Thursday, May 3, 2012

GET INFORMED: THERE ARE GREAT NEW BOOKS OUT THERE

Just as I have developed a mild distortion in my eyesight which effects my reading (amild(retinal problem), the world has begun to publish a plethora of books recently that I want to read. Dylan Ratigan's "Greedy Bastards" wasn't consistent with my determination to read only books with happy endings,  In this world of ' you can't have it all', all of a sudden there are a number of non-fiction books that have cramped my usual light reading with only happy endings.

Robert G. Kaiser, Published: April 30 in an article you can read in full here,  He writes: "Reading this book is a little like quaffing a double espresso on an empty stomach — it’s a jolt. For this reader it was a welcome jolt. Others will find it less palatable."  He goes on to write:  "Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have been Washington fixtures for three decades. They are two of the brightest, best informed and most scholarly students of our politics. They started out together as graduate students of political science at the University of Michigan, and decades ago took up residence at the Brookings Institution (Mann) and the American Enterprise Institute (Ornstein). Both have cultivated Democratic and Republican senators and House members to help them figure out the workings of the legislative branch. They acknowledge holding liberal views themselves, but throughout their careers they have tried to uphold a scholarly, non-partisan standard. Republicans once took them as seriously as Democrats did.

The4se books cover the old adage, :It never rains but it pours."  We either starve for information or get totally inundated by it. A third one to creep into my wish list and library is Drift by Rachel Maddow.   This was a pleasant surprise.  Rachel Maddow writes in the same clear, well-articulated style of her show on MSNBC.  It is titled Drift:  the Unmooring of American Military Power.  This is hardly within the genre of my usual reading, 'feel-good' books with happy endings with boy-meet- girl and they live 'happily ever after plots.' but well within my strong desire tpo understand the world around me and how things work, past and present.

 

 






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