“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.” -- Margaret Walker
Steve is apparently working late. I've caught up on news, the dogs are walked and fed. I'll watch Say Yes to the Dress and then read WSJ and various other things.
Today's interesting call: I pick up the line and the woman says "So what have you found out?" No name, no hello, no nothing. All righty then.
Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster
The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single, powerful, quintessentially American concept: confidence. Both centers of power, tapping brazen innovations over the past three decades, learned how to manufacture it. Until August 2007, when that confidence finally began to crumble. In this gripping and brilliantly reported book, Ron Suskind tells the story of what happened next, as Wall Street struggled to save itself while a man with little experience and soaring rhetoric emerged from obscurity to usher in “a new era of responsibility.” It is a story that follows the journey of Barack Obama, who rose as the country fell, and offers the first full portrait of his tumultuous presidency. Wall Street found that straying from long-standing principles of transparency, accountability, and fair dealing opened a path to stunning profits. Obama’s determination to reverse that trend was essential to his ascendance, especially when Wall Street collapsed during the fall of an election year and the two candidates could audition for the presidency by responding to a national crisis. But as he stood on the stage in Grant Park, a shudder went through Barack Obama. He would now have to command Washington, tame New York, and rescue the economy in the first real management job of his life. The new president surrounded himself with a team of seasoned players—like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner—who had served a different president in a different time. As the nation’s crises deepened, Obama’s deputies often ignored the president’s decisions—“to protect him from himself”—while they fought to seize control of a rudderless White House. Bitter disputes—between men and women, policy and politics—ruled the day. The result was an administration that found itself overtaken by events as, year to year, Obama struggled to grow into the world’s toughest job and, in desperation, take control of his own administration. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ron Suskind introduces readers to an ensemble cast, from the titans of high finance to a new generation of reformers, from petulant congressmen and acerbic lobbyists to a tight circle of White House advisers—and, ultimately, to the president himself, as you’ve never before seen him. Based on hundreds of interviews and filled with piercing insights and startling disclosures, Confidence Men brings into focus the collusion and conflict between the nation’s two capitals—New York and Washington, one of private gain, the other of public purpose—in defining confidence and, thereby, charting America’s future.
It is not light reading but I'm learning a lot.
Tonight the Cowboys are playing so we'll catch a bit of that. Otherwise, reading paper, reading book, and sleep.
Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster
It was published in 2010 and has 512 pages. This is a library book.As the apocalyptic leaders of Iran call for the annihilation of Israel and the U.S., CIA operative David Shirazi is sent into Tehran with one objective: use all means necessary to disrupt Iran’s nuclear weapons program—without leaving American fingerprints, and without triggering a regional war. At extreme personal risk, Shirazi undertakes his assignment. A native Farsi speaker whose family escaped from Iran in 1979, he couldn’t be better prepared for the mission. But none of his training has prepared Shirazi for what will happen next. An obscure religious cleric is suddenly hailed throughout the region as the Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi or the Twelfth Imam. News of his miracles, healings, signs, and wonders, spread like wildfire, as do rumors of a new and horrific war. With the prophecy of the Twelfth Imam seemingly fulfilled, Iran’s leaders prepare to strike Israel and bring about the End of Days. Shirazi must take action, but the clock is ticking.
It has 416 pages. I absolutely adore this series.An intense and terrifying new case for New York homicide cop Eve Dallas, one that will take her all the way to the city that gave her her name-and plunge her into the nightmares of her childhood. When a monster named Isaac McQueen-taken down by Eve back in her uniform days-escapes from Rikers, he has two things in mind. One is to pick up where he left off, abducting young victims and leaving them scarred in both mind and body. The other is to get revenge on the woman who stopped him all those years ago.
From Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, and served as the director of Policy Planning at the State Department from 2009-20011:After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were put in concentration camps. That there was no comparable overreaction after 9/11, and that we have been able to preserve a free and open society, owes much to the fact that for 10 years there has been no repetition of those terrible attacks.
In its entirety from Mark Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and author:One way in which Americans have overreacted, however, is emotionally--by assuming, as we so often do, that our experience of terrorism was qualitatively different from the experience of Europeans, Indonesians, Indians, Africans and others. We have since watched and admired the courage and determination of the British after coordinated attacks on subways and buses in July 2005, and of the Indians after the 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks in Mumbai in November 2008.
The world likewise watched the many acts of bravery and heroism on 9/11, from firefighters and police to the group of passengers who rushed the cockpit on United Flight 93. But as a society we were unable to resume business as usual in the way that the British and Indians and many others have done. Because the sensation of vulnerability to violent attack on American soil was so new to us, we gave the terrorists the satisfaction of knowing that they had changed our lives dramatically.
The lesson here is the power of resilience over revenge. As emotionally satisfying as the killing of Osama bin Laden and the attacks on other al Qaeda leaders are, in the long run they are a less effective response to terrorism than enhancing the resilience of our infrastructure, our economy and our people. If we are prepared for an attack and can return to normal as quickly as possible, even while grieving--with our planes flying, our markets open, and our heads high--we can diminish the impact and hence the value of that attack in the first place.
And to conclude from Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic:When this war was brought to us, deliberations should have centered upon the aims and execution of our response. Instead, we debated its justice, and thus "whether or not" rather than "how best." The question here at issue echoes this, as if to inquire about the power of the shot rather than if it has hit its target. The answer is that in the absence of strategic clarity we have lurched from one extreme to another.
We underreacted in failing to declare war and put the nation on a war footing, and thus overreacted in trumpeting hollow resolution. We underreacted in attempted quickly to subdue and pacify, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers, 50 million famously recalcitrant people in notoriously difficult terrain halfway around the world. We are left with 10,000 American dead here and abroad, a bitterly divided polity, a broken alliance structure, emboldened rivals abroad, and two fractious nations hostile to American interests with little changed from what they were before.
We overreacted by attempting to revolutionize the political structure--and therefore the religious laws with which it is inextricably bound--of a billion people who exist as if in another age. The "Arab Spring" is less a confirmation of this illusion than its continuance. If you think not, just wait.
We underreacted when we allowed our military capacities other than counterinsurgency to atrophy while China strains for military parity--something that the architects of our national security a decade ago thought laughable, now deny, and soon will hopelessly admit.
Rather than embarking upon the reformation of the Arab world, we should have geared up, sacrificed for, and resolved upon war. Then struck hard and brought down the regimes sheltering our enemies, set up strongmen, charged them with extirpating terrorists, and withdrawn from their midst to hover north of Riyadh in the network of bases the Saudis have built within striking distance of Baghdad and Damascus. There we might have watched our new clients do the work that since 9/11 we have only partially accomplished, and at a cost in lives, treasure, and heartbreak far greater than necessary.
********************And I have one other anxiety: that we will overreact to our "overreaction." If we conclude, as we are everywhere counseled to do, that the time has come for the United States to recede from the forefront of history, we will compromise and injure ourselves, and our allies, and all freedom-seeking people around the world.
It has 250 pages and will be published in October. I have this on my Kindle as an ARC through netgalley.com.Baron Herbert’s return from crusade should have been a joyous occasion. Instead, he grows increasingly morose, withdraws from his family, and refuses to share his wife’s bed. When his sons begin to die in strange accidents, some ask whether Herbert harbors a dark sin for which God has cursed him. The baron suddenly sends for Sir Hugh of Wynethorpe, begging his friend to bring spiritual and secular healers but giving little explanation for the request. Worried about Herbert’s descent into melancholy and the tragic deaths, Sir Hugh persuades his sister, Prioress Eleanor of Tyndal Priory, to accompany him as well as a respected physician, Master Gamel. Although he is pleased when the prioress brings her healer, Sister Anne, he is dismayed to find Brother Thomas included, a man he has reason to despise. Perhaps there is a malign presence at this storm-blasted castle, oddly named Doux et Dur. Tensions spark among family members and soon between those who came to help. Death’s scythe harvests more victims, and it is not long before Ecclesiastes’ grim words seem all too apt: there is a season for everything under heaven, including a time to kill. But is there also a time to heal?
Sorry no blog yesterday. After work, I got home to find that Coda had destroyed, ripped to shreds, his bed so I had to clean up bed stuffing from the deck and yard. So no walk for the dogs. To show them that we weren’t going to walk, I vacuumed the stairs. Blech. I hate doing that. Then Steve got home and we took them outside the front yard for a little exercise. Then dinner. Then discovered the dishwasher wasn’t working so had to wash the dishes by hand. Then found out the laptop wasn’t working so I just gave up.
I got through the day listening to music. Specifically my Pandora channel via my cell phone. Isn’t it funny how some songs or bands can embed themselves in our psyches? I heard some music today that made me flash back: Tracy Chapman’s first album ( song: Fast Car) and U2’s Joshua Tree (song: Still Haven’t Found What I’m looking For) bring back such memories of the summer of 1988. I did summer rep at Billings Studio Theatre, stage managing three of the four shows: A My Name is Alice, Ten Little Indians, and The Odd Couple. Rich Hansen, the tech director, was playing Tracy Chapman over the theatre’s sound system and when I first heard it I didn’t realize it was a woman. And U2’s Joshua Tree was playing a lot that summer; I remember a trip in a car to a cast party somewhere hearing that and another memory while doing a parade downtown on a hot summer day, the float was for The Odd Couple and the girls had to walk and the guys were playing poker.
Listening to The Doors and The Rolling Stones reminds me of driving on the highway toward Virginia City for the two summer seasons I did there. Good traveling music. That would have been about 1989 and 1990.
The acoustic cd of Rod Stewart reminds of me working in the production office on the movie FTW that starred Mickey Rourke, filmed in Livingston. That would have been around 1992-ish.
Pink Floyd reminds me of dating Steve. And the sound track to City of Angels and Alanis Morrisette.
After work I had to get some groceries and a prescription for Steve. Steve is now walking the boys. I'll be making hamburgers for dinner and watch Say Yes to the Dress. Then maybe I'll read; I haven't been able to do much of that these past couple days. I've been reading the WSJ in the evenings.
This weekend will be busy with the newsletter, finishing the old and starting the new.
Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster
