Collected Miscellany

One of the eternal mysteries of the blogosphere is how Glenn Reynolds finds the time to post so much on his InstaPundit blog. After all, this is not some unemployed socially challenged teenager posting from his parent’s basement (not that there is anything wrong with that).

Reynolds is a law professor; columnist; musician, producer, and record label owner to name just a few of his varied activities. Add in the fact that he is married and has a daughter and it is hard to imagine where he finds the time to post all those entries or read just a fraction of the unending stream of emails he receives.

Clearly, Reynolds has a curious mind and a lot of energy. In the midst of all of the above, he found time to write a book. The recently released An Army of Davids, gives those unfamiliar with his writing an idea of the breadth of his interests. Subtitled “How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths,” the book is also a guided tour through some of the more interesting ways technology and markets are changing society.

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I had some technical issues over the weekend that resulted in a couple of posts disappearing (been that kind of week) so content will be delayed yet again. Below are some links to interviews you might find interesting.

– John Hawkins over at Right Wing News has an interview with Claire Berlinski, author of Menace In Europe and the novel Loose Lips.

– Robert Birnbaum continues to crank out the interviews. Here is one with Thomas Beller, author of How to Be a Man: Scenes From a Protracted Boyhood and The Sleep-Over Artist. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley had this to say about Beller:

Thomas Beller is a smart, funny, interesting guy who labors under the misfortune of knowing that he’s a smart, funny, interesting guy, but for the most part he manages to avoid the pitfalls — narcissism, self-absorption, self-congratulation — that such knowledge often creates. To be sure, he is an accomplished navel-gazer — “How to Be a Man” is all about Me, Me, Me — but he is disarmingly self-deprecatory and gets his laughs, of which the book has a number, mainly at his own expense.

The interview includes this interesting exchange:

RB: What is it you think you can do [laughs] as a writer?

TB: Hmm.

RB: [still laughing] What do you bring to the table?

TB: Another thing I can’t do is answer questions that directly. But I can tell you apropos of what I can do as a writer that I did a radio interview with the North Carolina NPR affiliate. And the guy who conducted it was not a local. He was subbing. He had come down from Washington. A very nice guy, very intelligent. Had read at least a respectable amount of the book. And understandably wanted me to discuss some of the thematic offshoots of what that issue [raised by How to be a Man] might bring up. I just went into this thing of what I do—I just won’t do what is asked of me. I did have things to say and afterwards this very nice producer said, “You know, you wrote a really good book and you are really self deprecating in your book and that’s great, but when you go on the radio you have to get over that and say that you wrote a good book and say what it’s about.”

– Mr. Birnbaum also recently spoke with Alberto Manguel. Here is the teaser:

Should “America” only include the United States? Does art criticism matter when it doesn’t account for emotions? Our man in Boston talks to author Alberto Manguel about working with Borges and responding to paintings.

– National Review Online has an interview with Charles Murray, author of In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State. In the book the famous libertarian proposes to end the welfare state by replacing it with a grant system. The gist of it is given in this exchange:

Kathryn Jean Lopez: First things first. $10,000? Who’s getting and when? And can I use it on my credit-card debt?

Charles Murray: If you’ve reached your 21st birthday, are a United States citizen, are not incarcerated, and have a pulse, you get the grant, electronically deposited in monthly installments in an American bank of your choice with an ABA routing number. If you make more than $25,000, you pay part of it back in graduated amounts. At $50,000, the surtax maxes out at $5,000. I also, reluctantly but with good reason, specify that $3,000 has to be devoted to health care. Apart from that, you can use the grant for whatever you want. Enjoy.

Yet another non-fiction book I would like to read. But I am hopelessly behind so I doubt I will get to it.

Took some books to half-price books today and here is what I got in return:

– The Cossacks (Everyman’s Library) by Leo Tolstoy :

I have a weakness for the Everyman’s Library. Plus, I figure this way I can read some Tolstoy without tackling War and Peace.

– Love and Friendship by Allan Bloom

Bloom is a tough read and I have heard that some of the chapters are uneven, but it was only a dollar and I wanted to have it on the shelf.

– The Brass Cupcake by John D. MacDonald.

What a great title! And who wouldn’t want to read a hard boiled detective story from the 1950’s.

This is my inaugural wish list for books. I hope to post future wish lists every month. The first book is Vasily Grossman’s A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945. Vasily has been desrcibed as Russia’s Ernie Pyle. This appears to be a personal viewpoint of the Russian/German conflict in World War II.

The second book on my wish list is Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. In contrast to Grossman’s book, Merridale takes a more traditional, objective look at the war between the Russians and the Germans. These two books will hopefully shed some light on an area of World War II that has not been discussed much in the West – the Russian side of the war.

The third book is Dick Winters’ Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters. As the title infers, this appears to further detail the exploits of Easy Company from the book Band of Brothers. I look forward to reconnecting with Easy Company.

The last book is Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda. I have become more interested in America’s recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope that Naylor’s book will explain what happened in one of the war in Afghanistan’s most reported battles.

If you want to read a hard-hitting, fast-paced book, read Tim Pritchard’s Ambush Alley. The book is about the U.S. Marines’ own version of Blackhawk Down – the battle to capture two bridges in Nasiriyah, Iraq.

Pritchard’s book is based on the events that occurred on March 23, 2003. On that date, the U.S. Marines were expected to wait twenty-four hours before entering a city that was supposed to capitulate quickly. As many military planners know, the best-laid plans often go awry. After a U.S. Army convoy is ambushed near the city, the Marines are forced to advance their attack by twenty-four hours to rescue the missing soldiers from the convoy and seize the bridges. Unfortunately, the Marines find themselves in a life-or-death struggle with Iraqi forces.

Pritchard does not give a bland, general description of combat – he throws his descriptions in your face. You really feel as if you are with the Marines as they fight to survive. His raw descriptions of the casualties are heart-rending and moving. Anyone who has any romantic ideas of combat after reading Pritchard’s book needs to have their head examined.

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In case you missed it, NRO had some coverage of Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers for the Assassin this week. John J. Miller reviewed it and Kathryn Lopez had a Q&A session with the author.

Here is Miller:

In reading Prayers for the Assassin, it’s important to engage in what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief” — i.e., it’s essential to grant Ferrigno his unbelievable premise that a certain set of circumstances may arise to compel millions of Americans to convert to Islam. Once you allow this, everything else falls into place, because everything else about Ferrigno’s invented world feels utterly believable . . . This, in fact, may be the chief reward of the book: The creation of an alternate reality that abides by a set of internally consistent rules as well as a place that reminds us of what’s at stake in the war on terror.

Here is an interesting exchange from the Q&A:

Lopez: Whom do you read?

Ferrigno: Elmore Leonard, William Gibson, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Michael Ledeen, Mark Steyn, Ralph Peters, JG Ballard, John Connolly, V. S. Naipul, Hugh Hewitt, Carl Barks, and Vince Flynn.

For those who are interested, my review of the book is here.