John C Summitt

To read this book is to fall down the rabbit hole into some smoky circle of Hell with Hemingway and Orwell and occasionally Kerouac as your tour guides. War is about death and Dispatches captures the insanity and psychic rot that permeates the landscape of war–particularly, it would seem–this war, and also the fascination and even addiction to it. If one has ever read Hemingway's Soldier's Home and wondered at the disconnect between Krebs and his family and normal life, Dispatches describes what was in Krebs' head. Highly recommended.

When I was young my grandmother used to come visit and I played Scrabble with her. She'd sit at the table for what seemed like hours, lips pressed together, arranging and rearranging her tiles. Finally with an expression of triumph she would lay down most of her rack of tiles to form some absolutely beautiful word that netted her, oh, ten points or so. Dan Simmons finally gets around to letting us in on the mystery surrounding Hyperion but too often he is writing beautiful passages instead of winning the game. This triumph of style–and he is good–over substance leaves the characters falling short of qualities that allow reading empathy and identification and make the aesthetic digressions tedious to bear. The material in this book and the preceding Hyperion would have made one fine shorter novel; as it is it's like a beautiful Christmas tree with too much glitter and lights.

In this book Randy Shilts tells the story of Harvey Milk and his path from a closeted gay man with conservative values (he supported Goldwater) who stumbled through a good part of his life without direction until he moved to San Francisco and found his calling in advocating for gay equality and striving toward his vision of a a time and place where gays and straights could coexist peacefully. Though most widely known for his gay advocacy he was a populist who, among other things, pushed for district elections of supervisors in an effort to wrest political power away from the downtown business interests and put it back in the hands of the city neighborhoods.
As a grassroots populist Harvey Milk's improbable rise in city politics put him at odds with the moderate gay politicos who preferred working within the system and ultimately the cronyism of the existing political machine. Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, once the gay movement gained some power and achieved a measure of respectability the movers and shakers absorbed the methods of traditional politics and became insiders themselves.
Many familiar names have cameo appearances: Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter, Anita Bryant, Art Agnos, Jim Jones, and of course, Dan White, the man who shot Mayor George Moscone and Milk. There are a number of possible motives that may have led Dan White to kill Moscone and Milk; the most unlikely of which was his alleged manic depression exacerbated by Twinkies and Coke.
The book is a well written fascinating account of Milk, the trajectory of his life, and the events in San Francisco during his short time there.

This book is a well-written account of the events and circumstances that are likely at the heart of the JFK assassination. Shocked at how closely the world had come to the disaster of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy escalated his efforts to reach out to both the Soviet Union and Cuba with the hopes of ratcheting down the cold war tensions and ultimately moving toward world peace. This put him increasingly at odds with his own government, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. The author makes a strong case that Oswald went to the Soviet Union in the employ of the CIA and demonstrates how he was set up along with the Soviet Union and Cuba to take the fall for the assassination. The author follows the two narratives to their ultimate collision course, along the way discussing the case of Thomas Arthur Vallee, a troubled Marine who was going to shoot Kennedy in Chicago until the plot was exposed by a whistle blower named Lee, and the legion of Oswalds that were running around Dallas shooting up the rifle ranges, leaving the TSBD alternately by bus or by car, being escorted out both the front and rear of the Texas Theater, and my favorite; driving in to work with different people on different days while in possession of curtain rods. One set was likely German and the other Italian. Check it out; it reads like a thriller so even the coincidence theorists will be entertained.

Isherwood Williams gets bitten by a snake while camping and after he recovers and returns to civilization he discovers that a mysterious disease has killed off most of the population. As a result civilization collapses. It is a quiet book, a steady accumulation of observations of the breakdown of civilization, the encroachment of the natural world into that void and, after gathering some survivors around him to form a community, the challenge of how to preserve the spark of civilization for future generations. It is essentially a treatise on earth science, anthropology, sociology, etc., disguised as a novel, but artfully done by the author. The ruminations of Isherwood Williams in the course of the book would relevant topics of discussion today (if we can switch the channel from American Idol for a moment) in light of the current economic collapse, resource depletion, and environmental instability. But then , Soylent Green taste like chicken, or so I'm told.