Stepping in the Write Direction

It’s been a long time since I read a book with vocabulary like you find in  While Justice Sleeps  by Stacey Abrams. Words and phrases shimmer throughout the book,  a storm of verbal confetti including cacophony, eidetic, epithetic, saturnine, weft, “parsing out opprobrium,” and others, the totality of which potent enough to ratchet up one’s verbal SAT scores. If you’re fond of rich vocabulary, Abram’s lexicon lifts you up on silvery wings and carries you swiftly through the pages. The book is a winning trifecta of smart political thriller, investigation of global criminal weaponization of c hromosomal research , and judicial intrigue at the highest levels, a tale of “carpetbaggers, and Frankensteins, and lesser kings,” with a cinematic quality.  Supreme Court Justice Howard Wynn, gruff, inscrutable, imperial, curmudgeonly, and cantankerous, hates US President Brandon Stokes. His increasing paranoia about an upcoming SCOTUS vote on a Big Pharma merger ...

Adulting is hard, harder for some than for others. On the outside looking in, seeing nothing but privilege, judgement comes easy. It’s hard to fathom promise that never matches expectations, a knife felt most keenly by it’s owner. Beautiful things can be fleeting if not safeguarded. Hunter Biden’s memoir Beautiful Things is an instructive narrative on deriving strength from within the throes of human frailty.  The nexus of Hunter’s lifetime struggles, through rehabs and every other taxing issue in his life, was the unconditional love, commitment, and active involvement of his supportive brother Beau, as well as that of his busy, otherwise occupied, extended family. Living life in the public eye, for some, makes recovery an impossible tightrope to successfully navigate over the infinite horizon of time, played out live beneath the unrelenting spotlight’s glare of global scrutiny.  A failed marriage, the inability to repeatedly rise above one’s problems long enough to end them, ...

By the time I was two thirds of the way through  Everything Will Be OK  by Dana Perino  a series of questions cropped up in my head. I wondered why such a book would limit its audience by focusing specifically on women. Can a woman write such a book as this for all career oriented people, or would men just dismiss it without a second glance because it was written by a woman?  Don’t men need the same kind of advice, or are women the ones that need remedial help in foundations of leadership and career management? Why wouldn’t a businessman need or want a book on career advice written by a woman? Is theirs a skill set previously acquired naturally on athletic fields, during military service, or networking in locker rooms and strip clubs, that women just don’t get? A less than charitable thought meandered through my brain cells: men don’t need a book like Dana’s because traditionally they ride to the top on the backs of woman they manage, who make them look good while th...

On The House: A Washington Memoir by John Boehner is a real litter box of a book, as you might expect from any memoir by a House Speaker describing Washington DC politicians from 1991-2015 (a period during which Congressional earmarks doubled from  $23.2 to $47.4 billion).  It contains such nuggets as Mark Meadows ending  up on his knees in Boehner’s office (probably not the last time Meadows assumed that position in DC), a 10” knife ends up near Boehner’s neck in a tense moment on the chamber floor (to be fair, Boehner can have that affect on some politicians and voters alike), and a friend gifting Boehner, as a tribute, a unique leathery African hunting trophy in a case he displayed on the center of his conference table (which staffers repeatedly relocated, but he always restored). The unpleasantness with the knife involved strong feelings about talk of earmarks being cancelled (they were), but by way of an update, this Rep should be happier now with earmarks’ recent 20...

Killing the Mob by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard is an accounting of the lives and deaths of mobsters and the men who pursued them from the days of Prohibition’s bootlegging and speakeasies, to the underworld’s elite upper echelons, power brokers in modern times.  They lived by violence, and often died by it, fueling newspaper sales with details of their crimes, their hunt by law enforcement, trial reporting, and often inglorious end. Kidnapping, bootlegging, robberies, films, gambling, and drug dealing financed their lives and their lawyers, playing out over the dark winding backroads of Illinois and Wisconsin, to the glittering lights of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  Impeccably researched and footnoted, the book is a fascinating look at the mob’s rise to power in Cuba, NYC, Chicago, California, Las Vegas, and Miami.  It touches on John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Marilyn Monroe, Judith Campbell Exner, JFK’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s years of pursuit including tele...

Reading Of Women and Salt, a debut novel by Gabriela Garcia (3/29/21) is like watching a string of videos, or slides, different moments captured in the sun seen from the eyes of a photographer, each clip a different point in time with different people but aspects linking them together, the camera a silent observer of each vignette, the reader another. Images strung together so beautifully with words, spare yet evocative and rich with emotion. “ Memory as static history.” Salt is in the book, in the ocean, on the skin of a child at the beach; Miami smells of salt, a taste of brine in the air. Several engaging stories weave through the book, different generations of women and girls at critical moments in their lives, in Cuba, Mexico, and Miami from 1866 to the 21st century, connected by a common thread of immigration in its varied forms, as seen through their eyes. Danger, crimes, death, loss, struggle, hope, beauty, and the potential for healing, all play roles in this narrative. What ...

“I am consoled by the words my grandmother spoke, “Even when the battle is long, and the path is steep, a true warrior does not give up. If each one of us does not step forward to claim our rights, we are doomed to an eternal wait in hopes those who would usurp them would become benevolent.”         —   India Peyton, Grandmother of  Little Rock  Nine member  Melba Patillo Beals Warriors Don’t Cry  by Melba Patillo Beals  should be required reading for every American. Thanks to the diaries Beals kept during the tumultuous period President Eisenhower called up the elite 101st Airborne Division to enforce integration of Little Rock Arkansas Central High School by her and 8 other Black students (each outnumbered 200 to one), readers have the opportunity to walk in her shoes during that moment in time. Her narrative is both staggering and horrifying in terms of the scope of the relentless terrorism each experienced during this perio...