Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America

by Kurt Anderson

(Random House, 2009)

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From Tom Brokaw’s Forward:

“What has encouraged me greatly as I travel around the country, from the shaken baronies of Wall Street to the regional centers of commerce and back roads of rural America, is the common acknowledgment not just that a course correction is overdue, but that this is an exciting opportunity to construct a new model that will serve us better for the challenges ahead.”

Anderson’s long essay or short book includes perceptive interpretations about our evolving lifestyles, proposals about readdressing the meaning of the world around us and how we analyze fitting in to it. Anderson concludes that “the crisis should therefore prompt Americans now to call upon the old-fashioned, self-reliant, enthusiastic, common-sense part of themselves–that is, their true amateur spirit.”

While reading Reset, I couldn’t help but focus on Lemuria. With the downturn, we’ve addressed the crisis by tightening up and improving the bookstore. With a good and rightful motivated staff, we’ve worked hard to survive. We’ve corrected internal flaws, eliminated selfish personal malaise, and gotten more good books on the shelves (less crummy titles or just plain hoax books). We hope during this crisis we’ve given Jackson a better bookstore. We want to be ready to grow as the waters become smooth.

Reading Reset will prompt you to look at yourself, encouraging you to take the bull by the horns, turning those visions into actions using a renewed cultural perspective.

I consider myself to be somewhat of a lukewarm basketball fan. I enjoyed playing in junior high and high school, but I was never very good. I’ll follow a couple of college teams (and of course March Madness), but I don’t usually pay much attention to the NBA until the playoffs start. As a kid I didn’t read basketball books or stories, or study basketball statistics like I did with baseball. I never had an understanding of basketball history or what players were historically important.

Bill Simmons wrote The Book of Basketball for people like me. The book has several different sections — among others, there’s a chapter that outlines every watershed moment in the NBA, a chapter that discusses every controversial MVP award, and a chapter that compares Wilt and Russell in just about category you could imagine.

The meat of the book is Simmons’ tiered ranking of the 96 best players of all time. Each player’s impact on the game is discussed over several pages. Simmons reviewed old taped games and original sports stories from the early days of the ABA and NBA to construct his rankings, and I found this information to be the most interesting. It’s easy enough to say that Elgin Baylor was “great” or “unique” — it’s another to go back and see what the sportswriters were saying about him, what his teammates and opponents were saying about him, and compare his impact with his peers. You may disagree with the order of his player ranking, but ultimately, that’s really kind of the point — to spark awareness and discussion about the history of the ABA and the NBA, before the great players of the past are lost to public memory.

Hey Everybody!!  Well Christmas is right around the corner and these are some novels that I think everyone would like to have under the tree….

Wolf  Hall by Hilary Mantel

Henry VIII’s challenge to the church’s power with his desire to divorce his queen and marry Anne Boleyn set off a tidal wave of religious, political and societal turmoil that reverberated throughout 16th-century Europe. Mantel boldly attempts to capture the sweeping internecine machinations of the times from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, the lowborn man who became one of Henry’s closest advisers. Cromwell’s actual beginnings are historically ambiguous, and Mantel admirably fills in the blanks, portraying Cromwell as an oft-beaten son who fled his father’s home, fought for the French, studied law and was fluent in French, Latin and Italian. Mixing fiction with fact, Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times and brings to life the important players: Henry VIII; his wife, Katherine of Aragon; the bewitching Boleyn sisters; and the difficult Thomas More, who opposes the king. Unfortunately, Mantel also includes a distracting abundance of dizzying detail and Henry’s all too voluminous political defeats and triumphs, which overshadows the more winning story of Cromwell and his influence on the events that led to the creation of the Church of England.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel.

Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself–through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.

The Paris Vendetta by Steve Berry

Bestseller Berry deftly blends contemporary suspense and historical mystery in his fifth novel to feature former U.S. Justice Department operative Cotton Malone (after The Charlemagne Pursuit). Danish billionaire Henrik Thorvaldsen, a friend of Malone’s, has become consumed with finding out who masterminded the slaughter outside a Mexico City courthouse two years earlier that killed seven people, including his young diplomat son. Once he learns that a wealthy British aristocrat was behind the outrage, Thorvaldsen gets entangled in a conspiracy that involves an elite group of ruthless financial experts planning to destabilize the global economy, a terrorist plot to destroy a European landmark, and a legendary cache hidden by Napoleon. Malone soon finds himself in a desperate struggle to save not only Thorvaldsen’s life but the lives of countless innocents as well. While the plot takes a few predictable turns, this well-crafted thriller also offers plenty of surprises.

here is a link to Sid Salter’s piece on Alan Lange and Tom Dawson’s book Kings of Tort.

Maggie, one of two mighty front desk managers, has a knack for knowing what each of us likes to read.  She said, “Hey, Pat.  I think you’ll like Spooner. It’s funny and a bit quirky and by Pete Dexter, National Book Award winner for Paris Trout.”

The first few chapters spelled magic for me. When Spooner, our reluctant protagonist, was born along with his twin who died at birth, their mother grieved that loss over a lifetime. Spooner sees himself as second fiddle and even further down the line after genius siblings are born to mom and her new husband named Calmer after the death of Spooner’s father. If it weren’t for Calmer, a navy captain who makes a disaster of a funeral at sea with prestigious onlookers shocked by a coffin that won’t sink, Spooner may have ended up much worse.  Calmer provides enough unspoken support for this stepson that Spooner often survives rather poor choices that keep us laughing and cheering for the not obviously loved and often rejected Spooner.

Who amongst us has not felt rejection? To survive, most of us have enough laughter and success to weather those pitfalls and poor choices. To celebrate such a life may be even harder. The strong pull in this book is the character driven plot that just won’t let us give up on Spooner. We won’t put this book down until we find out how it all turns out. It probably deserves some most worthy awards because it is wonderfully original and very well crafted by a unique voice in American literature.

-Pat