John’s Blog-o-Rama

I just finished the book Team of Rivals : The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s an Abraham Lincoln biography that shows his considerable leadership and political skills as the President of the United States, as he dealt with his Cabinet composed of men who were his politlcal rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, and negotiated the Union’s way to a victory in the Civil War. It’s not the usual extensive biography focused on the basic facts of his life, but puts a context on Lincoln’s decisions during his presidency and the thought process behind how he arrived at them through analysis of well-known historical facts, plus his personal diary and the diaries of those around him.

The most interesting aspect of the book was certainly his strong leaderhsip and political abilities. The stories of the ways he was able to turn enemies into friends, navigate and manipulate political allies and opponents, and mold a war and a country into his image were amazing, and really show his true greatness. If someone with Lincoln’s abilities hadn’t been President at that exact moment in history, there’s no telling how the United States would have turned out.

Overall the book was a great read and, surprisingly, a pageturner. The author worked on the book for 10 years, and it really shows in the depth of the personal details presented about Lincoln and those around him. I fully expect it to be nominated for a Pulitzer, and wouldn’t be surprised to see it win.

I loved the movie Fight Club (one of my all-time favorites), which is based on a book of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. It was an extremely well-acted and well-written story that made some very interesting observations on consumerism and the state of American culture today, and as well as had some very dark humor and shocking scenes. I’ve seen it over and over during the past several years, and it always entertains. So now every time I see or hear the name “Chuck Palahniuk”, I pay attention.

So I was reading Boing Boing a few weeks ago, and I saw a post about an NPR interview with Chuck. So I downloaded the interview from the link and listened to it over a few days (it was 45 minutes long). It gave a lot of insight into how he writes and approaches stories, what his mindset is and what his motivations are. One thing he mentioned was as short story from his new book, Haunted, called “Guts”, that he reads often on his book tour. Apparently, whenever he reads it, people seem to faint because of the horror. Now I found that hard to believe, but I was curious, so I found a website that had the story and read it. Now I didn’t pass out, but I’d be hard pressed to find a better combination of “imaginative”, “disgusting”, and “horrifying” in any other story in all of literature. It’s certainly not for the easily-sickened or faint-hearted, but entertaining nonetheless. Needless to say I just bought a copy of Haunted, so we’ll see how many other stories like that it has. I’ll just make sure I don’t eat before reading it.