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Last edited by Dilbert_X (2009-01-15 00:51:23)

FEOS wrote:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man's wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are "good guys," but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out.

Very interesting writing style...something I've never seen from another author. The internal struggle of the main character is very moving.
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Last edited by Vax (2009-01-15 14:59:30)

In the latest installment in the Oxford History of the United States series, historian Howe, professor emeritus at Oxford University and UCLA (The Political Culture of the American Whigs), stylishly narrates a crucial period in U.S. history—a time of territorial growth, religious revival, booming industrialization, a recalibrating of American democracy and the rise of nationalist sentiment. Smaller but no less important stories run through the account: New York's gradual emancipation of slaves; the growth of higher education; the rise of the temperance movement (all classes, even ministers, imbibed heavily, Howe says). Howe also charts developments in literature, focusing not just on Thoreau and Poe but on such forgotten writers as William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, who helped create the romantic image of the Old South, but whose proslavery views eventually brought his work into disrepute. Howe dodges some of the shibboleths of historical literature, for example, refusing to describe these decades as representing a market revolution because a market economy already existed in 18th-century America.

“Success is uncommon, therefore not to be enjoyed by the common man.
I’m looking for uncommon people.”  --Cal Stoll

In a culture that defines success by the size of your salary or by the media frenzy surrounding you, Tony Dungy offers valuable insights on achieving uncommon success and real significance. They just may be the most important lessons—on and off the field—that can be applied to your life today.

Last edited by CameronPoe (2009-02-09 03:39:36)

"I am here to debunk and declassify and otherwise hold up a brutally honest mirror to our fat, ugly, lazy American selves."

Flaming_Maniac wrote:

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g44/F … tliers.gif

Outliers: The Story of Success

Recommend

Malcom Gladwell, someone I would consider to be a contemporary genius, has also written The Tipping Point and Blink, the likes of which I hope most of you are familiar with. In a similar style Gladwell takes on the idea of success this time, taking some common and some uncommon examples of what most would consider success and examines just what exactly made them successful. Was it innate talent that made the Beatles what they were, or did they just play an awful lot? Are the players on the Canadian junior hockey leagues really the premiere, up and coming stars, or is the country using only roughly half of their talent? These are the kinds of specific examples Gladwell brilliantly uses to show us that while there are very specific, measurable variables that cause success at the micro level with little doubt, these same principles can apply at a macro scale as well. If taken to heart, the ideas put for can and should change the way society looks at success, to make more people more successful more often.

Quite frankly, if you have not bought this book or other books by this author, you are in for a treat. His books are stimulating and thoroughly entertaining, often in the same style of Freakonomics of taking seemingly obtuse example and making a very clear case out of it. It's a fairly short read, but one that will keep you entertained from cover to cover while giving you ideas that if taken to heart could very well change your outlook on life for the better.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ … k_code=as1

Chapter 3 - 132kb Requires PDF reader Available from Adobe

How did the very rich gather so much of the income and wealth in the past three decades?

Why are so many millions of Americans working harder, but falling behind?

From the inside cover

*Roberto Goizueta, CEO of Coca-Cola, built a billion-dollar fortune without paying a dime in taxes on it.

*Tom and Cindy Toth, a corporate trainer and stay-at-home mom, live on $90,000 a year. But the alternative minimum tax will take back much of the tax cuts Congress voted them in 2001 and 2003. By 2010, 35.6 million households will pay this “stealth tax.”

*Ingersoll-Rand pays $26,000 a year to maintain a Bermuda post office box as its legal headquarters. That little trick lets them escape $40 million in corporate taxes each year.

*The IRS unjustly came after Maritza Reyes, a cleaning woman in East Los Angeles who earns $7,000 per year, but ignored the fact that billionaire art dealer Alec Wildenstein and his wife Jocelyn never filed a tax return in three decades

    The rapidly widening gulf between the super-rich and everyone else is an American tragedy. Pundits have raged about it, but until now, no one has explained exactly how it happened, why it’s not a normal part of capitalism, or how much damage it’s really causing—not just to the poor, but to 99 percent of all Americans.

    Whether your family makes $30,000 or $300,000 a year, you are being robbed because the IRS and other institutions have been systematically corrupted—under both Republican and Democratic administrations—to serve the needs of people who make millions. Your future is being undermined and chances are you will never come out ahead.

    If you’re the kind of person who works hard and plays by the rules, prepare to be outraged. Perfectly Legal will show you why the American Dream is turning into a lie. This explosive book, by an award-winning investigative reporter, reveals exactly how the tax code and many other laws have been twisted over the past three decades to subsidize the incomes and extravagant lifestyles of the richest and most powerful fraction of 1 percent of our country.

    For nine years, David Cay Johnston has been exposing this covert campaign, piece by piece, on the front page of The New York Times. His scoops about outrageous tax scams have ruffled the feathers of powerful business leaders, politicians, and members of the political donor class. He routinely exposes the CEOs who fly free corporate jets to Myrtle Beach for a day of golf and stick you with the bill; the business owners who build overseas factories to earn tax-free dollars; the former IRS employees who now teach multimillionaires how to hide their assets from the government.

    Now Johnston offers a raft of compelling new stories, about real people across all areas of society. In Perfectly Legal, you’ll meet sleazy accountants and brazen tax cheats, clueless congressmen and crafty lobbyists. You’ll meet frustrated IRS agents who have been handcuffed from pursuing the most blatant lawbreakers. And you’ll meet ordinary Americans who are struggling to make a decent living with the system stacked against them, in ways they don’t even realize.

    Compared to thirty years ago, every American now lives in a society much less equal and much more fraught with financial risk. Perfectly Legal lays out the details in plain English, and shows how we can stop these trends before it's too late.

Last edited by Agent_Dung_Bomb (2009-03-09 11:08:59)

The novelist Nicholson Baker’s customary style in books like “The Mezzanine” and “Room Temperature” is to observe the world in slow, painstaking detail, relishing the tiny moment, enjoying the aside for the sake of accuracy, insisting on charting the precise state of things. He has now applied this system to history, to the few years before the United States declared war on Japan and entered into World War II as a full participant. It is clear Baker has not done this as a literary exercise, nor as a new way of amusing himself and his readers, but because of a passionate view of how the war against Germany was conducted by Britain under Winston Churchill.

There is, it seems at first, a sort of madness in his method. He does not offer a straightforward narrative as a historian or a polemicist might do, but instead his book is made up of a set of vignettes, each containing a fact or a quotation from one of the main participants, or from someone who kept a diary. Most vignettes carry a date. Sometimes these entries come three to a page, sometimes they are slightly longer. Slowly, as you read, because of the variety in the tone and the shocking or tragic nature of the quotation, and because of how well chosen they are, “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” becomes riveting and fascinating. It is as though a brilliant film editor, with an urgent argument to make, began to work with gripping newsreels.

Amazon.com Review
Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy -- a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.

Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources -- including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries -- the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.

Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative within Human Smoke that unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand.