Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
Here is a little pre-review of a book by Michael Kimmel,
University of California, “Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into and Out of
Violent Extremism”, abook review by Dina Temple-Raston, “Masculinity, not
ideology, drives extremist groups”, Washington Post, March 25, 2018, Outlook.
While Amy Chua had argued earlier (“Political Tribes”) that
they were carrying out their group behaviors. Kimmel argues that they have
become frustrated in attempting to experience themselves as men, because they
cannot succeed in a society that demands so much restraint and abstraction.
That may be true of many groups like white supremacists and
some of the European radical Islamic terrorists, although it explains less well
the 9/11 hijackers.
All of this sounds Rosenfelsian.
It’s true that upper middle class men who do succeed in
academics, business or technology (or professional sports) probably never
encounter other men who behave this way.There is a movement going on to (like on Facebook) to let boys grow up as boys (Steven Marche’s New
York Times article in Nov. 2017). .But
upper class families (and higher achievers in the gay community today) would
never see this.
Time Special Editions sells a coffee table gloss book, “1968:
The Year that Shaped a Generation” in supermarkets now (112 pages).(I never knew how big Wegmans could be until
yesterday.) The editor is Edward
Felsenthal.
The back cover has a protestor holding a sign that reads “Resist!”
1968 (as in the CNN series “The 60’s”) was said to be a “revolutionary
year of years”.Or, “like a knife blade,
the year that severed the past from the future.”
Indeed, on February 8, 1968 (a Thursday) I was drafted, in
Richmond VA. On May 31, a Sunday, I would be in Special Training Company at Ft.
Jackson, cleaning out the grease pit with a toothbrush, but I got off KP in time
to overhear LBJ say on the radio that he would not seek reelection. There would be the DC riots on 14th
Street, and then the “Medium Cool” convention and Chicago, and then the last-minute
win by Nixon.
A week or so later, we would be on “red alert” after the
assassination of Martin Luther King.
There’s a lot in here, like about showbiz at the time (“Hair”)
or the turmoil in Czechoslovakia and especially France (Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers”).
It isn’t often that I feature “somebody else’s” book review,
but Kathi Wolfe has a great account of the new novel “Red Clock” by Leni Zumas(Little Brown [a “real” publisher], 2018, 368 pages).
The review is in the Washington Blade, March 9, "Viewpoint", p. 19.
The novel, set in a dystopian future and probably capable of
generating another LionsGate-like movie franchise, imagines a future where
surrogacy and abortion has been forbidden, single people can’t adopt, and there
is an “Every Child Needs Two” law.Oh, it
sounds so much like Rick Santorum a few years ago, or maybe Pat Buchanan before
that.
It almost sounds like procreation is mandatory for everybody
so that everyone else can find a partner.
I’m more interested, as a writer, in how a society becomes dystopian:but with Russian meddling in our social
media, weaker social capital, and a certain background complacency, all leading
us to have a “President Poopiepants”, we can imagine how it starts. It's about a lot more than phony religious freedom laws .
The March 2018 issue of Wired offers a cover with Mark Zuckerberg
having undergone what looks like a bloody nose attack (or cut eyelash) from
Vladimir Putin. Perhaps Putin doesn’t want to allow a 33-year-old become more
powerful than Putin.
On p. 46 there appears the booklet-length essay by Nicholas
Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, ”Inside the
Two Years that Shook Facebook, and the World”, link (paywall after free article allotment;I
bough a print copy at Union Station today after the kids’ “National Walk Out”
gun demonstration on the Capitol Grounds).
The narrative begins with a tale of the firings of two
contract employees, one of whom had done some private sleuthing of Facebook’s
intended way of trying to defeat Trump in early 2016.One of the employees was fired only for
social media connection to a Gizmodo editor who released the leak. But then the
article (in thirteen sections) goes back to give the history of Facebook’s
energy in doing news aggregation, for the bucks.
The article explains how Facebook has depended on Section
230, discussed widely on the blogs in connection with trafficking, especially
sex trafficking and Backpage. So Facebook insisted on neutrality in presenting
content to users, considering only the users’ interests according to algorithms.
Facebook wanted to have its chocolate cake and eat it
too.Newscorp (Fox) acted threatening,
as Facebook was creating serfdoms to subordinate the news media, and underming Section
230 might be a way to hit back.(That
could silence individual bloggers, like me, over eventual downstream liability
fears).
By mid 2016, it had become evident that the neutrality was
an albatross.Trump’s people considered
how to use the idea to feed fake stories about Hillary Clinton, and soon the
Russians were doing it. Facebook was becoming a publisher of supermarket tabloid
stuff while pretending not to be one.
The article discusses Zuckerberg’s 5700-word “Manifesto”,
titled “Building Global Community” , from February 2017.He does talk about
Supportive, Safe, Inclusive, Informed, and especially Engaged communities.It is the last one that is the hardest.The new world seems to demand personalized
community engagement that would have been unwelcome in the past.But the Manifesto was written before Mark
saw all the wheels that had come
off.
Rebecca Rosen edits a “booklet” in The Atlantic for March
with three life stories of human trafficking.
All three are women who worked domestically.Two are from the Philippines, one from
Brazil.
They were generally involved in caregiving as live-ins, and
were paid much less than promised contractually.Some did not have good living conditions, as in
Boston winters.Some had immigration and
visa issues, although the articles do not go into detail on this.
But there is “slavery” in other areas (especially caregiving) besides the sex trafficking
which is in the news now because of the FOSTA-SESTA bills in Congress.
I’m not one who will sign up to write for specific minority
groups or play identity politics, but I noticed with some interest a story by
Denene Millner (with her own book company) on p. 10 of the New York Times Review,
“She wants more than M.L.K. at bedtime”, or, online, “Black kids don’t want toread about Harriet Tubman all the time”.
She then writes about the need for more black characters in
children’s books.
I keep getting these messages on how to sell volumes of
books for specific groups, and fortunately have had the luxury of ignoring
them.
But there was a minority-focused book table at the NBC
Washington Health Fair in DV this weekend.
Tobias Jones has a booklet-length article in the Guardian, “The
Fascist Movement that Has Brought Mussolini Back into the Mainstream”, in a
series called “The Long Read”, link here.
The article describes the muti-facted Casa Pound.It seems to have started in bars in the late
1990s and been evangelized through rock and “fight clubs”.The movement would get pushed in some books
in the middle 2000’s and would be pushed farther by the migrant crisis starting
in 2014.
I can remember well from a freshman history course in college
that Mussolini “taxed bachelors” and demanded procreation.
Andrea Mamomme has an alarming article on CNN, “Can AnythingSave Italy from a Return to Fascism?” Brexit
(Blogtyrant’s tweet “Whoops, England?"), in June 2016, Trump’s election, and the
softening of EU have come with shocking speed after the migrant crisis.
Illustration by Luc Giarelli on Wikipedia under CCSA 2.0 , “We
dream of a Roman Italy”
A grade school teacher, Tina DuBrock, in Dyer, IND (almost on Lake Michigan) has come up with a wish
list for mental health books, and the list went viral.Here is the MSN story, and here is the Amazon
link to the list.
The story says the teacher notes the “blaming” by parents on
teachers and vice versa for serious discipline and security problems.
Some of the subject matter requested is pretty specific,
like dyslexia.
Reid Ewing’s past discussion of his body dysmorphia might
seem appropriate.Here is a typical
story in People Magazine explaining it.
A lot of issues here: living on the Gulf Coast with
hurricane risk;flipping of property, subprime
risk, do-it-yourself mentality, and a young man prepared to deal with all this
as long as he had no dependents.
There’s also the problem of renting to unstable tenants who
squat if they can’t afford anythingAnd
the way abandoned property around deteriorates and smells.
I remember a Dr. Phil episode with a young couple who
thought they could skip education and get by flipping houses with a baby on the
way, back in 2006.
A couple days ago I got an email from a company “USBookviews”
which offers review services.The strike
page is here.The email marketing page is more colorful.
A process like this might work with a new book, like the
novel that I am planning (“Angel’s Brother”). I don’t think sending older books
(even as recent as 2014) makes a lot of sense, especially non-fiction and
commentary.I’ll think about this as I
work on the novel.
The video above is another review service I found on
YouTube.
I have a templatefor outlining the novel that I explain
here.This process helps tie “loose ends”
together before it goes out to the world.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
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