The Long Slide, Thirty Years in American Journalism is a Home Run

-
Tucker Carlson notes in his Introduction of The Long Slide, Thirty Years in American Journalism: “Americans should be able to read whatever books they want, publishers told us, but they should start with the books authorities have tried to suppress.” I can’t imagine any authority trying to suppress the 15 articles Carlson included in this sampling of his works published over the last 30 years, and I haven’t enjoyed articles/essays this much since reading Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. That’s been a long dry spell, so I’m glad I decided to read this book. 

My favorite articles (listed with their original source and publication date) were: 
“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” Esquire 2003, is a great choice to open the book with. Carlson documents his rich experiences traveling with Al Sharpton and a “delegation of American civil-rights activists into the middle of the Liberian civil war” with the hopes of brokering a peace deal. 

“When the Fun Stopped,” Weekly Standard (now Washington Examiner) 3/7/2005, is about how reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing made Carlson want to drop everything and immediately embark on a journalistic career, and his subsequent encounters with his icon. 

Tucker encounters Derek Richardson in Washington DC, and later learns he’s “… a fireman in Louisville, an astrophysicist in Toronto, an employee of a dog-food company in London, a high-school debate champion in Atlanta, the chairman of the National Farmers' Union in England, and a referee in the NBA. Several years ago, he was a murder victim in New Orleans.”
“Derek Richardson, Where Are You,” Weekly Standard (now Washington Examiner) 2/19/96
“Derek Richardson Returns,” Weekly Standard (now Washington Examiner) 8/4/97

“Praise the Lord and Pass the Potatoes,” GQ Magazine November 2002, is about potato cannons and spud guns, with all the fun that involves!

“Banzhaf’s Game,” Weekly Standard (now Washington Examiner) 11/13/1995, is a colorful profile of self described legal activist John Francis Banzhaf III, law professor at George Washington University Law School.

“James Carville, Populist Plutocrat,” Weekly Standard (now Washington Examiner) 3/18/1996 recommends itself well in the audiobook format where Carlson channels his Carville impression while narrating. It’s an unblinking gaze upon the eccentric, charismatic, pragmatic “Serpenthead.” 

“Hired Guns: Inside the (Not So Secret) Secret Army of Operation Iraqi Freedom,“ Esquire March 2004 Someone wise once said, “Only a moron drives to Bagdad unarmed.” Of bodyguards, sketchy places, driving 110-130mph between destinations in Iraq (where 13 journalists had been killed in 2003), while riding with a group of civilian contractors working for a security firm led by Kelly McCann “hired to pacify and reconstruct postwar Iraq.”

“On The Road,” Weekly Standard (now Washington Examiner) 3/27/2000, is about traveling with John McCain during his presidential bid. It’s an interesting look at McCain’s personality and life on the road during his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination. 

“One Man’s Treasure,” The Weekly Standard (now Washington Examiner) 10/2/2000, is a nostalgic look at a family summer home occupied across three generations. It’s a time capsule of shared lives, poignant and moving.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spend a Year Walkng in Stanley Tucci’s Shoes

-
What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci is an interesting, light, humorous, and witty read for anyone interested in cooking, good food, restaurants, acting and actors, what Tucci’s daily business and family life is like, and what the heck is going on with his wife Felicity Blunt who Tucci portrays constantly throughout the book as potentially engaging in affairs, which I’m sure is just a humorous device of some kind. You couldn’t help noticing everytime he mentions where she’s off to, there is a tongue in cheek sarcastic suggestion that other men may be involved, throughout the entire book, yet they pair beautifully in the kitchen, and he makes the point, “Time cooking with someone you love is time well spent.” Before this book I was reading Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders, and struggling to get through which I didn’t expect as I’ve loved previous books he’d written. I found it very different from his books in the Thursday Murder Club series. Tucci’s book by comparison was a v...
Read more

The Wager is a Safe Bet As A Gripping Book About Life, Death, and Adventure on an 18th Century British Warship

-
The Wager by David Grann is the poster book for “Truth is stranger than fiction;” this  narrative nonfiction book is a story about a crew of men and boys with ages spanning from 80 years (a cook) to adolescence, who work on the British 18th century ship HMS Wager in 1741. They are sent on a secret Naval mission with a squadron of other ships to destroy any Spanish vessels along the way toward South America and the Pacific Ocean (they were at war with Spain), and also try to locate and commandeer a legendary Spanish treasure ship. Author David Grann had access to “archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the half-truthful journals, and the surviving records from the troubling court-martial”(Kindle book blurb). This book is like a runaway train I didn’t want to leave. It is gripping and not easily put down.  I posted several passages from this book on social media, prompting a friend to ask if it was similar to William Golding’s book Lord of the Fl...
Read more

A Plot to Capture the American Zeitgeist

-
Image
Amazon’s book blurb for The Everglades by Louis Berry says this about it, “…a chilling saga unfolds where the pristine wilderness of Florida’s Everglades masks a sinister legacy of evil. In 1945, two Nazi war criminals, General Reinhard Hochstuhl and Colonel Wilhelm Von Unterscheisse , infiltrate 1945 Miami via a covert U-boat landing, seeding a multi-generational plot to subvert American society.” Berry writes, “No one in Miami was aware of the German U-Boat five hundred yards offshore; south of Flamingo Point . The ship operated within rat-lines moving high-valued Nazis to safety across the globe…Orders were to assimilate. Approach was to erode each generation’s connection to God. Free of dogmatic German machinery, lies became subtle; directed at influencing beliefs Americans held dear. Eliminating God from the collective consciousness was best accomplished across generations. The men knew they must find wives sympathetic to the Fatherland’s cause of world dom...
Read more