Well, thank you for that.
I seldom look at the New York Times bestseller list, and when I glanced at it a couple of months ago I remembered why. Aside from a pop-science book by the astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, there wasn’t anything on it I would want to read, ever. I paged through the top 10 on the bestseller shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. There was a memoir by a writer in her thirties about her long struggle to do something worth writing a memoir about; a plump sermon on national piety called, of course, The Soul of America; a book about opioids. And six books about Donald Trump. Evidently Trump has swallowed up the book-publishing industry the way he has swallowed up everything else. I bought all six, along with another by Ann Coulter, whose new book about Trump has failed to make the list. I like Ann and she looked lonely.Ha ha. He'd read a book by Neil deGrass Tyson, the arrogant walking talking politicized shadow cast by more solid Carl Sagan. That right there tells us who are reading.
1. The villain. Several very good paragraphs about Omarosa whom I don't care about. He actually read her malevolent little book.
2. The Judge. Several very good paragraphs about how bad the style of Judge Jeanine Pirro's book is, Liars and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.
A pretty good amusing Mad Magazine style caricature illustration is inserted here, people climbing a wooden pole carrying a load of their own books.
So there we are, just reading along, minding our own business, when suddenly, out of nowhere, she falls into using the second-person pronoun. Readers will wonder why she’s addressing them this way—and then they’ll realize she’s decided to talk directly to Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton or Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro or any of several other people who would rather be waterboarded than pick up her book and read it. “Meryl, you say you didn’t know about Harvey [Weinstein]’s predatory behavior. Really?” She can’t wait for an answer because De Niro has come into view. “Bobby, I think you’re taking your roles too seriously.” Whoops, here’s Hillary. “Hillary, could it be you said nothing because you have experience with pedophiles?” Then she collars Michelle and gives her a tongue-lashing about feminist hypocrisy.Shut up, Andrew Ferguson, that's how Jeanine Pirro actually talks. You must know that. It's her voice.
Much more about Jeanine Pirro, Trump, Republicans and conservative inconsistency and conservative irony from a liberal point of view skip, skip skipptiy-skip.
3. The Consultant. Rick Wilson. Described as frequent MSNBC contributor and longtime political consultant. His book is titled Everything Trump Touches Dies.
Nobody sensible listens to Rick Wilson, far less read one of his books.
Immediately debatable. I'm not interesting in reading any further. Everything Whig is being forced out, everything that's an anchor to prosperity is being dropped, and everything meaningful actually touched by Trump blossoms and thrives. Written by a Whig being forced out, so not worth reading, nor even reading about.
Rick Wilson is terribly slow on the uptake.
The books that Andrew Ferguson's bought and read bore me.
As with Judge Jeanine, the intensity of Wilson’s hatred pushes him into errors of fact and logic. It’s simply not true that Paul Ryan will “defend any outrage” from Trump. He says Ted Cruz “responded meekly” when Trump insulted his wife and slandered his father. That’s not true either. He thinks “the GOP is the party of big government, and it’s all Trump’s fault.” Alas, Trump arrived rather late to that party ...4. The Historian. Dinesh D’Souza’s fascinating Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party. Described as refreshing for being more than a book about Trump. It reminds Ferguson of the ascent of man charts that trace the evolution of humanity.
Johnson is central to D'Souza's thesis, claiming that newly released documents prove President Johnson was member of Ku Klux Klan and Johnson was central to Democrat about face from racist resistance to Civil Rights legislation to cynical support to break up black families and keep blacks at poverty level and continue voting Democrat. Ferguson disputes this idea and claims the new evidence is mere rumor.
To take one small example: Lyndon Johnson is a pivotal figure in D’Souza’s tale. Johnson, he writes, “is a man who, according to a memo filed by FBI agent William Branigan, seems to have been in the Ku Klux Klan.” He was? “This memo was only revealed in recent months, with the release of the JFK Files. Progressive media . . . have largely ignored it, trying to pretend it does not exist. Branigan cites a source with direct knowledge.” D’Souza then treats LBJ’s Klan membership as settled fact and a building block in his case against the Democrats.
I’ve got to side with the progressive media on this one. The FBI memo that D’Souza is using to misinform his readers was written in early 1964. It was released last year in the (presumably) final dump of government documents about the Kennedy assassination. It is a piece of raw intelligence, unverified, repeated with no assessment of its credibility. Branigan, the FBI agent, writes that a “confidential informant” told him that the editor of a magazine published by the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana, himself a Klan member, had told the informant that he, the editor, had seen documented proof that Johnson was a member in the 1930s.
No proof was provided.
Johnson is a pivotal figure for D’Souza because he presided over the period in which the party of racism somehow became the party of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act. In an ingenious and completely unsupported argument, D’Souza tells us that these legislative landmarks constituted a spectacular feat of misdirection.5&6. The Russophiles. Gregg Jarrett’s The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump. Craig Unger is on the other team. His House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. SKIP!
I despise all your books. All your new books that fill your head.
These are the type books I would read eagerly forty years ago and fancy myself getting smarter and better informed because of them.
My bookmark would be a stack of index cards ready for new words to look up. I had thousands of those in a cardboard file for them. But not now. There are no new words in these types of books, and there are no new ideas to expand my mind or aid my thinking. I laugh at your reading. Your books choices are keeping you thick.
No wonder your book shelves are groaning.
I can see it. People walk up to to your bookshelf and think to themselves, "Holy shit, what a bizarre collection of crackpot reading." Without bothering to examine any further than scanning a few titles. Not a single book would they be interesting investing time reading. And now they know you are a distorted personality.
The assent of man causes me to think of the assent of books. Goes like this:
Dick and Jane primers --> Classics --> Non fiction --> Fiction --> Bible --> Book of Urantia --> Pop-Up Books.
Hey!
I bought a new book.
It arrives tomorrow.
I've been waiting for its availability.
Wanna see it?
But first, I want to tell you something. People enter my home and walk up to my bookcase and scan titles. They see the titles of classics. They see big fat books predominating and that scares them. This convinces them of my scary deep intellectualism.
I say, "They're all pop-up books."
They look at me bemused and they grin.
That always happens.
The books' width belies their lightness, in physical weight and in heaviness of reading. They're each only a few pages and light as feathers.
They turn back to the book case and remove one. They flip through it. They realize that's done better sitting down with the book on their lap. They sit in a comfortable chair with a stack of big fat books and get lost in them flipping through through book after book.
For mine is a working library.
Grown men and women delight with discoveries. Classical tales POW right in their faces. Books they never bothered to read in words, now available in popping up pictures. "Hey, look at this." They say to each other. People actually sharing books, "What a Mess. It's about children cleaning their room. Look, a tornado, look a whirlpool. Ha ha ha ha ha." And then, "This one is all about birds." And "OMG, this one is Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven." They read aloud the whole book. And, "A whole book about beetles." And, "Here's one about butterflies."
Dinosaurs, Moby Dick, Peter Pan, Jungle Book, Castles, Sharks, Gods and Heroes, Star Wars, Predators, America, Frozen, Beauty and the Beast, Sendak and Reinhart's Hilarious Are You My Mommy?, Nascar, Narnia, The Walking Dead, Harry Potter, Princesses, 20,00 Leagues Under the Sea, Alive, The Ark, Cathedrals, Welcome to the Neighborhood, Alice in Wonderland, Oz, Elves, Fairies, Red Riding Hood, Hollywood, Tall Sailing Ships, Chanukah Lights, The Odyssey, The Little Prince, Hansel and Gretel, The Human Body, All Things Bright and Beautiful, The Pop-Up Book of Sex, Phobias, Mermaids, Nightmares, Alfred Hitchcock, Architecture, Halloween at the Zoo, Science, Leonardo Da Vinci, Snow White, Dragons and Monsters, Flowers, Sam's Sandwich, Animals, Bugs, Mice. Easter Dog, and many many more wonderfully imaginative books that cause you to wonder in delighted amazement about the author, how did you even write this book?
Visitors tell me how they love pop-up books. Couples share them. They pour through the entire collection deciding which ones to pull out and actually read. Right there. On the spot. Just a few minutes and they read the whole book.
And now a book about Persia. Before it was overakentay by religious uckheadsfay.
Zahhak The Legend of the Serpent King. How dramatic!
4 comments:
I have Welcome to the Neighborhood bookmarked for when me great-nevvy turns three. It will blow his mind...thanks for the reco.
Off the top of your head can you think of one that would be good for a two year-old?
There are a ton of them about identifying animals, colors, numbers, alphabet. Noah's ark. Little mice having an adventure. American parks. Reviews say things like, "My two-year old loves it."
Dr. Suess.
I've shown videos of parents reading to children. The frog book is one.
The thing is, adults love the as much as the kids do.
Thanks, Chip, I need to do research. I remembered a cute one last night...not a pop up, but it was the Gingerbread Man (boy). It was made of sturdy carboard with a hole in each page. A string ran through all the holes, on which was a GB boy cut out. The string was tied in a circle and on each page the GB boy could pass through.
I read a lot of history. It doesn't particularly help me understand the world or, for that matter, history, but it's less aggravating than reading about current events. There's some semblance of consensus about the past......The people who had to contemporaneously deal with Lincoln and Stalin had no idea that they were dealing with Lincoln and Stalin. They had no idea that Lincoln was the great man of his age or that Stalin was a hideous monster. It's instructive and edifying to read how heavyweight intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Bernard Shaw could completely misread the big leaders of their eras. I don't hold out much hope that George Will or Thomas Friedman have it all figured out.
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