By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Franklin Mint
“This year marks two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of The Way To Wealth, among the most famous pieces of American writing ever, and one of the most willfully misunderstood,” The New Yorker reports.
“A lay sermon about how industry begets riches (“No Gains, without Pains”), The Way To Wealth has been taken for Benjamin Franklin’s – and even America’s – creed, and there’s a line or two of truth in that, but not a whole page. The Way To Wealth is also a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham.”

Read More

Posted on January 30, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at book reviews local and not.
Sex Machine
“Writer and former stripper Stephen Elliott likes sadomasochistic sex,” Mike Thomas writes in the Sun-Times. “And he doesn’t care who knows it.”
“In fact, he wrote about his kinkiest predilections at length in the sexual memoir My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, and he’s glad they’re no longer secret.
“‘It’s incredibly freeing to write about sex,’ says Elliott, 36. The politically active journalist, author and editor of several books – including the forthcoming collection Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica – Elliott grew up in Chicago, where for a time he did drugs and lived in tough group homes for lost kids.”

Read More

Posted on January 28, 2008

By The Beachwood Barack’s Books Affairs Desk

“The book, a giant best-seller, is called The Audacity of Hope,” Bob Somerby writes at The Daily Howler. “In Obama’s very first chapter (“Republicans and Democrats”), he sketches his feelings about Ronald Reagan – and about Bill Clinton.
“Is something wrong with Obama-on-Reagan? In The Audacity of Hope (chapter 1), the gentleman sketches his thoughts on the subject. Presumably, this work was carefully composed, unlike last week’s offhand comments. For our money, his published account of the 1960s and the 1990s is a bit odd from the Dem perspective; on the other hand, much of what he says about Reagan in this same chapter is not. But if you want to see what Obama said about Reagan – and about Bill Clinton – when he had time to say it carefully, we’ll suggest that you look at his book.”
So that’s just what we’ll do. Here are the relevant excerpts by Obama on Reagan – and Bill Clinton – from The Audacity of Hope.
*
[A]s disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, I understood his appeal.
It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watched a well-played basketball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.

Read More

Posted on January 23, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

The incredibly shrinking book reviews at our two daily papers have made this feature nearly impossible to continue in its current form because, quite simply, there isn’t much to review. Still, we’ll soldier on with a weekly look at the book reviews laying around Beachwood HQ and continue to point you to the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as trying to expand the outlets under our consideration. This feature is also open to submissions or even someone else willing to take it under their wing. Contact me if you’re interested.
*
Top Gun
“If you read Andrew Morton’s unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise with a fan’s curiosity in one hand and a thinking person’s skepticism in the other you’ll likely end up in the same place you were before you read it: not all that interested,” Teresa Budasi writes in her Sun-Times books column.

Read More

Posted on January 21, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

An (almost) weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Change Bank
* “America wants change,” the Economist says from overseas. “It just can’t work out what sort of change . . . and who can deliver it?”
Which is just about right, but the Economist buys into a bit of clever, disingenuous and divisive Obama spin when it posits that change might not come without a break from “Bush-Clinton partisan politics.”
Since when was the Clinton Administration anything like the Bush Administration? And who were the divisive, partisan forces of the 90s – the accommodationist, centrist president or the right-wing loonies whose wild and lunatic attacks seem to have been internalized by Democrats?

Read More

Posted on January 17, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Publication: New York Times
Cover:: “Say What You Will,” a review of Anthony Lewis’s Freedom For The Thought That We Hate.
“[A] heroic account of how courageous judges in the 20th century created the modern First Amendment by prohibiting the government from banning offensive speech, except to prevent a threat of serious and imminent harm,” Jeffrey Rosen writes.
“Still, the most surprising and provocative occasions are those when Lewis himself departs from civil libertarian free speech orthodoxy.”
Indeed. The restrictions to speech favored by Lewis and his faith in the judiciary is simply naive.

Read More

Posted on January 14, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

We’ve been remiss with this feature the last few weeks, so let’s catch up. Unfortunately, the news in book review land isn’t good.
*
Publication:Sun-Times
Cover: Well, here’s the thing. The Sun-Times doesn’t really have a book section anymore, though it does still carry reviews.
“We’ve been fortunate over the past few years to have had an expanded number of pages to run many full-length book reviews, local author features and interviews when many newspapers cut back to abbreviated reviews or eliminated their book review sections altogether,” books editor Teresa Budasi wrote on December 23rd in “How The Grinch Stole The Books Section.”
No longer. Now book reviews appear in the Sunday Showcase section.
What’s so funny about it is that it was only last May when former books editor and now editorial page editor Cheryl Reed bragged about her paper’s commitment to its books section and attacked the Tribune for moving its section from Sunday to Saturday.

Read More

Posted on January 9, 2008

By Nancy Simon

First in a series.
Within the past six months, the term pushback, loosely defined as “resistance from an opposing force,” has been used in association with phenomena as varied as the presidential campaign, the competitive domain of retail shopping, and Apple iPod customers.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, pushback is defined as “the name of a mechanical device used in motorized devices that serve the function of opening and closing a door or other object, e.g., ‘the pushback on a subway door.'”
AHD also recognizes pushback for its military connection, e.g., “the forced movement of troops back from the line.”
Along similar lines, Wikipedia links pushback to aviation, referencing it as “an airport procedure during which an aircraft is pushed backwards away from an airport gate by an external power.” Note the inclusion of the word “external,” emphasizing its origination from an outside source.
From the aforementioned definitions, we come to the conclusion that pushback’s traditional meaning was based upon the idea of a physical act being performed by an outside force which, in turn, jostled someone or something from his, her or its chosen position.
Over the past couple of years, however, pushback has gotten a makeover of sorts and, thus, taken on a whole host of fresh and colorful alliterations.

Read More

Posted on January 8, 2008

By M L  Van Valkenburgh

I read a recent study that said one in four American adults read no books last year – a rather appalling statistic. Bibliophiles everywhere must take action! Here are my picks for the 12 best books published in 2007.
*
Genre: Adolescent
Title: The Dangerous Book for Boys
Authors:Conn and Hal Iggulden
This book is the rarest of gems – it teaches boys how to be boys. In an age when video games are the norm and playing tennis means turning on the Wii, boys have forgotten their roots – and some of the magic of childhood. The Iggulden brothers originally published this in England in 2006, but this is the updated American edition. Soon your son will be fashioning complicated knots or palming a coin. And while it’s unlikely your boy will actually ever end up needing to know how to tan a skin, better prepared than not.
Genre: Biography
Title: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
Author: David Michaelis
This eye-opening look into the life of a man dedicated to making us laugh (and sometimes think) reveals Schulz as an ultimately profoundly unhappy and depressed man who turned the comics industry on its head. Discouraged from being an artist by his parents and at school, Schulz persevered nevertheless, in some cases writing and drawing his own life into his work, such as an extramarital affair that came to the papers in the form of Snoopy’s crush on a girl dog. Schulz detested the name “Peanuts,” but was forced to use it by his publishing syndicate. The book contains 250 Peanuts strips, in addition to memoirs, interviews and personal correspondence.

Read More

Posted on January 4, 2008