4 comments about Living It Up With National Review: A Memoir.

1. What will we do when the Buckley clan is gone? First John Wayne, then Ronald Reagan, now the Buckleys, WFB and his sister, Priscilla gradually recede from our consciousness, followed ineluctably in time by Paul Harvey we tearfully conclude. Giants all. This book is to be cherished, as with brother Bill's memoir of last year ("And Miles Gone By"), like a strand of hair from a saint; to be pulled out every now and then and pressed to one's heart in longing remembrance of the grandeur that humankind can produce so resplendently every now and again in individuals(as opposed to collectively). Read the book and weep, but with a smile on one's face mirroring the same that radiantly graced it's author's lo these many years.



2. Living It Up At National Review is a memoir by Priscilla L. Buckley, who spent forty-three years as an editor at National Review. The exploits of her brother William F. Buckley among many other "brilliant but highly combustible" characters come alive in this engaging and folksy collection of true tales of daily life amid a national icon of conservatism. An index allows for quick reference in this highly readable and enjoyable reflection on the highs, lows, and weirdness present in the author's remarkable and vivacious working life.



3. Living It Up At National Review is a memoir by Priscilla L. Buckley, who spent forty-three years as an editor at National Review. The exploits of her brother William F. Buckley among many other "brilliant but highly combustible" characters come alive in this engaging and folksy collection of true tales of daily life amid a national icon of conservatism. An index allows for quick reference in this highly readable and enjoyable reflection on the highs, lows, and weirdness present in the author's remarkable and vivacious working life.



4. Living It Up At National Review is a memoir by Priscilla L. Buckley, who spent forty-three years as an editor at National Review. The exploits of her brother William F. Buckley among many other "brilliant but highly combustible" characters come alive in this engaging and folksy collection of true tales of daily life amid a national icon of conservatism. An index allows for quick reference in this highly readable and enjoyable reflection on the highs, lows, and weirdness present in the author's remarkable and vivacious working life.

5 comments about Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn.

1. As someone I would love to have known, Martha Gelhorn ranks right up there with Carly Simon...who, thankfully, is still alive. She is the only one of Hemingway's four wives who left him. This after an affair-turned-to-marriage that began when she walked into a Key West bar and introduced herself to him.
   
   Her extensive correspondence detailed in this book, and her life subsequent to Hemingway, reveal a woman, who though emotionally healthier than Ernest, had her own demons to contend with. She is nevertheless a fascinating personality, widely traveled, a prolific author, and by all accounts a very engaging raconteur. She deserves to be notable in her own right and spent much of her life in a fight to be accorded someone other than Heminway's third wife. Though with a personage as large as Hemingway, that was a difficult struggle, this treatment of a segment of her correspondence certainly helps her individuality along by revealing the brilliant and complex person she was



2. This book is beautifully edited by Caroline Moorehead, the one woman in all the world who knows more than any other about dear old, trying old, basilisk-fierce Martha Gellhorn. The odd thing is that the publishers sent out an advanced uncorrected proof claiming that this was Gellhorn's "COLLECTED LETTERS" and now, months later, the dust has settled and the book has changed its title to "SELECTED LETTERS," perhaps a subtle difference but one that makes you wonder what went south at the last minute. If only the beloved investigative snoop, Gellhorn herself, was still here to look into this minor mystery! Warning, there is indeed a lot in it about Hemingway, but that's why many will be drawn to Gellhorn in the first place, and the other half of the readers will be wanting to know how a dogged spirit stays independent, especially in the face of huge sadnesses, There's an inspirational feel about the collection, surprising as it may seem, and even though tragedy seemed to overshadow her fun no matter where she went.
   
   Her dedication to reporting is in itself remarkable. Wasn't there ever a point where she paused and wondered what on earth good it did to do this particular job, or did she merely shrug off the moral niceties. She doesn't seem to have cared whose feelings she hurt, even those she loved (one of her novels was withdrawn from the UK when a dear friend, whose love life Gellhorn had written up and lightly salted with fiction, complained, first to the author, then to the courts) and her ire hangs high against those who have crossed her (especially Lillian Hellman, who must have been scared silly every day of her life with that menace Gellhorn still out for her blood).
   
   She had a weakness for "sophisticated" (often bisexual) men and Moorehead prints some "NOTES ON A SCANDAL" style letters outlining her embarrassing obsession with Leonard Bernstein, his genius, his private life, and his body. Really everything about him. "He's got quite a nice voice, plummy and deep, as if his mouth was pure, as if he'd never had a filling. The complexion of a white peach. He's worth it, this one. He's the one I've waited for." (My paraphrase of Judi Dench.) Another set of letters between Martha Gellhorn and Betsy Drake, the former wife of screen star Cary Grant, elicits more rueful confessions, for Drake shared a great secret with Gellhorn, that it may be liberating to step away from an adored and celebrated spouse, but at the same time every day you look in your mirror and you know that your obituary is going to say, "Ex-Wife of Blank."
   
   Gellhorn's passion for action, in Africa, Spain, wherever, covering the war in Vietnam for the Manchester Guardian, is rather better covered in Moorehead's great bio of the journalist, than in this book of collected, I mean selected, letters. In fact if you didn't have Moorehead's notes coming in every now and then to re-ground the story and put it into real perspective, you might as well be on a cloud.



3. To turn the pages of a collection of letters in our time, is to return to a time when people wrote, at leisure, at length and in great detail, to one another about trifles, confidences, and assorted themes. In our age of e-mails it is almost inconceivable. Inconceivable too is that Martha Gellhorn's letters, by Caroline Moorehead, brings this world before us with such force, that we are held captive from page to page, from the start to the last. Yet while her correspondents are many of them famous, it is true, it is the letters themselves that shimmer, that gives us images rare, reflections profound, letters for all of time.



4. Intelligent, dauntless, and restlessly peripatetic, Martha Gellhorn refused to be encumbered by what she called "the kitchen of life." Travel, men, seclusion and adversity all were stimulants to Martha's agile mind. "Normal people depend on other people, I roam in space", she once remarked.
   
   Like most complex personalities, Martha is difficult to peg, and even an intrepid reader who makes the effort to negotiate these 500-plus pages of letters may come away feeling dissatisfied. Martha was a prolific writer--these letters represent a minute fraction of her output, most of which she managed to destroy. Her surviving correspondences reveal a fluid writer, fueled by a "passionate desire to find SOMEONE to communicate with."
   
   She is unfailingly candid and insightful. Only in a few instances is she less than cordial, and only in a few instances does she seem free to totally enjoy the act of writing. These instances are instructive, involving her adopted son--whom she wrote to in tones of fearfully harsh admonishment, and her stepson, to whom she allowed herself to write freely and playfully. Oddly enough, both of these young charges shared the same name: Sandy.
   
   It is tempting at times to compare Martha's character to that of Katherine Hepburn (who attended Bryn Mawr at the same time), or to Isak Dinesen. Both of these women seemed to share Martha's brand of independence. However, Martha crossed paths with both, and in her recorded opinions, does not express admiration for either of them. To Martha, Hepburn and the Baroness Karen Von Blixen were both too patrician. Martha was not at one with the monied class, which she found wasteful and vainglorious. Martha liked to have things both ways in her life--she loved to mix it up, defending the underdog, and she also loved the freedom of getting away from the hurly-burly, keeping life at a distance.
   
   What was most impressed upon me by these letters was how much Martha was devoted to, and suffered for, her fiction writing. Martha gained her reputation as a war correspondent, but these letters leave no doubt that Martha truly wanted to be remembered for her books of fiction. She often agonizes over writer's block, her failing memory, and the self-doubts that plagued her.
   
   The final portrait that emerges here is of Martha as an unflaggingly energetic, unvanquished personality who periodically engaged with the world, and then fled to solitude in order to write about it. Her unflinching honesty and her humorous dismissal of all that was "bulls---t" are the qualities that drew people to her, and she is worthy of far greater renown than she currently holds.
   
   Carolyn Moorehead has provided two great touchstones in the biography, "Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life", and this large volume of letters. Now, I will move on to the volumes about war, and the available fictional works that Gellhorn left behind.



5. Martha Gellhorn did not cooperate with her biographers when she was alive and she did not make it easy for them after she died. She made her opinions on this matter quite clear: "...writers are diminished by having their lives known: they should only be known by what they write." She left many of her manuscripts and some letters and other papers to Boston University before she died, but she deliberately destroyed most of her letters. She probably hoped her correspondents would destroy the letters she sent them as well, and even specifically requested them to in some cases, but she knew a clean sweep would not be possible.
   
   Well, then. Should we respect her wishes and read only her many stories and articles? Or should we pry into her private life, in the hopes of learning something valuable that will add to her published writings? Or should we be completely honest and read her biographies and letters, knowing full well that although we will find out nothing that adds to her journalism or literature, we'll get an adventure story that rivals anything she ever wrote.
   
   Having tossed aside my misgivings when I picked up the first biography of Gellhorn, Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave by Carl Rollyson, I didn't hesitate when Caroline Moorehead's Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life came out. It was a foregone conclusion that I would read The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn. Sorry, Martha.
   
   In The Selected Letters, as in the Moorehead biography, we find out that Gellhorn was a difficult person. She could be rude and something of a bigot, although it may not be fair to judge her based on letters she wrote to friends. Still, suffice it to say that if I were to quote her on African Americans, or the Chinese, or the Italians, my review would not be published on this website. And while she loved to discuss and argue with friends and colleagues about politics, apparently she would not listen to anyone who disagreed with her regarding the Palestinians.
   
   Her relationship with her adopted son was painful to read about. Much has already been said about whether she was a good, or even a fit, mother, so I won't add my amateur opinion. However, it is interesting to note that, like so many parents in the Sixties, she considered her son's recreational drug use altogether different from her own frequent and liberal use of alcohol and amphetamines.
   
   An odd discrepancy occurs in a letter she wrote in 1991 to an old friend from the Spanish Civil War. In it, she mentions having taken four marriage vows. Even counting her early relationship with Bertrand de Jouvenal as a marriage, which it probably wasn't, she was married three times. Curious.
   
   The Selected Letters is a fascinating companion to Moorehead's biography of Gellhorn, although I can't honestly say it is a valuable addition. Gellhorn's best stories have already been told by Gellhorn herself. The letters show an unpolished side of Gellhorn's writing, for what that's worth. She wrote so many letters and such long letters that one is tempted to speculate that writing them was a way of putting off real writing, or perhaps a way of writing through all the clutter in her mind that had to be cleared out before the real writing started.
   
   Regrettably, Gellhorn was right about a writer being diminished by having her life known. But she would surely understand that the curious reader can't resist getting to the bottom of a great story.

5 comments about The Journalist And The Murderer.

1. This is another book I read because it is on the Modern Library's Top 100 non-fiction list. The overall topic of the book is the journalist/subject relationship, which was interesting, but I thought Malcolm could've gone a lot more in depth on the issues. She stuck only to one particular case and seemed to have been discussing more of the innocence or guilt of the subject, Macdonald, rather than fully delving into the broader issues. I thought the book would've been much more powerful if she had worked more on proving her thesis, rather than detailing the accounts of the murder trial.
   She seems to barely touch on the ideas of the original thesis, therefore ending on a very weak note.
   The only reason I would suggest this to anyone is if you are itching for a quick and somewhat-interesting, and definitely thought-provoking read.



2. Joe McGinniss put himself on the map writing the classic 1969 book, THE SELLING OF A PRESIDENT. That book detailed how Richard Nixon was sold to the public like any other consumer product. It's worth reading if you can find a copy. The Nixon book was such a hit and McGinniss was so young he couldn't find material good enough to follow it up and his next few books were mediocre.
   
   Determined to find another worthy subject, he tackled the case of Dr. Jeffrey McDonald, a man accused of killing his wife and children. That story became the bestselling FATAL VISION and this book, THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER, chronicles the techniques that McGinniss used to get close to McDonald, and how he pretended to support McDonald through the years of legal proceedings although he always thought him to be guilty and wanted a guilty verdict for a better book. McGinniss' technique led to unfettered access to legal files, evidence, but most importantly access to McDonald. They'd drink together, strategize together and were pals during the experience.
   
   The central question is how far can a journalist go to get the story? Although a jury found McDonald guilty of murder, a later jury found in favor of McDonald in his suit against McGuinniss because they felt that his techniques were so underhanded and self-serving that even a murderer deserved better. The book shows the divide between the win-at-any-cost media and the public that grows weary of the techniques used against people to create news. Does the public have the right to know enough that journalists can lie to subjects to bring the story to press?
   
   This short book makes you question a number of journalistic techniques and it doesn't hurt either that McDonald has strong supporters and could possibly be innocent of the murders, at least in the context of this book.



3. Ms. Malcolm slices off the hand that feeds her
   
   With regard to item "a)" from "...pointless exercise," MacDonald v. McGuiness was over when Ms. Malcolm got involved. According to Fatal Justice by Palmer & Bost, McGuiness's lawyers threw a post-trial press conference for the court of public opinion: only Ms. Malcolm showed up.
   
   Otherwise, Journalist & Murderer is mainly about journalistic ethics, if there are any. Here, McGuiness insinuated himself into the defense team (he was privy to trial strategy) of Jeffrey MacDonald, with the promise presenting him in the best possible light. When McGuiness sours on MacDonald, he puts up a cheery front & presses on. After Fatal Vision, MacDonald felt betrayed.
   
   Of course, in our Cartesian-dualist society, since it's always either-or, we ask why he should feel betrayed? Guys convicted of killing their families have no reason to feel betrayed. They're bad guys; they deserve betrayal.
   
   However, when McGuiness concluded that MacDonald was guilty, trial evidence just wouldn't do. McGuiness shamefully proved himself a member of the old Star Chamber (maybe Joe expected some votes as Cheney's heir @Halliburton?) by trundling out Cleckley's (1941) old psychopathology checklist & diagnosing Dr. MacDonald an incurable, speed-fueled sociopath. Dr. Phil's forbearer: super!
   
   Ms. Malcolm is my favorite contemporary writer: she is foremost literate & like my favorite noncontemporary writer Mencken, she can be vicious without being vengeful. However, when you read, say, 1999's Sheila McGough, you may well wonder what sort of journalistic ruse Ms. Malcolm might cook up while slicing vegetables in the McGough kitchen. The Journalist & the Murderer is a blueprint for any such ruse. Better news is that after reading J&M, you can laugh without a twinge of guilt @gaudily & nightly paraded notions like "journalistic integrity."



4. I'd have a bit more respect for Ms. Malcolm if:

   a) she had actually attended MacDonald vs. McGinniss, so that she could write from an informed viewpoint instead of relying on second- and third-hand accounts;

   b) she had spent less time oohing and ahhing over MacDonald's personal magnetism, and stuck to the facts of the case at hand;

   c) she had bothered to read the literary releases to McGinniss's publishing company, SIGNED BY MACDONALD HIMSELF, that gave McGinniss license to write any type of book he wished (including, one presumes, a book that might actually say that McGinniss himself had concluded that MacDonald was guilty, despite the friendship the Journalist may have felt for the Murderer);

   d) she hadn't stated - repeatedly - the total fiction that the jury hung 5-1 in MacDonald's favor. The fact is, the jury hung on ONE QUESTION OUT OF THIRTY-SEVEN, never actually voting on the other 36, because one juror believed that MacDonald had violated his agreements with McGinniss by cultivating other journalists and by ignoring his agreement not to sue McGinniss.

   Or is MacDonald next going to sue Malcolm, because in her very title, she herself calls him a murderer?

   Let's call an egg an egg, Dr. Jeff. You killed them. Pay the price. Be done with it.




5. In 1970, a respected army physician named Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald claimed that four strangers broke into his home in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and killed his wife and two daughters. Although an army tribunal tried Dr. MacDonald and cleared him, years later the case was reopened. This time, MacDonald was convicted and sent to prison, where he still is today.
   
   Janet Malcolm does not reopen the MacDonald case in her book, "The Journalist and the Murderer." Rather, she examines the issues behind a libel suit that MacDonald brought in 1984 against his supposed friend, Joe McGinnis, author of "Fatal Vision." Joe McGinniss posed as an ally of Jeffrey MacDonald for years. McGinnis lived with MacDonald for a while and even joined his defense team. McGinniss sent MacDonald sympathetic letters in support of his cause. In these letters, he frequently expressed his belief in MacDonald's innocence.
   
   It was only after "Fatal Vision" was published that MacDonald discovered the truth. McGinniss did not believe in MacDonald's innocence; on the contrary, he portrays MacDonald as a psychopathic murderer. The author posed as a friend for the sole purpose of keeping MacDonald in the dark so that McGinniss would continue to have access to his subject. "Fatal Vision" became a huge bestseller and it eventually became a miniseries.
   
   Malcolm's book, written in 1990, takes on added significance in 2003, when the ethics of journalists are under fire as never before. Time and again, a small number of journalists have been accused of plagiarizing and fabricating stories. The public is beginning to recongnize that reporters are fallible people who suffer from the same pressures, ambitions, and even psychological disorders as other ordinary mortals.
   
   Malcolm's book is not merely a condemnation of McGinniss's behavior towards MacDonald. Her premise is that the journalist's relationship to his subject is, in its very essence, a perilous one. The gullible subject babbles away to his "sympathetic" listener, revealing more of himself than he realizes. When all is said and done, only the journalist and his editors have control over the final product. They are sometimes tempted to distort the facts to make the piece more interesting.
   
   Malcolm asserts that certain journalists are con men who prey on people's loneliness, credibility, and narcissism to get a good story. Journalists have their own agendas and the "truth," which is elusive at best, is not always their top priority. Malcolm's book is a warning not to believe everything that is printed in a newspaper or a magazine, since each story is only one version of reality.

2 comments about Alexey Brodovitch.

1. Alexy Brodovitch is one of the best art directors of the 20th Century. This book is worth every penny because it really allows you to see his work in the same scale that he created it at. Thus when you are looking at a magazine spread from the master, you are seeing it full size - and not as a little pretty icon that decorates too many design annuals. In addition there are examples of his raw layouts, which really let you see a genius at work. This book is a must for any fan of graphic design, photography and fashion.



2. This book represents one of the very few studies of one of the masters of American advertising and graphic design. Brodovitch served as mentor to such photographic luminaries as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, and his distinctive and very modernistic style of layout and use of the grid are exemplary. He was integral to magazine design in the middle of this century, and yet has fallen into relative unknown. Unreasonably so. Any student of graphic design, its design or current practice, would do well to own this book. In this age of busy, frantic graphic pages, Brodovitch's work reflects a serene, yet knife-edged clarity.

5 comments about Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim.

1. As acknowledged by the author, I was involved in the early going, but years later, now that I can sit down with Meg Murray's Fuller biography, I am thrilled. Very few books about literary giants do justice to the narrative. It either seems cooked or perhaps worse lumpy and raw. Murry's story is riveting. I recently needed stories about the Tiber Island hospital where Fuller served as a nurse during the Roman seige and found Murray's account very worth quoting. This is a superb work of scholarship AND a compelling story about one of America's most neglected giants.



2. Wandering Pilgrim is an excellent study of one of America's most important and neglected literary figures. Murray writes of Margaret Fuller with compassion, complexity and professionalism. Her account of Fuller -- a bold and brilliant woman who enthralled both Emerson and Hawthorne, who used her as a model for Hester Prynne - is a lively and original reading of this memorable woman.



3. Margaret Fuller for Everyone
   
   Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim manages to be both a page-turning
   read and a richly dense one. The clear narrative will please and
   inform readers who know little about Fuller, a fascinating nineteenth-
   century author and thinker; at the same time, Murray's extensive
   research and careful analysis will be invaluable to scholars of both
   American literature and women's studies. The book balances
   psychological, historical, and literary background in a wonderfully
   successful attempt to explain the life and achievements of the complex
   woman who made a pioneering case for American women in her classic
   Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Even as Murray astutely
   prepares us for the ending of Fuller's life, we keep reading to find
   out both what will happen, and why.



4. Murray's study of the 19th century American feminist author and intellectual Margaret Fuller ,a creative,richly talented,conflicted, even bedeviled New England Romantic, is nothing short of brilliant. Murray weaves into the warp and woof of her complex Fuller tapestry a blend of criticism, history, literature, psychology, religion and theology, which together yield a finely nuanced picture of a brilliant but profoundly troubled woman who struggled valiantly though unsuccessfully to break free from the constaints of her strict puritanical upbringing and the oppression of a domineering father. Some may wonder whether anything worthwhile can be added to our understanding of Margaret Fuller after the publication of Prof. Capper's second volume. The answer: an emphatic "Yes". Murray's "Wandering Pilgrim" deserves a distinguished place alongside Capper's and the best of the other scholarly volumes on Fuller. A long time birthing, it should stand well the test of time. Murray's controversial interpretation of Fuller will not win acceptance by all Fuller scholars, but they can ill afford to ignore her. Her provocative biography is a must-read .



5. Murray analyzes Margaret Fuller's achievements as "America's first full-fledged intellectual woman," from child prodigy to crusading journalist to revolutionary agent in Italy, always struggling to make sense of the world around her and her own divided nature. Careful consideration of this Romantic woman writer's "gender / sex identity crisis" makes the book an original contribution to Fuller scholarship and brings us as readers face to face with a conflicted soul, never able to resolve all the contradictions of her mind and body. I recommend this biography to anyone with a serious interest in women's and gender studies.

5 comments about The Badge: Thoughts from a State Trooper.

1. Wow - what a book! An absolute "must read" for EVERYONE - not just law enforcement officers (but should be compulsory reading for them!!). A rare blend of excitement, humour, action, honesty and humility. One of the best books I have ever read (and I read a lot of books!!). I can't recommend it highly enough.



2. This book is the first book in a long while that I picked up and never put down until I read it from cover to cover. Jim's words and stories make you feel at home with the book. This is "the real stories of the highway patrol." I can't wait to get the rest of Jim's books



3. This book is simply the most endeared book in my vast "law enforcement"
   collection. Jim Geeting is instantly your best friend. Reading his words
   is like having him at your kitchen table, coffee in hand, with a very
   warm, comfortable atmosphere!



4. Thank you, Trooper Geeting - you made me realize why I got into this profession - and why I need to stay. You also showed many of our "customers" a side that is rarely seen. Keep up the good work!



5. Cops are People, Too!
   By John De Haven

   Happily, it's still possible to find your way to a good book now and then. And once in a while you can get lucky, and a good book will just sort of find its way to you. That's what just happened to me!

   We've all heard the jaded expression "You can't put it down." You know what I mean. You sometimes get that feeling of connection with the author or with the story (or both!) and adjust your posture, reload your beverage and maybe sink a little deeper into the couch with the welcome and soothing thought: "This is good. This just feels good. He's talking to me here, and I can tell I'm gonna like this." With some good books, it can happen early on. Sometimes, if it is to happen at all, it can take a little longer.

   In Jim Geeting's new one, "The Badge - Thoughts from a State Trooper," (McKenna Publishing Group) it happened to me in the first few seconds. No, I don't mean somewhere in the first chapter; it happened earlier than that. I didn't get any farther than the dedication where the author acknowledges his beautiful wife and young sons before I had a tear in my eye and solid confidence in my certainty that Jim's book was going to be a pleasure.

   Here, in the dedication, Geeting speaks to his sons, saying in part:

   You took a cop's blackened soul
   And taught it the joy of wrestling, giggles and unconditional love
   Of camp outs, good jokes and the wonder in a bug or a rock.
   Of the hero I could be - simply by being a good dad
   I dreamed of you both, long before God sent you.

   Oh, yeah? Please pass the Kleenex!

   Author Geeting is a veteran cop, a trooper with the Wyoming Highway Patrol. For some time he has written a column, "The Badge," which appears regularly in largest circulation newspapers in Wyoming. Bearing the same title, his book is a digest of some of Jim's (and his publisher's, no doubt) favorites from among a couple years' worth of these columns. Whether sorting out broken cars and bodies at the scene of a wreck, lecturing those who might choose to drink and drive or fail to buckle up, or basking in the pleasures of the school spelling bee or in any of the many places and experiences in between, each savory nugget in the banquet of a cop's and a family man's life can be consumed in barely a minute or two. But like the best of Thanksgiving feasts, the pleasure derived has a way of lasting.

   Trust me. The reading is the easy part. It's the pondering of the practical simplicity of this cop's ways and wisdom that brings the reward. Indeed, the digesting and enjoying of the nearly 75 columns included in his book (yes, I counted!) represent a much more touching and longer-lasting experience.

   Early on, I had the good luck to recognize Geeting's anthology was, for me anyway, really something of a confession... a generous slice of the "stuff" of law enforcement we on the outside always want to know - not what happens in the legislature or in meetings when the brass get together but, rather, the stuff that unfolds or (on a bad day) explodes out there in the street. Easily, modestly, credibly and with a refreshing clarity, Geeting conveys his genuine love and respect -- both for his chosen profession and for his colleagues and brethren within it. Most often citing examples from his lengthy experience behind the badge, he invites us to see it from his side.

   And there, on the inside, we are offered this good cop's view of many of the familiar and not-so-familiar facts, routines, surprises, fears and follies that conspire to make the on-duty life of a law enforcement officer so exciting, interesting, satisfying, humorous, rewarding, dangerous, at times sickening, heart breaking, misunderstood, under-appreciated, frustrating, occasionally frightening, and yet always so absolutely essential to our safety and the quality of life most of us enjoy every day.

   Still, that's only part of why I'm lucky "The Badge - Thoughts from a State Trooper" found its way to me. Jim Geeting is much more than the stereotypical policeman. He is also the perfect blend of hard-hearted cop, all business and always steeled against publicly showing feelings or emotion, and the kind of family man that you and I wish we could be, adoring and adored by his wife and children. In one particularly memorable vignette, Geeting describes how his wife and (now teenage) sons are both his motivation and his satisfaction, in the end acknowledging: "They and our home are not the reason for my armor, they are my armor."

   In fact, I'm not certain whether this new book is more about a humble and devoted and decent citizen, a family man who happens to be a cop or about a cop who is still married to his first wife and who views his role as a father and husband as the most important and satisfying in his or anybody's life. That's not to suggest it matters; it doesn't. Time and again, the insights into each are presented with a persuasive and almost irresistible clarity and candor.

   I promise you... Jim Geeting will grab hold of your heart, too! Many of his commentaries, brief though they may be individually, favor readers with a look at this "other" side where he reveals his gentle nature, his appealing yet hair trigger sensitivity, his vulnerability and his extraordinary love of and desire to protect children. His recognition of and determination to preserve as best he can the innocence and ultimate worthiness of every child, is a subject visited several times in "The Badge's" 130 pages.

   So get comfortable, be sure the Kleenex is nearby and pick up "The Badge - Thoughts from a State Trooper." You'll catch Jim Geeting's message all right. Or it'll catch you!

   And when you're finished reading this one, don't take it to the book barrel at church. Put it on the shelf by your easy chair or atop the magazine pile in the pearl room. Keep it nearby. You'll want to read it again.

   I did.

2 comments about Refugees in Our Own Land : Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem.

1. I'd love to find a book by a book by a Palestinian that truly seeks peace. This is not such a volume.
   
   Beginning from the preface, which in hysterical tones accuses Israel of committing genocide, to the last pages, this is a book loaded with code-words calling for Israel's destruction. It's full of "humiliation," "murder," "genocide," and the like.
   
   Had those things actually been perpetrated by Israel, I would be first in line to condemn them. But even the United Nations has concluded that Israel has not committed genocide, in Jenin, or anywhere else. As for murder, it seems that the only murder is taking place by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, and that whosoever amongst Palestinians has been killed has died either in battle, in the line of fire, or by accident, for which Israel has apologized. When, on the other hand, was the last time a Palestinian leader actually sought an end to suicide bombings, because they are evil, not because they are inexpedient.
   
   My biggest problem with this book is that for most of the events that Hamzeh reports, she relies on hearsay. There has been no scientific or objective attempt to verify the information, much less the veracity of the sources. Even that might be all right, had the reporter not assumed an hysterical tone. But Hamzeh is so willing to believe everything nasty she hears about Israel or Israelis, or Jews for that matter, that nothing escapes unscathed.
   
   I want peace, but books like this one--filled with blame and outright hatred--do nothing to promote it.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



2. Few are the works that have given the personal touch to what it means to be living under the ugliest forms of occupation of modern times: The Israeli Occupation of West Bank and Gaza. Ms. Hamzeh's work is one of such works. Her diaries give a face to the people who are suffering on a daily basis faced with what an Apartheid-like situation - those people are the Palestinians who are being dispossessed and forced to live as refugees in their own land. Ms. Hamzeh's diaries and the additional essays give the personal touch and the political situation in the form of Oslo agreement that is shown to be nothing more than a mask that was intended all along to squeeze the Palestinians out of their land.
   This book should be recommended reading to students of Politics who risk losing sight of what it means to live under Occupation while reading Academic oriented works, and this book should be displayed as a testimony by all peace loving people against Violence and Racism and pure Murder that is being applied against Palestinians on a daily basis.

5 comments about Betting on Myself: Adventures of a Horseplayer and Publisher.

1. Great read for anyone even casually interest in playing the ponies. Horse racing is the only betting opportunity were all of the answers are given to you in the Daily Racing Form, before you make a bet. All one has to do is factor in what's important and throw out what's not. That is the trick.
   Crist has a great conversational writing style and makes it a fun read.



2. Crist took the racing form into the present & future. It was in the hands of guys frozen with a 1930s outlook (sorry Saul Rosen et al)and Crist pumped his energy and intelligence into a moribund product. Congratulations Steve.



3. Steven Crist, Betting on Myself: Adventures of a Horseplayer and Publisher (DRF Press, 2004)
   
   Crist's surprisingly readable "my life thus far" autobiography is probably stuck with a built-in limit to the numbers of readers who are going to be intrigued by it. This is a mistake not by Crist, but by those readers who don't think they're going to like a "horse book."
   
   Crist traces the path he took from his years at Harvard, when he first discovered greyhound racing, to his present position as the owner of the Daily Racing Form. In between there's a lot of other fun stuff to interest both the horseplayer and the general reading audience: a stint with the New York Times, various discussions of economics (as it pertains to horse racing, granted, but money is money), the political scene in Albany, and all the other good stuff a dirt-dishing autobiography is supposed to have. (Kitty Kelley readers, however, will be depressed to note that Crist has been married to the same woman since Methuselah was a pup, and if there's any steppin' out involved, it never gets mentioned. Which may explain why Crist, and not Kelley, wrote this book.) It's also exceptionally readable for non-fiction, and a lot of fun in the bargain. A lot of fun. ****



4. The nearby review - Well Written Memoir from a Fascinating Person - got all the details of a review right, so I don't need to repeat them. Enthusiastic individual believes in himself, makes good, but fails (hardly by accident) to reveal some of the "secrets" of parimutuel betting success. Kind of like that magician who just won't explain how he cut the lady in half.



5. It's always interesting to read and learn about the behind-the-scenes action that takes place during the business ventures of which the general public is not usually aware. In BETTING ON MYSELF, Steven Crist is a horseplayer who had ideas to improve the information provided to gamblers by creating an alternative publication to The Daily Racing Form (DRF). Instead, as this well written memoir details, Crist became chairman and publisher of DRF. His story serves as another example of a person who fulfills his goals and proves that luck is directly proportional to hard work applied to opportunity.

No comments about Doomed by Cartoon: How Cartoonist Thomas Nast and the New York Times Brought Down Boss Tweed and His Ring of Thieves.

No comments about The Starched Blue Sky Of Spain And Other Memoirs.