Read the INK Q&A with Howard Blum and save 30% on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century.
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Read the INK Q&A with Howard Blum and save 30% on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century.
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Gallagheralan2000 has commented on (3) products.
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 by Charles Murray
Gallagheralan2000, March 24, 2008
This was and is a great and necessary book. In the 1960s, the illegitimacy rate for Black Americans was 20%--then a national disaster--and 2 % for white. Now it is 20% for whites, and 70-80% for Blacks, 40% for Hispanics, a national average of 34%. Federal/state programs to help have harmed, assisting family disintegration. Illegitimacy cascades from single parent (or no parent) households to delinquency, school failures and dropout, crime and jail/prison population which grow and grow. It is, in Murray's words, "...the single most important social problem of our time...."This is an essential book, along with Dr. Bill Cosby's recent efforts to draw attention to this still-taboo problem, which cultural "advocates" praise rather than cure. This is a national problem, not a white, Black, or Hispanic problem. Murray and Cosby are the truth-tellers and risk-takers, to whom we must listen.
(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
The Harz Journey and Selected Prose (Penguin Classics) by Heinrich Heine
Gallagheralan2000, January 27, 2008
Heine, including in this book, is wonderful, as poet and as "travel-writer." I comment because it was a book read by the student narrator in Flann O'Brien's story At Swim-Two-Birds and thus must be considered (although it is not clear whether the student actually bought and read the book, although O'Brien did so. It is never quite safe to assume anything with O'Brien. Powell's Readers should note that the store has a first edition for only $2000). For years I have sung "Die Lorelei," and recited "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,"[the tree of the North dreaming of the tree of the East/South], poems which could relate to the magic and dreaminess of the Irish. It helps to remember that the Germans "discovered" and "rescued" Celtic Ireland. algAsk a Mexican by Gustavo Arellano
Gallagheralan2000, June 25, 2007
This is a book which may offend...just about everyone...but in doing so, it also presents good insights in Americans and Mexicans both. It would be better, but perhaps less amusing, if it were a bit more learned and made references, as cultural cliches and stereotypes are just that: if they fit anyone, they fit just a few. So it is a fun book.alg
(1 of 3 readers found this comment helpful)