papablues050164's reviews
136 reviews

A lot of people are going to die not just because of the climate disruptions we've caused, but because of the blatant & contradictory hatred infesting U.S. border security. Todd Miller explores the impulses to keep out immigrants and our tendency to treat them as scum. The question that never seems to be asked is why Latinos keep trying to cross the border when its perfectly obvious a lot of people don't want them here; why no one considers that as bad as they're hated here, life in their home country is a hell of a lot worse. At times depressing, there are glimmers of hope in the power of collective action.

For all those who miss an artist who gave his all.

Not much to say. These pups are just adorable.

I have a confession. I’ve read this series completely ass-backwards . I first read Pebble In The Sky during my first year in high school, not knowing it was the last part of a trilogy. I was given the set as a gift, well, decades ago and just got round to reading the rest. While I recall Pebble as an enjoyable book, remember even at that time it was over a quarter century old and I was a much younger kid with very little exposure to actual science fiction. That said, I found book one, The Stars, Like Dust …okay, even tho the dialogue was stilted and the characters stiff. The Currents of Space was different. There is political intrigue entangling which involves Rik, an Earthman man who has a secret. It is a secret primarily because his mind has been wiped, though why it went to the extent that it had would become clear only if you read through to the end. Now if I’d read this even ten years ago I might have found the idea of five men ruling the wealth of one planet, Sark, unlikely. With what I know now about the power brokers controlling a certain political party in our fair nation, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched. One of our main protagonists is in fact a multiple murderer. While the science behind star formation has superceded this novel’s premise, if you can just let that go, you might find this an enjoyable read.

The Seeker, the Trickster, the Healer and the Teacher. Thus has the author characterized four men who changed our perception of reality and what was possible. Each chapter is broken into sections following the trajectory of these men: Timothy Leary, Trickster and showman; Richard Alpert, the seeker who made a pilgrimage to India and returned as spiritual leader Ram Dass; Huston Smith, a professor of religion who offered insight and an inclusive view towards all belief systems; and Andrew Weir, better known today as a promotor of holistic medicine. In the early 60’s three of these men were involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, an exploration of the mind-altering effects of LSD. Along each man’ path, we are led on side-paths involving Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, the man who synthesized LSD-25 in 1938 and made the world’s first acid trip in 1944. We also hear of the experiments in 1950 by Drs. Max Rinkel and Robert Hyde which were secretly funded by the CIA. At turns Leary is not as bad, but then again worse than we imagined. His and Alpert’s expulsion from Harvard in 1963 was spurred largely by a story in a college newspaper by then-student Weir, who in a nasty twist of irony would years later find himself in a similar situation. That expulsion basically took the leash off of Leary, whose antics led to the illegalization of LSD and to a lesser extent, to the War on Drugs. Thanks in large part to these four, the counterculture in the 1990s became our culture; way-out ideas like yoga, meditation, alternative medicine didn’t seem so far out anymore. Humor suffuses much of their antics over the years, reeling in subsidiary allies like author Aldous Huxley and poet Allen Ginsberg. The final pages touch on the author’s own excursions on his acid trips in the early 70’s, the first being an euphoric and the second a horrific trip whose effects lasted for weeks. Having been subjected to enough pot parties in the same time period, and a personal affront best spoken of in another blog…while I disagree with the whole ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ notion, I found much that was intriguing and humorous in this book.

Very early on there was a section in the first speech presented that really struck me, in part because this observation was made in April, 1963, but also because of its relevance: “Forty million people, under $2,000 a year…Look at the concentration of wealth, on the other hand. One percent of the population, 700,000 families, own 25 percent of all the money, stocks, bonds, real estate, all the tangible assets, in the country. And furthermore, this hasn’t changed much over the years. “
This should be required reading; we should bind every nativist ignoramus in this country to a chair and force-feed them these speeches. Again & again over the year, Zinn reminds us that change never comes from the top down, never at the pleasure of our Congress. It has to happen when a mass movement of people become too large a body to ignore; when the people say, ‘Enough, we’re done waiting for you to change’. These are the words of a man who fought for his country, who found reason to question our rationales of war, and found them wanting. Words that’ll remind us that we can love your country while remaining critical of our government. Not that his reasoning is always perfect; in his frequent nods to the passage of the 13th,14th & 15th Amendments to the Constitution, Zinn forgets to mention that without the Confederate states to block them, passage of those Amendments became a surer deal; in fact, those Southern states were not allowed back into the Union until they ratified them. Finally, we should take to heart his reminder that all governments rely on the obedience of their people; that once the people withdraw that obedience,, once they start defying bad laws like the Fugitive Slave Law, once soldiers refuse to fight in unjust wars, that government stands on very shaky ground.

I'm not a fan of Joyce Farmer's artistic style, but to be fair it's probably truer to life than the photogenic women we're usually treated to in comics. This story hits close to home; both my parents are in their 80's and twice this year, my father has been in the hospital, primarily due to medical incompetence, another unfortunate takeaway from this book. This is a helpful reminder that our folks' time on this earth is limited and we should treasure it while they are.

Here is a case where I can say I love the man's writing, but he's a bastard. For decades he cheated on his first wife Jane while using her as editor, housewife & accountant, while taking no hand in raising his children or those of his sister Alice when she committed suicide. At times in the 1970's he was cheating with two woman. In a final double-twist of irony, his second wife Jill Krementz ended up cheating on HIM & demanding a divorce, which she eventually called off after her suitor was discovered cheating on HER. Yeh. So it goes.
I saw Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Puget Sound in 1985, while he was promoting his book 'Galapagos'. The funny thing is what I remember most about that night was, as I was driving home my car threw its fan belt and the fan punched its way into the hood, taking out the radiator and a couple of hoses.
About the book? Oh that. Recommended.

The irony is if the Japanese authorities had kept their mouths shut, her work might have remained unknown but to a chosen few. Kudos to the Japanese courts for helping Rokudenashiko's works reach an international audience. A funny & absurd record of her life as an artist & survivor of state-sponsored overreach. Thank you for this memoir.

The members of Bush's war cabinet didn't know their asses from a hole in a ground, let alone how to manage 'regime change'. The Iraq war is a study in chaos-management, most of it self-inflicted. I just want everybody to remember this as our current Tweeter-in-Chief assembles his own war cabinet.