“Is the glass half empty or half full?” is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full) or pessimism (half empty); or as a general litmus test to simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble. This idiom is used to explain how people perceive events and objects. Perception is unique to every individual and is simply one's interpretation of reality. The phrase "Is the glass half empty or half full" can be referred to as a philosophical question.
“I do tend to be an anxious fellow and I do tend to see the world as a little darker than perhaps it genuinely is, but I also do appreciate much more than a rosy scenario, I appreciate straight news. I appreciate honesty. I appreciate confronting something head on and being given all the details first — and then responding to them in whatever way I might. At best, it simply confirmed who I am to myself. It helps me. For me, it works.”
In September 2010, Bill Scheft wrote “Nabob of Negativism” for The New York Times. The book jacket of “Half Empty,” David Rakoff’s third essay collection, contains not only the warning “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found in These Pages,” but the guarantee that the author will have you “positively reveling in the power of negativity.” It’s never clear whether the pessimism alluded to is Rakoff’s philosophy, Rakoff’s device or Rakoff’s publicist clearing his throat. Luckily, we don’t have to judge this book by its cover. The inherent problem with most collections is that the reader can’t help comparing entries, like a track handicapper setting the morning line. In his ambitious opening essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.
“Writer Melissa Bank said it best: 'The only proper answer to 'Why me?' is 'Why not you?' The universe is anarchic and doesn't care about us and unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask. And in so many other ways, I'm so far ahead of the game. I have access to great medical care. My general baseline health, aside from the general unpleasantness of the cancer, is great. And it's great because I'm privileged to have great health. And I live in a country where I'm not making sneakers for a living and I don't live near a toxic waste dump. You can't win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say 'Why am I not winning this contest as well?' It's random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren't me? Absolutely. I still can't make that logistic jump to thinking there's a reason why it shouldn't be me.”
In December 2009, Michael Lindenberger wrote “Obama's Afghanistan decision evokes LBJ's 1965 order on Vietnam buildup” for The Dallas Morning News. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson took ownership of a war he, like Obama, had inherited. Gen. William Westmoreland wanted more troops in Vietnam, and after a protracted debate within the White House, Johnson sent them. Over the next three years, he would send hundreds of thousands more and launch a carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Johnson's presidency – and many argue, Johnson himself – were destroyed long before America could finally, 10 years later, quit Vietnam. Obama's decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan has reawakened those memories of Vietnam's early days, and brought unsettling comparisons from an array of historians who have spent their careers studying Johnson. "I'll tell you, the more that I stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, the more I think of it, I don't know – it looks like to me we're getting into another Korea," Johnson said in 1964 during a tape-recorded conversation with national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. "It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of it, once we're committed." McGovern, who campaigned hard for Johnson, said he had expected Johnson to pull back after gaining the presidency in his own right in 1964.
“I think this is a dreadful mistake on President Obama's part. It makes me sad. I am for him. I worked for him, and I still think he is a brilliant man. But it looks to me like Vietnam all over again.”
- Senator George McGovern, 2009
In September 2010, Peter Baker wrote “Woodward Book Says Afghanistan Divided White House” for The New York Times. Some of the critical players in President Obama’s national security team doubt his strategy in Afghanistan will succeed and have spent much of the last 20 months quarreling with one another over policy, personalities and turf, according to the new Bob Woodward book. The book, “Obama's Wars,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.
“I have to say that. I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”
- President Barack Obama to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, when asked about whether or not his deadline to withdraw was “firm”
“This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan. Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”
- Barack Obama, telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation
In September 2010, Steve Luxenberg wrote “Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war” for the Washington Post. President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward. Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page "terms sheet" that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars," to be released on Monday. According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.
“It got to the point in the spring, after a top-secret update to the president in the Situation Room at the White House, the president left the meeting and told his aides: What makes us think that given the description of the problem, that we're going to design a solution to this?”
From NPR's Morning Edition: You might say Nora Ephron — raised in Beverly Hills, the daughter of New York playwrights who moved west to write screenplays for the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy — was born to tell stories. As an adult, Ephron worked as a journalist. Later she made her own name in the movies, writing When Harry Met Sally and directing scripts of her own — including Sleepless in Seattle and Julie & Julia. More recently, the 69-year-old Ephron has been sharing reflections on aging, first in her book I Feel Bad About My Neck and now in a new collection called I Remember Nothing. In the latter, Nora Ephron spins stories on a potpourri of subjects: divorce, disdain for egg-white omelets, and most especially memory loss. "I have been forgetting things for years – at least since I was in my 30s," Ephron writes in the book's opening paragraph. "I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to."
From Publishers Weekly: Reading these succinct, razor-sharp essays by veteran humorist (I Feel Bad About My Neck), novelist, and screenwriter-director Ephron is to be reminded that she cut her teeth as a New York Post writer in the 1960s, as she recounts in the most substantial selection here, "Journalism: A Love Story." Forthright, frequently wickedly backhanded, these essays cover the gamut of later-life observations (she is 69), from the dourly hilarious title essay about losing her memory, which asserts that her ubiquitous senior moment has now become the requisite Google moment, to several flimsy lists, such as "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again," e.g., "Movies have no political effect whatsoever." Shorts such as the several "I Just Want to Say" pieces feature Ephron's trademark prickly contrariness and are stylistically digestible for the tabloids. Other essays delve into memories of fascinating people she knew, such as the Lillian Hellman of Pentimento, whom she adored until the older woman's egomania rubbed her the wrong way. Most winning, however, are her priceless reflections on her early life, such as growing up in Beverly Hills with her movie-people parents, and how being divorced shaped the bulk of her life, in "The D Word." There's an elegiac quality to many of these pieces, handled with wit and tenderness.
From The New York Times: Nora Ephron worries about a failing memory in the title piece of “I Remember Nothing,” her inviting new collection of essays. But even her most amnesiac readers still remember “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” the 2006 collection that this new book closely resembles. That resemblance is helpful in some ways and alarming in others. Each of these books is 137 pages long. Their covers are similarly formatted, with the same font used for the author’s name. One of Nora Ephron's back-cover portraits was taken by someone named Elena, the other by someone named Ilona; either way, Ms. Ephron looks attractive, accessible and well worth listening to. Her repackaged aperçus are now $3 more expensive than they were four years ago. She is now 69, not 65, and her sense of creeping mortality has changed accordingly. But the most salient comparisons are those between the lengths and origins of each book’s articles. “I Feel Bad About My Neck” had 15 entries, most of them tight, beguiling, exemplary essays written for print magazines (O, Vogue, The New Yorker) and The New York Times. “I Remember Nothing” has 23 pieces, and most of them are much shorter and less shapely. Some sound like the hurried Huffington Post blog entries that they seemingly were. The single strangest inclusion is a one-paragraph item titled “I Just Want to Say: Chicken Soup” and asks whether chicken soup creates colds instead of curing them. This is the inexplicably truncated lead paragraph of a much longer Op-Ed article from The Times headlined “The Chicken Soup Chronicles.” And all it amounts to is the wry, five-sentence version of a one-liner.
Nora Ephron (born May 19, 1941) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. She is best known for her romantic comedies and is a triple nominee for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay; for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally... and Sleepless in Seattle. She sometimes writes with her sister Delia Ephron. Her most recent film is Julie & Julia. Ephron graduated from Wellesley College in 1962 and worked briefly as an intern in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.
After a satire Nora Ephron wrote lampooning the Post caught the editor's eye, the author landed a job at the New York Post, where she stayed as a reporter for five years. In 1966, Ephron broke the news in the Post that Bob Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a private ceremony three and a half months before. Upon becoming a successful writer, she wrote a column on women's issues for Esquire. In this position, Ephron made a name for herself by taking on subjects as wide-ranging as Dorothy Schiff, her former boss and owner of the Post; Betty Friedan, whom she chastised for pursuing a feud with Gloria Steinem; and her alma mater Wellesley, which she said had turned out a generation of "docile" women." A 1968 send-up of Women's Wear Daily in Cosmopolitan resulted in threats of a lawsuit from WWD. While married to Bernstein in the mid-1970s, at her husband and Bob Woodward's request, she helped Bernstein re-write William Goldman's script for All the President's Men, because the two journalists were not happy with it. The Ephron-Bernstein script was not used in the end, but was seen by someone who offered Ephron her first screenwriting job, for a television movie. Ephron's 2002 play Imaginary Friends explores the rivalry between writers Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.
From the Pritzker Military Library: From the beginning, the nation’s commander-in-chief and its capitalists have been uneasy partners in the American enterprise. But for a few decades, it was nothing short of love. Andrew Jackson earned popular acclaim and enraged business magnates by crushing the Bank of the United States and quashing federal spending on roads and canals. But H.W. Brands argues that the Civil War radically changed the relationship between government and business. When J.P. Morgan received a draft notice, he hired a substitute to serve in his place, and spent the war doing a swift trade in commodities like rifles; nearly all of the fortunes that dominated the next four decades, from Carnegie to Vanderbilt, would either begin or soar during the Civil War. In American Colossus, H.W. Brands chronicles an age when the railroads led the nation west and began the Indian Wars; meanwhile, even further west, capitalists would save the military the trouble of toppling the native government of an obscure set of islands called Hawaii. By the Spanish-American War in 1898, business and military interests were so inextricably entwined that ambassador and merchant alike could agree: it had, indeed, been a “splendid little war”.
From Publisher's Weekly: In this timely study, University of Texas historian H.W. Brands (Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) describes the rise of the great corporate capitalists after the Civil War. J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie constituted an trinity of power-obsessed individuals who instinctively understood that wealth was the ultimate political weapon. They defined the cold-blooded authority of big business. Fascinating detours away from the tale of corporate empires examine the Reconstruction process in the South, the Indian Wars of the West, the opening of the Great Plains, immigration in the East, and the rise of organized labor and the agrarian reformers. Effectively, excerpts from the first-person accounts of Booker T. Washington, Black Elk, Jacob Riis, and others convey the drama of the time. Perhaps the only significant omission in this fast-paced, engrossing narrative is a tendency to dwell on political doctrines that sought to repudiate or restrain capitalism while only briefly discussing the dogma of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, which favored the monopolists.
From Wikipedia: Henry William Brands is an American historian and author of 22 books, co-author of 2 and editor of 4, he is also a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated from Stanford University in 1975 with a B.A. in history and from Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon. He resides in Austin, Texas. In June 2009 he and eleven other distinguished historians had dinner at the White House with President Barack Obama.
Financial Times - John Gapper - 17 Dec 2010: The life stories of the first JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt have been written by authors such as Ron Chernow. But HW Brands weaves them into a broader account of the astonishing social changes that rippled through the nation in these decades – shaking up the lives of everyone from the southern slaves to Lower East Side immigrants. [...] Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas who has written Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, does not shy away from such suffering. He chronicles the tensions between capitalism and democracy created by extreme divergences of fortune and the lobbying power of big business – tensions that are no less strong today. [...] Yet Brands concludes that “the capitalist revolution was in many ways the best thing ever to befall the ordinary people of America”. The population grew from 40m in 1876 to 76m in 1900, one-third of the rise coming from immigration. Infant mortality fell by one-third and life expectancy grew by one-seventh. Output tripled and average per capita income doubled as the proportion of the workforce on farms halved.
From the American Thinker (January, 2011): In a fascinating book entitled Furs, Fortune, and Empire (New York, 2010), Eric Jay Dolin recounts the entire history of the fur trade in America. Dolin's book is full of interesting stories, one of which involves government's attempted takeover of the fur trade during the early 19th century. The story calls to mind government's intervention in the home mortgage market nearly two centuries later, and for much the same reasons, the government fur operation was a dismal failure. As Dolin points out, the U.S. government did not enter the fur trade with the idea of making a profit. Its overriding purpose was to protect American Indians, who, as liberals of the day believed, were being cheated by private fur companies. In creating the so-called "factory system," government would organize the fur trade as a nonprofit enterprise. With the advantage of taxpayer subsidies, government agents would then drive the for-profit traders out of business. In the minds of liberals of the day, social justice necessitated government intervention in the fur trade. Once government had driven profiteers from the field, Indians would receive a fair price for their furs, and they would be spared the harmful effects of alcohol (with which the private traders were said to ply their "victims"). And once they realized how much better off they were under the protection of government, Indian tribes would become allies of the United States, to the betterment of both parties.
From W. W. Norton & Company: Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.
From the Washington Post, by Kirk Davis Swinehart: Even among historians of colonial America -- who should know and care about such things -- the fur trade tends to elicit groans of boredom. The subject is so blandly ubiquitous that it seems to demand little explanation even as it remains, at heart, a confounding mystery to anyone but the most narrowly focused specialists. Like the transatlantic slave trade, the fur trade exists more as a nebulous concept than as a richly complex industry populated by some of the most colorful and nefarious personalities in world history. And that's because it is rendered unrecognizable by its powerful association with a primitive, far-distant past. Yet the fur trade remains very much alive: a multi-billion-dollar global business with discernible ties to its earlier incarnation. In "Fur, Fortune, and Empire," Eric Jay Dolin ranges far and wide over land and sea, searching for the beating heart of a gargantuan industry touched by almost every aspect of human society and human nature: war, power, money, faith, desire and ambition. Dolin concerns himself primarily with the trade's North American theater between the 17th and late 19th centuries, from European colonization to post-Revolutionary America's colonization of its own Western interior. But he keeps a close eye on the wider world, too. As in "Leviathan," his highly praised book on U.S. whaling, he restores what most of us regard as an American institution to its rightful place on the international stage. The result is easily the finest tale of the trade in recent memory, a crisply written tale unburdened by excessive detail or homespun provincialism.
From The Oregonian: Eric Jay Dolin's new book, "Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America," is here to tell the real story behind the men who transformed a continent while in pursuit of pelts. Or, at least as much of the story that can be told in 464 pages. Fueled by an international business model built on vanity, fur trappers from the 17th century to the late 19th century decimated species ranging from sea otters (so overhunted they are still not recovered in Oregon) to beavers. In doing so, they opened North America to settlement, exploring and mapping the future while expanding national boundaries, particularly in the Northwest. The characters in this drama are at once so outrageous and so admirable that it is no wonder the era has become a stew of fable and truth. Dolin does his job separating the two in his popular history, explaining that the demand for furs for expensive clothing in China and Europe was such an economic driver that even the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony found themselves propelled into the trade.
From the New America Foundation: Lisa Margonelli writes about the global culture and economy of energy. Her book about the oil supply chain, Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank, was published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in 2007. Recognized as one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007 by the American Library Association, Oil On the Brain also won a 2008 Northern California Book Award for general nonfiction. Ms. Margonelli has been published in The Atlantic, New York Times online, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Discover, Salon, Business 2.0, San Francisco Magazine, and California Monthly, among other publications. Her column, "Money Tales," which combined economics and oral history in the San Francisco Chronicle online, won an Excellence in Journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists in 2003. In 1999-2000, she was awarded a Sundance Fellowship. She is a graduate of Yale University.
Publisher-provided book-description: Oil on the Brain is a smart, surprisingly funny account of the oil industry—the people, economies, and pipelines that bring us petroleum, brilliantly illuminating a world we encounter every day. Americans buy ten thousand gallons of gasoline a second, without giving it much of a thought. Where does all this gas come from? Lisa Margonelli’s desire to learn took her on a one-hundred thousand mile journey from her local gas station to oil fields half a world away. In search of the truth behind the myths, she wriggled her way into some of the most off-limits places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day battle. In a story by turns surreal and alarming, Margonelli meets lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit. Deftly piecing together the mammoth economy of oil, Margonelli finds a series of stark warning signs for American drivers.
Lisa Margonelli recently wrote "Forget About $5 Gas: $3 Gas Is Bad Enough" for the periodical, The Atlantic. The author wrote: James Schlesinger famously said that Americans have two modes when it comes to oil: complacency and panic. This week, it seems, we're having both at the same time. Today the national retail average for gasoline is $3.07 per gallon, which is higher than it's been since 2008. But instead of freaking out about that, the media has been focusing on the possibility of $5 gasoline in 2012, a claim made by former Shell President John Hofmeister. Hofmeister's point (he heads a non-profit called Citizens for Affordable Energy) is that the problem is that we're "essentially frittering at the edges of renewable energy, stifling production in hydrocarbon energy," leading to "blackouts, brownouts, gas lines, rationing." When Platts printed Mr. Hofmeister's predictions the day after Christmas, he became an instant media sensation. Even Platts claimed to be surprised by the ruckus, since Mr. Hofmeister had predicted the same many times before, and it would imply that the price of crude reaches $180 a barrel, which even the boldest analysts think is too high.
In May of 2010, the author, Lisa Margonelli, wrote "A Spill of Our Own" for The New York Times, and said this: THE history of American oil spills is the history of the environmental movement. The 1969 blowout of an oil platform off Santa Barbara, Calif., gave rise to Earth Day as well as President Richard Nixon’s National Environmental Policy Act, and led to a moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. Twenty years later, the spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker near Alaska quashed the first Bush administration’s ambitions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and ushered in the laws that made oil shippers liable for damage caused by their cargo. Now 5,000 barrels of oil a day are apparently spilling from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon rig off New Orleans, and ghastly floating pads of emulsified oil are reaching the sensitive marshlands and coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, coating birds and fish. On Thursday, as the scent of fuel hovered over New Orleans, residents joked online that they should eat fish now, because they might not be able to again for a while. One longtime offshore oil worker told me this looked like a “game changer,” and he was thinking about finding another line of work.
From Time Magazine: For Justin Halpern, going home was his lucky break. A year ago, Halpern was a 28-year-old writer who after splitting up with his girlfriend swallowed his pride and moved back in with Mom and Dad. Now he has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter, a best-selling book and a TV series in the works with CBS, all thanks to his now 74-year-old hilariously blunt dad. It all started with this tweet on Aug. 3, 2009: "I didn't live to be 73-years-old so I could eat kale. Don't fix me your breakfast and pretend you're fixing mine." Halpern took his ridiculously popular Twitter feed and turned it into a book by the same name, which debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times best-seller list. Halpern, author of the crudely titled Sh*t My Dad Says, spoke to TIME about William Shatner playing his father on TV, his whirlwind year and, of course, dear old Dad.
Justin Samuel Halpern (born September 3, 1980) is the American author of the Twitter feed and best-selling book Shit My Dad Says. He is also the co-writer and co-executive producer of a CBS television situation comedy series based on the book. Justin Halpern grew up in the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego, California. His father is Jewish and his Italian American mother is Catholic. His father, Samuel Halpern, M.D., is a radiologist, now retired, who practiced at the University of California San Diego. A blunt-spoken man, he gave memorable, expletive-laden advice and comments to young Justin from childhood on. Samuel Halpern has been described as "a profane comic genius," "Lenny Bruce with a stethoscope," "a scatological Socrates showering rough wisdom on his son."
Justin Halpern graduated from San Diego State University in 2003. He then headed for Hollywood looking for work as a writer. He wrote screenplays and waited tables, but success as a screenwriter eluded him. By 2009 he was a full-time writer for Maxim Magazine's online site and no longer needed to live in Los Angeles. He moved back to San Diego and wound up living with his parents. Justin Halpern had always kept a record of his father’s salty comments. Some, repeated to him by brothers, cousins and other relatives, go back to when he was 4 or 5 years old. When he started living with his parents, his record of his father’s remarks became a daily journal. On August 3, 2009, he started a Twitter feed, @shitmydadsays, just to have a place to store his father’s rhetorical gems. He thought he might use some of them someday in a script. On the Twitter site he explains, "I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says." To his surprise he quickly gathered a large following on Twitter. A friend posted a link to his feed, then Rob Corddry tweeted it, and "that really jump-started it" according to Halpern. By mid-August he had more than 100,000 followers. By October he had a book deal with Harper Collins, and by November he had a television deal with Warner Bros. As of November 2010 his Twitter feed had more than 1.8 million followers.
An American Life is the 1990 autobiography authored by former American President Ronald Reagan. Released almost two years after President Reagan left office, the book reached number eight on The New York Times' bestsellers list. The book is composed of 748 pages, describing Reagan's life from his birth in Tampico, Illinois, to his acting career, marriages, entrance into politics, years as Governor of California, loss in the 1976 Republican primary, and finally his years as President of the United States. Reviewer John O'Sullivan says of Reagan, "[H]e shows a tendency, where other people's feelings are concerned, to gloss over unpleasantness in a way which does him credit as a Christian, but detracts somewhat from his value as a historian." He revealed the events that led to his reluctant 1976 candidacy, as well as his relationships with members of Congress and his views on the world and the Cold War.
Reagan was married twice: the first to actress Jane Wyman (1917–2007) from 1940 to 1948. Reagan only mentions her in one paragraph in the book, saying "it didn't work out" but that the marriage "produced two wonderful children." He married Nancy Davis in 1952, saying in the biography "Sometimes, I think my life really began when I met Nancy."
Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he currently lives in Brooklyn. Bayoumi completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2002), editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israeli/Palestine Conflict (Haymarket Books, 2010) and has published academic essays in publications including Transition, Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.
His writings have also appeared in The Nation, London Review of Books, and The Village Voice. His essay "Disco Inferno", originally published in The Nation, was included in the collection "Best Music Writing 2006". From 2003 to 2006, he served on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and he is currently an editor for Middle East Report. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of The Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States. Bayoumi's work, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, traces the experiences of seven young Arab-Americans navigating life in a post-September 11 environment, where complicated public perceptions of the attacks gave birth to new brands of stereotypes, fueling widespread discrimination. It is the story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. His title is a reference to the W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America was awarded a 2008 American Book Award and the 2009 Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction.
The author was recently a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. On the program, he said this: Feisal Abdul Rauf, yes. I think the idea of - behind the project from the very beginning was precisely to model a place like the 92nd Street Y to have some place where we can see - Islam, see American Muslims and the rest of American society come together and create a culture together. And, in fact, they did everything, as they should have, according to plan. They bought the building. They went to the community board and such things. And the project was announced in December of last year to little ado. But then, somehow, in the early summer, it started to generate a lot of hostility. And by the end of the summer, you saw huge crowds around that site in New York to the point where, around the anniversary of September 11th this year, there was a significant demonstration in opposition to it, where - and I went, actually, to see that demonstration, and I've never really seen anything like that in New York City before. I mean, there were thousands of people on the street just yelling, no mosque, no mosque, no mosque, and - a kind of blatant in-your-face anti-Muslim sentiment that really left me quite depressed. On the other hand, there was another demonstration just two blocks away that was a pro - you could call it a pro-Park51 demonstration that was very typical of New York City. It was loud. It was rambunctious. It was very diverse. And that one, to me, seemed much more representative of what New York City was all about. And that one didn't leave me depressed. That one left me quite optimistic. Below is the podcast of that show, in full.
In December of 2010, The Jewish Week wrote this, in mentioning and invoking the author: Howard Wohl, president of Tanger Hillel and a 1964 graduate of Brooklyn College, attributes much of the atmosphere to an episode that took place this summer, when the college instructed all its incoming students to read a controversial book edited by Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at the school. The book — “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America” — is a collection of personal stories by and about seven Arabs from Brooklyn. Critics objected to the assignment, saying that Bayoumi takes up the Palestinian cause in his final chapter and provides a decidedly slanted view. Recalling the episode earlier this month, Wohl said his greatest concern is that Brooklyn College doesn’t start to resemble “too many other campuses in North America,” where, in his view, anti-Israel rhetoric has morphed into anti-Semitism, and hate speech has blossomed under the guise of academic freedom.
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a 2010 non-fiction novel by Laura Hillenbrand, author of the best-selling book "Seabiscuit: An American Legend". Unbroken is a biography of World War II hero Louis Zamperini. Source: Wikipedia. The New York Times said this about the book: Zamperini joked to Hillenbrand that he’d be an easier subject for her than Seabiscuit because he could talk. But that also presents perils. Though his wartime experiences faded with time, talking about them was pretty much all Zamperini did for years. From more than a thousand retellings, in newspaper and radio interviews and in inspirational speeches — “This Is Your Life” even devoted an episode to him — his story had been sanded down, and while Hillenbrand ably assembles its component parts, she rarely gets beneath the surface. That Zamperini does not seem especially introspective and may have forgotten or repressed certain memories only compounds the problem.
The Statesman had this to say about the author and book: Hillenbrand is careful not to demonize all of the Japanese guards; parts of her account of Zamperini's time as a POW are based on interviews with former Japanese soldiers at the camps who were clearly disturbed at the time by the goings-on. Yet it's hard to sugarcoat some of the incidents she relates. Zamperini was made to clean out a pig's sty with his hands. (He was so hungry that he shoved some of the pig's befouled feed in his mouth.) He was lined up with other officers and hit in the face by the enlisted men at the orders of guards, who finished off the beatings with a kendo stick after two hours of hitting. Like many of the other prisoners, he suffered from dysentery, at one point visiting the latrine as many as 20 times a day.
Decision Points is a memoir by former U.S. President George W. Bush. It was released on November 9, 2010, and the release is being accompanied by national television appearances and a national tour. The book surpassed sales of two million copies less than two months after its release, nearly matching sales of Bill Clinton's memoir, which took six years to achieve. Bush's 481-page memoir is broken up into 14 chapters. The first two chapters are about his life before the presidency. The first chapter is about notable events in his earlier life such as his decision to quit drinking in 1986. The second chapter is about his decision to run for Governor of Texas, and then President of the United States. The remaining twelve chapters are about events during his presidency: the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, aid to developing countries, the "surge" (a decision to deploy more U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007), domestic issues (including Medicare Part D, Social Security reform, No Child Left Behind, and Immigration reform), the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, stem-cell research, and the financial crisis of 2008. He wrote with the research assistance of former White House Deputy Director of Speechwriting Christopher Michel. Source: Wikipedia.
In November of 2010, Spiegel Online reported this about George W. Bush's Decision Points: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has said that ex-US President George W. Bush is not telling the truth in his memoirs, released on Tuesday. Schröder said he never offered his unconditional support for Bush's aggressive policy against Iraq. Both ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and former United States President George W. Bush have been out of office for some time. But the enmity which they developed for each other while they were in office seems to have survived.
Also in November of 2010, Ryan Grim through the Huffington Post, reported this:
Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir. Bush, on his book tour, makes much of the fact that he largely wrote the book himself, guffawing that critics who suspected he didn't know how to read are now getting a comeuppance. Not only does Bush know how to read, it turns out, he knows how to Google, too. Or his assistant does. Bush notes in his acknowledgments that "[m]uch of the research for this book was conducted by the brilliant and tireless Peter Rough. Peter spent the past 18 months digging through archives, searching the internet[s], and sifting through reams of paper." Bush also collaborated on the book with his former speechwriter, Christopher Michel.
DANIEL RASMUSSEN ’09 found his senior thesis topic where the history books left off: scattered but brief references to a slave rebellion in New Orleans in 1811 piqued his interest junior year. When the history and literature concentrator realized that, with a militia of some 500 black slaves, this was the single largest and most tactically sophisticated slave revolt in American history, and that not only this fact, but the event itself, had gone largely unexamined, he knew he had his topic. The thesis went on to win a Hoopes Prize for excellence in undergraduate research, but Rasmussen wanted to make sure that the story had readers beyond the prize committee. “This is a story that needs to be told,” he says. “This is a tremendously important moment in American history, and a very important moment in African-American history. It undermines our understanding of slavery as depressing, and of the slaves as victims. These slaves were heroes.” Since graduation, Rasmussen has been working as an analyst at a private equity firm in the Boston area and devoting his free time to expanding his thesis into a book. The result, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt, will be published by HarperCollins in January.
In December, 2010, The Washington Post wrote this about the author and book:
Pauline Maier, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at M.I.T. and one of the nation's foremost scholars of the American Revolution, explores how the process of ratification worked in each of the 13 states. In doing so, she transforms our understanding of what representative government itself means. Eschewing a traditional focus on great men and their political ideas, Maier investigates the complex route to ratification in each state. After receiving the Philadelphia Convention's proposal for a new Constitution, the Confederation Congress, in accordance with procedures described in the document itself, recommended that the people (meaning white, male property holders) in each of the 13 states hold elections for delegates to state ratifying conventions. (Always contrarian, Rhode Island held a referendum instead.) Again according to the document itself, it would take ratification by nine states for the Constitution to go into effect. Representatives ran on a platform of support for or opposition to the document. What was at stake was nothing less than this question: Did ordinary people believe that an entirely new system of government, never tried before in history, was the best means of ensuring the country's future - or was it a too-risky experiment that they dared not accept?
Read that WP article here. In 2004, the author was a guest on NPR's All Things Considered. See the webpage for that radio show here. The podcast is embedded below.
In December, 2010, the Financial Times had this to say about the book:
The book’s title is taken from the Greek myth in which Procrustes fitted his guests to a bed – cutting to size those too tall and stretching those too short. Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems, but together produce a sort of picture in reverse – the surrounding space shaded in to reveal the central subject: human knowledge and its limitations.
We are here in this French café in Morningside Heights to talk about Socrates, Seneca, Averroës, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. These are his forebears in the art of the aphorism, a form he took up for several months earlier this year, resulting in his new book, The Bed of Procrustes, a compendium of Talebian witticisms and skeptical philosophizing: “You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.” “Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.” “You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional insult of having to become humble.” It is a work very different in format from The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, best sellers that predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street relied on to measure risk would help bring down the world economy. When the crash of 2008 came, it secured Taleb’s fame as the oracle of the Great Recession and made him, for a time, a ubiquitous cable-news presence, inveighing against the financial-policy elite.
[2010-12-16 12:00:00] How did family jealousy culminate in the assassination of one of America's greatest presidents? We'll find out this hour with historian Nora Titone, whose new book is "My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy" (Free Press, 2010).
[If] it seems that the acting profession has never been filled with more vile representations of the human race, one particularly atrocious case has generally escaped popular memory. Because 145 years ago, an actor who was the Steven Segal of his day shot the president of the United States in the back of the head and killed him, for no greater reason, author Nora Titone posits in her recently released first book "My Thoughts Be Bloody," than that he was jealous of an older brother. Even before Abraham Lincoln's assassination at the hands of hack actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, writes Titone (who attended Castilleja School in Palo Alto from 1986 to 1990), actors were considered to be of the same class as prostitutes and thieves. Patrons flocked to theaters to forget the brutality of the ongoing Civil War for a short time, but when, for example, it was discovered that Lincoln's head had rested in actress Laura Keene's lap as a doctor removed bullet fragments, she was called a jezebel, was shunned for the rest of her acting career and, deeply in debt, died from a tubercular hemorrhage.
Travis E. Poling and co-author Paul W. Hightower’s book is a guide to nearly three dozen breweries, microbreweries, and brewpubs across Texas. The book also provides information about the wide variety of beer styles available in the state. Travis Poling talks about the history of beer in Texas, the recent Craft Beer Movement and shares his thoughts about the future of beer making in the Lone Star State. More information is available at beeracrosstexas.com.
,” David Rakoff’s third essay collection, contains not only the warning “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found in These Pages,” but the guarantee that the author will have you “positively reveling in the power of negativity.” It’s never clear whether the pessimism alluded to is Rakoff’s philosophy, Rakoff’s device or Rakoff’s publicist clearing his throat. Luckily, we don’t have to judge this book by its cover. The inherent problem with most collections is that the reader can’t help comparing entries, like a track handicapper setting the morning line. In his ambitious opening essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak
”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.
,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.
) describes the rise of the great corporate capitalists after the Civil War. J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie constituted an trinity of power-obsessed individuals who instinctively understood that wealth was the ultimate political weapon. They defined the cold-blooded authority of big business. Fascinating detours away from the tale of corporate empires examine the Reconstruction process in the South, the Indian Wars of the West, the opening of the Great Plains, immigration in the East, and the rise of organized labor and the agrarian reformers. Effectively, excerpts from the first-person accounts of Booker T. Washington, Black Elk, Jacob Riis, and others convey the drama of the time. Perhaps the only significant omission in this fast-paced, engrossing narrative is a tendency to dwell on political doctrines that sought to repudiate or restrain capitalism while only briefly discussing the dogma of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, which favored the monopolists.
, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
. The author was a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation in October, 2010. That show is embedded below. 
, 
, 
, 