Stephanie's books and other things

“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a new way of living—one without massacres and torn throats and bonfires of the fallen, without revenants or bastard armies or children ripped from their mothers’ arms to take their turn in the killing and dying.

Once, the lovers lay entwined in the moon’s secret temple and dreamed of a world that was a like a jewel-box without a jewel—a paradise waiting for them to find it and fill it with their happiness.

This was not that world.”

Laini Taylor, you're good.....you're dark, but good. You write books with prettiest words portraying some of the darkest things I've read.

Days of Blood & Starlight lives up to it's predecessor Daughter of Smoke & Bone, which was not easy given how darn good it is.

Karou was mystery to herself and others, then one day she breaks a wishbone which she holds at one end while Akiva, a seraphim (who she loves), holds the other. Magically filled with all her memories of her past life, once broken she remembers everything. She now knows who, and what she is/was. She's Madrigal, a chimera, with the power to resurrect.

Karou makes some terrible monsters with purpose to make war on the seraphim, an enemy of the Chimera. The two have been at war with one another for as long as anyone can remember. Akiva and Madrigal had loved one another once, hope the two peoples could someday be at peace. It didn't end well.

A couple of quotes I liked.....

The Dark

“Take up a weapon and you become an instrument with as pure a purpose as the weapon itself: to find arteries and open them, limbs and sever them; to take what is alive and deliver it unto death.”

The Pretty

“She had said she didn’t feel fear, but it was a lie; this was her fear: being left alone. Because of one thing she was certain, and it was that she could never love, not like that. Trust a stranger with her flesh? The closeness, the quiet. She couldn’t imagine it. Breathing someone else’s breath as they breathed yours, touching someone, opening for them? The vulnerability of it made her flush. It would mean submission, letting down her guard, and she wouldn’t. Ever. Just the thought made her feel small and weak as a child...”

and the Pretty Funny

“Anyone who would wear all white like that clearly had issues. Just looking at him made her wish she had a paintball gun, but hell, you couldn’t pack for every eventuality.”

Son brings us back to the original community we read about in The Giver, and tells us the story from the perspective of Water Claire and ties up the questions about the place where Jonas and Gabe were born.

Everyone in the community is assigned a ‘job’ at the age of 13. Claire was given the job of Vessel. ‘Vessels’ carried ‘Products’ (um, babies) and at 14 Claire produced her one and only product in the form of a Son. There was an issue with the birth and she was relieved of her vessel duties, but she never forgot about her son and was determined to find him at any cost.

I loved The Giver, and really enjoyed the Messenger and The Gathering Blue, so I was very pleased to find out there would be a final chapter in the story. I thought Son delivered nicely upon my expectations. I also have to say that I really like Lois Lowry’s style of writing, everything I’ve read of hers is a bit hard to describe, dreamlike would be the closest I could come.

“It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you're leaving.”

I am an agnostic which means I am firm in my belief that I have no idea what to believe. I don't know what is true and what isn't and no one, no matter how strong your faith, or how strong your lack of faith is.....you don't know either. You don't know what happens to you after you die. You pretty much have to die to find that out. You may really, really, really believe little alien souls are attached to your body and making your life miserable, and that the only way to make it all better is to blow your life savings in Clearwater Florida trying to rid yourself of these little bastards by way of a weird looking machine. It still doesn't make it true, it's purely your free will to believe it is.


Next to art, and generally making things that are pretty and/or interesting, I'm really fascinated with science. Books on the brain are something I generally gravitated towards which is why I picked up Free Will.


Sam Harris is obviously a very intelligent man he generally seems to know what he is talking about. But I can't digest what he is dishing out in Free Will. Basically, if I am following what he is saying (and it is possible I'm NOT) human beings have no free will.....excuse me?


Apparently there have been studies that prove that when we make the decision to do something our brain does the deciding first before we are even aware of our decision consciously. This is done with some fancy imaging machines that catch a blip of some sort go off before you do what you're going to do. So, of course we don't have free will.


I must be missing something.


My head hurts.


Somehow because we don't know what makes our brain decide something before we become aware of what it is that we are deciding we aren't actually deciding anything at all. Uhhh......ok? To me this strengthens the argument that we are something more than just our brains. Maybe....just maybe, what is making the brain do it's business is the energy (or soul if you like to call it that) that animates these meat suits we walk around in. Or not! I don't know but I believe someday science will figure out what that's all about. Science advances insanely fast. Right now I can probably take over a third world country with my Ipad. I can't even imagine what will be invented or discovered in the near future. So for Sam to jump to this conclusion seems premature.


It is more likely we have control over our decisions and that we are responsible for them than not. I believe we have free will to do the right thing despite our circumstances growing up.


I have the free will not to like Free Will all that much and you have the free will to disagree with me about that.....

Also reviewed on Shelfinflicted

Oh, Dor…..Dor……Dor. You silly man. What possessed you to measure time? You screwed things up for the rest of us. Now we have to BE places at certain times and DO things until the time comes when we are allowed to go home. Why did you do this to humanity? Someone should imprison you in a cave for 6000 years and make you think about what you did, and not let you out until you are truly sorry.

Wait….that is what happened.

Dor was a curious man who lived 6000 years in the past. He wanted to measure things, like the movement of sun the moon and the stars. Back then there was little to do, no xbox, cable television with eleventy hundred channels to choose from, no internet……nothing. So he took up a hobby and discovered time.

One day, the king of the land (a former childhood friend) came to visit Dor to ask him for his help on this tower he was working on. The king thought all of Dor’s gadgets he use to measure time would help bring power to his tower, since he was building it to reach heaven, but Dor refused. He just wasn’t that interested. This did not make the king happy so he exiled Dor.

Dor and his wife, Ali, then went out on the road, leaving their children with some family, and on the way they met some strangers. Dor wasn’t too keen on them but his wife was very social, so they always shared a meal with these folks. Apparent Ali was the touchy, feely type and would hug all these strangers, though Dor warned her not to. Ali contracted a deadly disease and died, Dor was kind of upset.

He stormed off towards the Tower of Babel and climbed the steps, he wanted to have a word with God, he wanted more time with his wife. God responded by sticking him in a cave where he didn’t age a day, didn’t need food, water or sleep for 6000 years. During these years, Dor got to hear all the people bitching about time. One day God decided that it was time to release Father Time (yup), but with homework. Dor was to help two people, yes only two after 6000 years, two very unremarkable and unlikeable people.

Ehh, this was a typical Mitch Album book. You are supposed to learn a lesson from it, like in all his books. In this one you are supposed to learn not to take time for granted, not to rush it, not to wish it away and not to take into your own hands. It was a good book, but it didn’t move me like it was meant to.

It in no way made me think differently about time. Love it, hate it, want more of, or less of it……time is what it is and it doesn’t give a crap about you, it’s going to keep moving forward whether you like it or not.

Also posted at Shelfinflicted

Ever since I read this stinker, a book bent on manipulating you into Christianity, and not in proving an afterlife, I had been kind of keeping an eye out for a book that was a credible counterpart to it. I had heard stories of NDEs previous to reading Heaven is For Real, and new such credible cases did exist.

Well, the other night I was flipping channels and stopped on 20/20 because, being that it was close to Halloween they were doing stories on the paranormal and the afterlife. I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff so I watched. One of the stories was about Eben Alexander M.D., a neurosurgeon who had a compelling story of a near death experience that he wrote a book about, this book, and I thought “There’s the book.” And I ran out to get it.

Eben Alexander’s story is as credible as Burppo’s was not. Eben knows the brain, and before his own NDE he didn’t believe that they were anything other than hallucinations brought on by any number of reasons. He was a scientist and a skeptic, he believed in only the material world. Then one morning he awoke with severe back and head pain, he was taken to the hospital where after a spinal tap that showed his spinal fluid to be more puss than fluid, he was diagnosed with incredibly rare gram negative, E-coli bacterial meningitis. Something that was really not possible for him to have.

Eben went into a coma where all of his higher brain function ceased to exist due to the meningitis damaging his brain. He couldn’t hallucinate even if he wanted to, all that capacity was shut down, yet he had a very long and vivid NDE. In short, he went to a dark, muddy gelatin like place first, that he was not at all scared to be in because, as he states, “he had always been there”. From there he emerged into a beautiful, bright, ultra real place with a beautiful, blue eyed woman who was there to guide him. He learned many things instantaneously. He would think of a question and bam! The answer was there.

After a week, Eben came out of his coma. The doctors were amazed, because medically it should never have happened. When he came out of it he sat up in bed and was pretty much normal, except for some oddities that all coma patients face when they wake up. Eben, because of the severity of his illness should have been a vegetable, he’s not. He is back performing neurosurgery and writing books.

And just who was the girl who was his guide on the other side? Eben didn’t recognize her and was disappointed that his guide wasn’t his adoptive father who had already passed. He also had just connected with his birth family. He had met his birth parents and all of his siblings but one, a sister who had died a few years before. The family sent him a photo of his sister and, you guessed it, he recognized her as his guide.

This story is full of science, instead of manipulation. Eben doesn’t preach religion to his readers (unlike that other book) which lead me to believe his story. A Very interesting read.

I enjoyed every bit of this book!

June is a fourteen year old girl who is kind of on the quirky side. She feels like she doesn’t belong to her time and imagines she’s in the middle ages, she wears medieval boots given to her by her uncle Finn. She also has talent for visual art, but she doesn’t quite believe it.

Finn is dying from AIDS when the virus was new and little was known about it. He’s a famous New York artist, and before he dies he wishes to paint a portrait of his nieces, June and Greta. Greta is a sixteen year old who is advanced a grade because she is too smart for her own good, and musically talented. But she’s as mean as a snake to June and takes every opportunity to hurt her sister she can get.

Toby is Finn’s boyfriend of nine years who has been hidden away from the sisters by their mother (Finn’s sister) and father because they don’t know him, and don’t wish to get to know him. Toby is also has AIDS and forms a friendship with June after her beloved uncle Finn passes away from the disease. This is not easy for June, because she believed she was the only person close to Finn.

I can relate with Tell the Wolves I’m Home, especially with the character June. I grew up the odd middle child with a popular, smart older sister who was (and is) as mean as a snake. In Greta’s case, it turns out she has a heart. My sister? Not so much, the older she gets the crueler she gets. I make my living as a visual artist, I have a brother who is gay and has been with his partner for fourteen years. I love his partner as much as any brother and I cannot imagine him being hidden away and never knowing him.

How very sad that would be.

This is a very touching, coming of age book.

“Oh…….Sweet Jesus”- Joe Scarborough

So last night was the last presidential debate and all of us are a bit tired of politics at the moment, even political geeks like me. Also, considering the fact I live in Ohio, Ohio, Ohio, (if you live anywhere else, multiply your ads by ten) the most salivated over state in the nation……..well, I’m wanting this over! But, never the less, I had to read this book.

Why? Because, like you may have experienced yourself, I have been through some mind boggling conversations with those on the tea party extremes of today’s Republican Party. The absolute denial of facts as they are pointed out to them confounds me. When I read the title of this book I thought, “yes! Finally an explanation.”

An example of a conversation with an extreme teaparty type Republican, let’s call him Skeeter.

“Hey there Skeeter, what’cha watching?”

“I’m watching a story on Obama. It’s really scary! Did you know that he’s a secret Muslim, Kenyon, Socialist, Communist, Nazi with a crazy Christian pastor? And that he has a plan to destroy America from within and a plan on world domination? He’s going to take away our guns AND force women to have abortions when they don’t even need them AND he’s going to force a government takeover of health care with DEATH PANELS!” pant, pant, pant. “He shouldn’t even be president……he’s foreign!! Plus I heard he’s GAY!”

“Wow Skeeter, that is scary….I guess, but the good news is that all of that is false.”

“Huh? No, it has to be true; they said it on the TV machine.”

“Well, for starters you can’t be Muslim and have a crazy Christian pastor. His religion should not be a factor anyway. He’s not from Kenya, he was born in Hawaii. You can’t be a Socialist, a Communist, and a Nazi because they are a completely different ideology from each other. He’s not trying to destroy America, just the opposite, I’m not so sure about the current Republican party though. He doesn’t want to rule the world, this country is fucked up enough he doesn’t have the time to rule the rest of the planet. He hasn’t tried to take your guns in the last four years. How do you force non-pregnant women to abort a non-existent pregnancy? Health care needs reforming and there are no death panels. Have you seen Michelle? He’s not gay……not that that would matter.”

“But how do you know for sure Stephanie? Like, how do you know he wasn’t born in Kenya?”

“He has a birth certificate that he has released from the state of Hawaii, here it is online. If that’s not enough proof for you, here’s a copy of the birth announcement dated in 1961 printed in a Hawaiian newspaper.”

“That don’t prove nuthin’ Stephanie.”

“Uh…..yes it does.”

“Nope. He probably has a time machine and he took it back to 1961 to plant the birth certificate and the article so he could become president to destroy America!”

“Skeeter, that’s insane.”

This conversation could go on forever. Chris Mooney calls this motivated reasoning. When you believe something as strongly as Skeeter does it becomes almost physical in the brain and nothing short of surgery can remove this belief. Think about the cults who predict the end of the world, it never happens, yet these people are so invested in this belief that they always come up with a new date, rather than admit to themselves they made a mistake. Skeeter is extreme, a closed minded authoritarian according to the author. Not all Republicans are this extreme, but they are most certainly closed minded by definition. That’s how they can stick by a candidate no matter how bad they turn out to be. They are a loyal crowd, for better or for worse.

Now for the opposite person, the extreme liberal, let’s call him Kyle.

“Hi Kyle. What’cha reading?”

“Oh hi, a blog about how Obama hasn’t done EVERYTHING I wanted him to do in the last four years, so I’m going to vote for the Green candidate in protest.”

“But that’s just throwing your vote away Kyle! You know that the president is your best bet to get what you want; Romney will do nothing for you. Protest? I don’t think the president will be thinking about how he failed you…….”What? We lost Kyle? What could we have done? Maybe if we would have got him a unicorn that farts glitter…….”

“A glitter-farting unicorn would buy my vote, I admit…….but come on Stephanie, he didn’t magically fix everything in four years like he promised he would. I’m very disappointed. Plus his performance in the first debate was horrible.”

“He didn’t promise that, he said the road would be long and he would need our help, that he couldn’t do it alone. Besides, I didn’t think the debate was all that bad. You fought for him in 2008, made phone calls and went knocking on doors. You loved him, now you turn on him? ”

“Yep!”

The problem with the extreme liberal is that, like all liberals, they are open minded. Except more so. They will change their mind on a dime. New information will send them off flailing their arms in a new direction. Think Chris Mathews after the first debate. It didn’t go as well as Chris had hoped so he went mental. Pretty much declaring it a tragedy in all out panic, I yelled “you’re not helping Chris!” at the tv that night.

To sum it up, if you put facts in front of a liberal with a strong belief, that disproves his belief, he will change his mind most of the time. Try the same thing with a teaparty type, and you will find him to stick to his guns come hell or high-water……or facts.

Do I understand Republicans any better now that I read this book? Um….not really, I’m not sure that’s possible. But, by all means read the book. It’s very interesting.

There are many rave reviews for this book, but I fail to understand why. I was completely underwhelmed it, yet it seems everyone else found it orgasmic. I’m left scratching my head.

Angels are real. But they are not the kind, loving beings we have made them out to be in today’s popular culture. They're like the angels of the bible, out for blood. For a reason no one knows (yet) the angels have attacked the humans of earth, a few people survive and do what they can to get by.

Penryn, her wheelchair bound sister Paige and her schizophrenic mother are among the survivors. One day a feather falls from the sky in front of them and terror sets in. They fear that feather belongs to an angel…the fear is warranted. An angel falls from the sky followed by others,his enemies, who cut his wings off, ouch. During the fight Paige is plucked from her wheelchair and is taken away. Penryn saves the angel, Raffe’s, life in hopes he will give up information on where her sister was taken. The mother runs off in terror......smart.

Raffe is beautiful, a perfect specimen of the male variety (of course) and Penryn is drop dead gorgeous (of course). They reluctantly team up to find Paige and to find a way to have Raffe’s wings reattached.

Penryn finds herself attracted to Raffe, and Raffe finds her attractive as well even though he is an angel who has been around since before the beginning of time. What could they possibly have in common besides their physical beauty? Me personally, I can hardly spend five minutes with the teens I work with before there is nothing left to talk about. I like them very much, but there is only so much we have in common.

I thought Angelfall was good, but not world changing……earth shattering……mind blowing. Part of the problem may be is that I read Daughter of Smoke and Bone before I read Angelfall and it’s (in my opinion) a much better book on angels.

The recommended amount of servings of fruits and vegetables a person is supposed to get is 5 to 10 a day and I was not even close to that. So I decided to get a juicer to help me get there, and I needed some recipes and information about juicing. I got a few samples sent to my kindle and picked this book to purchase first.

It has many recipes, both for fruit and veg, and so far those I've tried have been very good.......except for the one vegetable recipe I tried.

It was truly terrible! Now I'm sure not all people will feel this way, by all means try the vegetables......but sweet baby Jesus, for me, it was awful. I love properly cooked veggies, well most of them, but I have never been a fan of raw veggies except for the lettuce family. I guess I shouldn't be surprised I didn't like a bunch of ground up and squeezed out raw veg all mixed up together.

My reaction went something like this.....

First sip: Hey, that's not that bad.
Second sip: Meh, it isn't knocking my socks off.
Third sip: Oh God, yuck......I'll keep going if it kills me.
Fourth: I am not going much further....
Fifth: Okay, that's it I quit!

If any of you out you have done this juicing thing and have any recipes for me to try that you think I might find palatable.....please pass it along. In the mean time, I will stick to the fruit juices until I hear back from you.

If this book didn't have a dog as one of the mian characters this would have been a three star for me.

Hig survives a super flu out break that kills off everyone he loves except for his dog Jasper and his airplane The Beast (which is also the name of an awesome roller coaster at Kings Island in Cincinnatti). He teams up with a man who is now a sociopath, but might not have always been before the shit hit the fan. They hold up at a small airport that they can protect with the help of a tower, a few guns, good aim, a dog that growls at the sign of trouble and the Beast that Hig flys to scope the area for intruders. Because, you see, everyone turns mean and murderous.

This is a problem I am beginning to have with books like this (I know it's distopian), the assumption when something really bad happens, like a super flu, everybody who had moral values prior to the event turn into killing machines automatically. I don't believe that is the way it would go down in reality. When 9/11 happened everyone pulled together and were kinder to one another than they were on 9/10, at least for a little while. So I believe if a pandemic were to sweep the globe and kill almost everyone, human nature would bring people together probably out of shear loneliness more than anything. "oh hi there! Good god it's been a long time since I've seen another face! Too bad we can't talk and get to know each other because I have to kill you.". Bang! "Now that's a shame."

But that would'nt make for a very good story, and this story was about a bleak future for the human race. As far as that's concerned I think the author did a good job. I did have an issue with the part where after Hig finds a couple of other people and after he convinces them not to kill him and then plans to fly them out , he does all this math to calculate how much weight he can safely carry on take off, figures out he would have to leave the man and take the woman...but barely. So the plan is to pick up the man from a near by stretch of highway where take off would be easier, ok, cool, that's smart. They load up the plane with gear, a couple of lambs, and the girlfriend and they just barely make it over the trees. Hey, dumbass, why didn't the girlfriend, gear and lambs go to the highway with the dad? I'm sure if the frail women couldn't walk some kind of cart pulled by left behind livestock could have been devised!.......so that was kind of rediculus.

But the best part of the book is the relationship between Hig and his dog Jasper. Jasper is all that is left of his old life, a reminder of how life used to be before. He did a good job with that.

3.5

If a mentally ill person had not been able to get his hands on a gun, the secret service was doing the job that it does today, if doctors didn’t consider the science of antisepsis the way the anti science crowd considers climate change today, Ohio would have had a significant president in James A. Garfield.

I had a long review written here that seemed to have grown out of control. I decided I would let you read the book instead, and you should. In short(er) Mr. Garfield grew up poorer than poor. He rose out of it, went to college then into politics. He was an abolitionist and worked with the Underground Railroad. He was against the secession of the southern states and became an accomplished military man. He was intelligent, kind and empathetic, everyone loved him. He proved the Pythagorean Theorem while in congress just for something to do. He became the president of the United States against his will but accepted this challenge without complaint. He never once campaigned for any of his political positions. Unimaginable today.

A delusional man with a gun walked up to President Garfield at a train station one day and shot him in the back. At that time the president was unguarded so as to be easily accessed by the public. Being guarded seemed to be too” royal” for Americans and they believed their president should be accessible to everyone. This was after the assassination of President Lincoln. What the hell.

Doctors poked and prodded the man’s wounds in the most horrifically unsanitary ways; a germ-aphobe would have crapped themselves, twice. Garfield developed raging infections which is what ultimately killed him after 80 days of torture. During that time he never complained. He died due to medical incompetence, he would have survived if doctors had opened their minds a tad and started using Dr. Listers antisepsis practices which were widely accepted throughout Europe, but no, they denied the science. He would have lived if they did nothing; the doctors killed him as much as the assassin did.

He was a great man; I wonder what would have been different if he had finished his presidency?

cross posted at Shelfinflicted

I can find no fault with Cloud Atlas.

Because of that I have had a difficult time coming up with this review. This book could have gone all wrong, its premise could have easily tipped this book over the edge into gimmick but David Mitchell pulled this off seamlessly. It blows my mind.

This book is six very different stories, occurring in different time periods that on the surface have nothing to do with each other. Yet they have everything to do with each other.

In 1850, a lawyer crosses the pacific during which he falls seriously ill and is treated by a doctor on board with unusual methods.

In 1931 a young composer of questionable morals works his way into the house of an old, formerly great composer who, due to late stage syphilis has lost his edge. During his time there he writes his masterpiece.

In 1975 an ambitious reporter working for a gossip rag goes after a big story that makes her a target.

Present day, an older gentleman working in publishing finally finds success, after working his entire life, with a book with ties criminal types. He soon finds trouble as well. In an attempt to find a safe place to lie low he ends up in a retirement home against his will.

In the near future, people are cloned and are genetically engineered for slave labor. They are called fabricants, and one fabricant, Sonmi 451 starts to think outside of the box. When she does all hell breaks loose.

Far into the future, we find Zachry living in Hawaii just as people did in the distant past, in tribes and in huts and with zero technology. Language itself is even breaking down. He meets a young woman that shows up on a ship that still has technology.

Zachry’s story is the center of the book and is the only one that is told completely without a break. All the rest are told up to a certain point and then they break and start with the next story in order. Once we hear Zachry’s tale we move backwards and hear the conclusion to the earlier stories to end up where we started, on the ship crossing the Pacific. It’s an onion.

All of these stories could have been written by different authors. You have an historical novel, a crime mystery, a comedy, a sci fi and an apocalyptic novel all mashed up and connected.

Superb.

If you are an American you need to read The Grapes of Wrath. It scares the poop out of me because, my fellow Americans, we are repeating history. If live anywhere else read it as well as a guide for what not to do.

In the Grapes of Wrath Mr. Steinbeck tells the tale of the first great depression through the Joad family from Oklahoma, who has been displaced from their family farm through no fault of their own. You see, there was a big bad drought which made farming impossible. In those days the family farm fed the family and what they had left over they sold. But when the drought hit the only thing that would grow was cotton, you can’t eat cotton, and that crop sucked the life right out of the soil so no other crop could grow in it for a very long time.

“These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.”

Some guys with a lot of cash came along and bought up all the struggling family farms and leased the land back to the former family farmers and when they couldn’t produce, the new Owners kicked the families out of their homes. Put them on the streets, children and elderly and all……..who cares, right? Poor people are less than.

From California came hand bills, pamphlets promising jobs and urging the homeless to drag their whole lives via barely moving junk heaps to the golden state where grapes grew in bunches by the side of the road. What choice did they have? They drove across deserts and mountains, losing loved ones along the way, they answered those hand bills in droves. What else could they do?

What happened when they got to California? They didn’t get jobs, they got ridicule. They were called Okies and shitheals and were looked down upon. “How can they live like that?” The people with money would ask, as if being poor was a choice. As if they were just lazy and all it would take to get out of poverty was to get a job……but there were no fucking jobs. The owners sent out more handbills then they needed to. Why? Because the more men begging for a job the less the owners would have to pay them. Supply and demand. The greedy sons a bitches wanted to pay as little as possible, and that is exactly what they did. The Okies did not have a union of course.

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”

Who are the “great owners” today? The Walton family (of Walmart), six of them, have the same amount of money as the bottom 40% of Americans. That is 124,720,000 people, people. $93 billion…..BILLION and they want more, more money than could be spent in several lifetimes. They don’t need it all, but the rest of America does. Do you think the Walton’s might have an interest in keeping people poor? Go check out who’s in that store at 3am.

Let’s also take a look at who is running against President Obama. Mittens is so rich that he doesn’t even know what a doughnut is, and he’s fighting for the Waltons and all of the 1 %. He’s so rich he thinks he is entitled to the office and “us people” do not need to see his tax returns……the nerve of us, move on. We need to sit down, shut up, and stop asking questions because he, being a rich bastard, is an “owner” and we should know our place. Not bloody likely.

“Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor. Pray God some day a kid can eat.
And the associations of owners knew that some day the praying would stop.

And there’s the end.”


Also posted at Shelfinflicted

When I was in the sixth grade we had a science project. I remember this well, we had to learn all about rockets and space travel. When we were to reach the end of all the information, we were going to have a test on what we learned.

Nothing new there right? Oh but there was……

The person who had the highest grade on the test was to be the one to “launch” a rocket, you know, the model rockets made from cardboard with a built in parachute for its descent…the ones that you would sometimes put a toad inside as a passenger (I never did that, but I heard he traveled well…not me I swear!) Those rockets seemed incredibly dangerous. I wonder if they’re still around?

Anyway, I decided that person was going to be me because, at the time, I thought I really wanted to go to space. I studied my sixth grade butt off, and much to the dismay of all the geeky boys in my class I aced that test. That test was mine, and I got to launch the rocket. They all glared at me through they’re sullen eyes during the countdown. Sorry boys.

My grandma declared that I was going to be the first women in space. She was positive I was going to be an astronaut.

I am sooo glad she was wrong, because according to this book there is nothing more unpleasant in every conceivable way than space travel. With the problems of the food going in and then the inevitable coming out the other end, I think maybe they should have just taped a diaper on and been done with it. All the cramped quarters, no way, I get claustrophobic in crowds. And then there is the high likely hood of death…and things like that.

Until the posh Star trek like space ships with gravity are invented I’ll pass on the trip to Mars.

And there is the end for my grandma’s dream.

What I Saw and How I lied is not going to end up as one of those books that returns to my thoughts now and again. It's perfectly forgettable.

This is a coming of age book set at the end of World War 2. Evie is a teen who's step father, Joe, has just come back from the war and he's not exactly the man she remembered. Joe decides that the family should have a vacation and then schleps himself, his wife, his mother and Evie to Palm Beach, Florida in the middle of god awful hot August In the days before air conditioning.

A handsome GI by the name of Peter shows up, who coincidentally (or not) served with Joe in the war, and catches young Evies eye. Before long she is madly in love.

This book is filled with lots of nostalgia, dresses with pumps dyed to match, red lipstick and lots of smoking. Future lung cancer victims of Ameerica. It was well written, but I don't think I fancied the style.

I liked it, it wasn't bad nor was it great. Meh.

Mia and her family, father, Mother and younger brother go for a drive on a sunny morning after a light snowfall the night before. In a moment, their world is turned upside down in the form of a devastating car crash.

Mia finds herself watching her mangled body being pulled from the crash and follows what takes place in the hospital as she decides if she should stay in this life or to move on.

Mia has couple of reasons to stay, one is for music. She has a major talent for the cello and is about enter Julliard. Then there is her boyfriend who also has a talent for music, rock and roll, he and his band finds early success. He, of course, wants her to stay.

So, does she?

I read s bit about the author and I read a blog post or two by the author Gayle Forman. What I read made me like the book a bit more than I would have. First of all I learned that Gayle is a huge Joss Whedon fan (Buffy/Avengers) and that was a big plus. Second, I learned this book was a result of a personal tragedy. Her, and her husband’s close friends and children were involved in a devastating car crash that none survive. In addition, soon after, a friend and co-worker fell ill and passed away. All of this happened just weeks before September 11th, 2001.

This sadness and subsequent healing was channeled into If I Stay, and made it very special. Loved the book.