This handsome book includes childhood pictures of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards with hundreds of photographs and illustrations of the band and interviews with all the Stones except Bill Wyman, who left the group in the early 90s.
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Over The Edge: Tackling Quarterbacks, Drugs, and a World Beyond Football
by LAWRENCE TAYLOR
Harper Collins Publishers
Raw and uncut, Taylor tells of his life from a small town in Virginia to becoming the most dominant defensive player of all time. Through a record ten straight All-Pro seasons. LT led the New York Giants to two Super Bowl victories, along the way revolutionizing the outside linebacker position.
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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Carr who spent nearly 30 years studying the Holocaust, turned his focus to the overlooked number of blacks who survived and perished in the Nazi concentration camps.
A good read.
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film
by Peter Biskind Simon & Schuster 2003
As he did in his acclaimed Easy Riders, Biskind profiles the people who took the independent movement from obscurity to the Oscars, most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford.
[ January 16, 2004, 10:49 PM: Message edited by: Mojo Long ]
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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In 1999, after almost 20 years of mysterious symtoms that he tried to ignore, popular award-winning talk show host Montel Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Montel vowed to continue to live the most active life possible and became a tireless spokesperson and fundraiser for MS research. In this intimate and resourceful memoir--and blueprint for living with the disease--Montel reveals how the shocking diagnosis changed his life.
Good read.
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
by Elijah Wald Amistad/Harper Collins Publishers: 342 pp.; $24.95
Aprofessional musician and the author of "Josh White: Society Blues," Ward wrote this book largely because a "more polished, professional approach has been disrespected by generations of blues writers in search of wild delta primitivism." Another version of the great Mississippi blues.
Good read.
[ February 03, 2004, 09:35 PM: Message edited by: Mojo Long ]
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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SONS OF CAMELOT: The Fate of an American Dynasty
by Laurence Leamer
Yale University Press/William Morrow
2004
Based on five years of rigorous research and unprecendented cooperation from the five surviving sons of Robert Kennedy, the four Shriver sons, Maria Shriver, ans other Kennedys, this is the most revealing book ever written about these lives.
Good read!
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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REEFER MADNESS: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
by Eric Schlosser Marina Books, 2003
America's black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risque video or pay our kids' nannies in cash. Here the best-selling author of "Fast Food Nation" turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society.
Good read!
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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INSIDE HITLER'S BUNKER: The Last Days of the Third Reich
by Joachim Fest
Farrar Straus & Giroux 2004
Fest describes in riveting detail the final weeks of the war, from the desperate battles that raged night and day in the ruins of Berlin to the growing paranoia that marked Hitler's mental state--an utter disregard of the well-being of both soldiers and civilians.
A compelling narrative.
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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Former President Clinton adviser Dick Morris turns his sharp-eyed gaze on Hillary, the long time first lady, current New York senator, and bestselling author. For, as he argues, no politician in America today is better alligned to become president in 2008--and none would bring more baggage to the White House--than Mrs. Clinton.
Good and fascinating!
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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What is good reading & fascinating to me is the National Association of Black Scuba Divers to visit the website. url = http://www.nabsdivers.org
If anyone is even interested in this I am sure it is most rewarding.
Also in case you find it interesting The Wreck of The Henretta Marie is most moving for She was a slave ship which recently was laid to rest
http://www.melfisher.org/henriettamarie.htm In May of 1993, the National Association of Black SCUBA Divers placed a memorial plaque on the site of the Henrietta Marie. The simple bronze marker, which faces the African shore thousands of miles away, bears the name of the slave ship and reads,
In memory and recognition of the courage, pain and suffering of enslaved African people.
Speak her name and gently touch the souls of our ancestors."
Posts: 107 | From: North Dakota USA | Registered: Apr 2004
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Social history at its best, Founding Mothers unveils the drive, determination, creative insight, and passion of the other patriots, the women who raised our nation.
Here, Frank, a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry, unwraps the mystery of George W. Bush assembling a comprehensive psprofile of the 44th president.
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WILL THEY EVER TRUST US AGAIN? LETTERS FROM THE WAR ZONE
by MICHAEL MOORE
Simon & Schuster 2004
In its first publication, soldiers, veterans and their families writes to Michael Moore sharing their thoughts and feelings about the war in Iraq, with an introduction by Moore. A thriller.
Posts: 83 | From: Kirksville, Missouri, USA | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Pound For Pound: A Biography Of Sugar Ray Robinson
by Herb Boyd
Amistad 2004
Hailed by Muhammad Ali as "the King, the master, my idol," Sugar ray Robinson was the greatest boxer America had seen since Joe Louis and is considered by many today to be, pound for pound, the best boxer the sport has ever known. A world welterweight and five-time middleweight champion, he had a career that spanned three decades.
Good read!
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“Blighted Blues is a seductive and tantalizing mesh of many interlocking stories from a gifted story teller.”
Blighted Blues is a book about cause and effect, with strong and emotive characters that dabble in troubled and uncharted waters of African politics. By writing an audacious, anfractuous exposé about Africa’s past and present dictators, Chrys Chimé, a precocious foreign student in a British university, unwittingly becomes an unintended catalyst that triggers a chain reaction of intrigues and spookily foggy-bottom encounters. In the main, the book provokes an out of the blue groundswell of belligerent Rastafarian fundamentalism as the Rastamuffins protest the heresy of branding of their icon, Haile Selassie a dictator. As a consequent subset, Amanda his girlfriend is shot in Lagos, Nigeria and Chrys himself is abducted. From thereon the story and related events ripple and spiral.
For starters, it needs acknowledging that Blighted Blues is a refreshing and assertive departure by Dr. M. O. Ené from the busy, tedious and near obfuscating, Soyinkaĕsque writing mode that shooed many readers away from his last novel Jaundiced Justice. This work runs an intercontinental gantlet, traversing the halcyon environs of Southampton, England, the unforgiving streets of the Lagos, Nigeria, to the cool ambience of the beautiful, valley town and coal-city of Enugu, all in a never-stopping joyful literary excursion.
Blighted Blues is a work that is proportionally a mix of a foreign student’s (the protagonist) biography, cultural history and unhoary African politics. Some male students out of Africa, who did their educational sojourns in the UK or the USA, would readily find bits of their transplanted persona in Chrys Chimé, his philosophy, political outlook, and other earthly and ethereal concerns. They will also identify with Chimé’s challenges and the pull to the homeland, which is frequently juxtaposed with the demanding conflict of attaining the “Golden Fleece” or facing dishonor. Add to this, the chemistry of Amanda, an elegantly tantalizing female consort – who is beauteous and brainy - and you have a veritable page turner.
The substance of the book aside, there is a clear synergy between Ené’s masterful use of supple prose (“the tail pipe was tap-dancing to the discordant rap music from the whistling fan belt and drumming exhaust system”) and his modish and non-pedantic writing style this time around. Ené’s admirable attentiveness to scenic details, his strong sense of specificity and his effective use of translated Igbo proverbs (“If you keep your ears to the ground you will hear the chants of ants” and “when you bite me on the butt, despite the danger of sinking your teeth into faecal matter, I will bite you on the head and disregard the danger of sinking my teeth into cerebral matter”) gives Blighted Blues its most endearing, compelling, and captivating flourish.
In this work, Ené employs a writer’s prerogative to liberally and with great aplomb, poke fun at contemporary Nigeria’s crass fixation with honorific titles in the quest for public recognition (“Chief, (Sir) Patrick Chukwuka Chime, KSM”). He goes further to hilariously dissect other forms of the society’s foibles, such as the efficacious use of contrivances of tone and selected ambiguity that Nigerians conveniently use in dealing with each other. In so doing, he brings some obvious added value to the existing body of work dealing with Nigerian mannerisms and whims, of which Peter Pan Enaharo’s How to Be a Nigerian remains the dominant classic.
Blighted Blues is a seductive and tantalizing mesh of many interlocking stories that are severally enchanting, mordant and hilarious from a gifted story teller. Ené crosses continental, religious, and ethnic boundaries to deliver his tale with gusto. It is well-written book that comes close to being an exhilarating work. Though some may find Blighted Blues in some instances, ornery and at other times irreverent, its is unquestionably a terrific read. With this book, Ené affirms his credentials as an up-to-the-minute au courant and commentator on Nigeria’s socio-cultural and geopolitical affairs.
___________________ Feel me? Ofu onye ana asi unu abia go. - Ednut Igbo-American . www.airamericaradio.com visit her. Posts: 2447 | From: Mother Earth | Registered: Mar 2001
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M. O. Ené has written a good book whether he knows or not. Not only does he capture the essence, he demonstrates the beauty of proverbs and analogies in Igbo storytelling. For proverbs are like palm oil with which words are eaten. "Blighted Blues" infuses that Igbo culture matters, that it is universal in outlook, which is why Hilary Clinton was duly impressed upon when she visited Africa. She came away with the knowledge principle that proverbs have a way of injecting meaning and bringing to life, issues that affect our daily endeavors no matter, which corner of the globe one may choose to abide.
Even in the West, when one is consumed in a deep thought, slouching in a sofa, he usually, would straddle his chin with the palm of his hand while resting the elbow on the thigh, until someone suggests to him, "a penny for your thought" in order to snap him back into the fold of the present. Displaying the power of analogy, in the preface, "The chant of ants," "Blighted Blues" opens with a persuading sentence, "Chrys sat ...with his left forearm wedged between the chin and thigh as if physically preventing his mouth from uttering a word." But this technique is precisely a reverse anecdote that would have certainly caused the reader to want to ask Chrys, "A penny for your thought?"
Then comes the response, not only in the art of color in imagination but also in metaphor. Colorful words as evidenced in this quote, "No one spoke as she kept gnawing her chewing gum at sharp strokes like a nanny goat in labour." Subsequent pages are just as captivating. "Chrys treated Jackie like an eagle's egg." "Hell hath no fury like Jackie supposedly scorned. In fact, hell had no more fury - she took it all."
"Blighted Blues" waxes poetic. Using the experience as an exhaust engineer, the author represents the thoughts of Chrys drawing from the functions of a combustion-powered mechanical vessel: "My thoughts raced... off went the harbinger of anxiety... polluting with toxic and noisy emissions... noisily but successfully left with my woman, leaving alone at the airport a lonely man."
How about "rhymes and rhythms!" "Blighted Blues" spoke of the Arinze arrogance and the ability to make the "impossible plausible; the seemingly impossible, possible" "This is not religion, which is about 'fat faith and flaccid facts... collating facts, not fiction.'" "But here was an angry man looking for a vent, any vent, a butt to kick, any butt to shine his shoes." Jesse Jackson would be impressed!
And sex sells, especially when programmed with lust and laced with booze and lies-to-go. The height of dramatic irony in this case is that the narrator in "Blighted Blues," observed that Chrys knew it was a waste of time trying to get people to read books that were not about sex, scandal, soap gossip and more sex."
So, what do find in "Blighted Blues?" The narrator starts exactly with such lustful technique. Modern society, it seems, cannot shake the imagination of what Eve's boat and rump looked like behind those leaves! O.K.
"The lady looked as though she had just stepped of a spacecraft from Planet prestige, as if she was conjured out of Vogue magazine and her bosom and backside retouched with a bit of firm but fresh flesh. She was a sight to behold. He stopped within a hearing distance to feed his eyes." But he isn't talking about Eve! I wish he weren't so erotic, I thought to myself. But as I proceed down the page, in the next few lines, the answer to my worries is revealed: I encounter the inscription in bold-print, "DILUTION IS NO SOLUTION TO POLLUTION." Therefore, I guess, he decides to let it all hang out. After all, "Blighted Blues" is also about Africans immersed in European carnal love affairs and intrigue.
Very well then! The narrator continues, "The lace, skin-tone Tonga briefs left little to the imagination; she might as well be without them. The same-design, colour-to-match bra had a delicate stretch lace top; its unpadded, front-fastening, half-moon cups allowed the lace portion half-custody of her boobs. He had always teased Jackie that she could do with a slice of silicone. What he saw several moons after was both eye-popping and mouth-watering." "Barry White took over the background with her favourite number: 'You're My Everything.' From here, it was an express ride back to the Garden of Eden for yet another bite of the apple." Even me! I'll have to admit I am beginning to blush as I read the story to my missionary elder sister.
Such matters arising are that the narrator speaks as if his audience are "all Igbo." If that is so, then the format is quite alright. But if not, then the narrator obviously employs a few tortured proverbs. The word, "tortured" implies that certain (African) Igbo analogies by their constitution are quite difficult to translate literally into the English language without nearly distorting or losing their real significance. One such complex and compound example reads, "When two palm trees adjoin, their fronds abut... and Yolanda knew when to stop soiling the village spring."
There are others but a couple of more instances should suffice: "When the fowl farts, the ground becomes a nuisance." Perhaps only an Igbo reader familiar with free animal husbandry (who knows that a lone chicken could take off, and just run and chuckle in the middle of the day without anything pursuing it) could make sense of this message, flowery and elegant nonetheless. "Go ahead an insult me. The doormat said I am a cow; what's new?" Probably, a person conversant with tradition could relate to the practice of using hide as a footmat, otherwise, the essence may be lost to the foreign or modern reader who is grappling to look into the Igbo worldview and learn from it.
It may be a bit hard for the uninformed of African tradition to read "Blighted Blues" with ease because some of the languages and uneven breaks, which sometimes make it a task to grasp at one pass, who is actually talking. Though the author tries to distinguish himself as the narrator from the characters, he may not have conveyed it concisely by paying little attention to exclamation and when a new paragraph ought to begin.
One example is on page 5, paragraph 4, which could easily have been broken into three paragraphs but he bundled it into the same paragraph as if it is Chrys who is still speaking. "Everyone was taken aback!" should do well to stand alone in a new paragraph in order to clearly demarcate the narrator from the actor.
Overall, except for a couple of typos in addition, the book is a timely release that stimulates. Determined not to let the Igbo culture of proverbs and wise sayings die, and more to revive it, "Blighted Blues," though fiction, is a good work and an interesting read for all who wish to brush up on their knowledge of Igbo value systems and how Western influence has a way of successfully corroding such values.
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