Book Reviews
Junior News & Mail Book Reviews – January 21, 2011
Milo and the Moon Kangaroo
By Dan Taylor
MILO Montgomery loves to doodle so when, one bedtime, he discovers that his favourite green crayon has gone missing, he is determined to find the thief. Outside in the garden, he spots a green crayon trail leading down the path and out of the garden gate â?? where will it take him?
A fantastic night-time adventure, children aged three and over will love following the green crayon trail with their fingers as they move through the pages.
Jam-packed with pirates, rockets, jungles and much, much more this boldly illustrated picture book is guaranteed to feed the readerâ??s imagination.
Published by Simon amp; Schuster, itâ??s priced at around £5.99.
Madame Pamplemousse and the Time-travelling CafÃ
By Rupert Kingfisher and illustrated by Sue Hellard
THE delectable and irresistible Madame Pamplemousse returns in her second food-filled escapade. She and her companions, Camembert the cat and Madeleine, must travel through time and use their culinary genius to save the spirit of Paris.
A magical romp that will charm and delight, this is the irresistible sequel to Madame Pamplemousse and Her Incredible Edibles.
Priced at around £4.99 in paperback, itâ??s published by Bloomsbury and is the ideal read for youngsters aged six and over.
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Book Reviews: Just My Type and more
BOOK
Just My Type by Simon Garfield
Profile Books, £14.99
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Garfield shines a light on the tight-knit world of the type fanatic and exposes some curious stories and fascinating facts.
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Book reviews: VS Naipaul, Jay Naidoo, Ethiopia Famine
The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief
â?¨VS Naipaul
256pp, Knopf Publishing Groupâ?
Fighting for Justice: â?¨A Lifetime of Political â?¨and Social Activism
â?¨Jay Naidoo Â
393pp, Picador Africa
Peter Gill
280pp, Oxford University Press
These reviews were first published in the October-November 2010 edition of The Africa Report.
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7 Book Reviews in Cleantech and Energy
Sandor Schoichet s a longtime Cleantech Blog reader, and Director of Meridian Management Consultants. Sandor has EE and SM degrees in Electrical Engineering amp; Computer Science from MIT, where he studied artificial intelligence, office automation, and business process reengineering, and completed a joint program in Management of Innovation at the Sloan and Harvard business schools. He holds undergraduate degrees in Information Sciences and Philosophy from UC Santa Cruz. He published these book reviews on our sister site Cleantech.org, and following our Cleantech Bookshelf, we liked them so much we’re republishing them here as a Reader’s Choice Bookshelf.
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins
If there was one key to turning around the damaging business and environmental practices of modern culture, what would it be? ‘Natural Capitalism,’ the seminal 1999 call for a broader focus on sustainability, presents an overwhelming case that the key is resource efficiency and effectiveness. Just as conventional capitalism is all about using financial capital effectively, so ‘natural capitalism’ is about expanding that bottom line focus to include the natural resources and ecosystem services underlying the ability of business and society to function in the first place. The authors argue that with appropriate shifts in business perspective and government policy, our economy could be something like 90% more efficient in its use of irreplaceable natural resources, thereby mitigating ecosystem impacts, enabling global development, and staving off climate change.
Throughout history, until very recently, man has been a small actor in an overwhelmingly large world. Most of the book explores how this has given rise to our ingrained cultural patterns of wasteful resource utilization, limited focus on capital efficiency, and drive for production volumes, while assuming unbounded access to subsidized natural resources and ‘free’ ecosystem services. Shifting perspective to include natural capital on the business balance sheet, and to expand lean manufacturing principles beyond the factory walls is what’s required to address the ecology/climate change nexus. This change in perspective is embodied in a range of sustainable business concepts, including the ‘triple bottom line’ (profits, people, and planet), and the ‘cradle-to-cradle’ model for recycling products and integrating industries to eliminate ‘waste’.
The basic principles of natural capitalism put forward can be summarized as: (1) focus on natural resource efficiency (2) using closed loop, biomemetic, nontoxic processes (3) to deliver more appropriate end-user services (4) while investing in restoring, sustaining, and expanding natural capital. Following these principles leads not to constraints on business or lowered expectations, but an enormous range of new business opportunities to profit from improved efficiencies and environmentally beneficial activities. One of the best expressions of this perspective comes in the discussion on climate change, providing a refreshing contrast to the recent spate of bad news on this front: Together, the [available business] opportunities can turn climate change into an unnecessary artifact of [our] uneconomically wasteful use of resources.
While the authors deliver an awesome, deeply researched articulation of their vision, showing with many examples why it’s important and how it can work within our current capitalistic economies, the book has two key flaws. First, it falls prey to the syndrome first articulated by Paul Saffo, founder of the Institute for the Future, of confusing a clear vision of the future with a short path. This combines with an excessive reliance on sheer volume of examples to make their points, too many of them poorly explained, bristling with non-comparable numbers, and substituting hand-waving for real outcomes. Deeper exploration of fewer examples might have illustrated the principles better, and have been much easier to read. Also, 11 years after the original publication, many of the examples are seen to be hastily chosen and and used to support glib and overreaching conclusions that make the authors seem naive. Examples include the advent hydrogen powered cars (hypercars), the potential for shutting down Ruhr Valley coal production in favor of direct social payments to coal workers, or the imminent triumph of the Kyoto Protocols for international carbon trading. And, while much attention is paid to articulating the perverse incentives, misguided taxes and subsidies, and split responsibilities that impede more efficient system approaches, there’s short shrift given to new technology adoption rates, the scale of existing infrastructure investments, or the political complexities of changing incentives and subsidies.
However, if you are interested in understanding the genesis and foundations of the modern sustainability movement, this is a fundamental text. Despite its flaws, after 11 years the fundamental argument and principles hold up well and are still inspiring.
Power Hungry: The Myths of Green Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce
Bryce bills himself as a purveyor of industrial strength journalism, and ‘Power Hungry’ doesn’t disappoint. Starting with a clear statement of his own energy policy I’m in favor of air conditioning and cold beer. Bryce provides a muscular, data-driven analysis of our modern industrial civilization and the changing mix of energy sources that power it. This is an eye-opening discussion that does an unusually good job of conveying the scale of our existing energy infrastructure, and the challenge of providing adequate energy supplies for the future, not just for the US and Europe, but for the developing world and the third world as well, under the constraints of economics and decarbonization. Bryce articulate four energy imperatives power density, energy density, cost, and scale and uses them as a consistent framework for looking at what he calls the Myths of Green Energy. His myths run the gamut from the idea that wind power can really reduce overall CO2 emissions, to the idea that the US lags other countries in energy efficiency, to the idea that carbon capture and sequestration could work at scale, and intriguingly, even the idea that oil is a dirty fuel compared to the alternatives. While the debunking of green alternatives has flaws, especially in the lack of attention to advanced biofuels, smart grid technologies, and green building materials, it is refreshingly apolitical focused on facts, practical alternatives, and the requirements of scale. In some ways Bryce ends up with conclusions similar to those of Bill McKibben in his recent book ‘Eaarth’: we will not be able to turn the tide on atmospheric CO2 quickly enough, the scale is too large, the transition times are too long, the pressure for global development is too great. We will have no choice but to mitigate some problems and adapt to the rest. However, instead of advocating acceptance of a graceful decline as McKibben does, Bryce lays out an energetic path forward, a no regrets policy he dubs N2N: shifting electrical generation aggressively towards natural gas in the near term, while investing in advanced nuclear technologies for the long run. The strongest element of the book is how he effectively links the future economic health of the US with rising prospects for the rest of the world and that will take massive quantities of carbon-free power, not only for economic development, but for mitigating unavoidable climate change impacts as well. ‘Power Hungry’ is a challenging and valuable read for everyone interested in green energy and an effective response to the climate crisis.
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Brand, as ever, is a clear and forceful writer, fearlessly putting himself on the line with specific recommendations and a call to action. This is the Plan missing from Al Gore’s otherwise excellent textbook, ‘Our Choice: A Plan to Solve to Climate Crisis’ harder-edged, more urgent, more tech-savvy, willing to name names, kick butt, and provoke a reaction. This is the place to start if you’re ready to move beyond the conventional green perspective and really get a grip on what responding to the climate challenge entails. Frightening and exhilarating at the same time!
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
by Bill McKibben
I’m conflicted about this book, and McKibben’s style in general. First, this is a valuable contribution to the debate about how to think about climate change and appropriate goals for our planetary future. McKibben actually presents many good ideas (in the second half of the book), rooted in a realistic and compelling vision of how our world is changing and how we need to adapt. However, his writing style, especially when presenting bad news (the first half of the book) is just one damn thing after another, an endless listing of specifics without adequate context or meaningful analysis he apparently does not understand that anecdotes are not evidence. While he makes his argument most energetically, and has lots of suggestive detail that appears to support it, in the cases with which I am directly familiar he is guilty of taking things out of context, then making gross simplifications and overreaching generalizations. And this is too bad, because, overall, I think he’s basically right, and that his suggestions for change are excellent. Probably the most important aspect of this book is simply his tough, clear-eyed situation assessment of the damage that’s already been done, the building momentum of environmental change, and the need to get on with a meaningful response. I worry, though, that by beating us over the head with a stream of bad news, and then framing his suggestions for a response in terms of achieving a graceful decline, too many people will be turned off and won’t hear the good ideas towards the end of the book. The grand project of changing our culture so that we can live in a durable and robust symbiosis with our environment on a global scale that’s not a graceful decline, but a call to help create a new age as exciting as any that went before.
Turning Oil Into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice
by Anne Korin, Gal Luft
This slim volume is the clearest and most direct analysis I’ve yet seen of oil’s position as a strategic commodity, and the potential for open fuel standards to enable a market-based pathway to transportation fuel choice. Especially notable for its independent perspective we hear so much about the need for ‘drop in’ petroleum equivalents and the ‘ethanol blend wall’, but not nearly enough about other approaches that might emulate the open interface model that has driven the phenomenal growth of the internet. Absolutely required reading for anyone interested in clean energy, the potential contribution of biofuels to achieving energy security, and the practical steps that we need to take to move down the path.
Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate
by Stephen H. Schneider, Tim Flannery
If you care about the big picture of climate change that’s driving the urgency behind global environmental agreements and the commercialization of greentech, then Schneider’s ‘Science as a Contact Sport’ is must reading. The book achieves two objectives in an engaging and forceful manner. First it is a great introduction to the science of climate change, presented through Schneider’s personal experience as a key participant in its development. And second, it provides much-needed insight into how the issue has played out in the US legislature and the global media, again from an up-close and personal point of view. Democracy and government are both messy systems, but still are forums where the environmental and greentech communities must ultimately triumph, and Schneider’s personal experience should be of value to everyone engaged in the battle. Some elements of Schneider’s message echo Al Gore’s discussion in ‘The Assault on Reason,’ but are presented in a clearer, more direct, and better operationalized manner. Highly recommended!
Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider
by John Hofmeister
Hofmeister writes with refreshing directness and lack of pretense about two key ideas: the disconnect between political time and energy time that drives legislative dysfunction in energy and environmental planning; and his own proposal for an independent Federal Energy Resources Board to fix it. Most of the book is a walkthrough of the current US energy business and infrastructure the straight talk from an energy insider part. He convincingly lays out an array of problems with the approaches advocated by just about everyone, from left-wing environmentalists, to right-wing infotainers, to the energy and utility power industry itself with special scorn for the disastrous and long-running failure of our elected officials of all stripes to address our energy needs in a serious manner. The book provides a prescient and unnerving in-depth background to current newspaper reporting on the BP spill disaster in the Gulf (it went to press just before the explosion and blowout). Hofmeister is on less firm footing, however, when he switches to his proposal for an independent energy regulatory agency modeled on the Federal Reserve. While he surely gets an ‘A’ for boldness and for thinking outside the box, how this is supposed to work and how we are supposed to get there in advance of a national energy disaster akin to the Great Depression, are both left up to grassroots pressure. All I can say is that I hope his non-profit, Citizens for Affordable Energy.org, is successful at pushing his ideas onto the national stage, and helping to build a consensus focus on practical solutions. Highly recommended wherever you stand on these complex issues, Hofmeister will push your buttons and make you think about what a real solution might look like.
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Facing the terror inside us
I first encountered the work of Erika Dreifus at her literary blog, â??My Machberet,â? which I quickly bookmarked as a must-read site (erikadreifus.com), and I was so impressed by her acuity, discernment and style that I invited her to contribute book reviews to The Jewish Journal. Now I have the opportunity to call attention to her debut work of fiction, â??Quiet Americansâ? (Last Light Studio, $13.95), a deeply affecting collection of short stories that displays all of the qualities that I admire in her literary journalism.
Dreifus, who lives and works in New York City, is the grandchild of German Jews who managed to reach the United States in the late 1930s, and the long shadow of the Holocaust that fell across her own life can be plainly seen in her stories, too. â??Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?â? is the quotation from the Nobel lecture of Imre KertÃsz that she has chosen as an epigraph, and she is donating portions of the proceeds from sales of â??Quiet Americansâ? to The Blue Card, an organization that supports survivors of Nazi persecution and their families in the United States.
Thus, for example, the opening story in the collection, â??For Services Rendered,â? focuses on a shocking variant of what we might call â??survivor guilt.â? A Jewish doctor in Nazi Germany finds himself caring for the child of Hermann Göering â?? â??the sybaritic king of Karinhallâ? and Hitlerâ??s second-in-command â?? at precisely the moment when the Nazi regime is escalating its war against the Jews. Remarkably, Göering extends an offer of mercy, and the doctor and his immediate family are permitted to leave for America. But the doctor experiences an acute crisis of conscience when the war ends and his savior ends up in the dock at Nuremberg. â??Papa,â? his daughter asks him, â??what are crimes against humanity?â? The answer, as Dreifus shows us, can be elusive, and when we find the answer, it can be excruciating.
Dreifus is both compassionate and demanding when it comes to the characters she has created and the stories she tells in â??Quiet Americans.â? She works in a lapidary prose, every word considered and chosen with care, and yet the writing is always clear and compelling. Indeed, at certain moments, she addresses us as if we are sitting across her work table: â??I can anticipate your comment, dear reader â?¦â? What I admire most in her work is the bright light that she shines on the innermost fears and desires that simmer beneath the surface of the human experience.
The title story, for example, is an intense account of a young American womanâ??s trip to postwar Germany. â??You will go, after years and years of refusing to go,â? she writes, perhaps of herself, â??just as you refused to learn German until circumstances (that is to say, graduate school requirements) forced you to.â? But the narrator is full of anxiety and suspicion, and she focuses them on a German guide named Greta, who is far less concerned with German war guilt than with the damage inflicted by Allied bombers. â??But you stay quiet,â? Dreifus writes. â??You shred a tissue and drop pieces into your bag.â? The tension that builds inside the narrator, a quiet American, is ultimately resolved only when a British tourist refuses to remain silent.
â??This British man evidently remembers,â? writes Dreifus. â??He remembers a lot of things.â?
So Dreifus does not confine herself to the kind of character studies and slice-of-life sketches that are the stock-in-trade of so many short-story writers. Rather, she cares deeply about history â?? her own family history and the larger history that we all inhabit â?? and thatâ??s what makes her stories both engaging and consequential. At the end of a story titled â??Matrilineal Descent,â? which reveals the potent emotional chemistry in the troubled relationship between two sisters, all of the family tragedies are abruptly reframed by a kind of epitaph.
â??What happened to Emma?â? she writes about the heroine of her story. Then she quotes an entry in the public archive: â??für tot erklärt seit 30 Oktober 1940.â? Then she adds: â??And if you donâ??t read German, Iâ??ll translate. â??Believed deadâ?? â?? since the day she was deported.â?
History, as James Joyce once wrote, is a nightmare from which we struggle to awaken. But Dreifus is courageous enough to confront the terrors from deep within that nightmare. To be sure, she has mastered the historical facts, â??#91;b#93;ut this story, dear reader,â? as she writes in one of her tales, â??is about what they do not tell.â?
Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs on books at jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve and can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Washington Post to Expand Sunday Edition & Increase Book Coverage
The Washington Post will increase its Sunday edition paper by creating separate Arts and Sunday Style sections. Beginning with the January 23rd issue, book coverage will play a larger role in the modified Sunday edition.
According to Yahoo! Finance, two types of book reviews are planned. The Sunday Style section reviews will examine books that focus on pop culture topics and the Arts section reviews will focus on arts-related books.
Responding to the news, fiction editor Ron Charles posted on Twitter: INCREASED book coverage in a mainstream newspaper! Whens the last time you saw that? (Maybe indie bookstores will come back too!) Other changes will include a new KidsPost tabloid and a more developed Real Estate section.
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Comic Book Reviews For The Week of 1/19/11
Monday was a holiday for us but luckily it didnt affect the release of this weeks comics. There were some big releases like Invincible Iron Man #500, the next arc in Spider-Mans Big Time and even the final issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight. DC continues their character/logo covers and its always interesting to see what they do for characters that dont really have a logo.
But enough of this commentary. Lets check out the reviews for some of the books we reviewed today.
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New book reviews the features and functions of the cell nucleus
COLD SPRING HARBOR, NY (Nov. 30, 2010) — The nucleus of a cell contains its DNA and is the site where DNA replication, transcription, and RNA processing take place. Within the nucleus, nuclear bodies appear to dynamically self-organize, assembling and disassembling according to the functional demands of the cell.
The study of the cell nucleus, its structure, and its functions, is arguably one of the most exciting fields of contemporary cell biology, write Tom Misteli and David Spector in the Preface of The Nucleus, a newly released book from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. We finally need to know how genomes really work in the context of their natural environment, the cell nucleus.
The Nucleus contains 28 chapters, each written by leading nuclear biologists and focusing on a specific aspect of the cell nucleus. Topics include the relationship between nuclear structure and function, the various nuclear bodies that have been identified, and the organization of the nuclear lamina and nuclear pore complex. Other chapters examine the higher-order organization of chromatin within the nucleus and the dynamics of DNA replication, transcription, DNA repair, and RNA transport. The last few chapters describe pathological conditions involving disruption of nuclear structure and function.
The book will be essential reading for all molecular and cell biologists?from students to experts in the field?as well as for pathologists interested in the role of nuclear architecture in disease.
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Bush misses chance for insight in rambling ‘Decision Points’
Read Winston Churchills memoirs, or Ulysses S. Grants (ghost-written by Mark Twain) or even Richard M. Nixons.
They tell — in some cases rant — of times on the world stage counted in drops of sweat and tears and blood; they recount grand machinations of mind and spirit that move nations and forge the world we live in; they offer a sometimes ugly glimpse of the gears and wheels turning in those mischievous minds that erect for the rest of us mortals the foundations of our society.
—
Decision Points by George W. Bush
Crown, 497 pages, $35
—-
George W. Bushs memoir reads like a high school students report on the Swiss banking system.
What follows reviews former President Bushs book, Decision Points, not the news snippets excised out of it. The book, most assuredly, defends and even tries at times to recast his presidency, but the task here is not to re-argue or explain it, but rather measure the worth of the vehicle he uses to do so.
Like much about President Bush, this is perplexing. Not because he is unlikable. Hes more complete and understandable in his book than in most of the interviews and reports about him in eight years as president.
His book is a rambling hodgepodge of head-scratching observations and conclusions. He vaults around decades and topics and backtracks to recollect random anecdotes that seem of great value — to him — yet leave the reader digging for hidden meaning and finding none. This peripatetic process confuses the reader, not because hes hard to follow, but because its difficult to connect with the flow of his thinking. Memoirs dont have to start at birth, but they should be logically organized.
He pays scant attention to major aspects of his life — devoting three paragraphs for instance in a Joe Friday account of his DUI in Maine on Labor Day Weekend in 1976. But he then offers needless detail about events like an insignificant dinner with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his wife, Cherie, and their children. He fills his book with such phrases as, after months of soul-searching, without discussing his soul or his search.
A careful, concentrated, concerted study of Bushs memoir can reward the reader with a clear sense of why he decided and did what he did between 2000 and 2008 and chose to discuss here. But the effort creates more friction than light. The book is a grind, without transcendent revelations or the insights that the presidential memoir business promises by its very nature to provide. Introspection is not this books theme.
Bush, in his own words, is a loyal son, and a privileged one who tasted religion from the Rev. Billy Graham and politics from Lyndon Johnson, in his senator-grandfathers Georgetown salon. W says he adores a father who had eight jobs any other high achiever would be happy to have one of, including Yale baseball star who met Babe Ruth, heroic fighter pilot, congressman, UN ambassador, CIA director, US ambassador to China, chairman of the Republican Party, vice president and, oh yes, president. Tough act to follow?
W is a Texan, not a Connecticut Yankee, and was a drunk, though not an alcoholic, as he explains it; he was an oil entrepreneur; co-owner of a Major League Baseball team; a congressional candidate, governor of Texas and, oh yes, president.
While he refers to his relationship with his father throughout the book, including many previously unpublicized personal stories, its all unsatisfying surface stuff. Given the opportunity to fill the vacuum of wonder and questions about this remarkable duo, he punts.
We know Ws resume, his role in the Republican equivalent of the Kennedys and how its members wrote themselves large on the world stage for two decades. Were aware he can be a workout demon [he ran a 3:44 marathon], a pretty funny guy and a hale fellow well met.
We marvel at the stunning turns of events his presidency faced, from his 2000 election by five final arbiters on the US Supreme Court, through 9/11 to his decisions to fight three wars — Terror, Afghanistan, Iraq — that persist and challenge this nation nearly a decade later.
Yet what you see is what you get — and unfortunately he leaves his readers with no other conclusion than thats just not much.
Whether depth and gravitas are not in Bushs makeup, or he simply chooses not to reveal them, his account of some of his major presidential decisions are so cursory and lightweight that we seem to get wisps of Coolidge and Hoover and Taylor rather than Roosevelt and Reagan and Lincoln.
Bush is a religious man, and that shapes his thinking and some of his decisions. He is an educated man — I had gone to Andover by expectation and Yale by tradition; I was at Harvard by choice. He does not lack ambition, or, certainly, achievement.
Fifty or 100 years from now, as he clearly hopes, he may indeed be regarded as a pivotal president. But his book is as flimsy and veneer-thin as hes perceived to be as a leader. And whats most frustrating about that is he doesnt seem to care, or at least show any evidence of caring.
Let them eat sawdust, seems his attitude.
His take on weapons of mass destruction demonstrates his aloof nature. After one of the lengthiest treatments of a major subject — Iraq — that his book offers (just 49 pages) he concludes that Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy even without those dadburnit WMDs we never found.
Bush, for all his justified personal references to military heroism and American warrior sacrifice, somehow doesnt seem to grasp — or at least thoughtfully address — that he ordered the invasion of a sovereign nation that at the time played no role in 9/11 or al-Qaida, for a reason that did not exist. Some 5,000 American deaths and 30,000 injuries on his watch through three wars would not seem to tip the scales of judgment in favor of such a decision unless the Iraq dictator had what Bush and his national security team said he had and the United States prevented their use.
This book delivers his decision points in a series of Harvard Business School case studies in such dry, matter-of-fact ways that the reader marvels at his detachment. His statements about his most meaningful accomplishment (no 9/11 repeat), his best decision (marrying Laura), his toughest decision (Iraq), his most disappointing time (Kanye West saying he didnt care about black people) come across as detached, stuck like hanging chads to the ballot of his presidential record.
He cares, without passion; he drives toward what is right and good, but seldom achieves either; hes macho, in a country club buddy way; he is born into a family of immense political influence, but sees no need to explain in recounting how his father always stepped in to help him at this (Vietnam) or that (running for political office) crucial time in his life; Bush chooses Dick Cheney as his vice president aware of the irony and link to his fathers administration, but fails to analyze his own motives.
The books most moving part covers 9/11 and its immediate aftermath.
My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this and kick their ass.
This is clearly the dominant event in Bushs life and presidency. All decisions, including Iraq, that stemmed from 9/11 went toward preventing another attack, or worse. Worthy thinking, no doubt. He takes great pride in avoiding new attacks, justifies and elucidates a bit his decisions on waterboarding, but says almost nothing about why his administration did not prevent 9/11. Nor does he address why he shifted to Iraq from the opportunity to kick their ass, when US Special Forces cornered Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora.
His book portrays a man who seems incapable of awe. Aw shucks dominates. Intellectual curiosity? Negatory, good buddy. How unexcited can one person be? How flatlined can you make your reaction to each history-making decision?
Ann Richards, whom W defeated to become governor of Texas, needled then Vice President George HW Bush at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 with the line: He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. The equivalent for 43, at least as we glean from his own words is, He never left the dugout, but thought hed just hit a walk off home run.
Stephen W. Bell, director of public affairs for Eric Mower and Associates, was The News editorial page editor during part of George W. Bushs presidency.
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Win a Royal Blood Chronicles Ebook with the Vampire Book Blog Tour
This month is December and time for you to start searching for the best books to give for Christmas. Everyone loves to cuddle under a blanket with a good book and I have the perfect one for you whether you are an adult or a teen. This series is labeled as young adult but is a perfect read for any paranormal fan.
The Royal Blood Chronicles by Elizabeth Loraine is a 4 book (as of now) series that tells the story of the world of The Protectors. They are five vampire royal girls who are protectors of the world and all races within that world- humans, elves, witches, vampires, and more.
The first book of the series is Katrina: The Beginning, the second is The Protectors, the third is The Dark Prince and the book that is coming soon….Cain.
These book are available here on Amazon.com as well as Elizabeth Loraines website.
This month is The Royal Blood Chronicles Blog Tour and offers up a lot of fun for the RBC Fans.
There are interviews, discussions, book reviews, contests and more. The link to this event is here.
The rules to the contest are:
You receive the noted point(s) for doing each of the following:
1- Sharing Royal Blood Chronicles Blog Event on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=132823000109330amp;index=1
2- Invite friends to Royal Blood Chronicles Blog Event- http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=132823000109330amp;index=1
1- Tweet about the event- can do this each day for up to 30 points
1- Like RBC FB Fan Page- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Royal-Blood-Chronicles/135355462710
1- Share RBC FB Fan Page- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Royal-Blood-Chronicles/135355462710
1- Suggest to friends RBC FB Fan Page- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Royal-Blood-Chronicles/135355462710
5- Comment on Each Blog that is posted on the RBC Book Blog Tour
5- Share each Blog each day that is posted on the RBC Blog Tour
3- Like, Follow or subscribe the Blog Hostess that is featured each day
1- Join as a member to RBC Official Website- http://royalbloodchronicles.com
1- follow RBC on Twitter – http://twitter.com/bloodchronicles
10 – for tallying up your points on the 31st and post your total on the Facebook Page Event.
The Top 3 winners will receive a copy of an RBC ebook. It can be Kindle or PDF if you dont have a reader.
Hope you come along for a month of fun.If you have a blog or are a book reviewer and would like to be part of this blog tour please email me and let me know. We can send you an e copy and you can send us back the link to help promote you and this awesome book.
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