What Are You Reading? - Page 6

Pretty Flamingo · #51 (**permalink**) 09-30-2012, 10:04 AM

I just finished 50 Shades of Grey which I wasn't impressed with. I just went along with the hype because it is a bestseller. The female character irritated me and she let a good man slip away from her. She had him hooked on her but she overstepped the mark.

I never pay full price for books. I get them in a new or almost new condition from charity shops. They are shops in practically every high street/shopping centre, where people donate unwanted (but in good condition) clothes, books, ornaments etc., and the proceeds go to the particular charity that runs the shop; perhaps Oxfam, Scope (cerebral palsy charity), etc. They are a very popular source for books which can be incredibly expensive. I can pick up hardbacks for less than five dollars and paperbacks for less than two dollars.

My next book waiting is Persian Brides which was recommended to me. I am not sure when I will get to read it as I am back from three weeks off work tomorrow but hopefully will find time.

rivrrat · #52 (**permalink**) 10-06-2012, 08:17 PM

Finished Blood and Gold, then re-read Queen of the Damned because Blood and Gold raised questions I couldn't remember the answers to since it had been so very long ago that I read it, then just tonight finished The Vampire Armand. Starting on The Violin now. I'm on an Anne Rice kick apparently.

Manitou · #53 (**permalink**) 10-07-2012, 10:54 PM

I am one third into Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars Documentaries, in Latin.

Comet · #54 (**permalink**) 10-07-2012, 11:05 PM

Finished 'The Time Keeper' by Mitch Albom. Terrific novel and highly entertaining and deep. Highly recommend it to anyone.

Going to start 'Sutton' by J.R. Moehringer. This one looks very good. Can't wait to begin.

Quote:

Willie Sutton was born in the squalid Irish slums of Brooklyn, in the first year of the twentieth century, and came of age at a time when banks were out of control. If they weren't failing outright, causing countless Americans to lose their jobs and homes, they were being propped up with emergency bailouts. Trapped in a cycle of panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Sutton saw only one way out, only one way to win the girl of his dreams.

So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. Over three decades Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List.

But the public rooted for Sutton. He never fired a shot, after all, and his victims were merely those bloodsucking banks. When he was finally caught for good in 1952, crowds surrounded the jail and chanted his name.

Blending vast research with vivid imagination, Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer brings Willie Sutton blazing back to life. In Moehringer's retelling, it was more than poverty or rage at society that drove Sutton. It was one unforgettable woman. In all Sutton's crimes and confinements, his first love (and first accomplice) was never far from his thoughts. And when Sutton finally walked free - a surprise pardon on Christmas Eve, 1969 - he immediately set out to find her.

Poignant, comic, fast-paced and fact-studded, Sutton tells a story of economic pain that feels eerily modern, while unfolding a story of doomed love that is forever timeless.

Sutton by J.R. Moehringer - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

MrLiberty · #55 (**permalink**) 10-10-2012, 01:04 PM

New book shows U.S. top earners pay larger share of taxes than any other industrialized nation

This will be on my reading list in the near future..........

Who's the Fairest of Them All?: The Truth about Opportunity, Taxes, and Wealth in America

Quote:

The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore has just come out with a new book titled Who's the Fairest of Them All?: The Truth about Opportunity, Taxes, and Wealth in America and he reveals some interesting information about how much the top ten percent of income earners in the United States pay in federal income taxes as opposed to any other industrialized nation in the world.

According to Moore, these earners pay almost half (45 percent) of the country's total taxes. This conclusion flies in the face of the liberal concept that top earners in the U.S. are not paying their "fair share" in taxes. The National Tax Foundation created the chart below to which Moore explains:

Read more: PICKET: New book shows U.S. top earners pay larger share of taxes than any other industrialized nation - Washington Times PICKET: New book shows U.S. top earners pay larger share of taxes than any other industrialized nation - Washington Times
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

rivrrat · #56 (**permalink**) 10-10-2012, 01:21 PM

Started on The Violin but couldn't get into it. So now I've diverted from Anne Rice and I'm reading the second book in The Hunger Games series: Catching Fire

Comet · #57 (**permalink**) 10-14-2012, 05:54 PM

Finished 'Sutton' by J.R. Moehringer. I enjoyed it. If that is your thing, you will like it.

Going to commence 'Mugged' by Ann Coulter next.

rivrrat · #58 (**permalink**) 10-14-2012, 07:14 PM

Finished Catching Fire, will start Uncle Tom's Cabin tomorrow.

Infidel Dog · #59 (**permalink**) 10-14-2012, 11:21 PM

I just got Catching Fire, but I haven't started it yet.

saltwn · #60 (**permalink**) 02-15-2013, 06:41 PM

Books - Sunday Book Review - The New York Times

The New York Times book review is doing some reviews on books about Republican Presidents.

couple of excerpts follows

Quote:

The Great Refrainer
‘Coolidge,’ by Amity Shlaes

This past December the Claremont Institute convened a forum at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington to discuss the presidential election. The mood among the conservative stalwarts during the reception may have ranged from pensive to glum, but it brightened somewhat when Clare*mont’s panelists contemplated a return to true Republican principles as advanced by the last president to slash both taxes and the federal budget — Calvin Coolidge. James Ceaser, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, said it was important to revive the “moral stigma” of debt, and added, “I want to go back to Coolidge and even McKinley.” The Claremont fellow Charles Kesler, author of “I Am the Change,” a recent book denouncing President Obama and liberalism, agreed: “We’re in for a Coolidge revival.”

Indeed we are. Coolidge was a figure of sport in his own era. H. L. Mencken mocked his daily naps — “Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored” — and Dorothy Parker reportedly asked, “How could they tell?” when his death was announced. But such quips have only heightened the determination of a growing contingent of Coolidge buffs to resurrect him. They abhor the progressive tradition among Democrats (Woodrow Wilson) and Republicans (Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover) as hostile to big business and prosperity. Instead, their aim is to spread the austere doctrine of what might be called Republican Calvinism. Their liturgy is based on Coolidge’s remark “If the federal government were to go out of business, the common run of people would not detect the difference.” Coolidge, the new Calvinists say, has been calumniated by liberal intellectuals for his embrace of what amounted to supply-side economics — tax cuts for the wealthy that would pay for themselves. Far from being a hapless president who set the stage for the Great Depression, they argue, he presided over a notable golden age.

more

Quote:

A Lincoln for Our Time
‘Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism,’ by John Burt
There have been many ways to think about Abraham Lincoln, our most enigmatic president, but the image of him as a moral philosopher is not the most obvious. We have “Honest Abe,” the great rail-splitter of American legend, Lincoln the political operative and architect of the Republican Party, and Lincoln the savvy wielder of executive power as portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s recent film.

Yet several works have put the issue of Lincoln’s language, rhetoric and political thought front and center. Among them, Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” Ronald C. White Jr.’s “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech” and Allen Guelzo’s “Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas”all deserve honorable mention. But the first and still best effort to advance a philosophical reading of Lincoln was Harry V. Jaffa’s “Crisis of the House Divided,” published in 1959.

A student of the philosopher Leo Strauss, Jaffa argued that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas during the 1850s was the clash between Lincoln’s doctrine of natural right and Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty. This was, as Jaffa declared, identical to the conflict between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s “Republic.” Douglas argued that whatever the people of a state or territory wanted made it right for them. For Lincoln, however, only a prior commitment to the moral law could make a free people.

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