Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past week or so, you can’t have failed to notice the launch of Sarah Palin’s new book, “Going Rogue“.  I have read her much anticipated tome and recommend saving your money and borrowing someone else’s copy.  Books by politicians tend to fall into one of two categories—a statement of their political views and/or policies or a memoir of their life and a defense of their actions. “Going Rogue” is a mix of the two, performs badly on both counts, and is ultimately unsatisfying as a result.

That’s a shame because “Going Rogue” had the potential to be a very compelling book. Sarah Palin’s meteoric rise to fame, first as governor of Alaska and then as the first female Republican vice-presidential candidate, captured everyone’s interest and her behind-the-scenes account of the 2008 campaign could have been a rip-roaring good tale. Would a different ghost writer, someone less polemic than Lynn Vincent, been able to coax the story out of her? It’s hard to say.

Likewise, a straight forward account of her conservative principles and her take on politics of the day would have had a smaller, but equally interested audience. Unfortunately, “Going Rogue” mixes a generalized account of her life and career with political screeds and the end result ranges from clashing to completely unbelievable. Are we really supposed to buy, for example, that she urged her daughter Bristol to put off starting a small business until Obama was out of office? Sheesh.

The publication of “Going Rogue” has set off an avalanche of refutations and fact checking.  A list of links follows:

Poltifact factchecks Palin’s book  here

Shushannah Walshe, one of the authors of “Sarah from Alaska”, refutes some of Palin’s claims about the 2008 campaign here

Shannyn Moore offers three of the Alaskans (Anne Kilkenny, John Bitney, and Andrew Halcro) who were bad-mouthed in the book equal time on her show, video segments of which are posted on here on her blog, “Just a Girl from Homer”, and on YouTube. The panel discussion is very civilized. I must say that I’m happy to finally see a group of people who actually understand Alaskan issues and know Mrs. Palin personally talk about this book as opposed to the usual range of vacuous talking heads.

Geoffrey Dunn (Huffington Post columnist) talks here about Anchorage activist Andree McLeod and here about Palin’s former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, also bad-mouthed in the book. Dunn is a regular blogger on the lefty mega-site, the Huffington Post. He also has a book coming out called “The Lies of Sarah Palin” so he obviously has a bias, but the posts are interesting for the counterpoint they provide.

My ratings of other books on or about Sarah Palin:

Avoid “Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down” by Kaylene Johnson. It’s a puff piece.

“Sarah from Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar” by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, two reporters embedded with the McCain campaign, is an excellent book and an engaging read. The authors are sympathetic to their subject, but not blind to her faults and give an even-handed account of her career and the subsequent fall-out from the 2008 campaign.

To get the bigger picture, I highly recommend “The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election” by Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz. Johnson and Balz had behind the scenes access to all of the players in the 2008 election and give a clear rendering of the major problems with the Clinton and McCain campaigns as well the ups and downs of the Obama campaign. Another very readable and engaging book.

Here’s a few favorites I’ve been holding back. Friday the 13th seemed an opportune time to share them. Enjoy!

Finally, the truth about Batman ….

I want to get this picture made into a name tag and wear it at work …..

Always wondered what old Smokey was doing out in the woods with a shovel. Now we know. If you should go into the woods today, you better go in disguise ….

Every now and then you have a little moment that reminds you why you are proud to be a cataloger.

Cataloging is an arcane science.  I like to think of it as a kind of cryptography–you analyze the object in hand and then “code it up” so that people can find it when they do a search.  Mostly that involves putting down the information that is already there, but a really good cataloger takes that extra step and finds the information that isn’t there, but should be.

Today, my assistant, Joann, was cataloging an oral history interview with a woman who, in the parlance of the time, was referred to by her husband’s name–let’s call her “Mrs. John Smith”.  This is an old practice and reflects the thinking that when two people marry, they become one person and that person is the husband (British common law, I believe).

Hoary laws and customs don’t do the modern researcher any good, however, and both Joann and I were keen to find this woman’s first name, but we were batting zero. Finally, I suggested that Joann take a look in the Pioneers of Arnor records.  If the husband was a member, then the membership rolls might name his wife.  As it happens, my guess was on the money and I’m proud to say that  “Ada Jean Smith” was entered as the author and subject of the interview.

In doing this bit of extra digging, we set the historical record straight and gave this woman back her identity. A small thing and no more than our job, but we were glad to do it.

I’ve been down for the past five days with a nasty sinus infection so I’ve had the opportunity to watch repeated trailers for the disaster flick “2012″ while on serious antibiotics. The idea that the world will end in 2012 due to a Mayan prophecy wasn’t as unbelieveable as the idea that the government will have the foresight to build ships for the survivors. Get serious. We are talking the same government that can’t agree on a health care reform or on the best way to regulate Wall Street, but somehow they have an apocalypse preparedness plan? Now that is fiction.

Feet

Originally uploaded by dr.Ozda

This is officially the creepiest photo my colleague, dr. Ozda, has ever posted. Doc’s “little hobbies” are why we keep him locked in a back room during working hours ……

“Artificial mystery flavor.”

–Written on a label on a post-dinner, complimentary lollilop offered up by a local Japanese restaurant that I was eating at last night. The mystery flavor turned out to be coconut.

I’ve been down and out for the past ten days with the seasonal flu. In consideration of the upcoming Talk Like a Pirate Day, I was able to do a credible imitation of the dying Captain Flint (Treasure Island):

“Darby McGill! Darby McGill! Bring aft the rum, Darby!”

Or at least I was until I lost my voice for about two days.

After visiting the doctor swab, the pharmacist swab recommended something called Host Immune. If you’ve never seen this, it’s a liquid nutritional supplement made from Mycelium that is supposed to boost your immune system. Mycelium, at least what I was able to ascertain from the box in my virus-afflicted condition, is a kind of fungus. So, yes, I was officially drinking fungus juice.

What can I say? When you have chills, sore throat, a nasty cough, and infected sinuses, you’re willing to clutch at any possible remedy. But, for the record, killing the taste of fungus juice is the reason the rum is always gone.

The New York Times has an interesting article on a new approach to teaching English literature entitled “The Future of Reading: Pick the Books You Like”. As the title suggests, this approach, called “reading workshop”, encourages middle school students to read more by doing away with an assigned list of classic texts. Instead, kids pick out books they want to read and keep journals listing their reactions to the books.  Teachers point students toward more challenging texts and monitor page counts (each student must read 20 pages a night). Students also give book talks to their class.

The “reading workshop” approach has attracted its critics and the crux of the problem seems to be a disagreement on what the goal of English literature instruction should be. Is the goal to develop lifelong readers or is the goal to give students a shared canon of knowledge?

My question after reading the article is where is the school librarian? It’s the librarian, after all, who usually performs the functions taken on by the teacher in this article. Admittedly, this particular middle school may be one where the school library/librarian has been cut as “non-essential”, but it’s disappointing not to see the library at least acknowledged as a partner. In practice, school libraries in general and public libraries in particular play a large role in literacy instruction for kids.

This article caught my eye because I’m considering embarking on my own “Great Books of Western Literature” reading program. I’ve decided that this fall is the year when I will improve my mind by reading the books that I’ve heard about, thought were interesting, but just hadn’t gotten around to yet.

My rules of thumb are as follows:

• The books can be either fiction or non-fiction.
• I can’t have read them before. They must be completely new to me.
• I reserve the right to toss aside anything I find unbearably dull or hard to get into.
• The books need to be able to interest a modern reader. They can’t be period pieces that are read for the antique value and nothing else. In other words, the classics must be classic.
• The works need not be limited to the Western canon.
• Children’s classics as well as adult books will be considered.

Here is my list of Great Books to date:

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I found “Finn” hard to get into as a kid, preferred “Tom Sawyer”)
• Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
• Shahnameh (I hope to find a good translation of this Persian epic poem)
• Analects of Confucius (another non-Western classic I’m hoping to find a good translation of)
• The Wizard of Oz (I’ve seen the movie, but I’ve never read the actual book)

Any recommendations for me?

President Obama is a noted reader. The press recently reported on his heavy duty August vacation reading list which included such hefty tomes as David McCullough’s new biography of John Adams and Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  The New York Times ran an article in Jan. 2009 on the books that shaped his life.

If you haven’t read Obama’s own autobiography, Dreams of My Father,  I highly recommend it. Dreams is a lyrical, moving account of Obama’s search for his father, his family history, and, by extension, his own identity as a man.

I always know when fall time is rolling round as I become more enamored of reading in the evenings. In much the same way that squirrels collect pine cones for the winter, I begin hauling in books that peak my interest.

Here are a few of my recent reads and reviews thereof:

This literary classic is much improved by the addition of some ultra-violent zombie mayhem.  Not only do I heartily approve the addition of brain-hungry hordes of the undead and sword-swinging Ninja action to this wheezy tome, but I can only hope that it will lead to other cross-over stories. Charles Dickens’ novels could badly do with an injection of killer robots, for example. Seriously, if you have never been able to get into Jane Austen before (like me), try this volume and see if you don’t enjoy the story that much more.  I am greatly looking forward to “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” which should be out in September.

From zombies to politicians–some folks would say that’s not much of a stretch.  However, if you are looking for a good,non-fiction, political page turner, I can highly recommend “The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution”.  I’m not generally interested in election stories, but I was definitely intrigued by Chicago Tribune reporter, Naftali Bendavid’s, coverage of the 2006 election.  Bendavid’s portrait of the election process and the personalities behind it is both riveting and compelling. Literally, I couldn’t put this book down once I started even though I obviously knew the outcome.

One small nitpick: it would have been nice to have described the duties of a campaign manager in more detail. If you don’t have experience trying to coordinate a large event like a campaign, I’m not sure that you can really appreciate Rahm Emanuel’s position as he essentially manages not one, but fifty separate political races–at the same time.

So what were the ideas Rahm Emanuel and his posse of Democratic challengers campaigning on? “The Plan: Big Ideas for Change in America” by Emanuel and Bruce Reed outlines the three major points of the Democratic platform: 1) universal education, 2) universal healthcare, and 3) universal service.  A word of advice: the universal healthcare plan Emanuel and Reed advocate is not the same as the current plan under discussion.

Get the paperback version of this book with the new foreword written in 2008.  The authors make clear in the foreward that The Plan is about their ideas and doesn’t reflect the views of the staff and management (e.g. President Obama).

The book opens with an entertaining account of the difference between hacks (professional politicians) and wonks (policy experts) and the importance of keeping an even balance of power between the two. It then moves into a discussion of the authors’ proposals for education, health, and volunteer service.

The healthcare policy changes they propose are much more conservative than anything currently being discussed in Congress (or at least that was my read of Emanuel and Reed’s ideas).  I didn’t care for their idea of a volunteer service corps either. I’ve heard similar proposals before and I dispute the idea that my fellow Americans are somehow falling down in their citizenship duties.  It’s the government that should do more, not the citizens who are going all out just to keep their heads above water.  I did like President Obama’s plan–which is just a footnote in the universal service section–that high school and junior high students could earn money for college by doing community service.

The idea that held the most promise for me was universal education. In this section, the authors talk about making a college education free for everyone which I rather like.  In Arnor, we have a similar program where high school seniors at the top of their class get a four year, full tuition scholarship to the state university.

One of the outcomes of The Thumpin’ was that Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House. “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters” is the book she co-wrote with Amy Hill Heath. If you are looking for a definitive autobiography, however, you will be disappointed. The book is really the text of a long, inspirational speech in hardback. If, on the other hand, you are just looking for the highlights of Nancy’s life, then you will enjoy this book.