I finished Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood recently. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of my favorite stories and I’ve always meant to read In Cold Blood, especially since I saw the movie Capote when it came out. And that’s what my summer reading is about, finishing the books I’ve always meant to read.
In Cold Blood was a good book, well-written if not a bit overdone. It’s the story of the real life murder of a Kansas family in 1959. It was considered one of the best books of the time. While it was good, it wasn’t quite as mesmerizing as I had expected. Perhaps that is because true crime books are so common now. Back then they were a novelty. Now they have entire sections of bookstores dedicated to them. And perhaps it wasn’t what I had expected because the story of four murdered people isn’t shocking anymore. It takes a lot more than that to get the attention of today’s readers. If that’s not a sad commentary on our modern world, I don’t know what is.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Latest Reading
Now comes the summer reading. I’ve been looking forward to four months of reading what I want to read, not what I’m told to read. Here’s the first book:
I’ve mentioned before that my favorite historian is Howard Zinn. I admire the way he tells the story of forgotten history, the history that the establishment doesn’t necessarily want you to know about.
I started my summer reading with Original Zinn, the text of a series of radio interviews he did with David Barsimian of Alternative Radio. It’s classic Zinn, although it might be a little dated in that it was published in 2006 and deals frequently with the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration. It’s probably not the best Howard Zinn book to read for those unfamiliar with him. It’s best read by people like me who’ve read many of his works and still can’t get enough.
Here are a few quotes:
Once you’re elected to office, you become a less important person in history. That is, you may become more important in the eyes of the establishment, in that you have the power to make decisions but less important as a factor in social change because as soon as you take office, you are being battered by all of the instruments of wealth and power, which diminish whatever moral compassion you initially brought to that office.
War is terrorism on a very large scale.
War is always useful for political leaders because a war enables them to conceal from the public what they are doing or not doing for the people of the country.
Democracy is meaningless if the public cannot get accurate information.
The definition of fanaticism: When you discover you are going in the wrong direction, you double your speed.
To me, socialism means a society that is egalitarian and in which the economy is geared to human needs instead of to business profits.
I’ve mentioned before that my favorite historian is Howard Zinn. I admire the way he tells the story of forgotten history, the history that the establishment doesn’t necessarily want you to know about.
I started my summer reading with Original Zinn, the text of a series of radio interviews he did with David Barsimian of Alternative Radio. It’s classic Zinn, although it might be a little dated in that it was published in 2006 and deals frequently with the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration. It’s probably not the best Howard Zinn book to read for those unfamiliar with him. It’s best read by people like me who’ve read many of his works and still can’t get enough.
Here are a few quotes:
Once you’re elected to office, you become a less important person in history. That is, you may become more important in the eyes of the establishment, in that you have the power to make decisions but less important as a factor in social change because as soon as you take office, you are being battered by all of the instruments of wealth and power, which diminish whatever moral compassion you initially brought to that office.
War is terrorism on a very large scale.
War is always useful for political leaders because a war enables them to conceal from the public what they are doing or not doing for the people of the country.
Democracy is meaningless if the public cannot get accurate information.
The definition of fanaticism: When you discover you are going in the wrong direction, you double your speed.
To me, socialism means a society that is egalitarian and in which the economy is geared to human needs instead of to business profits.
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