Minggu, 08 Maret 2015

? Free Ebook The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project), by Chalmers Johnson

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The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project), by Chalmers Johnson

"Impressive . . . a powerful indictment of U.S. military and foreign policy."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review, front page

In the years after the Soviet Union imploded, the United States was described first as the globe's "lone superpower," then as a "reluctant sheriff," next as the "indispensable nation," and in the wake of 9/11, as a "New Rome." In this important national bestseller, Chalmers Johnson thoroughly explores the new militarism that is transforming America and compelling us to pick up the burden of empire.

Recalling the classic warnings against militarism-from George Washington's Farewell Address to Dwight Eisenhower's denunciation of the military-industrial complex-Johnson uncovers its roots deep in our past. Turning to the present, he maps America's expanding empire of military bases and the vast web of services that support them. He offers a vivid look at the new caste of professional militarists who have infiltrated multiple branches of government, who classify as "secret" everything they do, and for whom the manipulation of the military budget is of vital interest.

Among Johnson's provocative conclusions is that American militarism is already putting an end to the age of globalization and bankrupting the United States, even as it creates the conditions for a new century of virulent blowback. The Sorrows of Empire suggests that the former American republic has already crossed its Rubicon-with the Pentagon in the lead.

  • Sales Rank: #117098 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-01-06
  • Released on: 2004-12-23
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 8.50" h x .89" w x 5.50" l, .80 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 400 pages

Amazon.com Review
Since September 2001, the United States has "undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible," writes Chalmers Johnson. Unlike past global powers, however, America has built an empire of bases rather than colonies, creating in the process a government that is obsessed with maintaining absolute military dominance over the world, Johnson claims. The Department of Defense currently lists 725 official U.S. military bases outside of the country and 969 within the 50 states (not to mention numerous secret bases). According to the author, these bases are proof that the "United States prefers to deal with other nations through the use or threat of force rather than negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction." This rise of American militarism, along with the corresponding layers of bureaucracy and secrecy that are created to circumvent scrutiny, signals a shift in power from the populace to the Pentagon: "A revolution would be required to bring the Pentagon back under democratic control," he writes.

In Sorrows of Empire, Johnson discusses the roots of American militarism, the rise and extent of the military-industrial complex, and the close ties between arms industry executives and high-level politicians. He also looks closely at how the military has extended the boundaries of what constitutes national security in order to centralize intelligence agencies under their control and how statesmen have been replaced by career soldiers on the front lines of foreign policy--a shift that naturally increases the frequency with which we go to war.

Though his conclusions are sure to be controversial, Johnson is a skilled and experienced historian who backs up his claims with copious research and persuasive arguments. His important book adds much to a debate about the realities and direction of U.S. influence in the world. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
In his prescient 2000 bestseller, Blowback, East Asia scholar Johnson predicted dire consequences for a U.S. foreign policy that had run roughshod over Asia. Now he joins a chorus of Bush critics in this provocative, detailed tour of what he sees as America's entrenched culture of militarism, its "private army" of special forces and its worldwide archipelago of military "colonies." According to Johnson, before a mute public and Congress, oil and arms barons have displaced the State Department, secretly creating "a military juggernaut intent on world domination" and are exercising "preemptive intervention" for "oil, Israel, and... to fulfill our self-perceived destiny as a New Rome." Johnson admits that Bill Clinton, who disguised his policies as globalization, was a "much more effective imperialist," but most of the book assails "the boy emperor" Bush and his cronies with one of the most startling and engrossing accounts of exotic defense capabilities, operations and spending in print, though these assertions are not new and not always assiduously sourced. Fans of Blowback will be pleased despite Johnson's lack of remedies other than "a revolution" in which "the people could retake control of Congress... and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Americans worrying about Islamic terrorists should start worrying about their own Pentagonized government. So argues political-scientist Johnson in warning his fellow citizens that their own country's militarism--imperialistic abroad, secretive at home-- threatens their peace, their prosperity, and their freedom far more than does al-Qaeda. Johnson indicts the idealistic Democrat Woodrow Wilson for having first sent the U.S. military on a global crusade for democracy, American style. And he criticizes presidents of both parties for having supported an unnecessarily aggressive and far-flung cold war military buildup in the fight against communism. But he blames the current political crisis chiefly on recent Republican presidents (Reagan and the two Bushes), whom he accuses of having first misinterpreted the internal collapse of the Soviet Union as an American triumph and then claimed the entire world as victors' spoils. As an avowed leftist, Johnson exposes himself to charges of bias--and of geopolitical naivete. Certainly, it will chafe some readers when Johnson partially shifts the blame for the terrorist attacks against the U.S. to America's own arrogant militarists. But irritated readers can hardly dismiss Johnson as just another partisan ideologue when he buttresses his critique with Republican Dwight Eisenhower's cautionary analysis of the "military-industrial complex" and even echoes the long-ignored isolationism of Old Right traditionalists. A provocative summons to the task of reining in a runaway military. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Most helpful customer reviews

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
The Sorrows of Empire or The Empire of Sorrow
By Thomas Fleenor
In The Sorrows of Empire Chalmers Johnson has compiled and constructed a brilliant analysis of United States military policy and its history, as well as evolution, of imperialistic tendencies. The book presents an overwhelming amount of superbly done research as well as an incredible array of statistical information to buttress the arguments that Johnson wishes to promulgate. Most importantly, Johnson is providing an increasingly unaware world population, especially and most-importantly that of the American contingent, with information and analysis that is being progressively more and more silenced by mass media conglomerations and the U.S. Government's Orwellian methods of knowledge distribution and censorship.

Johnson starts his book off with a very thorough examination of the history of U.S. foreign policy, roots of imperialism, and an illumination behind much of the motivation for classic shifts in the direction of the U.S. methods of international engagement. I found this section of the book to be one of the more interesting, because it provided me with some foundational understanding for some of the current direction of U.S. policy. Because most American students and laypeople's understanding of U.S. history regarding the military and foreign policy is antiseptically produced by major U.S. publishing companies, information that Johnson elucidates in The Sorrows of Empire is as vitally important to an educated public as it is unsettling to the average persons' consciousness.

Branching out from his discussion of history, Johnson moves on to discuss the sheer numbers involved regarding the U.S. military hegemony. Unfortunately, as much as these chapters of the book are extremely important to a full understanding of U.S. militarism, I found that the sections are so full of facts and statistical information that they began to read like VCR manuals. However, in wading through the numbers, estimates, pricings, and projections, I've found that not only did I not know how pervasive the military establishment was, but that the world is essentially dotted and monitored by an unfortunate web of U.S. military concrete and steel.

I was perhaps most impressed by the fact that Johnson did not stop at the exposing of the military establishment at home and abroad, but rather he continues to discuss the terrible inequality and hardship that has come as a result of current neoliberal tendencies in the form of domestic and international economic free-market fundamentalist policy design. Johnson goes on to discuss how the U.S.' hypocritical non-market funding and deployment of the military regime cooperates with the self-benefiting establishment and execution of institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund to provide for world-wide economic hegemony of the ruling Capitalist economic states. While, this may not be the way he describes it, at its fundamental level this is the contradictory relationship the U.S. and its "allies" in exploitation have chosen as the most effective route to strip-mining the Third World.

The Sorrows of Empire in its final pages appeals to the American people to attempt to at the very least be mindful of the reality with which it has presented throughout the previous analyses. Unfortunately, Johnson does not provide much in the way of useful suggestion to create positive global social change and eradicate the massive military establishment, but he does warn that it may soon be too late, if it is not already, to redirect the course of the United States away from that of all previous empires. Johnson warns the American public against the possibilities of casting the die and crossing the Rubicon, and we should all be listening.

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
The Collapse of the US Empire
By J.W.K
Author Chalmers Johnson became an intellectual superstar after his last book, Blowback (2000), predicted the horrors of 9-11. With this book, Johnson traces the origins of the US Empire, first as a by-and-large economic empire (via the World Bank and WTO), and now as a military empire, under neoconservative leadership. Scarier than the neoconservative agenda, though, has been the bipartisan acceptance of a growing, secretive military-industrial complex (MIC), with it's "black budgets" and lack of accountability and public oversight. Johnson traces the history of the MIC all the way to the present, showing how it expanded in the post-cold-war era to become a de facto "empire of bases", ruling the world through unilateral gunboat diplomacy. For those Americans who have enjoyed the benefits of global economic and military hegemony, life seemed good until 9-11. Now, it seems rather insecure, to say the least. And, according to Johnson, the road ahead is only going to get bumpier, as our foreign policy increases global insecurity, both social and economic, as well as the threat of terrorism. The argument Johnson weaves together is highly cogent and well-researched. Most remarkable for a book of such leaning, he only utilizes the most rigorously conservative sources. A powerful, necessary read for anyone concerned about the fate of the nation. For further reading, I suggest A People's History of the U.S., by Howard Zinn.

j.w.k.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Things I Never Knew and Am Sorry I Did
By Constant Weeder
This book is a shocker. I thought I was pretty savvy on American history and politics, and economics too, but...the logic of the author's argument is irrefutable. We are spending ourselves blind on military weaponry and bases (in 153 countries), constantly expanding our "defensive" (read offensive) capacity, and blindly letting the Bush gang destroy our Constitution. We are allowing lies and disinformation make us cynical about government. We are looking for war. We teach state terrorism to foreigners. We violate treaties. We provoke attack. We oppress friendly nations. We are installing puppet governments. We have private armies. The war profiteers, linked to government, continue to fatten on the sales of arms. The WTO and IMF, which operate out of Washington DC are crippling Third World countries, dumping on them, restricting their development, controlling their governments, favoring dictatorships, bankrupting them in the name of "globalization." The media in our own country is controlled. Our Congress is ineffectual. Secret courts allow civil rights violations to go unchecked. We have bases that are secret, listening posts that are secret, government budgets that are secret. Next we'll have secret satellites designed to destroy other countries' satellites.

It isn't all about oil and it isn't all about terrorism. It's about American imperialism and an out of control military. We are attempting to control all of Central Asia. We dominate space. Empires survive by aggression and expansion before they crumble and fall. America is an empire. I'm convinced that this author has got it right, and it's scary as anything I've ever read.

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Jumat, 06 Maret 2015

!! Free PDF Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger

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Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger

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Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger

“Perfectly placed to tell us what’s really new about [the] second-generation Web.”—Los Angeles Times

Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world—in which everything has a place—are upended. In the digital world, everything has its places, with transformative effects:

• Information is now a social asset and should be made public, for anyone to link, organize, and make more valuable.

• There’s no such thing as “too much” information. More information gives people the hooks to find what they need.

• Messiness is a digital virtue, leading to new ideas, efficiency, and social knowledge.

• Authorities are less important than buddies. Rather than relying on businesses or reviews for product information, customers trust people like themselves.

With the shift to digital music standing as the model for the future in virtually every industry, Everything Is Miscellaneous shows how anyone can reap rewards from the rise of digital knowledge.

  • Sales Rank: #1454995 in Books
  • Brand: Times Books
  • Published on: 2007-05-01
  • Released on: 2007-05-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.75" h x .91" w x 6.28" l, 1.10 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 288 pages
Features
  • Great product!

Amazon.com Review
Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.

From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world.


The Flocking of Information: An Amazon.com Exclusive Essay by David Weinberger
As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash--adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like "flocking behavior," joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped.

For example, Wize.com is a customer review site founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Doug Baker. The site provides reviews for everything from computers and MP3 players to coffee makers and baby strollers. But why do we need another place for reviews? If you’re using the Web to research what digital camera to buy for your father-in-law, you probably feel there are far too many sites out there already. By the time you have scrolled through one store’s customer reviews for each candidate camera and then cross-referenced the positive and the negative with the expert reviews at each of your bookmarked consumer magazines, you have to start the process again just to remember what people said. Wize in fact aims at exactly that problem. It pulls together reviews from many outside sources and aggregates them into three piles: user reviews, expert reviews (with links to the online publications), and the general "buzz." (For shoppers looking for a quick read on a product, Wize assigns an overall ranking.) When Wize reports that 97 percent of users love the Nikon D200 camera, it includes links to the online stores where the user reviews are posted, so customers are driven back to the businesses to spend their money.

Zillow.com does something similar for real estate. The people behind Expedia.com, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, were looking for a new business idea--and were in the market for new homes. After hunting for information, they found that most of it was locked into the multiple listings sites of the National Association of Realtors. Now Zillow takes those listings and mashes them up with additional information that can help a potential purchaser find exactly what she wants. The most dramatic mashup right now is the "heat map" that uses swaths of color to let you tell at a glance what are the most expensive and most affordable areas. At some point, though, Zillow or one of its emerging competitors will mash up listing information with school ratings, crime maps, and aircraft flight patterns.

Wize and Zillow make money by selling advertising, but their value is in the way their sites aggregate the miscellaneous--letting lots of independent sources flock together, all in one place.

We’re seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a company’s will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock.



From Publishers Weekly
In a high-minded twist on the Internet-has-changed-everything book, Weinberger (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia. Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: the author insists that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." Building on his earlier works' discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that "our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break—they're already breaking—in the digital world." Today's avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Perhaps carried away by his thesis, the author gets into extended riffs on topics like the history of classification and the Dewey Decimal System. At the point where readers may want to turn his musings into strategies for living or doing business, he serves up intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams about "the third order of order" and "useful miscellaneousness." But the book's call to embrace complexity will influence thinking about "the newly miscellanized world." (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Think about how you organize your CD collection. Whether you're quirky or meticulous, once you pick a system, you're pretty much stuck with it. But in the digital world the laws of physics no longer apply. At iTunes you can sort music by any number of criteria, including artist, genre, song name, length, or price. The Internet itself is a hyperlinked web of information that we cruise organically, often finding ourselves far afield of where we started. Weinberger takes us on a journey through the human constructs of classification, from alphabetization through the Dewey decimal system, all necessary but limited approaches to organization that seem antiquated in the digital age. At places like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, an almost infinite ability to sort and combine objects and ideas produces results that range from the surprising to the ridiculous. This so-called third order mixes it all up; it's all about multiple connections and a realization that the world is not as orderly as we thought. Weinberger presents a thought-provoking and entertaining look at our rapidly evolving culture of data. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Most helpful customer reviews

128 of 137 people found the following review helpful.
Deceptively deep
By Ethan Zuckerman
One of the central ironies of David Weinberger's new book, "Everything is Miscellaneous", is that a book about classification is bound to suffer from classification problems. Reviewers and bookstore owners are inclined to think of David as a business writer because his previous books - The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined - were profoundly useful in helping businesspeople understand what this World Wide Web thing was really all about. But it's a mistake to consider David's new book solely as a business book.

Which isn't to say that reading Everything is Miscellaneous won't help you make a buck in world of Web 2.0. It probably will, as the issues Weinberger explores are core to any business that deals with information and knowledge... which is to say, virtually every industry you can think of. But "Everything is Miscellaneous" is also a philosophy book. It's about the shape of knowledge, and how moving information from paper to the web changes how we organize and how we think. And this means that Weinberger's book crosses from territory like Wikipedia and Flickr into Aristotle and Wittgenstein.

This would be a dangerous path for a lesser author to take, but David grounds his explorations in examples and interviews that are, as Cory Doctorow puts it, wonderfully miscellaneous. We bounce between the lives and ideas of taxonomers past - Linneaus, S.R. Ranganathan, and the wonderfully strange Melvil Dewi - and the librarians and software developers who are making sense of today's digital disorder.

At its heart, the book is about what happens when we liberate knowledge from the world of atoms. In the physical world, we can only organize books on a shelf in one way or another - books can't be in multiple places at once. Frequently we find ourselves reduced to ordering information in arbitrary ways as a result - AAAAA Towing Service gets more business through the phonebook than Mike's Wreckers through the unfairness of alphabetization.

Adding a layer of metadata to the physical world helps somewhat - card catalogs allow us to put multiple pointers to a single physical location so we can file a single book on Military Music under both "Music" and "Military". But card catalogs pale in comparison to the wonders of "third-order" metadata, the sorts of organization we're capable of in a digital age. A book listed by Amazon can be filed in any number of categories. It can be annotated with reader reviews, added to reading lists, enhanced with tags or statistically improbable phrases. The "card" in the card catalog can be larger than the book itself, and the full text of the book serves as metadata, as the book itself is searchable.

Weinberger argues that the fact that we tend to organize data in terms of its physical placement has consequences for how knowledge works. We tend to think in Aristotelian terms - objects are members of a categories, and share the same traits as other members of that category. We can organize these categories into trees: a robin is a bird, which is an animal. We can expect the leaves of trees to share the attributes of their branches, and we expect each leaf to fit onto only one, specific branch.

But that's not knowledge works in a digital age. When I bookmark a [...] it's to my benefit to add many tags to it, both because it makes it easier for me to find it again, and because it helps other people find it as well. Weinberger advises us to "put each leaf on as many branches as possible", building a tree that looks more like a hyperlinked pile of leaves.

This suggestion, along with advice to use everything as a label, to filter only when we need outputs, and to give up the idea that there's a "right way" to order things, serve as a roadmap for how to build tools and services in a digital age. But the magic of Weinberger's book is that this practical advice is also an invitation to explore categorization, language and knowledge itself. If knowledge is a pile of leaves instead of a tree, how does the shape of our knowledge change?

It's questions like this that make "Everything is Miscellaneous" deceptively deep. One moment, we're thinking about how we organize photographs in shoeboxes or on our hard drives, and a moment later we're asking whether we understand "shoebox" in terms of definitions, family resemblances or exemplars. It's a little like drinking a mojito - smooth going down, but deceptively powerful, and slightly staggering when you get up to buy the next round.

I've read the book twice now, and am looking to my third pass through it. Weinberger has done something rare and admirable here - he's written about a world I thought I knew well in a way that makes me realize that there are innumerable depths and implications left to explore.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
The way of the (Virtual) World
By Miles Kehoe
With a background in enterprise search, I'm inclined to think of David's book as required reading for those who doubt how vital meta-data and community tagging is to quality corporate search. In reality, it's about meta-data.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the book is about moving organization and retrieval of content - physical and virtual - from atoms to electrons. Office supply stores, libraries, and daily life are all limited by atoms: how much space there is in a store; what products should be displayed near other products; and what single specific shelf should a new book occupy given the Dewey Decimal system categorization.

In our increasingly virtual world, based on electrons, little of this matters - fax/copying/printer/scanners can be 'stored' under all of those categories, or a new book can be tagged with every possible related term, regardless of what category the librarian suggests. Web 2.0, Flickr, Wikipedia, Enterprise Search 2.0, all of our virtual worlds, will allow us to tag everything in any way that will help us find it again. And we can make it even better by opening the tagging up to a wider audience - friends, co-workers, even strangers - consider Amazon's suggestion system.

The book is a masterpiece and is a must-read for anyone involved in using - or designing - any part of our virtual and future world(s).

49 of 57 people found the following review helpful.
A rambling look at an important subject
By Yaron
The big contribution of "Everything is Miscellaneous", I think, is the concept of "orders". "First-order order" is structuring, like the placement of sentences in a text or products on a shelf. "Second-order order" is classification, putting information into categories and subcategories, maps,, etc. "Third-order order" is tagging and other meta-data, which allow us to make our own categorization on the fly ("give me a list of all books in this bookstore, divided by century published and subdivided by genre"). It's a neat set of phrasing, and if the book is not remembered for anything else, hopefully that taxonomy will remain.

Where the book falls short, though, is in its own "first-order order", its organization of ideas; which may be sadly appropriate for a book extolling "messiness". The book jumps from topic to topic, introducing ideas and people seemingly (to my mind) haphazardly, and in a way that makes it hard to keep track of all that has been covered. A better system of organization might have been chronological. After all, the full possibilities of tagging, or "third-order order", have only been enabled by computers and the Web. How much more interesting could it have been if we could see the progression of techniques for ordering and taxonomy through time, as a function of improving information technologies? Have there been pre-computer attempts at tagging? You can get a sense for some of these issues by piecing out the historical anecdotes Weinberger places, but it would have been easier to see them in a more natural order.

On that note, I also think Weinberger gives too little time to historical attempts at classification. The book does contain interesting examples of thoughts about categorization, from the ancient Greeks onward, but too often Weinberger stacks the deck against previous generations, by bringing in such loaded examples as apartheid South Africa's classification of races or psychiatrists' old definition of homosexuality as an illness. That unfairness extends even to book classification, where Weinberger talks at length about the badly-designed Dewey Decimal System, but ignores the Library of Congress system, which is nearly as old and much better-produced.

Blogs, on the other hand, get a lot more attention in the book than I think they should: they do not provide meta-data at all but rather commentary, and those two are not the same thing. Weinberger does not clarify that distinction, and in fact at one point asserts that "everything is metadata". That's not true in any rigorous sense, and I think just further confuses the issue.

On other current technologies I give "Everything is Miscellaneous" a mixed review. Wikipedia gets a prominent mention, as it should, but there's no discussion of categories within Wikipedia, which is the biggest effort at what could be called "collaborative tagging", as distinct from the standard web model of every user creating their own tags. And there's a nice discussion of the Semantic Web, but none of semantic wikis; Weinberger missed a chance to think a little ahead of 2007 (I'm speculating here a little bit).

For an information-science enthusiast like me, just about any discussion of classification is interesting; however, this book unfortunately does not provide a solid or clear overview of the theory of classification, instead getting caught up in what I see as Web boosterism. Yes, the Web has changed a lot about categorization, but not *everything* on the Web has done that.

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Kamis, 05 Maret 2015

## Ebook Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series: The 17th President, 1865-1869, by Annette Gordon-Reed

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Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series: The 17th President, 1865-1869, by Annette Gordon-Reed

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the tale of the unwanted president who ran afoul of Congress over Reconstruction and was nearly removed from office

Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office.

Johnson faced a nearly impossible task―to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of America's leading historians of slavery, shows how ill-suited Johnson was for this daunting task. His vision of reconciliation abandoned the millions of former slaves (for whom he felt undisguised contempt) and antagonized congressional leaders, who tried to limit his powers and eventually impeached him.

The climax of Johnson's presidency was his trial in the Senate and his acquittal by a single vote, which Gordon-Reed recounts with drama and palpable tension. Despite his victory, Johnson's term in office was a crucial missed opportunity; he failed the country at a pivotal moment, leaving America with problems that we are still trying to solve.

  • Sales Rank: #570186 in Books
  • Published on: 2011-01-18
  • Released on: 2011-01-18
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 8.50" h x .56" w x 5.50" l, .66 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 192 pages

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth man to ascend to the highest office in the land, is generally regarded by historians as among the weakest presidents. Gordon-Reed has no intention of moving Johnson up in rank (“America went from the best to the worst in one presidential term,” she corroborates). So this is no reputation rescue. Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, takes as her task explaining why we should look anew at such a disastrous chief executive. She reasons he is worth looking at, though her reasoning yields a far from sympathetic look. In a short biography, all bases can be covered, but the author is still left to exercise the tone of a personal essay, which this author accomplishes brilliantly. Her personal take on Johnson is that his inability to remake the country after it was torn apart rested on his deplorable view of black Americans. In practical terms, his failure derived from his stubborn refusal to compromise with Congress in the abiding post-Lincoln controversy over who was to supervise the Reconstruction, the executive or the legislative branch. A failure, yes, but more than that, a failure at an extremely critical time in American history. --Brad Hooper

Review

“In this short and brilliantly written book, award-winning author Gordon-Reed … argues that the nation went from the best President to the worst during this most crucial period of its history.” ―Library Journal

“In a short biography, all bases can be covered, but the author is still left to exercise the tone of a personal essay, which this author accomplishes brilliantly.” ―Booklist (starred review)

“A fair-minded, toned-down portrait of a deeply problematic president who could not rise to the country's challenge after the Civil War.” ―Kirkus Reviews

About the Author
Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award. She holds three appointments at Harvard University: professor of law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. A MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, she is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy; the coauthor with Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., of Vernon Can Read!; and the editor of Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History. She lives in New York City.

Most helpful customer reviews

31 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent, devastating assessment of one of our worst presidents
By R. B. Bernstein
Andrew Johnson's historical fortunes have risen and fallen by reference to two currents of thought in American political culture -- one having to do with issues of slavery and race, and the other having to do with our assessment of the Presidenty, its independence, and its powers. When people pay no attention to issues of slavery and race, and when people generally favor the Presidency, then Johnson becomes a tough, brave, defiant defender of the American Presidency from a hostile, ideologically-warped Congress. When we do pay attention to the critical issues of race and the legacy of slavery, and we have doubts about the Presidency in light of the adventures of imperial Presidents, Johnson takes a beating.

As well he should.

Annette Gordon-Reed's fine, concise book is a strong contribution to an uneven series. She seeks not to trash Johnson but to understand him, and she does so not by applying a warped twenty-first-century ethical/moral measure to him but by assessing him by reference to his era. The resulting assessment of Johnson and the damage that his Presidency did to posterity is devastating. In particular, she does something in this book that is truly remarkable, and that I have not previously seen in any assessment of Johnson to date -- she recognizes that Johnson and the man whom he succeeded as President, Abraham Lincoln, had many things in common as well as many differences. She draws out this comparison with care and thoughtfulness, showing that two men born in southern/border states in straitened circumstances, with meager education, rising through their own unaided efforts, and living in regions characterized by white hostility to blacks, somehow turned out miles, even light-years apart.

Those reviewers who have sought to trash the book here have misrepresented its content, its style, and its research. This book is a companion to the great, standard life of Johnson by the late, great Hans Trefousse. I knew him as a colleague, and I also know Prof. Gordon-Reed as a colleague. Based on that knowledge, I can say without doubt that Prof. Trefousse would have welcomed this new book by Prof. Gordon-Reed -- not least for its warm and generous tribute to a great scholar now, sadly, no longer with us.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Very disappointing book
By Chris
I was looking forward to the release of this book because, while I knew a bit about Johnson's presidency, I wanted a nice, concise biography that covered the important points of his life, pre- and post-presidency. I wasn't looking for a full-length biography and I didn't want excessive analysis; just the basics. I had read a few other books from this series, and those had met that criteria.

Sadly, that's not what Gordon-Reed provided. This book is pretty much a nightmare. Her thesis is that Johnson was racist and stubborn, and no matter what he did or said as the sectional conflict intensified, when push came to shove, his racism and stubbornness would prevail. I agree with this line of thinking. However, the author spent so much time making this point that she eschewed the important details of his life. She referenced the Reconstruction Acts and the fact that Johnson vetoed them, only to see Congress override his vetoes. But what was in those Acts? If these books are supposed to be introductory biographies, the writers can't assume that the readers know the specifics of major legislation. She admits that an assessment of Johnson necessarily must focus on Reconstruction, yet she really didn't get into the specifics about Reconstruction.

A typical page in this book would include a sentence vaguely mentioning something Johnson did, followed by two paragraphs explaining why this action was racist, complete with some attempt at using a modern example as a basis for comparison. After 140-some pages, I don't feel like I know much more about Johnson; I only feel like Gordon-Reed considered Johnson a racist. Well, so do I, but I wish she had taken up much less of the precious few pages in this book telling us her opinion. Write a basic, short bio of Johnson, and then publish a journal article that expresses your views as to why he was racist and should have been impeached.

Now that I'm done with the book, I feel the need to find another Johnson bio that gets into more detail without requiring 500 pages. That's what I've gotten from this series in the past, but not here.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
a critical, informative, and concise history of the first President Johnson
By Glenn R. Springstead
I enjoyed reading this biography, which is another entry in the presidential biography series started by Arthur Schlesinger and now edited by Sean Wilentz. Gordon-Reed weaves a highly readable narrative from Johnson's improbable rise in local Tennessee politics to his emergence on the national stage as a vocal and courageous opponent of secession, Tennessee war governor, Lincoln's Vice President running mate in 1864, and president in his own right after Lincoln's assassination. Johnson was the first U.S. president to be impeached, and Gordon-Reed spends a good amount of time on the subject.

The book does start abruptly and subjectively, with Gordon-Reed casting Johnson in a negative light. Despite his opposition to secession and initially harsh criticism of Southern planters and rebels in his first days as President, Johnson soon quarreled with "radical Republicans" over Reconstruction in the South and began first to welcome southerners of all persuasions, including those formerly active in the Confederate forces and government, back into the good races of Congress and State offices, and then to oppose attempts by Congress to expand democratic rights to the new freedmen. While Johnson stated most of his objections to Congressional Reconstruction on state's rights, Gordon-Reed points out he also vetoed congressional legislation to award voting rights to African Americans in the District of Columbia, which Congress had Constitutional authority over.

But through much of the book Gordon-Reed handles her subject with more even-handedness. One of the regrettable aspects of Johnson's life is he apparently did not write much and appeared to have few confidants. His wife was often ill or simply very private, and as a result was not able to provide much of a public role during Johnson's time in Washington. Johnson also came into controversy after his impeachment for his role during the trial and executions of Lincoln's assassins as critics maintained he failed to give attention to pleas that the only female conspirator tried for Lincoln's death (Mary Surratt) be spared. After his years in the White House, Johnson was selected by Tennessee to fill a seat in the U.S. Senate, but Johnson died before being able to take up his new duties.

For Gordon-Reed, Johnson's short but memorable tenure is most notable for the missed opportunity it represented in establishing the rights of African Americans and re-establishing, in Lincoln's words, a new era of freedom. Instead, African-Americans, particularly in the South were largely excluded from public and political life and continued to suffer violence through 100 years of Jim Crow policies. Still, not even eight years of U.S. Grant as President, who was much more favorably inclined to African Americans than Johnson, was enough to rally the nation to Lincoln's call at Gettysburg.

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Rabu, 04 Maret 2015

!! Free PDF Race to Fashoda, by David Levering Lewis

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Race to Fashoda, by David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University and was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 received the Bancroft, Parkman, and Pulitzer Prizes, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.

  • Sales Rank: #3781760 in Books
  • Brand: Brand: Henry Holt
  • Published on: 2001-12-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 8.50" h x .75" w x 5.51" l, .98 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 336 pages
Features
  • Used Book in Good Condition

Most helpful customer reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A great story about African resistance, and a mindless race for worthless property.
By Kevin M Quigg
This is a great story, and the author is to be commended. It reads alot like The Great Game, except that it talks about a different piece of real estate. In this great game, the race is between France, Great Britain, and Belgium's Leopold II. At stake, worthless real estate in southern Sudan. Why?-- so an empire stretching across Africa can be established. For France, this empire would stretch from Guinea to French Somilia. For Great Britain-a Cape to Cairo empire. For Leopold II, a huge empire across the two main river systems in Africa- the Nile and Congo.

The author also establishes that in this Scramble for Africa, resistance occured regularly, whether is was the Ethipians beating up the Italians, or tribes in the Congo Free State resisting the Belgian colonial force. In Sudan, the Madhi threw the Eqyptians and British out. African resistance was high in the Scramble for Africa.

This is a great read for those interested in African history. The author did a great job of weaving facts and stories together for an entertaining read. Highly recommended.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Still Viable
By James P. Patuto
Anyone who wants to understand African History should read this book. It remains a classic and is much better than many works written since it was first published.

4 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful
By Glenn McDorman
Lewis has put together a wonderfully written exposition of a major episode in European colonialism.

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And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, by Charles J. Shields

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011

The first authoritative biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writer who changed the conversation of American literature.

In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no ("A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer"). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: "O.K." For the next year―a year that ended up being Vonnegut's last―Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters.

And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing―the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut's concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut's works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

  • Sales Rank: #682018 in Books
  • Published on: 2011-11-08
  • Released on: 2011-11-08
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.53" h x 1.71" w x 6.49" l, 1.77 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 528 pages

Amazon.com Review

An Interview with Amazon

Charles Shields is a writer who writes about writers. He previously penned a bestselling biography of Harper Lee, and now he's written the definitive portrait of Kurt Vonnegut, chronicling Vonnegut's slow and often difficult path to the upper ranks of American literature.

It's not always a pretty portrait. "Kurt wanted to be a writer from the time he was a teenager," Shields told me. But after serving in the military, getting married and having kids, he faced a dreary life behind a desk "which is not the kind of artistic one that he thought he'd have."

Yet the truth about writers is just that: they don't often live the exciting, public lifestyles of a Hemmingway or a Mailer. Most toil in solitary exclusion. It's a desk job in an office of one. It's sedentary, quiet, and often dull. Still, Shields is fascinated by the process of writing, and by the power and reach of the written word, which he discovered at age 15 upon earning a byline for his first high school newspaper story. "That was a magical moment for me," he said.

Shields has worked since to grow and change, to learn from others. That desire led him to study other writers and eventually to become a biographer, joining a group he admiringly refers to as "snoops" and "gossips." (Shields is co-founder of Biographers International Organization.)

When he learned Vonnegut was miffed that no one had tried to write his biography, Shields reached out. He was rebuffed, persisted, and finally received a postcard on which Vonnegut had sketched a self-portrait, smoking a cigarette. The card contained two letters: "OK."

Shields began working with Vonnegut in 2006. A year later, after a two-hour interview session at Vonnegut's Manhattan brownstone, Shields left, returning the next day to learn from the housekeeper that Vonnegut was in a coma. He had gotten tangled in his dog's leash and fell off his front steps, hitting his head. He died a month later at age 84.

"It's too trite to say that it was a shock," Shields said. "I felt a kind of… I felt sort of separate from myself for a little bit. Because I had invested a lot in this, and I had come to like him. And now suddenly, after dubbing me his biographer, he was gone."

Shields’s biography was saved by the discovery of 1,500 letters to or from Vonnegut, which had been presumed lost. "So, going on my interviews with him, and all of these long, intimate letters that he wrote, I was able to construct what I felt was a very authentic, personal portrait of this man as writer, father, struggling freelancer, suddenly famous man, divorced parent, divorced husband, over the course of more than fifty years," Shields said.

Review

“An incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography.” ―Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“An engaging, surprising and empathetic page-turner” ―Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

“The first truly exacting look into the life of a man who has fascinated so many.” ―Esquire Magazine

“Engaging and well paced, the book fills in the reality behind Vonnegut's work” ―Christen Aragoni, The American Prospect

“This first authorized biography probes both Vonnegut's creative struggles and family life, detailing his transition from ‘the bowery of the book world' to counterculture icon. Shields delivers a vivid recreation of Vonnegut's ghastly WWII experiences as a POW during the Dresden firebombing that became the basis for Slaughterhouse-Five. . . . Tragedies and triumphs are contrasted throughout, along with an adroit literary analysis that highlights obscure or overlooked influences on Vonnegut. . . . With access to more than 1,500 letters, Shields conducted hundreds of interviews to produce this engrossing, definitive biography.” ―PW, Starred Review

“This book fills a much-needed gap, since very little seems to be known about the late Kurt Vonnegut, despite his immense popularity over almost five decades. Shields did a thorough job, interviewing Vonnegut and his friends and family, and examining many letters. Vonnegut was one of the most influential authors of the late twentieth century, and this biography is essential reading.” ―Anis Shivani, Huffington Post

“Provide[s] a definitive and disturbing account of the late author, whose ambition and talent transformed him from an obscure science fiction writer to a countercultural icon.” ―Steve Almond, The Boston Globe

“[A] thorough and excellent new biography.” ―Tim Gebhart, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“The richest portrait of Vonnegut to date.” ―Craig Fehrman, Indianapolis Monthly

“[A] balanced, well-researched study of a flawed yet powerfully imaginative artist.” ―Ariel Gonzalez, Miami Herald Tribune

“A triumphant biography: scrupulously researched and powerfully written, compassionate, clear-eyed and compelling. Charles J. Shields manages a rare feat: offering a lucid assessment of Kurt Vonnegut's literary life alongside the moving tale of an American original and a misunderstood hero. From his harrowing survival of the Dresden firebombing through forty years of culture clashes and domestic battles, here is the Vonnegut we all thought we knew and the man we never got to see, a writer of searing wit and wisdom, of driving ambition, and perhaps most of all, of aching loneliness.” ―Jess Walker, author of The Financial Lives of the Poets and Citizen Vince

“Vonnegut's life was a fascinating tragicomedy worthy of his best novels, and I can hardly imagine a better teller of that tale than Shields. A superbly researched and above all very entertaining biography.” ―Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life

“And So It Goes will entrance lovers of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction. With the blessing of Vonnegut himself and help from scores of Vonnegut's friends, relations, and acquaintances, Charles J. Shields gives us a distinguished, fearless, page-turner of a biography.” ―Carol Sklenicka, author of Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life

“Vonnegut once said that he kept losing and regaining his equilibrium, and Shields dexterously captures the ups and downs of Vonnegut's life and work in this definitive biography.” ―Henry L. Carrigan, Bookpage

About the Author

Charles J. Shields is the author of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, the highly acclaimed, bestselling biography of Harper Lee, and I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers). He grew up in the Midwest and taught in a rural school in central Illinois for several years. He has been a reporter for public radio, a journalist, and the author of nonfiction books for young people. He and his wife live near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Most helpful customer reviews

65 of 74 people found the following review helpful.
A Pilgrim's Progress
By Robert Taylor Brewer
Dresden, Germany. The night of February 13, 1945. Remnants of the Army's 423rd Regiment, 106th Division, captured almost as soon as they began fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, are roused from their bunks in a POW camp by an airraid siren. They are hustled into a meat locker, 60 feet below ground. German prison guards enter the bunker with them, and shut the steel door behind them. Above ground, the night time firebombing of Dresden begins. In the one thousand degree heat, "super heated tornadoes had sucked out the oxygen and turned hiding places into tombs." The bombing continued into the night. At dawn the next day, the POW's emerged from the meat locker to see what had happened, Private Kurt Vonnegut among them. What he saw that day colored his entire career and formed the basis for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse 5.

The new Charles J. Shields biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, doesn't adhere to the love-hate mentality that was in vogue between biographers and their subjects a generation ago. In the current book, biographer and author seemed genuinely to like each other in the brief period they worked together. One could go so far as to say that before Vonnegut's death, they were well on their way to becoming, well, pals. Ah, I thought to myself. This biographer will suck up in person, then skewer the old man after he dies. It never happens.

This is not to say Vonnegut gets a free pass. Infidelities and indiscretions are on full view, and never more so than in the Fall of 1965 when the author begins an affair at the famous University of Iowa creative writing workshop. As his fame grows, so do the number of extra marital liaisons, most spectacularly with Jill Krementz, a photographer who comes off in the book as having the charm and graciousness of Lady Macbeth. During their tryst, wife Jane Vonnegut is rewarded by being left home in the role of family matriarch to supervise the upbringing of their children. In the saddest episode of the book, Vonnegut's brother-in-law Jim Adams is killed in a train wreck and Kurt's sister Alice, terminally ill and grief stricken over the tragedy befallen her husband, also dies and the Vonnegut household is newly infused with four additional children to care for.

Even as Jill finds Kurt an apartment in Manhattan where he feasts in regal fashion, Jane is as determined as ever to hold the family together. On page 290, out of the pain of knowing her husband is living with another woman, Jane issues her own prophecy: "Jill will find ways to cut you off from your home", an eerie forecast that comes true not once but twice - most flamboyantly on Page 404 when Vonnegut, smoking during Super Bowl pre-game ceremonies, goes down stairs for a snack, and watches portions of his Manhattan townhouse go up in flames. In a fit of anger, Jill changes the locks on the door for the second time, refusing him entry. If there is any justice in the game of musical beds, surely it came when Vonnegut learns that just as he and Jill deceived Jane, so Jill and investment banker Stephen DuBrul ultimately deceive Kurt. Even that isn't the end of things as DuBrul abruptly terminates the relationship with Jill and she hightails it back to Vonnegut, who has finally had enough of his sugar daddy role and files the first of three petitions to divorce Jill.

Even with contretemps like these, it is never the intention of Shields to intentionally debunk or puncture Vonnegut's reputation. If anybody gets skewered, it is literary critics as a group, who ignored him when he was starting out then jumped on his bandwagon as he became a moneymaker. Shields places his subject's actions in the context of success American style. Impoverished most of his life, when the trappings of reward were offered, Vonnegut took full advantage. The writing in this biography is straight forward and devoid of moralizing so that readers don't mind "looking under the hood" to discover that, as his father had done, Vonnegut not only became a stock market investor, but a shareholder in Dow Chemical which, Shields points out, was the sole manufacturer of napalm in the Vietnam War.

It is part of Shields' research effort to illuminate his subject's private persona, then compare and contrast that to his public image - if only to show that most of the time, public expectations are at odds with a subject's private behavior. In that, Kurt Vonnegut was no exception.

There are two major wonders in this book: 1. How did Vonnegut, not only a heavy smoker, but a smoker of Pall Mall, an unfiltered cigarette, live to the ripe old age of 85? 2. How is it that at page 350 in a 400 page book, we are only up to 1982 with the publication of Vonnegut's novel Dead Eye Dick? That is to say, how can the remaining 25 years of Vonnegut's life warrant a tad more than 50 pages? This second question is answered by Vonnegut himself. "We all see our lives as stories...if a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is."

Unless you are Kurt Vonnegut. Many would be satisfied to have their entire life distilled down to the career he had after age 60. He produced the best seller Hocus Pocus in 1990 at the age of 68. Showtime adapted three of his short stories for network TV in 1991. Nick Nolte starred in a 1996 film adaptation of Mother Night. A collection of his speeches and essays appeared in 2005 as A Man Without A Country, which spent several weeks on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list.

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
An impressive first biography of a great American writer
By L Goodman-Malamuth
Though I was one of the young folks enthralled by Slaughterhouse-Five, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and much more of Vonnegut's work, I really didn't know much about the man, his family, and his life--except for his youthful Army service and horrifying experiences as a POW after the Allied firebombing of Dresden. Charles Shields, who wrote the first substantive biography of Harper Lee, corresponded with Vonnegut, proposing a biography. Once he had convinced his subject--rightly--of his top-notch research skills, Vonnegut finally sent Shields a last illustrated postcard, this time captioned, "OK." Work had not progressed very far before Vonnegut tripped over his Lhasa Apso's leash, fell, and never regained consciousness, dying three weeks later in 2007.

Perhaps what finally pushed Vonnegut to trust Shields was the fact that really had been no previous biography of this literary icon of the second half of the twentieth century, which rankled Vonnegut. If America had a one-man Grub Street, Vonnegut grubbed away there in West Barnstable on Cape Cod for some twenty years churning out dozens of short stories and a few novels, amid clouds of Pall Mall smoke, before Slaughterhouse-Five made him a bestselling author. It also conferred financial security where previously there had been none. In this freelance writer's life existed a neat division of labor: Kurt wrote, while his then-devoted first wife Jane did everything else, including taking in three young, orphaned nephews when his adored sister Alice died of cancer just a day after her husband perished in a railroad accident.

In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut eagerly accepted a last-minute offer to teach at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. There, for the first time, he was a widely admired instructor and author in a community of fellow writers. When Vonnegut became besotted with a student, the other faculty members remained discreet; it was a while before Jane, joining him in Iowa City, found out about that indiscretion and those that followed. After twenty years, the marriage became severely strained--although Vonnegut saw no reason not to ask his estranged wife to continue handling the details of everyday life. She wisely refused.

Although Jane and Kurt's children Mark, Edie, and Nannie, as well as the nephews who moved in with them, all appear to have been most forthcoming in multiple interviews, the book easily could have been doomed at the outset. Mark Vonnegut, his father's literary executor, refused to allow Shields to quote from Vonnegut's correspondence, insisting the letters "spoke for themselves." Shields demonstrated his great gift for paraphrasing the letters' contents in order to meet the burdensome legal requirements. In nearly two thousand references, the paraphrased letter content does not stick out from interview quotes in an obtrusive way. When Harper Lee declined to be interviewed for Mockingbird, Shields' biography, he acquired a whole new skill set--fortunately for us.

One source who refused to speak to the author was Vonnegut's second wife, photographer/author Jill Krementz. Judging from the impressions of just about everyone in Vonnegut's circle of friends, family, and colleague, Krementz appears to be an opportunistic scalp-collector rather than a wife. Vonnegut was introduced into the higher echelons of New York litr'y circles before Krementz decided that her husband had outlived his usefulness. Though Vonnegut pursued divorce three times, he never followed through, and Krementz retaliated through infidelity and by doing virtually nothing to sweeten her husband's last years.

This book engrossed me from the time I slipped it from its wrapping until I read the final pages. Bravo, Shields--again!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A biased portrayal
By Jazz Doctor
I've waited a long time to write this review because I was pretty upset about several aspects of the book and wanted to calm down. It is an informative picture of many aspects of Vonnegut's life, but as other reviewers have pointed out, it dwells too much on deflating, sometimes inaccurately, the image of Vonnegut many admirers believed in, and it undervalues his literary achievement. Just to take one example of the image deflation, the author highlights Vonnegut's hypocrisy in owning Dow Chemical stock while presenting himself as anti-war during the Vietnam conflict, yet Donald Farber, self-described in an a New York Times Book Review letter to the editor as Vonnegut's "attorney, agent, manager and buddy for over 40 years" says that he managed Vonnegut's investments and is certain that Vonnegut never even paid attention to what specific stocks were in the portfolio. Sure, that can be thought of as a failing too, but it does not seem like the conscious hypocrisy it is portrayed as in this book. Shields' emphasis is usually on the negative, and when he does point out an act of generosity, it doesn't receive as much attention as the stories that tear down Vonnegut's popular image. As for the literary content of the book, Shields too often relies on book reviews that pointed out that the post-Slaughterhouse Five novels fell short. It is not unusual for books to garner a high reputation after publication that belies the initial reviews. Breakfast of Champions, for example, is very highly regarded by many readers, but Shields makes it sound decidedly second-rate. I know Vonnegut himself talked negatively about that novel, but authors are never the final arbiter of a book's success. The fact is that all of Vonnegut's novels are still in print, with at least four-star ratings in Amazon reviews (the last time I checked). That is pretty impressive. In addition, literary critics (as opposed to book reviewers) have analyzed most of them favorably, including Breakfast of Champions. So the book is valuable for giving us the shape of his life, but it has a bias with regard to how that life is presented, and it falls considerably short of presenting the magnitude of Vonnegut's substantial literary achievement.

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