Summer Reads

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Full disclosure, I like to line up my summer reading early. That’s why I latched on to the latest summer reading recommendations from the New York Times. Here’s how it begins:

Here come the page-turners of summer 2018. They’re about … maritime disaster? America’s opioid crisis? Toxic social media? The legacy of the Confederacy? How about a man who falls in love with a bear and is completely serious about it? No one said this was going to be pretty, but there are some very fine reads out there this year. There’s also some of the season’s usual fun, like the glitter of Broadway and fiction that wallows in the richly dramatic lives of the rich.

Want more? You can read the full article here

A Writer’s Writer

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Tributes are still pouring in for one of the greatest writers of our – and maybe any – generation. Tom Wolfe did it all and he did it with wit and verve.

William F. Buckley perhaps said it best, He is probably the most skillful writer in America – I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.

There are far too many eloquent tributes to capture in one blog post, so I’ll focus on just one, that by Ben Yagoda. Perhaps I picked this one because I spent most of my adult life as an aviator”:

One of the best passages in Tom Wolfe’s best book, “The Right Stuff” (1979), starts out:

“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot . . . coming over the intercom . . . with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it’s reassuring) . . . the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘it might get a little choppy’ . . . the voice that tells you [ . . . ]: ‘Now, folks, uh . . . this is the captain . . . ummmm . . . We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not . . . uh . . . lockin’ into position when we lower ’em . . . Now . . . I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right’ . . . faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you . . .”

The rendition of the “drawlin’ and chucklin’ and driftin’ and lollygaggin’ ”—the style of speech even pilots from Massachusetts or Oregon universally affect, Wolfe says—goes on for another few hundred words, too long to quote here; I commend it to your attention. The voice, Wolfe ultimately tells us, originated from someone who picked it up in the mountains of West Virginia. Starting in the late 1940s, it drifted “into all phases of American aviation.” “It was the drawl,” he writes, “of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”

You can read his full piece here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-appreciation-tom-wolfe-1526678237?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

Want more? You can read a comprehensive New York Times piece here.

We Have An App

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Few writers have as much of a knack for taking difficult subjects – especially technology – and making them understandable for the lay person. Tom Friedman is one of those people.

I read his book, “Thank You for Being Late” some time ago, and found it interesting and enlightening. However, I never really felt I was able to capture succinctly just what the book was about. Then I came across an old review of the book in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s how it began:

Change is nothing new. Nobel laureate Bob Dylan sang that the times they were a-changin’ back in 1964. What has changed is the pace of change: “The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once,” notes New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.” Gradual change allows for adaptation; one generation figures out trains, another airplanes. Now, in a world where taxi-cab regulators will figure out Uber just in time for self-driving cars to render such services obsolete, “so many aspects of our societies, workplaces, and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.” All of it creates a sense of discomfort and provokes backlash—witness Brexit and the American presidential election. Yet there is cause for optimism, Mr. Friedman believes. Humans are crafty creatures.

In this book, Mr. Friedman tries to press pause. The title comes from the author’s exclamation to a tardy breakfast companion: The unexpected downtime had given him an opportunity to reflect. If we all take such time to think, he claims, we can figure out how to “dance in a hurricane.” It’s a comforting idea, though one wonders why, if Mr. Friedman was so happy for this pre-breakfast downtime, he was busily scheduling daily breakfast meetings in the first place. Likewise, this ambitious book, while compelling in places, skips about a lot. His attempt to cover much of the history of modern technology, for instance, quickly descends into gee-whiz moments and ubiquitous exclamation points. Big-belly garbage cans have sensors that wirelessly announce when they need to be emptied, and so Mr. Friedman marvels that “yes, even the garbageman is a tech worker now. . . . That garbage can could take an SAT exam!”

Want to read more

Women Writers

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If there is one field where I believe the playing field between women and men is level, it’s the profession of writing. Both sexes have hit it out of the park with their stories and books.

I wondered about this, that is, until I read a review of Michelle Dean’s new book: “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion.” Here’s how the review begins:

One must have a mind of winter,” Wallace Stevens writes in his poem “The Snow Man.” It’s the cold eye that beholds, without sentimentality or fear, “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion,” the journalist Michelle Dean has rounded up 10 minds of winter, all of them female, all of them prominent writers whose criticism, long-form reporting, fiction and satire have shaped thinking on world events and cultural dramas: Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm. Dean gathered these women together, she says in her preface, “under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: They were called sharp.”

It is, of course, a compliment with an edge. Call a man “sharp” and he’s stylish, incisive, smart. Apply it to a woman, Dean writes, and there’s a “sense of terror underlying it. Sharpness, after all, cuts.” A virtue of her book is that it shows how each woman, by wielding a pen as if it were a scalpel or a scimitar, confounded the gender norm of niceness and placed her analytical prowess front and center. Among 20th-century intellectuals, “men might have outnumbered women, demographically,” Dean writes, but “in the arguably more crucial matter of producing work worth remembering, the work that defined the terms of their scene, the women were right up to par — and often beyond it.” I agree with her.

Want more? You can read the full review here

A Review of The Coronado Conspiracy from Rotor Magazine

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Learn more about The Coronado Conspiracy

We Are Vulnerable!

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Full disclosure, Dick Couch has been a friend and mentor for decades. Additionally, we have co-authored three New York Times best-sellers: Act of Valor, Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Out of the Ashes, and Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Into the Fire. Dick is enormously talented – even gifted – but now we should add “prescient” to his list of attributes. Here’s why.

Shortly after the attacks on America of September 11, 2001, Dick, in cooperation with agent John Boswell, began work on a book: “The U.S. Armed Forces Nuclear, Biological And Chemical Survival Manual.” No one knew if there would be more attacks on the United States, but if there were, Dick wanted Americans to be ready.

Thankfully, there were no more major attacks on the United States in the years following 911, but Dick knew there could be in the future. Now, in today’s political climate, “The U.S. Armed Forces Nuclear, Biological And Chemical Survival Manual” is flying off shelves and onto e-book readers. Why? Because Americans are fearful – and they have a right to be.

This book is a great way to protect yourself and your family. Here is a link

Turning Assignments into Stories

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Recently, a U.S. Navy SEAL turned his active duty experiences into a work of fiction entitled “Bring Out the Dog: Stories.” Author Will Mackin’s book will likely delight. Here is how John William’s New York Times review begins:

“I felt proud that I’d fought, or something like proud, but also glad it was over.” That’s the narrator of one story in Will Mackin’s debut collection, “Bring Out the Dog.” During his time in the United States Navy, Mr. Mackin was deployed with SEAL teams on assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. When he came home, he relied on notes he kept during his time in combat to write these stories, three of which have appeared in The New Yorker. Mr. Mackin talks about the experiences that inspired the book, why he chose to write fiction, a Pink Floyd lyric that has influenced his life and more.

You can read the full review here

We Are What We Read

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Many of us who are avid readers of John Sutherland’s books naturally gravitated to his piece on the front page of the New York Times book review earlier this year.

He reviewed two new books:

THE WRITTEN WORLD: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization, by Martin Puchner, and THE SOCIAL LIFE OF BOOKS: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home, by Abigail Williams.

Of the two, his review of Puchner’s book had the most to offer from my perspective. Here is part of what he shared:

“Literature,” the first page declares, “since it emerged 4,000 years ago,” has “shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth.” We are what we read.

“The Written World” makes this grand assertion on the basis of a set of theses. Storytelling is as human as breathing. When fabulation intersected with writing, stories were empowered to propagate themselves in society and around the world as civilization-forming “foundational texts.”

Puchner opens, by way of illustration, with Alexander the Great. Under his pillow at night he had, alongside his dagger, a copy of the “Iliad.” His literary GPS, we understand. As important as the epic’s originally oral story of great conquest was the script it was written in: That too would conquer worlds. This review is printed in a variant of it.

Want more? You can read the full article here.

Best Books

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One thing many of us look forward to on Sundays is to read the New York Times Book Review section. Here, outstanding writers offer their opinions on new books. They never seem to miss.

For much the same reason, we look forward to the Times year-end “best books” list. For 2017, the list is especially rich. Here is how the article begins:

This was a year when books — like the rest of us — tried to keep up with the news, and did a pretty good job of it. Novels about global interconnectedness, political violence and migration; deeply reported nonfiction accounts of racial and economic strife in the United States; stories both imagined and real about gender, desire and the role of beauty in the natural world. There were several worthy works of escapism, of course, but the literary world mostly reflected the gravity and tumult of the larger world. Below, The New York Times’s three daily book critics — Dwight Garner, Jennifer Senior and Parul Sehgal — share their thoughts about their favorites among the books they reviewed this year, each list alphabetical by author. Janet Maslin, a former staff critic who remains a frequent contributor to The Times, also lists her favorites.

Want more? You can read the full article here.

Lost Wars

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The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 profoundly change America’s national security equation – perhaps forever.

Those attacks spawned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and these have all-but-consumed the U.S. military for more than a decade-and-a-half.

There have been several books – some good and some less so – that have tried to help us come to grips with not only why we embarked upon these wars, as well as why we can’t “win.”

Andrew Bacevich’s review of Daniel Bolger’s book, “Why We Lost,” offers some key insights. Here is how he begins:

The author of this book has a lot to answer for. “I am a United States Army general,” Daniel Bolger writes, “and I lost the Global War on Terrorism.” The fault is not his alone, of course. Bolger’s peers offered plenty of help. As he sees it, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, abysmal generalship pretty much doomed American efforts.

The judgment that those wars qualify as lost — loss defined as failing to achieve stated objectives — is surely correct. On that score, Bolger’s honesty is refreshing, even if his explanation for that failure falls short. In measured doses, self-flagellation cleanses and clarifies. But heaping all the blame on America’s generals lets too many others off the hook.

Why exactly did American military leaders get so much so wrong? Bolger floats several answers to that question but settles on this one: With American forces designed for short, decisive campaigns, the challenges posed by protracted irregular warfare caught senior officers completely by surprise.

Since there aren’t enough soldiers — having “outsourced defense to the willing,” the American people stay on the sidelines — the generals asked for more time and more money. This meant sending the same troops back again and again, perhaps a bit better equipped than the last time. With stubbornness supplanting purpose, the military persisted, “in the vain hope that something might somehow improve.

Want more? You can read the full article here