Collected Miscellany

Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: And Other Words of Delicate Southern Wisdom by Celia Rivenbark

From Publishers Weekly:

In some 32 short essays on the ridiculousness of modern life, Rivenbark (Bless Your Heart, Tramp; We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier) wanders through Tweenland at the mall, thinking a better name would be “Lil Skanks.” She thinks that the Cruise/Holmes pregnancy has an “indescribably delicious” Rosemary’s Baby feel to it and recalls that Monica Lewinsky hosted a TV dating show—in which she “didn’t get the guy.” Rivenbark riffs on America’s crazier obsessions—the painful but obligatory pilgrimage to Disney World, the new attention to “buttocks cleavage,” coffee makers calling themselves baristas, or those celebrity moms who have “bumps” instead of babies. Rivenbark describes herself as a “slacker mom” and reminds readers to learn something from men—”because no matter how slack a dad is, if he does the least little thing, people gush over him.” This is a hilarious read, perhaps best enjoyed while eating Krispy Kremes with a few girlfriends.

– Death By Powerpoint by Michael Flocker

Book Description:

“By the best-selling author of The Metrosexual Guide to Style, a hilarious manual for navigating the many rungs of the corporate ladder. Does your manager talk endlessly about “engineering synergy” and “bridging disconnects?” Does the guy in the cube next to you eavesdrop and peak at what’s in your personal drawer? Have you ever come close to “death by PowerPoint” as you struggle to stay awake in a meeting? If you work in any kind of office–large or small–the answers to these questions are undoubtedly “yes” and you obviously and desperately need Death By PowerPoint. A life-saving guide to twenty-first century corporate culture, it provides incisive coverage of everything you’ll need to get ahead (or to simply stay above water):

– The Art of Office Politics–sucking up effectively, how to deal with control freaks and that annoying guy with all the “new ideas”
– E-Mail Etiquette–responding to ridiculous requests, managing passive-aggressive messages, and how best to undo E-damage
– Mandatory Fun–proper etiquette for office parties, the curse of Secret Santa, and undermining your drunken co-workers
– Sex in the Workplace–how to spot video surveillance, telltale signs that others are getting it on, dumping etiquette, and the treacherous realm of sex with the boss”

– Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake by Trevor Dann

From Publishers Weekly:

A British acoustic-psychedelic entry into the ever-swelling hall of artists who died young, Nick Drake received little recognition during his short life. Yet more than 30 years after his death, his celebrity has never been greater and has been accompanied by reissues, documentary films and biographies—one Drake tune even rated a Volkswagen commercial. Born to a wealthy family, Drake showed early interest in music; by his university years he had developed a unique guitar style and brooding songs that had little to do with the hippie noodlings of the era. Heavy drug use and commercial failure pushed the already introverted Drake deeper into isolation and despair; he died of an overdose at the age of 26. To this day, questions swirl around every aspect of Drake’s life, from his musical influences and sexuality to whether or not he intentionally killed himself. Unfortunately, Dann, producer of Live Aid, brings little insight to the Drake mysteries. While he covers Drake’s Cambridge years thoroughly, other aspects of the musician’s life are barely mentioned; even interviews with Drake’s closer friends reveal little—it just might be that no one really ever got close enough to him. By contrast, the book’s discography is comprehensive and informative.

– Strange Case of Hellish Nell by Nina Shandler

Book Description:

The fascinating story of Britain’s World War II witchcraft trial of Helen Duncan, the grandmother who conducted seances, and had a knack for revealing military secrets
On March 23, 1944, as the Allied Forces were preparing for D-Day, Helen Duncan–“Nell” to her six children and four grandchildren and “Hellish Nell” to her detractors–stood in the dock of Britain’s highest criminal court accused of: witchcraft!

At the time of her arrest, Helen Duncan was Britain’s most controversial psychic, a celebrity medium with a notorious reputation. During her seances, she channeled spirits who spoke from the world beyond, and on a few occasions, her “spirit” seemed to know too much: Helen’s seances were accurately revealing top-secret British ship movements. Intelligence authorities wanted “Hellish Nell” silenced.

Using diaries, personal papers, interviews, and declassified documents, Nina Shandler resurrects this strange episode and explores the unanswered questions surrounding the trial: Did “Hellish Nell” channel spirits of the dead who gave away wartime secrets? Was she a calculating charlatan or the innocent target of obsessive wartime secrecy? Why did the Director of Public Prosecutions try her as a witch, and not a spy? Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, The Strange Case of Hellish Nell is a true crime tale laced with psychic phenomena and wartime intrigue.

In my review of The Devil’s Halo by Chris Fox I raised the following question:

Here is an interesting question: Can you raise serious issues or ideas in a paperback thriller? Now I am not talking about a literary novel that uses aspects of the thriller genre. I know books that often get classified as genre fiction deal with serious ideas. No, I am more interested in whether the kind of book you might take to the beach or read on the commute to work can contain some serious ideas underneath the action driven plot.

This issue came up again recently while I was reading The Second Horseman by Kyle Mills. While Devil’s Halo was more of techno thriller, and Second Horseman is a political one, both raise interesting questions in the course of their fast paced action driven plots.

2nd Horseman’s lead character is Brandon Vale, a talented thief and con man currently serving time for a crime he didn’t commit. Vale is content just to serve his time and start over again once on the outside. But when a mysterious group arranges his escape and offers him a job things get complicated.

It turns out the man who arranged his escape is Richard Scanlon, a former FBI agent and currently head of a Vegas-based intelligence contractor, the man who framed Vale in the first place. Scanlon offers Vale the easy life on a South African vineyard if he can pull off a job. The problem is the job involves stealing $200 million dollars from Vegas casinos and exchanging the money for twelve nuclear warheads held by a Ukrainian crime syndicate.

Mills further complicates things with a twist that involves a National Security Adviser with a Machiavellian plan to use Scanlon’s nukes to forever alter the Middle East and international relations.

Continue reading →

– God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult And the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad by Charles Allen

Book Description:

An important study of the little-known history of the Wahhabi, a fundamentalist Islamic tribe whose teachings influence today’s extreme Islamic terrorists, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

In today’s post-9/11 world, the everyday news shows us images of fanatic fighters and suicide bombers willing to die in holy war, martyrs for jihad. But what are the roots of this militant fundamentalism in the Muslim world? In this insightful and wide-ranging history, Charles Allen finds an answer in the eighteenth-century reform movement of Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers–the Wahhabi–who sought the restoration of Islamic purity and declared violent jihad on all who opposed them, Moslems and pagans alike.

As the Wahhabi teaching spread in the nineteenth century, first, to the Arabian peninsula, and then, to the region around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, their followers brought with them a vicious brand of political ideology and militant conflict. The Wahhabi deeply influenced the rulers of modern Saudi Arabia and their establishment of a strict Islamic code. A more militant expression of Wahhabism took root in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where fierce tribes have waged holy war for almost two hundred years. The ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaeda today are filled with young men who were taught the Wahhabi theology of Islamic purity while rifles were pressed into their hands for the sake of jihad.

God’s Terrorists sheds shocking light on the historical roots of modern terrorism and shows how this dangerous theology lives on today.

– Showdown with Nuclear Iran: Radical Islam’s Messianic Mission to Destroy Israel and Cripple the United States by Michael D. Evans, Jerome R. Corsi

Book Description:

A terrifying examination of how Iran’s president (a radical Shiite zealot) believes he has a “divine mission” to usher in the apocalypse and thereby herald the second coming of a Shia Muslim messiah-and how he is trying to achieve this by building his arsenal and threatening to cripple America and destroy Israel in a nuclear holocaust.

– The Beast on the East River: The UN Threat to America’s Sovereignty and Security by Nathan Tabor

Book Description:

In his debut book, rising conservative voice Nathan Tabor offers a frightening expose of the United Nations’ global power grab and its ruthless attempt to control U.S. education, law, gun ownership, taxation, and population control.

Two interesting reviews of a new book on Dean Acheson that are worth noting. John Lewis Gaddis reviews ($) Robert L. Beisner’s Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War for The New Republic. In addition to discussing the man and the book Gaddis ponders the Democratic Party’s reaction to President Bush’s foreign policy:

They have responded to the first Republican president to have become a liberal interventionist by quivering–and blogging–with rage. They have offered no plan for building on the Bush Doctrine and moving on. It’s as if they’re imitating the Republicans of the 1930s, who quivered with rage at Roosevelt (blogging had not been invented yet) while neglecting his warnings about tyrants, as well as his vision of what a world without them might be.

As to the book itself, Gaddis has mixed feelings:

Beisner’s is by no means the first biography of Acheson: Gaddis Smith, David McLellan, Douglas Brinkley, and James Chace have written well-regarded ones, and Acheson’s own memoir sprawls over some seven hundred pages. But Beisner’s biography is the first to focus closely on the Truman-Acheson relationship, and to evaluate in detail Acheson’s performance as secretary of state. There is probably too much detail: Beisner’s six hundred and fifty pages of text, which draw more extensively than any other book on the documentary record of the years between 1949 and 1953, suggest that he feared some posthumous but scathing rebuke from his subject if he left anything out. That is unfortunate, because the size of the book obscures its sharpness. It requires persistence, but it rewards it.

Continue reading →

Interesting post from Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost on his thoughts after three years of blogging. Here are two ideas that I can definitely relate to:

On the Mixed Blessing of Free Books – Within the first few months of blogging I made an astounding discovery: If you write stuff (even drivel), publishers will send you books to review. Write stuff; free books. For an avid reader like discovery a recipe for alchemy. At first I didn’t even mind the fact that the books they were sending me were ones that I would never, ever have chosen to read. The fact that there even existed such a concept as “free books” seemed beyond my comprehension so I dutifully took what was offered. I soon realized, however, that “free books” weren’t exactly free at all and that I would be paying for them with the only currency that ever really matters: Time.

Soon I became much more discerning about the books I agreed to review when I realized that the publishers or authors actually expected you to review them. If you haven’t written a book review since 12th grade English class, you probably forget just how difficult it can be. Add to that the guilt that piles up alongside the 27 review copies stacked in the corner and you realize that buying your own books isn’t so bad after all.

[. . .]

On Guilt: The longer I blog the guiltier I feel. I feel guilty about receiving books that I haven’t reviewed. I feel guilty about the comments that I don’t take the time to answer. I feel guilty about the email from readers that languishes in my inbox. I feel guilty about the time I waste blogging instead of spending time on more productive activities. I feel guilty about not spending enough time blogging because I’m spending time on unproductive activities. I feel guilty when I blog about trivial current events. I feel guilty when I blog obscure topics. I feel guilty about not linking to other blogs enough. I feel guilty about not promoting other bloggers. The guilt shifts around but it never goes away.