I first read Man Without a Country not long after it came out in 2005 and I still totally agree with everything Kurt has to say. Kurt was a humanist who had the radical idea that war was bad, over population was bad, The Bushes-Chaneys-Rumsfelds of the world were bad, and that the idea that The Free Market will self correct and fix everything is total bullshit. My kind of a guy. Kurt Vonnegut is in heaven now, along with Issac Asimov. Just kidding. They were both famous atheists who prefered the rational to the fantastical, except for their writing.…
Category: book review
Made by Hand-Is This How Tom Good Would Do It?
There’s something fun about the idea of a gazillionaire taking up the DIY craze by doing such things as organic gardening and making his own cigar box banjos. He explores the many benefits of knowing how to build things, modify things, and create things out of the odds and ends most people toss out for the trash collector. It’s clear from the introduction that boingboing founder Mark Frauenfelder never read The Sex Life of Cannibals, a wonderful book about what a living hell the islands along the equator are. Mark and his wife decide to move with their two small…
How Starbucks Saved My Life
I found this odd little book of a rich man who loses everything and ends up working at a Starbucks kind of fun. Who doesn’t like a My How The Mighty Have Fallen story? In this case it’s an evil Madison Avenue Ad Man who was handed a job by a friend of a friend after his graduation from an Ivy League College. After forty years of living the good life, driving fancy cars, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, wearing two thousand dollar suits-he is fired from his high roller job. At first he isn’t too worried. But…
Snow by Orhan Pamuk-Book Review
Over the course of a few snowy days in a little town in Turkey we watch as a Poet regains his gift, a Coup overthrows the local Government, and Radicals of all sorts talk about how much they hate The West. Snow is a view into a world that is both changing and standing perfectly still. A place where poverty and torture are normal everyday events. A place where young girls who are forbidden from wearing their headscarves have been committing suicide. Not surprisingly, Orhan Pamuk’s cast of characters have names unlike any I am familiar with. There is a…
The Masters of Solitude
Modern Post Apocalyptic stories has a pretty dim view of the future. The Terminator has mankind crushed by intelligent machines. The Road has all life coming to an end. The Matrix has man surviving as nothing more than fuel cells for more evil machines. Waterworld is a wet world filled with evil people. The Postman and Mad Max are a dry worlds filled with evil people. My favorite post apocalyptic books are by Octavia Butler and deal with a world where all kinds of bad things happen, but there is a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.…
78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published
Pat Walsh is an Editor who takes on the task of schooling the would-be novelist on how to improve their writing by providing them with the reasons they might be better off taking up golf. He also adds 14 Reasons why it might be published. The chapters are small, the writing is clear and concise, the word choice errs on the side of the simple and understandable. It is also pretty damned funny. I’ve been writing this and that for a long time, but I have never been published. I have a couple of manuscripts I have been kicking around,…
The Quest for The Perfect Hive
Article first published as The Quest for The Perfect Hive on Technorati. Back in my Mom’s hippie days she subscribed to Mother Earth News and I was taken with the idea of finding 50 acres and living the Organic Life. One of my top interests was keeping bees. Over the years the idea of getting a bee hive has tickled my imagination, but I have never quite gotten around to it. Bees were big news not too long ago because of the mysterious affliction known as Colony Collapse Disorder-which seems to have been traced to the use of tobacco genes…
The Language of Trust
In The Post-Trust Era no one believes anything anyone says-not at first anyway. The reasons are simple, we are constantly being lied to about how New, Improved, and Updated everything we buy is. You want to believe that you are getting a good deal, you want to trust people, but you know that everyone wants something from you. Stores want you to buy stuff, websites want clicks, restaurants want you to buy their food instead of the food from the place across the street. The Language of Trust teaches you how to win a little bit of trust from your…
My Lobotomy by Howard Dully
Article first published as Review: My Lobotomy by Howard Dully on Technorati. It’s hard to read about the good old days of mental health care where chopping up a person’s brain was considered a good idea. Howard Dully’s lobotomy was a transorbital lobotomy, where what amounted to an ice pick was pushed into the brain’s frontal lobes and swished around a bit. It was a very fast and simple procedure that only had a couple of problems-1) it killed as many people as it helped, and 2) it didn’t really help that many people. The NPR radio program is a…
Voice-Over Voice Actor
Article first published as Book Review:Voice-Over Voice Actor on Technorati. Being an actor is one way to make a lot of money, another way to make a lot of money is to sell things to all the people who want to be actors. I have a small collection of Voice Over books, most of them say pretty much the same thing, but it is always nice to get a slightly different prospective. One of the things they all agree on is that you must have a Demo and that you must have it done professionally. It’s no good to whip…