitely into meditation, and tells lot about the very real benefits to be had. Of course, as a self-centered jerk, it is the self-benefits that get the air-time in his book. There is another realm, which involves compassion. While Harris does talk about this, it is pretty clear that meditation is a way for Dan Harris to do better in the world for Dan Harris. And while there are collateral benefits for those around him as a result of his evolution, the whole compassion thing remains for Harris a means to an end. In 10% Happier, a term he came up with to explain the benefits of his mindfulness practice and stop people from looking at him as if he were an alien, Harris offers a revealing portrait of himself as far, far less than perfect (his meltdown, for example, was made possible in large measure by considerable intake of cocaine and ecstasy), tells a tale of personal seeking and growth, and shares with us the very concrete techniques he has gleaned. So, while self-interest remains the beneficiary of his new knowledge, and while Dan Harris remains, IMHO, a jerk, he is a curious, articulate, and entertaining jerk who has shared some useful experiences and knowledge with the rest of us. Nothing jerky about that. Review first posted 11/21/14 Published - 1/1/2014 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Dan Harris’s vid on how to Hack Your Brain's Default Mode with Meditation Harris's on-air report about the book on ABC Harris is interviewed on Colbert ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Nov 12, 2014
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Nov 16, 2014
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Hardcover
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0062339419
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| 4.06
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| Oct 14, 2014
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really liked it
| “If the central government doesn’t stay together,” he said, “I’ll have to find a way to protect my people.” “If the central government doesn’t stay together,” he said, “I’ll have to find a way to protect my people.”There is a lot to like in journalist Kevin Sites’s latest report from the front, Swimming with Warlords. Sites takes us from point to point on his journey through geography and history, offering a look at the Afghanistan of 2001 as compared to the Afghanistan of late 2013. He spends considerable ink on warlords, but not enough, IMHO, to justify the title of the book. And this is just as well, because the other elements he finds to report on are even more interesting. He notes the extant miseries, for sure, but also finds some flowers blooming in the rubble, offering the fragrance of hope. He looks at the condition of women, notes gains and losses, bright spots and expectations maybe not so bright as we might hope. He looks at what is likely to happen when the US leaves. One major element here is the conflict between former allies within Afghanistan. Of course, he has been back to Afghanistan several times in between, but it is the bookend experience on which he focuses here. What changed between the time when American forces attacked in the wake of 9/11, and 2014, as US troops were preparing to depart in 2014? (The US retains about 15,000 troops in Afghanistan as of late 2018) Sites has certainly seen a lot during his many years in the field, across the war-torn planet, working for major news organizations like ABC, NBC and CNN, and newer entries like Yahoo! News and Vice. He has written two books, In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars (2007) and Things They Cannot Say (2012). His bona fides are impeccable. He even teaches journalism these days in the University of Hong Kong journalism and media program. There are plenty of villains in Sites’s depiction of what has become a more-or-less permanent war zone, but there are a surprising number of heroes as well, some ambiguously so, others not. The place we know today as Afghanistan, which has been called “the graveyard of empires,” has endured seemingly constant invasions and internal conflict, from the days of Alexander the Great to the present. It seems like the entire place is a huge stadium in which Premier league teams have battled it out among themselves and with the locals, with some notable modern matches having been during the Great Game days of the British empire, the Soviet invasion of the 1970s and 1980s during the Cold War, and most recently, the Western invasion to oust Osama bin Terrorist and his Taliban hosts after 9/11. And it is a favored pitch in which Pakistan does its best to make trouble for India. “The Taliban is really from Pakistan; they came here to destroy our country. That is clear to everyone,” said Jilani [a former Taliban member]. “In the beginning, I thought it was jihad against international troops, but I found out we were fighting for Pakistani interests—we were getting orders from Pakistan. Most of the leaders are not religious; they want to come to Afghanistan and tax the locals during the time of the harvest and take the money back to Pakistan. There is no jihad.” Jilani said.I imagine banners being hung from the bullet-pocked remnants of rafters noting local The US entered the playing field in the 1980s by providing arms and assistance to locals and some foreigners in Afghanistan in an attempt to make life miserable for the Soviets. In a classic example of the Pyrrhic Victory, the removal of the Soviets led to a continuation of the pre-existing tribal warfare, this time with more and better weapons, the ultimate rise of the Taliban to power and their hosting of you-know-who. I wonder if Charlie Wilson would have voted for the $4 to $6 trillion cost of this seemingly endless engagement. [image] Kevin Sites In retracing his earlier path, Sites notes bridges gone, landscape devastated, military remnants littering the paths that pass for roads, the many minefields, both literal and political. One of the permanent features in a place where landscape defines effective limits is the presence of warlords. Feudalism lives in Afghanistan, where inter-ethnic conflict is merely a superset of conflicts within each ethnic group. If there was ever a concept of loving thy neighbor as yourself, it is unlikely to have extended much beyond the borders of the fief in which one lives. Mistrust, born of centuries of conflict, has deep roots here. Every action taken on a national level is seen as somehow ethnically drive, whether or not it actually is. Cooperation is minimal, fear is ever-present, and allegiances are alarmingly fluid. Sites looks in on some warlords, living and dead, and some others who function as warlords in fact if not in name. The camp of martyred Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massoud is now a shrine, and Massoud’s lieutenants have moved on to diverse and often dark occupations. He meets with police chiefs, who point out that they are powerless to enforce the laws as long as coping with the Taliban continues. And it is the police forces that suffer the brunt of the casualties in the fight. However not all warlords are alike. He spends some time with one who seemed to be doing pretty well in taking care of his people, improving their lives with ingenuity and managerial efficiency. There are some darkly humorous moments, as when Sites recalls a 2001 lodging that, unbeknownst, included an unexploded 500 lb US bomb on the premises, fins up. Check please. There are moving moments, including a weep-worthy tale of an Afghani father who had lost his daughter to a slightly off-target US incoming, yet betrayed no bitterness. There are uplifting moments, when Sites talks with a woman who had started a radio station in order to get news and information to Afghani women, many of whom remain under lifelong virtual house-arrest for the crime of being female. Or in learning about Rahmaw Omarzad, an artist who returned to Afghanistan after the Taliban fell and established The Centre for Contemporary Art in Kabul. There are delightful moments, as when we learn that an Aussie’s contribution of skateboards had grown into an island of hope in the form of an actual institution called Skateistan that includes instruction on far more than keeping one’s balance on wheels. There are disappointing moments, when we see that many of those who had been educated, and were working on internationally funded development projects will be unemployed and maybe unemployable after the US leaves. Or in learning that Marza, the famed lion of the Kabul zoo, might have been somewhat less magnificent than reputed. There are bizarre moments, such as learning that a fortress wall built 1500 years ago, the Bala Hisar, which legend holds has incorporated the bones of workers who died in its construction, might very well include some of the special extra filling. And there are demoralizing moments, as when Sites describes an orphanage that would have been very much at home in the London of Charles Dickens. His report on drug addiction will strike a dark chord as well. The condition of women’s rights in Afghanistan comes in for considerable attention, as he talks with women about their lives under the Taliban and after their ouster. There is a segment on an American woman, Kimberley Motley , who had started a legal practice in Afghanistan, and another on a woman the Taliban had kicked out of dental school, who had resumed her training and established a national Dental association. It will come as no shock that there remains in Afghanistan a practice of buying and selling wives. And a related tale tells of young boys, bacha bazi, who are treated as sexual pets by the wealthy, a substitute for the females who are kept under wraps. The book seems a compendium of articles about Afghanistan crammed into a forced structure. But that is not really a problem here, as the information you gain far outweighs any feeling of the structure of the whole being not quite as advertised. Yes, there is a look at then and now, but the strength of the book lies in the collection of individual reports. GRIPES There are at least two elements in a book of this sort, the information to be gleaned about the presenting subject, and some insight into the teller of the tale. In this case, the subject is what has changed between 2001 when the Western attack on Afghanistan began following the events of 9/11 in the USA, and the present of the book, the year or so before US troops were scheduled to depart, whether completely or mostly. The other element is the author, him/herself. When you go on a journey, when you will be spending some time with your guide, you would like to know something about him. Sites does offer a few nuggets, and one that is particularly unflattering, but overall the sense I got was that it was mostly name, rank and serial number. While his recollected war stories are indeed interesting, there seems a paucity of info/insight about him. That is an area in which Swimming with Warlords only treads water. At end, we do not really know much more about Kevin Sites than we did before turning to page 1. I expect this is a lot about reportorial discipline, keeping one’s focus on the news and not the reporter, which is certainly a reasonable approach. But in this context, a book, a memoir of sorts, there is a need to be a bit more subcutaneous if an author wants to engender any feeling of camaraderie with his readers. It may be that in his previous books, The Things They Cannot Say and In the Hot Zone there is more of that. Don’t know, have not read those. But there is not nearly enough about KS in this one. I found myself wondering how he got into journalism, how from journalism he got into in-field war reporting. Is his work about adrenalin or something else? What are his values, his ideals? What does he hope to accomplish? What does he do when he is not ducking ordnance in war zones, where and why? Does he have family who worry about him when he is away? You know, stuff. This is not so much a classical road to self-discovery. Sites had already learned a lot about himself and his profession in the years between visits to Afghanistan. This is more like a look at the same eye chart with the optometrist clicking between the younger and more mature lenses. Is it clearer this way, or this way? The title of the book seems ill chosen. There is indeed one scene in which KS goes for a literal swim with an actual warlord, but the title would make one suspect that the entirety of the volume consists of KS visiting with warlords, and that is not the case. Yes, KS does meet up with a few of these guys, but there is a lot more going on here, and it is unfortunate to have our attention focused on the narrower topic. A better title would have let readers know that he is writing a comparison of then and now. There is an ironic title for one of the chapters in the book, regarding parachute journalism, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, which would have made, IMHO, a better, certainly a more descriptive title than the one that was chosen. Sites may well have been swimming with bearded sharks, but the macho-ness of it adds little in the title selection. I would not call this a gripe, but the book could use an acronym list, which should include SNAFU and FUBAR among its entries. In fact, the place might as well be name FUBARistan for all the horror that has gone on there over the centuries. An index, a glossary, and a map would have been helpful. If Sites is retracing a path, it would be nice to be able to follow along. There are plenty of books about Afghanistan out there, (there is a list in the Extra Stuff section below), but Sites’ work has the benefit of freshness. He was there not long ago, at least in book, if not live TV time, and there is an immediacy to his reporting that draws one in, and makes one wonder what might be happening right now. He reports on interesting elements of the current Afghan reality, and finds some informed opinions about what lies ahead. I would not call this a great book, but it is certainly interesting, engaging, and informative. Definitely worth pulling on a suit and going in for a dip, whether with a warlord, shark, or someone a bit less threatening. Review first posted 10/10/14 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Google+ and FB pages Articles by Sites on Vice Some other reading on Afghanistan: I have an Afghanistan shelf with 23 titles, mixed fiction and non. Within that, I heartily recommend the following to enhance your awareness of issues in the region In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan Seeds of Terror Descent into Chaos The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban Ghost Wars Charlie Wilson's War ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 26, 2014
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Oct 2014
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Sep 25, 2014
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Paperback
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0062218018
| 9780062218018
| 0062218018
| 3.51
| 161
| Jan 01, 2013
| Mar 04, 2014
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really liked it
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Anne Thompson is an on-online Hollywood reporter. Aware that the what’s-happening-right-now world of just-in-time digital journalism (or most print jo
Anne Thompson is an on-online Hollywood reporter. Aware that the what’s-happening-right-now world of just-in-time digital journalism (or most print journalism for that matter) does not allow for much reflection, she was looking for a way to tell her story of change in the movie business. Thompson was inspired by William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, which covered one year in the theater and, in The $11 Billion Year, applies that formula to the business of tinsel town. [image] The author While Thompson’s book hardly qualifies as a rom-com there are definite elements of affection. She headed into the ‘wood some time back, working as a film columnist and editor at Variety. She hails from that other big cinematic locale in the US, New York City. Clearly she carried a bit of home with her, as she remains a Yankees fan. She worked for Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Reporter, and other entertainment media as well. She began her blog “Thompson on Hollywood” in 2007, which conjures for me an image of the writer in a saddle atop the sign (not gonna go with cowgirl here), and heightens the disappointment I feel at my lack of expertise with Photoshop. It is not nearly a bio-pic either, as Thompson keeps herself pretty much in the background. Nor is it likely that this book will begin a franchise or constitute a blockbuster and be a tentpole to support her other endeavors, but hopefully it will find an audience. The $11 billion of the title refers to film income for one year, and that’s just domestic. Sounds like H’wood is doing nicely, able to put food on the dining room table, and maybe a few lines on the coffee table. In fact, according to Thompson Hollywood is like Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, hanging desperately to the hands of that old (silent) clock, which is moving inevitably toward future time. [image] She says that Hollywood studios, increasingly profit centers in Blob-like corporate behemoths, are narrowing the range of product they are willing to put out, going increasingly for the formulaic, the tried-and-true, and thus are pushing talent into other venues, TV, internet, VOD, Netflix, et al. This represents the real core of the book, the migration from a studio-centric film world to a more dispersed digital environment. [image] This is not necessarily a terrible thing, as technological changes have put the means of production into the hands of more and more potential film-makers, and a broad range of potential venues has arisen to provide places where these films can be sold and seen. One interesting bit of history Thompson looks at is the rationale for and the transition from film (1999) to digital (2012), and how the diverse parties came to an agreement. [image] She tracks the annual festival migrations, from Sundance in January to the SXSW in Spring, Cannes in May and the Fall festivals in Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York, stopping at other annual events along the way. At Cinemacon, filmmakers show their upcoming product to theater owners. And fan-boy nerds rule at Comic-Con. Part of this is to track the progress, or lack of progress of films through this gauntlet, whether the end result is to gain notice for awards season or merely to get some distribution at all and make back production costs. You will get at least a feel, and sometimes more, for each of these festivals. She writes in some detail about a handful of films whose titles are familiar and others you may not have heard of. Attention is paid as well to gender issues in the industry, with a focus on Kathryn Bigelow. The book offers for your consideration a look at some of the politicking that goes on before and into Oscar season, and some bits of info on AMPAS (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) membership, which is about 6,000 strong, and is by invitation only. You will pick up some terminology too, and a few more abbreviations to add to your alphabet soup. “IP”, for example has nothing to do with an initial public something or other, but refers to “Intellectual Property,” the from part of an Oscar nomination for Adapted Screenplay. You will find that NATO can be something other than a plot device in a war flick. (National Association of Theater Owners). MG is not a car or a medication dosage but a Minimum Guarantee, a cash advance payable to the producer upon delivery of the completed film in exchange for exclusive rights to distribute a film in a sales territory. One last term, “four-quadrant” refers to a film that can attract viewers from diverse demographics, including the young, the old, male and female. There are plenty more expressions and letter combinations to take in. As with any survey-type book, there is always the problem of wanting to know more about this or that element. Thompson’s prose is fluid, as easy to read as a film treatment . If you are a fan of the cinema (Yes, yes, me, me) there is plenty of scene stealing material here, and a bit of comic relief, but the end result is a fascinating documentary look at how the whole business has changed, a long tracking shot of the running of the festivals, a bit of close-up on Oscar season machinations, and some previews of what might lie ahead. While I could not say for certain that The $11 Billion Year would walk away with a statue for best book about the business of Hollywood, not having Publication date – March 4, 2014 Review first posted - 2/7/2014 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s blog, Twitter and FB pages. Seriously, if you want to keep up with things Hollywood, Thompson’s blog is a can’t miss, four-quadrant, blockbuster product. Thompson mentions Emma Fitzpatrick’s wonderful send-up of Anne Hathaway in a satirical version of I Dreamed a Dream . If you have not yet seen this you absolutely must. A nice profile of the author Thompson’s top ten films of 2012, the year covered in the book ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 23, 2014
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Feb 02, 2014
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Hardcover
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0060520841
| 9780060520847
| B000ECXDVC
| 3.69
| 2,269
| Feb 25, 2001
| Feb 01, 2003
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did not like it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 2003
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May 06, 2012
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0385343663
| 9780385343664
| 0385343663
| 3.54
| 49,673
| 2010
| Apr 06, 2010
|
really liked it
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[image] Tom Rachman - image from his site This just in, Tom Rachman has given readers an exceptional set of stories about the birth and death of a news [image] Tom Rachman - image from his site This just in, Tom Rachman has given readers an exceptional set of stories about the birth and death of a newspaper, populated these tales with engaging characters and done so with great style and feeling. The core here is a Rome-based English-language international newspaper. Rachman follows it from its inception in the 1950s to its 21st century demise. The story of this paper is the story of the people it touches, from founder to Obits editor, from editor in chief to Cairo stringer. There are 11 stories here, each with newspaper headlines for titles, and between each is another piece in the historical tale of the paper, so make it an even dozen in all. Rachman’s characters feel familiar and real, maybe a bit too real. I found that I was able to identify more than a couple of real people from my life who corresponded to the characters in his stories. And it is always a bit alarming to see parts of oneself in characters written by a complete stranger. Most of the characters are faced with personal and/or professional crises they must endure to be able to move on with their lives, or to understand their lives better, and that tell us something key about them. Loneliness figures prominently. As a foreign correspondent and editor at the International Herald Tribune, Rachman clearly knows of what he speaks re the details of the paper portrayed here. Perhaps the central character here is the paper. We get to see how it was conceived, some of the struggles it endured over its lifetime, and what forces ultimately cause its demise. Like any good reporter Rachman has given us the information we need, the who, what, where, when and why, but he has enriched the telling with an emotional content, showing us the stories behind the people behind the stories. Read all about it. Published - 2010 Review first posted in 2010 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, GR and FB pages Interviews -----Bookpagge - Tom Rachman : Write what you know - by Eliza Borné -----Bookbrowse - An interview with Tom Rachman - by Karen Rigby -----BlogCritics - An Interview With Tom Rachman About His Novel The Imperfectionists - by Scott Butki BookRags - The Imperfectionists: A Novel Summary & Study Guide ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 2010
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Jun 03, 2010
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Hardcover
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1568584377
| 9781568584379
| 1568584377
| 3.95
| 5,694
| Jul 13, 2009
| Jul 14, 2009
|
really liked it
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It will take me a while to put up a real review here, but overall, I agree with most of what Hedges has to say about the darkness all around us. I was
It will take me a while to put up a real review here, but overall, I agree with most of what Hedges has to say about the darkness all around us. I was a bit alarmed at his tone in the book, which made him sound like one of those guys parading up and down the street crying "the end is near" or "Soylent Green is people." I agree that we may be entering dark times, but will have to think more on the content before completing this. Hedges is a thoughtful, perceptive and intelligent guy, so whether one agrees or disagrees with his take on things, he is worth listening to.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 05, 2009
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Aug 27, 2009
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Hardcover
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0307266397
| 9780307266392
| 0307266397
| 4.13
| 11,040
| Sep 16, 2008
| Sep 16, 2008
|
it was amazing
|
[image] Dexter Filkins - image from PRH Speaker This is a bleeding, personal image of real-world horror. Filkins dots his canvas largely in red, with t [image] Dexter Filkins - image from PRH Speaker This is a bleeding, personal image of real-world horror. Filkins dots his canvas largely in red, with the bloodshed he has seen in war, in Afghanistan, Iraq, on 9/11. The book is comprised of many short passages, images of participants, of events, that offer a visceral experience of these zones of death, deceit and confusion. He does not make pronouncements on what he has witnessed, but puts the images out there for the reader to absorb. This is a must read for anyone interested in the reality of 21st century war and 21st century war reporting. ==================================QUOTES p 73 - Some days I thought we had broken into a mental institution. One of the old ones, from the nineteenth century, where people were dumped and forgotten. It was like we had pried the doors off and found all these people clutching themselves and burying their heads in the corners and sitting in their own filth. It was useful to think of Iraq this way. It helped in your analysis. Murder and torture and sadism: it was part of Iraq. It was in people’s brains. Sometimes I would walk into the newsroom that we had set up in the New York Times bureau in Baghdad, and I’d find our Iraqi employees gathered around the television watching a torture video. You could buy them in the bazaars in Baghdad; they were left over from Saddam’s time. The Iraqis would be watching them in silence. Just staring at the screen. In one of the videos, some Baath party men had pinned a man down on the floor and were holding his outstretched arms, while another official beat the man’s forearms with a heavy metal pipe until his arm broke into two pieces. There was no sound in the video, but you could see that the man was screaming. None of the Iraqis in the newsroom said anything. I tried to recall these things when I got impatient with the Iraqis. Sometimes, when readers from America sent me e-mails expressing anger at the Iraqis—why are they so ungrateful? Why can’t they govern themselves?—I considered sending them one of these videos. p 199 - Out there, the boundary between life and death shrank so much that it was little more than a membrane, thin and clear. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2008
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Nov 16, 2008
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0671870130
| 9780671870133
| 0671870130
| 4.03
| 124
| 1993
| Oct 21, 1993
|
liked it
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[image] Bob Edwards - image from Wikipedia Every Friday morning Bob Edwards, erstwhile anchor of NPR’s Morning Edition radio news program interviewed H [image] Bob Edwards - image from Wikipedia Every Friday morning Bob Edwards, erstwhile anchor of NPR’s Morning Edition radio news program interviewed Hall of Fame sportscaster Red Barber. They performed this ritual for twelve years. During that time, a bond grew, a father-son link. Edwards describes Red as a surrogate father. We learn a fair deal about Red’s history, although this is not a biography. He was a leader in the creation and sustenance of media coverage of baseball. He was there when Branch Rickey brought Jackie Robinson into the major leagues. He was there when television broadcast its first game. He saw and worked for the Dodgers and the Yankees under various managements. He is a broadcasting legend. He also could be a crusty pain in the ass. Edwards delights in sharing how Barber terrorized the NPR staff, changing planned discussion topics without warning. [image] Walter "Red" Barber on the job in 1955 - image from Wikipedia To hear Edwards tell it, he sounds like the rawest of rookies. I suspect this is disingenuous. He had already been co-anchor for All Things Considered. Yet, he is so taken with Red. It was a very interesting read. A biography might be just as good, but we get to see not only the tight-assed prima donna announcer, but his mellowing in a way, dedicated to his wife, his garden, his cats, and eager to share with listeners the small news of his life in Tallahassee. Barber may have been the most popular voice on NPR over those twelve years. To hear Bob Edwards tell it, he was the most loved as well. Clearly Edwards loved him, and this book is an expression of that affection. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2005
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Nov 02, 2008
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0060779594
| 9780060779597
| 0060779594
| 3.76
| 280
| Aug 01, 2009
| Jul 05, 2005
|
liked it
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Trippi was campaign manager for Howard Dean for most of his presidential campaign. There is a lot in here about how the Internet came of age as a poli
Trippi was campaign manager for Howard Dean for most of his presidential campaign. There is a lot in here about how the Internet came of age as a political tool. Trippi sees this as a truly revolutionary event, shifting power from on high to a much broader base. He takes extreme joy in recounting incidents in which bloggers had immediate impact on the campaign, making it the most interactive such campaign to date. I expect he sees himself in the role of midwife to the birth of a new political experience. I did get the feeling that there are many tales yet to be told about the campaign, tales that may be unflattering to Trippi. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2004
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Oct 29, 2008
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1400030250
| 9781400030255
| 1400030250
| 3.88
| 736
| 1990
| Nov 01, 2001
|
liked it
|
This was written in the early 90’s, and looks at the local players in Afghanistan, the various tribal leaders, with a lot of information about what th
This was written in the early 90’s, and looks at the local players in Afghanistan, the various tribal leaders, with a lot of information about what the Soviets did there during their war. Kaplan actually spent some time with the combatants and provides an intimate portrait of the nation, such as it is. This is a worthwhile read.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2004
|
Oct 29, 2008
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0375727086
| 9780375727085
| 0375727086
| 3.44
| 117
| Oct 03, 2000
| Oct 09, 2001
|
it was ok
|
In 1999, Koppel kept a diary. These are notes from each day of the year. We learn a bit about his personal background, how he reacts to the events of
In 1999, Koppel kept a diary. These are notes from each day of the year. We learn a bit about his personal background, how he reacts to the events of the day, occasional musings about this and that. It does provide a little insight into his worldview, professional ethics, that sort of thing. It also contains some interesting tales of days in the field in far off places, but overall, I found this a disappointing book. It could have been so much more. It is not a bad book, just a very limited one. But there are a fair number of quotable lines in it.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2004
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Oct 26, 2008
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Paperback
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my rating |
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4.32
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it was amazing
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Sep 30, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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||||||
3.80
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it was amazing
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Oct 31, 2022
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Oct 31, 2022
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||||||
4.09
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it was amazing
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Dec 27, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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||||||
3.99
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it was amazing
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Feb 18, 2019
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Feb 17, 2019
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||||||
4.15
|
really liked it
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Mar 25, 2019
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Feb 13, 2019
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||||||
3.96
|
it was amazing
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Sep 13, 2017
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Aug 30, 2017
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||||||
3.91
|
it was amazing
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Mar 12, 2017
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Mar 13, 2017
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||||||
4.34
|
it was amazing
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Feb 29, 2016
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Jan 16, 2016
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||||||
4.07
|
it was amazing
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Jun 21, 2015
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Jun 18, 2015
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||||||
3.92
|
really liked it
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Nov 12, 2014
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Nov 16, 2014
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||||||
4.06
|
really liked it
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Oct 2014
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Sep 25, 2014
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||||||
3.51
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really liked it
|
Jan 23, 2014
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Feb 02, 2014
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||||||
3.69
|
did not like it
|
Jun 2003
|
May 06, 2012
|
||||||
3.54
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really liked it
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May 2010
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Jun 03, 2010
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||||||
3.95
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really liked it
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Sep 05, 2009
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Aug 27, 2009
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||||||
4.13
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it was amazing
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Nov 2008
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Nov 16, 2008
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||||||
4.03
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liked it
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Aug 2005
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Nov 02, 2008
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||||||
3.76
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liked it
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Oct 2004
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Oct 29, 2008
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||||||
3.88
|
liked it
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Oct 2004
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Oct 29, 2008
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||||||
3.44
|
it was ok
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Sep 2004
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Oct 26, 2008
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