Jim Loves Books

A Review of Shock Value by Jason Zinoman

2011-09-06T11:25:00.000-07:00

A Shock You’ll Enjoy

By James Patterson

If you love horror films – especially those made during the 1970s – you’ll enjoy Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (Penguin, $25.95, 274 pages).

Though many fine horror films were made in the 1960s – such as Night of the Living Dead – according to Zinoman “horror was stuck in the past,” with directors William Castle and Roger Corman, among others, who relied on veteran stars, such as Boris Karloff, to chill drive-in theater audiences. The 1970s became the era of the New Horror, says Zinoman.

It took a new breed of director to push the limits of the horror film into mainstream success. Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, made in 1968, foretold the demise of traditional horror films, with guys in rubber monster suits. Films about serial killers soon became the rage.

Independent directors like Wes Craven – The Last House on the Left – and Tobe Hooper – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – used young unknown actors and subjected them to such horrors as on-screen rape and cannibalism. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which introduced audiences to Leatherface, was a mainstream success that moved from drive-in theaters to the Museum of Modern Art, thanks to a mob-connected, New York film distributor flush with cash from the porn classic Deep Throat.

Throughout the ‘70s other directors, like John Carpenter and Ridley Scott, copied Craven and Hooper and produced such memorable films as Halloween, which introduced audiences to serial killer Michael Myers, and Alien, a sci-fi classic with a particularly nasty creature.

This Halloween indulge yourself with Shock Value. It’s a quick, enjoyable, and spooky read.

James Patterson can be reached at jimjptt@aol.com.

(c) 2011 James Patterson

Is it "He or "She"?

2010-04-21T15:51:00.000-07:00

When using pronouns, always remember these Writer's Digest guidelines on two of the more troublesome ones.

Pronoun Problems: "He/She," "He or She," or Just Plain "He"?
Q: Is there a special rule regarding which pronoun to use when talking about a non-specific gender ("he/she," "he or she," "he") or is it completely the writer’s choice? —Jarrett Z.

A: For years, the masculine pronouns (he, his, him) graced most literary work when referring to a non-specific gender. It was an unspoken rule that was sexist and one-sided, but it stood in place for a long time. Being the equal-opportunity pronoun nation that we are today, that rule has changed—or, more precisely, completely disappeared.

Both male and female pro-nouns are acceptable to use when the sex isn’t specified. Therefore it’s OK to write “he/she,” “he or she” or declare one gender to use throughout an article. Many writers will stick with their own biological genes—men tend to use the pronoun “he” while women generally use “she.” Both ways are perfectly fine. The preference lies in the hands of the writer.

Many magazines, including the one you’re reading (Writer's Digest), take a different approach. Writing “his or her” or “his/her” can start to look clunky, and No. 1 on the Writer’s Digest 10 Commandments list states: “Thou shalt avoid clunkiness at all costs.” Our rule is to alternate pro-nouns: If we say “he” in one paragraph referencing a non-specified gender, the next time an example comes up in the article we’ll use “she.” And so on. Switching back and forth is easy to do, gets rid of the clutter and keeps readers from calling you unwanted names.

Fewer and Less: Some Guidance from WD

2010-04-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

If you've ever been stumped on whether to use "fewer" or "Less," here is guidance from Writer's Digest.

Q: I always thought “fewer” and “less” meant the same thing, but a friend told me I was wrong. What’s the difference?—Anonymous

A: Many people believe “fewer” and “less” are interchangeable, but that’s not true. While both words signify a smaller quantity of something, each has a more specific use.

“Fewer” emphasizes number and modifies plural nouns, as in a smaller number of persons or individual items. Fewer than 20 parents attended last night’s PTA meeting. I have fewer strikeouts than anyone on my softball team.

“Less” focuses on matters of degree, bulk or quantity. It often modifies collective nouns, mass nouns and nouns denoting an abstract whole. I asked our former managing editor, Maria Witte, for an example, and she said, “The more you bug me, Brian, the less respect I have for you.” Respect is measured in degrees, so “less” fits.

When examining a sentence, think of it in terms of individual items vs. quantity. I had less than $20 in my wallet (a quantity). I had fewer than 20 one-dollar bills in my wallet (individual items). Once you understand the definitions, you’ll waste less time and have fewer problems with the issue (Hey, that's a good mnemonic device to remember the difference!).

Pet peeve alert: Never, under any circumstances, use “fewer in number” or “fewer number of people.” It’s redundant and unnecessary. “Fewer people” works just fine.

Review in Progress

2008-04-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

Watch this space for another book review.

Gerald Ford and History

2008-04-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

Write It When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford
By Thomas M. DeFrank
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Price: $25.95
Pages: 258
Year: 2007

Gerald Ford was a remarkable politician and president. When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 for income tax evasion and other criminal acts he committed while Maryland governor, President Richard Nixon selected House Minority leader Ford to serve out the balance of Agnew’s term. Ford became the first unelected vice president after he was confirmed by Congress.

In August 1974, Nixon resigned over his role in the Watergate scandal and Ford became the first unelected president. He quickly selected Nelson A. Rockefeller as his vice president.

Ford met DeFrank while he was serving as Vice President. One day Ford reflected on his role as Vice President and his poor treatment by Nixon’s White House staff. “They’re angry and they’re bitter because they know Nixon is finished,” DeFrank told Ford. “It’s over. He (Nixon) can’t survive, and you’re gonna be president.”

“You’re right,” Ford said. “But when the pages of history are written, nobody can say I contributed to it.”

After this conversation, DeFrank promised Ford not to print the conversation until after Ford died. The two men began a friendship that lasted until Ford’s death in 2006. They met on and off over the years to discuss Ford’s presidency, the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Ford felt more in common with Carter than Reagan. “There was a bond because they both felt they had been defeated by Reagan,” Ford biographer James Cannon said. Ford held harsh judgment of Reagan because he refused to campaign for Ford in 1976. Ford considered Reagan “lazy,” “naïve” and “inexperienced.”

The most surprising revelation in the book concerns the relationship between Ford and Bill Clinton. As Clinton was being impeached by the House of Representatives, Ford and Carter wrote an op/ed piece for the New York Times in which they said Clinton’s Oval Office affair with an intern did not constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

During the impeachment hearings, Clinton asked Ford to lobby House Republicans on his behalf and to try and end the impeachment process and spare himself embarrassment. Ford said he would help if Clinton admitted lying under oath. Clinton refused to do that and Ford didn’t lobby for an end of the impeachment process.

Later, Ford told DeFrank that Clinton was a “sex addict.” “Betty and I have talked about this a lot. He’s (Clinton’s) sick—he’s got an addiction. He needs treatment. He’s sick.”

Still, Clinton praised Ford on many occasions. In 1999, Clinton awarded Ford the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a White House ceremony.

Throughout the book, Ford comes across as an able and intelligent politician. He was not a rigid ideologue, but a man who believed in compromise. Ford performed admirably, in the White House and as a private citizen, when history called on him. No other politician has gone through the political ordeal Ford managed with grit and courage. Gerald Ford was a remarkable man.

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Jim Patterson, an economist and journalist, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He worked for President Ford at the 1976 GOP convention in Kansas City.

Journalism's Finest Hour

2008-04-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
Authors: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 518
Year: 2006
Price $30

Book Review:

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Knopf) by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff is a history of race journalism in America.

During the segregation era, national newspapers assigned reporters to report on black issues in the South. The Emmett Till murder, integration at the University of Mississippi, and peaceful civil rights demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King were big news events but most southern newspapers either refused to report on them or reported biased accounts of the events.

After the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional in 1954, reporters flocked to the South to cover integration and resistance to it. Some states voluntarily integrated; Mississippi and Alabama refused. When Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett to integrate schools, Barnett said, “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide.”

Alabama Gov. George Wallace was equally defiant. When ordered to integrate the University of Alabama, Wallace stood in the doorway of the registrar’s office to prevent two black students from enrolling. He stepped aside after federal officials read him a statement from Attorney General Kennedy.

“Reporters were drawn to [Wallace] like biologists are drawn to the unexpected emergencies of an old virus they believed had been exterminated,” the authors write.

Roberts and Klibanoff hold the view that civil rights victories in the South were a joint effort by Dr. King and other leaders and the reporters who covered the speeches, marches and killings. They prove their view in this excellent book.

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Jim Patterson, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, is an award-winning journalist based in San Francisco.

Fame! Fame! Fame!

2008-01-05T18:39:00.000-08:00

Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truth Behind America’s Favorite Addition
Author: Jake Halpern
Published: 2007
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Fame Junkies is the book the fame industry doesn’t want you to read. At times funny, other times sad, Jake Halpern, author of Braving Home, has written an excellent critical account of what it means to be famous in America.

There are many striking examples of what passes for fame in America today. Halpern starts off with hip-hop star J-Kwon, who had a six-inch long bar code tattooed on his forearm. Why? “I got the bar code because I knew that someday I’d be a product,” he told Halpern. J-Kwon has earned some fame in the hip-hop world and the respect of countless other hip-hop wannabes.

Our culture of celebrity got its start, Halpern says, from the long ago television program Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Today Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and American Idol feed society’s young, and not so young, with visions of instant fame and wealth. American Idol, Halpern tells us, “has more viewers than the nightly news on the three major networks combined.”

Magazines like People, Teen People and US Weekly, as well as the supermarket tabloids, keep us informed about the every movement of Brad and Jen, Nick and Jessica, Britney and Kevin, Paris and Nicole and all the rest. We have a 24/7 cycle of celebrity. Enquiring minds want to know who is with whom and for how long and what the breakup was about.

These TV programs and magazines have brainwashed legions of kids into thinking they too can be famous. Halpern introduces us to Personal Best, a small town fame school for kids wanting to be stars of commercials, billboards or, the ultimate, a national television program.

The school, conveniently for Halpern, is located in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. Jessica White is a Personal Best graduate. You might have seen a lot of her in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.

A former beauty queen, also a local TV “movie lady,” manages Personal Best for kids of varying ages who want to learn acting and modeling so they can go to Los Angeles and be famous. Halpern meets one young lady who immediately tells him, “You can ask anyone in my family or any of my friends, and they will tell you that what I want more than anything is to be famous.” It is a desire she shares with others at the school.

Instead of memorizing poetry or historical speeches, kids at Personal Best memorize mouthwash commercials in hopes it will lead to fame and fortune. And their parents pay good money for them to get this “training.” As the reader gradually learns, when dreams of fame are at stake, no expense is too great.

Students at Personal Best are trained to go to the International Modeling and Talent Association (IMTA) convention in New York City. Many of Buffalo’s budding young talents have never been to New York City and, in some cases families can barely afford the trip and the convention fees, which Halpern estimates at $10,000. Since West Coast agents will attend the convention, families intent on fame find the money to attend.

Throughout the book, Halpern interviewed psychologists and educators who study fame and celebrity. It helps readers understand some of the illogical behaviors of the fame seekers.

One psychologist says, “The danger is that if these adolescents don’t curb all this daydreaming with a healthy dose of reality, they could end up in relationships that are manipulative or exploitive.” This seems excellent advice for the many young girls intent on fame at any cost.

From New York, Halpern takes us to the IMTA convention in Los Angeles. It is here that Ashton Kutcher and Elijah Wood were discovered. Equipped with a press badge, Halpern is besieged by kids wanting to give him their “head shots” along with a speech on why they want to be famous. After one young boy delivers his speech, a veteran of the conventions tells Halpern “it takes balls to do what that kid is doing.”

Halpern leaves the convention to visit a colony of young would be stars and starlets at Oakwood Toluca Hills, just outside Hollywood. Built in 1971, the gated community has 1,151 apartments. Some of the kids live with a parent or guardian while older kids room together.

Hilary Swank and Jamie Foxx passed though Oakwood. Sadly, many parents finance their kids’ stay at Oakwood with money that would have been used to finance college. Alas, economics and life are all about choices.

For those who don’t have the confidence to become a celebrity, there is still fame to be found in the Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants. I found this the saddest chapter. One guy works as a personal assistant to Tiffani Thiesen, a star of the 1990s show Beverly Hills 90210.

The show may be defunct, but we learn from “celebrities” like Thiesen, and the guy who assists her, that once granted celebrity status is permanent. The average celebrity personal assistant earns $56,000 annually, but psychologists suggest they also get satisfaction from the reflected glory of being near a celebrity.

Halpern learns from an academic that teen participants in a survey preferred dinner with Paris Hilton and 50 Cent rather than Jesus Christ. Halpern also informs us that teens prefer celebrity status by a wide margin over careers as political or corporate leaders. Dismal news? At least one academic suggests teen minds will likely change with maturity.

The author condenses celebrity craziness to a single person: Marcy Braunstein, a Pittsburg housewife who idolizes rock star Rod Stewart. She has a “Rod Room” in her house with such items as a glass he drank from. She travels around the world to see his performances.

Why does she love Rod Stewart? “It’s the whole package—the hair, the raspy tenor of the voice, the high cheekbones—it just drives me crazy,” Braunstein tells Halpern. When she learns Stewart has no star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she takes this on with a personal zeal that astounds.

Braunstein succeeds and gets Rod his star. She even gets to give a speech when it is unveiled in a high profile Hollywood ceremony. Stewart is appreciative, but not overly affectionate to the obsessed Braunstein.

Halpern ends his critical look at fame at The Fund, a Woodland Hills, California, retirement home, where he meets some of Hollywood’s octogenarian stars. They manage to keep their spirits high by waiting, hoping and praying for a comeback and an Academy Award.

“Ultimately, our obsession with celebrities isn’t about them; it’s about us and our needs,” Halpern writes. “We love them, or hate them, or pity them, or profess not to care but secretly do. In one way or another we use them. And when they grow old and lose the traits that once made them noteworthy--when they become frail, aged mortals like the residents of The Fund--we conveniently forget them, because they no longer serve our needs.”

Fame Junkies is an excellent critical appraisal of the American love affair with celebrity and fame. After reading this book, I suspect readers will think beyond the smiling faces on TV and magazine covers to the kids who spent everything and got nothing in return. This book is an instant classic of our times.

-30-Jim Patterson, an economist and freelance journalist, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. A former Washingtonian, he now writes from San Francisco.

Is Anger the Best Medicine?

2008-01-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now
Author: Peter Wood
Publisher: Encounter Books
Year: 2007, price $25.95 hardcover
Pages: 304

In this book anthropologist Peter Wood asks: “Have you slugged anyone today?” Seriously, a few years ago “Have you hugged anyone today?” could be heard across the land. What has changed America into an “angri-culture”? Allow me to paraphrase one final overused phrase: “Baby, We’ve come a long, angry way.”

Early Americans became so angry over the British tax on tea that a famous party was held and the tea dumped into Boston harbor. Taxes remain a sore point with many Americans, especially when we read that we paid for an $800 government toilet seat.

Delegates to the World Trade Organization are angry with each other over farm goods. As the debate rages on, more and more diplomats, politicians, lawyers, and, yes, Hollywood celebrities join in. It’s fun to be angry and profitable, too.

In the preface Wood writes: “The performance-art aspect of anger; its merit badge ‘I’m angry, therefore I’m real; and road-rage-respect-me-right-based-you’re a liar fury” characterize what he calls “New Anger.” America has become “a culture that celebrates anger.”

“The symbolic representation of anger has … become ubiquitous in American life…,” Wood writes. If you doubt him stop in your local Post Office and look at the faces on the customers queued for service. Outside a post office Wood sees a bumper sticker that reads “I see dumb people.”

We can see anger on display at anti-war rallies. We see it at anti-Bush rallies. We also see it at anti-same-sex marriage rallies. Check your local newspaper for an anger event near you.

In the 2004 Democratic Presidential Primary in Iowa, frontrunner Howard Dean lost the race and his temper. Thanks to the 24/7 cable news cycle, the world witnessed Dean in an angry rant. It disturbed voters and finished his candidacy.

Republicans took notice of the public’s reaction to Dean. In early 2006, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman told ABC News that “[New York] Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have a lot of anger.” He concluded, “Voters do not send angry candidates to the White House.” “Anger” as political strategy backfired on the Republicans in the 2006 election.

Sports are not immune from displays of anger. Indiana Pacer guard Ron Artest attacked a fan he thought had thrown a cup of beer at him. Wood suggests that some fans go to sports events in hopes of seeing a fight, planned or actual. Basketball has taken on the moniker “gangstaball.” Interestingly, Wood failed to cite any cases of violence at high school sport events.

In an earlier era, Wood writes, “a person giving free vent to anger was seen as weak and rather pathetic.” Not any longer. “We feel entitled to express that emotion [anger], and perhaps more importantly, we feel justified in feeling it in the first place in contexts where earlier generations would have felt ashamed.”

Obviously Ann Coulter, author of “Treason,” felt no shame when she charged some of the 9/11 widows profited from their family tragedies. Most recently, Coulter called Democrat John Edwards a “faggot.” She discovered long ago that anger was profitable. To date, her books have been bestsellers.

There are more ways for people to express their anger today. We have blogs, cable news channels and endless talk radio. Rush Limbaugh vents his anger to millions of conservative listeners, while Al Franken, author of “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot,” plays to a liberal audience.

“Americans today tend to see excess anger as more of a mental-health problem than a moral issue,” Wood writes. Thus, we have a multitude of materials and classes on anger management.

Wood takes a brief foray into ethnicity to explain cultural acceptance of anger. For example, Native Americans have a right to distrust government for taking their land. African Americans have a right to speak out against racism.

Political anger receives a chapter of its own. It is the longest chapter at fifty-one pages. Wood devotes too many pages defending President Bush from critics, like Jonathan Chait who wrote “I Hate President George W. Bush” for The New Republic. The author fails to examine why many columnists and much of the public direct their anger at Bush.

The book’s most glaring omission is the episode involving Vice President Cheney and Democratic Senator Pat Leahy. On the floor of the U.S. Senate an angry Cheney told Leahy “Fuck yourself.” The Washington Post reported it exactly as our faith-based vice president said it. Was Cheney apologetic? Hell, no!

When a reporter asked the vice president if he was sorry he had used the “f-word” to a senate colleague, Cheney said “it felt good.” This exchange took place in 2004.

In 2000 our faith based President Bush called New York Times reporter Adam Clymer a “major league asshole.” And it’s also not in the book. It makes me angry that Wood failed to mention these two high level demonstrations of political anger.

Anger also has a long musical history. The Depression era hit “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime,” was an angry song that has stood the test of time. Its sad refrain immediately brings to mind bread lines, soup kitchens, unemployed faces and a sense of desperation.

Today’s songs of anger, Wood finds, are largely of the hip-hop variety. He does a good job of analyzing and translating such hits as “C.R.E.A.M” (“Cash Rules Everything Around Me”) by Wu-Tang Clan.

“Hip-hop has become the sound track to a wide variety of identity politics,” Wood writes. Hip-hop has successfully been exported to other countries. For example, Maori in New Zealand have imitated hip-hop. Other countries and cultures have done the same.

Wood thinks hip-hop will leave small musical footprints in American music, while other artists like Johnny Cash (“Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire,” etc.) and Bob Dylan (“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are a-Changing,” etc.) more effectively captured anger in their songs.

Angry music has filled radio airwaves for the past six decades. Wood finds that Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” “is the music of the narcissistic ennui—the music of the Columbine shootings.”

Are children being taught to be angry? Yes. Wood finds parents who teach their daughters to demonstrate “grrrl power.” He cites many books, like “The Anger Advantage: The Surprising Benefits of Anger and How It Can Change a Woman’s Life,” on the subject of women and anger. If women in your office are angry, they are likely “benefiting” at the expense of non-angry employees, Wood suggests.

Since Madelyn Murray O’Hair successfully took prayer out of schools in 1963, students and parents have become angrier about school activities, Wood writes. He says O’Hair was “a prophet of the New Anger.”

Wood calls Beat poet Allen Ginsberg “an early out-of the-closet advocate of gay love,” and Timothy Leary a “nutty Harvard professor.” After noting the sometimes short lives of many angry social activists, Wood concludes that: “Anger does not seem, on the whole, to be a good basis for a career or life.” Yet, if it weren’t for these activists and others like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., segregation, a topic Wood ignores, might still be law.

On the whole, Wood has written a timely book on a serious subject. Indeed, anger often leads to violence and tragedy. It is important to understand why this happens. However, the author’s all too lighthearted approach to the subject is enough to make a reader angry.

A darker comedic view, including input from or commentary on anger celebrities, such as Jerry Springer and Howard Stern, would have helped. While there is much left out of the book, it is still a provocative and insightful assessment on a timely subject.

A final note: When Wood overheard a workman say “A bee in the mouth is always bad” he knew he had his title. Throughout the book Wood refers to bees, hives and nests to add even more humor. It diminishes the importance of his subject.

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Jim Patterson, an economist and journalist, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle

Ed Brooke Bridged the Divide

2008-01-01T18:37:00.000-08:00

Bridging the Divide: My Life
Senator Edward Brooke
Rutgers University Press (332 pages, $29.95, 2007)

Former Massachusetts Senator and fellow Episcopalian Edward Brooke is a man of peace, service and faith. These two important characteristics are demonstrated many times in his book.

A native Washingtonian, Brooke graduated Dunbar High School and Howard University. He was headed for law school when duty called and he served in Italy in World War II. While in the service, he fell in love with an Italian woman who followed him back to the States and they were married in Boston.

Brooke graduated Boston University School of Law after the war. He began his practice in Roxbury and soon entered politics serving as attorney general. In 1966, he became the first popularly elected African American U.S. senator since Reconstruction. And he was a Protestant Republican in a state where Catholic Democrats were the majority.

During the administrations of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, Brooke was a moderate Republican who worked for racial equality, supported Roe v. Wade, and sought international peace and normalization of relations with China.

Brooke was called “the freest man in the Senate” because he owed his election to no special interest group or any faction of the Republican Party. In fact, both Democrats and Republicans supported his election.

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC figures prominently in Brooke’s life. He was baptized and confirmed there. His father’s funeral was held there. He married his wife Anne there. His own son, Edward, was also baptized there. Brooke’s faith served him well in the pressure cooker of Washington politics.

When Brooke was elected to the Senate, the country was in near racial chaos. Many of the Deep South’s most solid segregationists held positions of great power in the senate. Brooke recalls going to the Senate swimming pool one day where found segregationist Democrats John Stennis, Mississippi, and John McClellan, Arkansas, swimming laps with Republican Strom Thurmond, South Carolina.

While swimming pools in the Deep South were segregated by race, Stennis, McClellan and Thurmond “invited me to join them and urged me to use the pool as often as I could,” Brooke writes. From this episode of friendliness from segregationists, Brooke learned a valuable racial lesson. “It was increasingly evident that some members of the Senate played on bigotry purely for politically gain. They appealed to ignorance and prejudice to entrench themselves in office,” he writes.

The challenges Brooke faced as an African American in the senate mirrored the challenges the nation faced with racial equality in the 1960s. Brooke led his party and the nation to a realization that race should not limit the potential of any person. Brooke can be proud of his service to our country during the most difficult of times.

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Jim Patterson, an economist and journalist, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He can be reached at jimjptt@aol.com.

Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far)

2007-12-31T21:20:00.000-08:00

Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far)
G.P. Putnam's & Sons
$22.95, 208 pages

This book is a departure for newspaper funnyman Dave Barry. He has re-invented himself as a social and political commentator. Perhaps Barry has noticed the success of Andy Borowitz and others on these same areas. At times this book reads like the Borowitz daily e-report, carried on more and more "summarized" daily news websites, like Jewish World Review.

Barry is fine form through most of the book. Gone are Barry's bread and butter "booger" and "whack- a- mole" jokes. It was certainly time for him to take a few steps toward more mature comedy.

The book is chronological and Barry treats us to a review of years 1000 to 1999 in a scant 33 pages including four illustrations. By the way, 1000 to 1999 was Y1K, if you wondered. This is even more amazing because Barry takes on the whole world. "In western Europe, the two dominantcultures were the French and the English, who hated each other because of a bitter, centuries-old dispute over the right way to prepare food," Barry writes.

From 2000 to 2006, Barry goes on a political rant against President George W. Bush for 170 pages. The chapter for 2000 is titled "George and Al's Big Chadventure." Barry doesn't just have fun with George and Al; he also pulls some jokes on President and Mrs. Clinton. The jokes are equally funny no matter your political preference.

Once Bush gets in the White House, Barry moves into the political driver's seat for some truly funny moments. He mines all the oddities of the Commander-in-Chief and President in waiting Dick Cheney. One running gag concerns Cheney's shotgun blast to the face of Texan Harry Whittington.

"Local authorities rule the shooting an accident," Barry writes, "noting that if the vice president was going to intentionally shoot anyone it would be Nancy Pelosi." Later, Barry uses "go quail hunting with the vice president" for several other jokes.

Barry uses pop star Michael Jackson for some needed non-political humor. When Jackson was arrested at his Santa Barbara amusement park and home, he was booked on "extreme creepiness, even for California."

In sum, this book represents a new comedic direction for Dave Barry. It is a likable book and excellent "lite" reading during the holidays or on your morning commute.

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Jim Patterson, economist and journalist, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Going Down Jericho Road

2007-12-28T16:19:00.001-08:00

Going Down Jericho Road:
The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign
By Michael K. Honey
Norton, $35, 619 pages, 2007

By 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had seen passage of his Civil and Voting Rights acts. His famous March on Washington had secured the former and his Selma to Montgomery March secured the latter.

As passionate as King was about civil and voting rights, he was as passionate about economic justice for the poor, especially poor African Americans who had worked at poverty wages due to segregation. He planned a Poor People’s Campaign to call attention to the plight of the working poor.

Memphis was the perfect place for King to begin his final campaign. City officials were insensitive when two black sanitation workers were crushed to death by a trash compactor.

Sanitation workers sought to improve their work conditions via a union. City officials rejected their call for a union and the workers went on strike. It made national news and caught King’s attention.

Memphis officials and news media called King a communist and a radical when they learned he was coming to march for economic justice in their city. “King’s radicalism stemmed from his understanding of Christianity as a moral belief system that called upon people to apply uncompromisingly the egalitarian teachings of Jesus to the work around them,” Honey writes.

A political power struggle between King and younger blacks resulted in a bloody riot in Memphis in late March 1968. He returned April 3 to conduct a peaceful march for worker rights. On that night, King gave his famous “Mountaintop” speech to thousands of eager marchers. Twenty-four hours later he was assassinated.

After King’s funeral, Memphis officials agreed to a union for sanitation workers. The strikers were victorious.

Honey successfully captures the spirit of the era. He has written an authoritative account of the labor/race struggle in Memphis. This book is a moving testament to Dr. King’s compassion for the poor.

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Jim Patterson, an economist and journalist, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

2007-12-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

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