Read and Review: Ambling into History, by Frank Bruni.

I know you are not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover, but I did. When I first saw this book, I knew that I wanted to read it. I love the picture of Pres. Bush on this book. The picture and title perfectly captures the laid-back, down-to-earth attitude of our 43rd president.

I finished this book yesterday, and I think I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t super fantastic. Frank Bruni was a journalist that followed the Bush campaign around during the elections of 2000. I enjoyed seeing Bush act and behave as a human being: Bruni portrays him as being funny (often at inappropriate times), a prankster (also at often at inappropriate times) and at times showing great depth and intelligence. The big question Bruni asks in this book is: how can a man who thinks “misunderestimate” is a word be a good leader of the most powerful nation in the world? Will he take the presidency seriously? In the end, (at least from this books perspective of shortly after September 11th) Bruni thinks that this guy might just have a chance.

At times, I felt like Bruni was maybe a little too harsh in constantly pointing out Bush’s flaws as a presidential candidate. Although, the point of the book was to show how this fellow, the most unlikeliest presidential candidate that has been seen in quite some time, attempted to transform himself and play politics.

Bruni was fair in his observations and criticisms, though, as he also poked fun and pointed out flaws in the other candidates, and even himself and the other journalists.

The book itself seems to amble around in the telling of the story, but for me that was part of the enjoyment. My favorite sections are the chapters in which Bruni relates the hardships of the journalists being on the campaign trail. (See my Teaser Tuesday quote about smoking next to jet fuel The mental image he portrays about these sleep and shower depraved guys cramming into a hotel room to watch “Sex and the City”.

This book was published back in 2002, during a time when Bush’s approval rating was riding high. I wonder how different the book would have been written if it were published today? This book and the current public opinion of Bush makes me wonder will there ever be a book written that portrays him in a positive light? There might be, but it may not be any time soon. Now that the door is closed on his presidency, the benefit of history and forgetfulness might be on his side. Only time will tell. In the mean time, I would recommend this book. It isn’t too critical of Bush, but nor is it too worshipful of him. I think Bruni tries hard (and for the most part succeeds) to present a fair and balanced view of him and everyone involved in the election mess of 2000.

Teaser Tuesdays: The Presidential Edition

Today’s teaser is from the book “Ambling into History: the unlikely odyssey of George W. Bush by Frank Bruni. I thought I would read something presidential since the inauguration is this week.

In this chapter Bruni is writing about the hardships of following a candidate on the campaign trail. In this passage he is covering smoking. Here it is:

“On three occasions, several of us lit up only a few yards from the campaign plane — we had just been in the air, and deprived, for two or three hours — and were threatened by airport officials with $10,000 penalites. It was apparently not a good idea to strike matches or play with any kind of fire on a tarmac, around all that jet fuel. Who knew?” — Ambling into History, by Frank Bruni, page 192.

This book has been very funny. Bruni has a great sense of humor and it is making this book a great read. The book is primarily about the 2000 presidential elections told from the point of view of a reporter following President Bush (then governor Bush) around during the election. I can’t wait to finish it!

Faith ‘n Fiction: Good Morning, Mr. President!

Amy who hosts Faith ‘n Fiction has asked a great question this week: who is your favorite fictional president, and who is your least favorite fictional president.

There have been so many good presidents on movies and tv. My absolute favorite has to be Harrison Ford’s Pr. James Marshall in the movie “Air Force One”. As unlikely as the movie would be in real life, I loved the idea of a president taking action, it was a great movie! I also really liked President Palmer in 24.

My least favorite? Pr. Charles Logan from “24″. The guy was creepy, and totally crossed the line of acting in the best interest of the American people. Plus, it was just a really good season of “24″.

My final conclusion? Jack Bauer for President!

Does anyone know any good books about fictional presidents? I don’t think I’ve actually read any.

Booking through Thursday: La-la-LA!!!!

This weeks Booking through Thursday questions is:

“If you’re anything like me, there are songs that you love because of their lyrics; writers you admire because their songs have depth, meaning, or just a sheer playfulness that has nothing to do with the tunes.

So, today’s question?

• What songs … either specific songs, or songs in general by a specific group or writer … have words that you love?
• Why?
• And … do the tunes that go with the fantastic lyrics live up to them? “

That’s a great question. I love to read, but it’s nice to remember that there are other ways to tell stories, such as poetry or music. There are some songs that I absolutely love, and the story they tell can be fun or moving, romantic or sad, depressing or HAPPY HAPPY!!!

I usually prefer older music, such as classical works or opera, but there is a variety of new songs that I like to. Usually my wife is the one to find them and then she plays it for me. I have no idea where she finds these songs at, but she is trying to make sure that I can have at least some idea about what’s popular out there. She is doing her best to make me not look like the nerd I am.

My absolutely favorite song is one that very few of you have heard. I call it “All My Love”, and my wife wrote it for me when we got married. I didn’t know she was going to sing a song during our ceremony. We had had rehearsal even, and I was struggling to remember what I was supposed to be doing during the ceremony, and then suddenly, everything was different! She pulls out a microphone and starts singing a song she had written, and our friend Jonathan played it on the guitar (He’s the most brilliant guitarist I’ve ever heard). It was beautiful, well-written, and I compare all other love songs to that one.

My wife is beautiful and creative. Her creativity is one of the things that first attracted my attention to her (and, no one can make me laugh like she can! And she can make a mean cup of coffee!) I currently have the song on my MP3 player even. I love it. The song tells about her disbelief that she could end up with a great guy like me (Ha ha, the poor thing), and the wonder of discovering what true love really is. I know I am coming from a slightly prejudiced point of view here, but I really think that that song could be a hit song if someone famous sang it (well, someone famous who was also a good singer). My wife is a very talented writer and poet, and that song was the

This was a good question. It is bringing to mind all the reasons why I love my sweetheart! And after 8.5 years of marriage, that is a good thing. There is a line in that song that says “As endless as the stars above, may our love always be”. I love that line, every time I hear it my heart thrills. I am happy to say that I do get to spend the rest of my life, and all of eternity, with my best friend.

Read and Review: The Night Trilogy

     I finished “The Night Trilogy” by Elie Wiesel. It consists of the books “Night”, “Dawn”, and “Day” (previously called, The Accident.) In the first book, Night,the author relates his real-life experiences during the Holocaust and his time spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It is a masterpiece of tragic, holocaust literature. It was also one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read, but that was no fault of the author. Wiesel wrote his heart out. He, very simply and efficiently, wrote what he experienced in the concentration camps. This book has left me speechless. There is just nothing I can say other than: you must read it. And learn from it.

     The second book in the trilogy, Dawn, is a novel. That story is fiction, though Wiesel said in some sense the main character is him, or what he might have become if circumstances in his life had been different after he was released from the Nazi death camps. The story is about a young man named Elisha who joins a Jewish underground movement and is ordered to execute a British soldier at dawn. The story is brief and poignant, as he struggles with this decision, debates whether he will do it or not. That one question, will he do it or won’t he?, kept me turning the pages to the very end. (It was 87 pages long.) If you want that question answered, you will have to read it for yourself.

     I was hoping that Day   would be a little more cheerful, or at least have a happy ending, or a hopeful ending. (It didn’t, really). This was my least favorite book of the three, but it still challenged my thinking. In it, Wiesel explores the question, “How can a person be expected to forget a tragedy of this magnitude (WWII) and go on to lead a normal life, to love, and believe in God?” I learned much in this book about Holocaust survivors, however. For the most part, I learn what I know about WWII from watching movies, reading books, and taking history classes. Primarily, these 3 sources of information deal with what happened during the war, which is important. Day helped me see the effects on Holocaust survivors after the war was over: the emotional damage, the despair they still live with, their loss of faith in God  and their belief that He is good and kind. Wiesel seems very bitter towards God, and it is very evident in his writing. His exploring of his own emotional damage was the most enlightening to me. People in the book kept telling him to forget what happened, to live and to love. You can almost feel his anguish and despair as he knows that he can’t.

These books are very brutal and real. Wiesel’s writing style is simple and efficient. If you are a quick reader, then it won’t take you more than a few days to read all three. But I will warn you, they will leave you feeling very grieved about the tragedies that took place during WWII, and it makes me wonder how many more such tragedies are going on even today that no one knows about? In his introduction to the book, Wiesel says that he writes these things in order that the dead might always have a voice, and to deny the enemy the final victory: the world forgetting what happened during one of the darkest time periods in our history. May we never forget!

Sneak Peak Tuesday!

Since a couple of you asked, I will go ahead and post the rest of the paragraph of my Teaser Tuesday post. Elisha, the character in the book, is recalling his first assignment/attack as a part of a Jewish underground resistance movement against the British shortly after WWII is over. Elie Wiesel writes in “Dawn”

“I saw the legs running like frightened rabbits and I found myself utterly hateful. I remembered the dreaded SS guards in the Polish ghettos. Day after day, night after night, they slaughtered the Jews in just the same way. Tommy guns were scattered here and there, and an officer, laughing or distractedly eating, barked out the order: Fire! Then the scythe went to work. A few Jews tried to break through the circle of fire, but they only rammed their heads against its insurmountable wall. They too ran like rabbits, like rabbits sotted with wine and sorrow, and death mowed them down” (p. 165)

I reviewed Dawn briefly in a previous blog. I am moved by the imagery in this passage. The character Elisha often questions his motives about fighting for his freedom. He wonders if he is now any better than the Nazi’s were. At one point in the book he sees himself in a vision wearing an SS uniform. Powerful stuff, and will cause you to rethink issues.

Now, I think I need to read something funny and light-hearted.

Teaser Tuesdays: “The Night Trilogy” by Elie Wiesel

Thanks to MizB at Should be Reading for hosting Teaser Tuesday! Here’s mine:

“I saw the legs running like frightened rabbits and I found myself utterly hateful. I remembered the dreaded SS guards in the Polish ghettos.” From: The Night Trilogy: Dawn, by Elie Wiesel, page 165.

Oh, if only I could post the rest of that paragraph! What a heartbreaking, and thought-provoking paragraph it is.

Musing Monday: Required reading

Rebecca, host of Musing Monday, asks, How did you react to assigned reading when you were in school/university/college/etc? How do you think on these books now? What book were you ‘forced’ to read when you where in school that you’ve since reread and loved?

Well, I loved required reading in school. I cannot remember a time I did not like to read, in fact. I liked being able to read the difficult books, and then discuss them in class. In college, I took an intro to lit class that read and discussed “The Scarlet Letter”, and that was very fun. We also covered “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” which was a blast, as well as many famous short stories. In high school I took a class that required me to read “Julius Ceasar” which I hated because I did not understand anything. But I kept reading various Shakespeare on my own until finally I read Macbeth and sort of understood the plot, so I was very excited.

The ultimate book nerdy thing I did when I was a teenager was read the entire book of “Moby Dick”. I think I was 17 or 18, and just decided that it was a book I should read before I embarked into the world of adults. So I found a neat old copy (that I lost somewhere along the way, thanks to mom, not that I’m bitter =-) and I read the whole thing. Even the boring chapters describing whale biology. And you know what? I loved it. Absolutely loved the entire book, it’s still one of my favorite classics today.

Now that I’m in graduate school I have to read a lot of books on doctrine and theology that are very boring and dry. Every once in awhile I’ll come across a theologian who can write well, but it’s dull going. They need some zest in their writing styles!

Overall, whether it was required or not, I loved to read. I think the #1 influence in my life was my Grandma K. She passed away a few years ago, but I remember she always would get me books for my birthday and Christmas. She always found ones I liked and new ones I had never read before. Maybe that’s why I never minded reading the required reading. I think most people are turned off by the word “required”. I saw it as a challenge: my teacher is making me read this, but I’m going to read it because I want to! AND I’m going to enjoy it! I know, I know, I was such a rebel!!

Daddy’s Book Club: “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”

Here it is, the inaugral edition of Daddy’s Book Club. I love reading to my kids, and just the past year we started reading chapter books. Today, we finished “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis. I wasn’t sure if Ryan, my 6 year old would like it, but he LOVED it. Every day he would beg me to read him more. I think he liked it more than anything we’ve read so far. I bought him the book for his birthday in December, so I’m glad to see it was money well spent. We bought the next three books in the series (according to the old way of numbering them), so we are anticipating reading more. So here are a few opinions that my kids had about this book:

Review Sam, Age 4:

Did you like this book? “Yeah!”

What was your favorite part? “Ummmm….I liked the silly parts.”

What silly parts? “Umm….when the world is turned upside for Edmund (I’m not sure what he meant by that) and when the giant picks up Lucy.”

What part did you not like? “When the white witch put her knife into Aslan! That was very sad.”

Which character did you like the most? “I liked all of them! Can my go play now?”

Sam likes me reading to him just as much as Ryan does, but I thought at times he had trouble figuring out what was going on in this book. Usually, before I read a chapter book, I read a little book for Sam. One of his favorites is “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” He loves that book.

Reviewer Ryan, age 6:

Did you like this book? “Yup. I think it was pretty good. I just think it’s a good thing we bought those other Narnia books from the store so we can read more!”

What was your favorite part? “When Aslan came back to life again.”

What part did you not like? “When they killed Aslan. It made me sad.”

What character did you like the most? “I liked all of the people!”

Is there anything else about the book you would like to add? “The white witch was a little scary and a little silly and it was ahappy thing when Aslan killed her.”

Ok. Wow. You liked the violence huh? “What’s violence mean?”

Ryan really got into this book. He liked it about as much as he likes Thomas the Train, which is considerable. When I finished the chapter of Aslan’s death, he cried. We had to read the next chapter so he could know that Aslan came back to life again. And, for the final reviewer:

Reviewer Rosie, Age ???

” I hated this book.  Every time daddy read it, they would all sit on the couch and make me sit on the floor. The nerve. Don’t they know how important I am?”

I enjoyed this book a lot, and I found myself looking forward each day to our reading time. Sometimes I would read another chapter because I wanted to find out what happened next. I have never read the books, but I did see the movie that came out a few years ago, and wasn’t too thrilled by it. I liked Lord of the Rings better. But “The Lion, the Witch, and the wardrobe” book was way better than the movie. I think this is a good book to read to your children as it explores issues like misbehaving and being mean and its consequences; having courage to do things even when your scared; death and life, and of course, all the religious metaphors or allegories that are in it. It’s a masterpiece!

The Sunday Salon: Adventures in Binge Reading

 The Sunday Salon is a group that blogs on Sundays about their reading adventures.

     This weekend, I’ve been binge-reading. I like to read a lot, but for some reason I’m not a fast reader. I like to read slowly and carefully, savoring the written words as if they were the finest delicacy. But this weekend I’ve read almost 300 pages! I finally finished “The Silmarillion”, so I was in need of something different, maybe more light-hearted. So, I tried to pick up, “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” short story collection, but it just wasn’t holding my attention. But that is the joy of reading short stories, you can read one or two, and then put the book down for a few weeks.

Friday, I read 3 chapters from “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” to my boys, (age 6 and 4). I was only going to read 1 chapter, but they begged me to read one more chapter so I did. It happened to be the chapter where (SPOILER ALERT for the rest of this paragraph !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Aslan sacrifices himself to save Edmund. My 6 year old was on the edge of his seat the whole chapter, and we were almost finished with it, he blurted out, “Is Aslan going to die? I don’t want him to die!” I finished the chapter (it ends with his death) and he just sat on the couch, absolutely quiet. You have to understand, my 6 year old is NEVER quiet. I put the book down and started helping my wife fix dinner. We look over on the couch, and he is sitting there, looking very pale and sad, trying not to cry. Then, he said, “I don’t want to read anymore of that book!” and he started crying! My wife comforted him and tried to tell him that he needed to hear more of the story. My wife smiled at me, and quoted the line from Samwise Gamgee in “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”  ‘It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? ‘ Anyway, she then told me I had better read just one more chapter before dinner, so I did, and Aslan came back to life, and my boys were happy again.

     That night at work I had to work a four hour shift overnight, so I brought a book along to keep me company (my job is very boring, especially the over night shift. I like it, because that gives me a chance to read!). I decided on starting Elie Wiesel’s “Night” trilogy, 3 short books called, Night, Dawn, and Day. The first one is a memoir of sorts about his experiences in a concentration camp, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I first read it 2 years ago (I think it was also an Oprah Book of the month). I finished the whole thing in the time I had to read at work. It is hard to read, because of all the tragedy that he writes about, but his writing style is very engaging and easy to zip along. But the themes and statements he makes in the book are profound, and they stick in your head for a long time. Yesterday afternoon I started “Dawn” and just finished that this morning. That story is fiction, though Wiesel said in some sense the main character is him, or what he might have become if circumstances in his life had been different after he was released from the Nazi death camps. The story is about a young man named Elisha who joins a Jewish underground movement and is ordered to execute a British soldier at dawn. The story is brief and poignant, as he struggles with this decision, debates whether he will do it or not. That one question, will he do it or won’t he?, kept me turning the pages to the very end. (It was 87 pages long.) If you want that question answered, you will have to read it for yourself. This book wasn’t quite as horrifying as “Night” was, but it was just as well written. Again, it will make you rethink many things, especially as they pertain to war, executions, morality, and God. I hope to start on “Day” this afternoon, and then, I think it’s time I moved on to something more cheerful than Holocaust literature.

     I find myself this weekend enjoying some well-written pieces of literature, as well as enjoying my freedom that so many people suffered and died for, and possibly faced such moral delima’s as Elisha did, all in the name of freedom. We are trully blessed to be living in America in the 21st century. May we never take it for granted!