For the past three decades, many history professors have allowed their biases to distort the way America’s past is taught. These intellectuals have searched for instances of racism, sexism, and bigotry in our history while downplaying the greatness of America’s patriots and the achievements of “dead white men.”
As a result, more emphasis is placed on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington; more about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II than about D-Day or Iwo Jima; more on the dangers we faced from Joseph McCarthy than those we faced from Josef Stalin.
A Patriot’s History of the United States corrects those doctrinaire biases. In this groundbreaking book, America’s discovery, founding, and development are reexamined with an appreciation for the elements of public virtue, personal liberty, and private property that make this nation uniquely successful. This book offers a long-overdue acknowledgment of America’s true and proud history.
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.
Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan’s social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty . Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth’s stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
Into Chase’s cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus’s countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.
Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem’s masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.
And here is a review about Chronic City from from Publisher’s Weekly:
Signature Reviewed by Arthur NersesianJonathan Lethem’s work has gone from postapocalyptic sci-fi to autobiographical magical realism. In Chronic City , he weaves these elements together, blending a number of actual recent events to create his own surreal urban landscape. The nearly mythological construction of the Second Avenue Subway spawns a strange destructive tiger that defies capture as it transforms the old city into a scary new one. A pair of eagles illegally squatting on an Upper East Side windowsill are summarily evicted. Best of all is the economic abyss that one once encountered above 125th Street. Here, Lethem has dropped a manmade fjord, a performance art chasm.At the heart of this city is former child star Chase Insteadman. Lately, he is better known as a celebrity fiancé to fatale femme astronaut Janice Strumbull, who is stuck in orbit because of Chinese satellite mines. Lately, though, his greater concern is his friend Perkus Tooth. Perkus is a pauper scholar, a slightly delusional Don Quixote character whose windmills are called chaldrons, imagined vases that bring inner peace. Somewhat like the tragic poet Delmore Schwartz who Saul Bellow fictionally eulogized (and Lethem acknowledges) in Humboldt’s Gift , Tooth cuts with equal parts genius and madness. Though he never really rises above a plasterer of broadside rants, he’s a recognizable artifact of New York circa 1981. Between bong hits—yes, for you potheads, Chronic is his favorite brand—and downtown cultural references, conspiracy theories hiccup from Perkus’s lips. A prevalent notion he has is that our reality is nothing more than a facsimile, a simulation of a hidden reality. Perkus’s hyperactive brain only pauses when he lapses into his periodic ellipse—a kind of revelatory break. The only problem is his breaks are gradually increasing in frequency. Inasmuch as Perkus is a personification of the old New York and its highly endangered culture, Insteadman finds a moral duty to protect him. If Perkus is Insteadman’s moral conscience, Richard Abneg, an opportunistic politico, is Insteadman’s naked ambition. Though Abneg started as an East Village anarchist, through intellect and arrogance he rose to become a powerful aide to Mayor Arnaheim (a Giuliani-Bloomberg hybrid). Now he’s dismantling the rent stabilization laws he once championed. Eventually, these two work together to save Perkus.Though Chronic City at times requires patience, it is a luxuriously stylized paean to Gotham City’s great fountain of culture that is slowly drying up. Like the city itself, the book sways toward the maximal, but its prose shines like our skyline at sunset. The key to his city lies in the very notion of reality: Chase Insteadman’s moniker implies that this former actor is now just a stand-in for a greater (perhaps former) reality. By the conclusion, I found myself wondering if Lethem hadn’t originally written a shorter simulacra of Chronic City , when it was just an Acute City. From him I would expect no less. Arthur Nersesian is author of The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (book two of the Five Books of Moses). His next novel, Mesopotamia , a thriller, is due out next year.
Here is the other of Chronic City, discussing the book:
Award-winning writer Maile Meloy’s return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers.
Meloy’s first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade.
Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields-and fields of victory-that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly- and reluctantly-in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.
Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy’s singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.
Author Sherman Alexie was recently on the Colbert Report, and he knocked it out of the park. He touches on book piracy, and how reading culture is dying faster than anyone realizes.
The New York Times top 10 list of 2009 is out and you’re going to love it. You should definitely check out these books, because next year they will most likely not make much of a splash. Well, I guess if they make movies out of them.
Today I found out about this super rad book. Yes, I just used the words “super rad” as a superlative of sorts. This book sounds like something that many different people will love. This story began with Jake Adelstein asking the question: “How does a Yakuza crime boss get a liver transplant without doing something illegal?” and of course the more he dug into the story, he found out big. This is an amazing thing, and it turned into this book that is a compelling true story, that is now available.
Here’s some quick information and an interview with Jake Adelstein…wow:
Jake Adelstein, former reporter for the Yomiuri Shinbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, and author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, discusses his new book. He tells Brian Lehrer why in Japan, the cops are friendly, the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) are cool and sometimes a massage is more than a massage.
It’s books and interviews like this, that makes me love reading, and I recommend this one for anyone that is interested in true stories, Japan, and crime. Wow. Make sure you read Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein today!
Bam Margera has penned a new book about his life up to this point and it’s gaining some popularity. Bam Margera is a professional skateboarder and overall crazy kid with a knack for making music videos, and so much more. Check out this new book “Serious as Dirt” by Bam Margera and check out a cool dude with a very interesting life.
You’ve seen him on the big screen. You’ve watched him on the small screen. But never before has Bam Margera exposed himself like this.
Famous for his cringe-worthy, laugh-out-loud daredevil stunts, he has thrilled and revolted audiences nationwide with his relentless antics. Now, for the first time, Bam shares his private writings, never-before-seen personal photos, drawings, and more in this dynamic, anarchic auto-collage, a frenetic yet brutally honest document of the life he leads. Fans who can’t get enough of his rowdy shenanigans will finally see what makes the star tick. Known for his creative style since becoming a pro skater at age thirteen, Bam pulls readers into his chaotic world — the music, the movies, the games, the pranks, the skating, the glory and the pain….
You may have remembered me posting about a news piece where parents and faculty were trying to get Sherman Alexie’s award winning novel banned from the required reading list. Well, out of another field comes yet another stupid story about someone trying to ban books. This time it’s even worse.
That’s right, two workers in Kentucky thought that this book was too harsh for kids and withheld it from someone. This cost them their job.
But that’s not where it all began, it actually started in a more odd way…check out Kentucky.com’s article, snipped below:
It all started in the fall of 2008, and she is still doing it. The proof is in her knapsack, in a bright yellow flexible file folder, hidden from prying eyes. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: The Black Dossier. It has pink and yellow highlighter tags sticking out, marking the pages that contain explicit sexual content. It is the Jessamine County Public Library’s copy, which she has checked out and not returned. She is being fined 10 cents a day for her breach of library contract — and for her moral stand.
She was, she says, simply appalled that a child could find a book that contained so many outright visually obscene graphics in the Jessamine library where she worked. So nine months ago, she challenged its right to be included in the collection, and when that failed, she simply checked it out herself. In effect, she removed the book from circulation. She checked it out over and over and over with her library card until a patron of the library, unaware of the circumstances of the book, put a hold on it, asking to be the next in line to check it out. When Cook went to renew The Black Dossier on Sept. 21, the computer would not allow it because of the hold. Cook used her employee privileges to find out that the patron desiring the book was an 11-year-old girl.
That’s right, another case of censorship. This time comic books are under fire.
In a new feature to keep this site form growing too stale I’ll be posting news and thoughts on the world of reading. So here we go.
A library book 51 years overdue came back to the library. The significance of this story lies in the fact that it wasn’t just one book, although my initial sentence said it was one book, but a bunch of books came back. First and foremost, 51 years later? Yep, 51 years later someone felt guilty and brought it all back. That’s pretty cool.
The second leg of this story is even greater, the second part is that the books were returned with a 1,000 dollar check!
An anonymous person brought a couple of books back, the thousand dollars, and a written letter that stated:
“I’ve enclosed a money order to cover my delinquency dues,” the letter reads. “At 0.02 cents per day it works out at $745.00 for 51 years,” the letter said. “I’ve sent along a few more dollars in case the rates changed.”
Bordine, a librarian at the 2,000-student school since 1991, says this is the second time she received an unexpected payment for materials. “I got a letter (three years ago) and a check in the mail for somewhere between $75 and $100 from a man who had been going through a 12-step program and wanted to make good the fact that he had stolen a book from the library back in 1962.”
If that wasn’t enough, the article also noted the following:
This isn’t the first time Camelback High School has been in the national spotlight. The school is mentioned in Alice Cooper’s song “Alma Mater” as part of his 1972 School’s Out album. Neal Smith, Cooper’s original drummer, was a graduate of the school.
51 years later, the library gets what’s coming to them. You can read more about this and other stories via School Library Journal.
Stephen King has been in the news for a long time it seems. At least in recent memory, and it all has to do with the fact that his new epic is out now. Under the Dome is over 1,000 pages of book and it’s not a compilation or short story archives, this is a grand scope of writing that you can’t really pass up if you’re a Stephen King fan.
Furthermore, he’s recently dropped some information about the possibility of a new dark tower book; and no that doesn’t mean a new comic book series. Here’s a video of him talking about such things and then some:
Stephen King was also on The View last week, promoting the release of his book “Under the Dome” and reveals a shocker…it had nothing to do with The Simpsons Movie.
Like Whoopi Goldberg said, this is a big ass book…and it comes recommended by yours truly.
