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Tuesday, May 27,2008
Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Peter Demetz
Prague had long been a cultural, multiethnic city at the heart of Central Europe. When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, the city’s inhabitants were faced with the possibility of collaboration, passive or active resistance, imprisonment, death, escape or simply trying to carry on as best they could. Literary . . .
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Tuesday, May 27,2008
Hunting for Clues
Book Preview
Racial tensions between the white and Hmong communities came to light in Wisconsin’s 2004 hunting season. And the recent discussions surrounding the hunting of wolves, which were removed from the federal endangered species list just this year, have sharpened conflicts between those who feel hunting is an . . .
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Monday, May 26,2008
Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty
The women behind the rise of America
More than two centuries after the birth of America, our nation’s founders still transfix us, says broadcaster and author Cokie Roberts.
“They are so much part of our fabric as a people that I was dying to know more about them,” says Roberts, who was named one of the 50 greatest women in the history of broadcasting by the American Women in Radio and Television. The results are found in Ladies of Liberty (Morrow), the follow-up to Roberts’ best-selling book, Founding Mothers (2004), in which she examines the lives and times of some of the women who helped shape America.
The author says that even though women were central to the survival of the country, female contributions have been overshadowed by the Founding Fathers.
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Tuesday, May 20,2008
Age of Consent?
The youngest P.O.W.
“For me, Omar’s age has always been the greatest factor,” says Michelle Shephard, a Toronto Star reporter who authored Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr (John Wiley & Sons). When Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, he was 15 years old, a child soldier. While international sympathy has gone out to child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sri Lanka and other countries, American and Canadian sympathy for Khadr has been far more muted.
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Tuesday, May 20,2008
Milwaukee Ghosts (Schiffer Books)
by Sherry Strub
From North Avenue to the South Side, from Shorewood to Brookfield, the Milwaukee area has ghosts—or so says Sherry Strub in Milwaukee Ghosts. Strub takes the reader from place to place—homes, cemeteries, historic sites and even the hallowed Pfister Hotel—in a trek around the area. The interviews and stories are interesting, but they lack a sense of authority and spookiness. Accounts of people saying, “I had this
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Tuesday, May 20,2008
The Right to Return
Book Preview
For some, the adage “home is where the heart is” is a hackneyed platitude; for others, it’s a wrenching expression of an almost filial bond. In Milwaukee native Sandy Tolan’s 2006 nonfiction book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew and the Heart of the Middle East, a Palestinian returning to his ancestral home in Ramla uses such visceral terms to describe his connection to the land from which he was expelled 20 years earlier.
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Tuesday, May 13,2008
Lady of Spain
Discovering gazpacho
Many young girls dream of being the most popular, adored girl in school. But the truth is, only a tiny fraction of them end up as the cool and popular ones, while the rest of us are left to find a different way in the social ranks, a way to define who we truly are inside.
In the deliciously twisted memoir Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love and Spain (Atria), Lori L. Tharps, a native Milwaukeean now living in Philadelphia, takes readers down the winding roads of her journey of love and self-discovery across the Iberian Peninsula and back again.
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Tuesday, May 13,2008
The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed . . .
Book Review
Muhammad may have been the prophet of one of the world’s great religions, but little-known developments after his death set the direction for human events even today. “The future history of much of the world was decided by the actions of a small number of men arguing and debating in the city of Medina,” writes Hugh Kennedy. In The Great Arab Conquests, the British historian investigates how the disunified Arab tribes and towns . . .
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Tuesday, May 13,2008
The F-Word
Book Preview
In June 1998, a Time Magazine article tried to convince readers that feminism was dead. After withstanding decades of being misrepresented by the media (and possibly misrepresented by itself), the boisterous lyrics of the Spice Girls and Ally McBeal’s persistently nonplussed visage had simply proven too much for it. Feminism had finally come to a most undignified demise. Or had it?
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Monday, May 5,2008
Long, Strange Trip
Finding the new world
It’s not true that Christopher Columbus defied the conventional wisdom of his time in thinking that the world was round. All the wise people of his time already knew that; Columbus, in fact, thought the world had the shape of a pear, complete with a stalk “like a woman’s nipple,” which was the site of the Garden of Eden.
That notion came to the famed “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” one night when it seemed like he was sailing uphill; hence, the impression of a pear’s slope. The rest of the imagery perhaps is attributable to the overactive imagination of a sailor too long at sea.
Read more...Elections 2008
Obama seeks greater rein on financial institutions
(AP)
AP - President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to pass legislation giving the government greater regulatory authority over financial institutions like American International Group.
Sources: Pentagon to stop forced tour extension
(AP)
AP - The Army will substantially reduce use of the unpopular practice of holding troops beyond their enlistment dates and will pay $500 to those still forced to stay in the service, defense and congressional officials said Wednesday.
AIG head shares US anger of bonuses but backs them
(AP)
AP - The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath. "I share that anger," Edward Liddy, chairman and CEO of the American International Group Inc., said in testimony prepared for Congress.
Analysis: White House, Dems backpedaling on AIG
(AP)
AP - For the first time since last fall's election, Democrats and the Obama administration are backpedaling furiously on an issue easily understood by financially strapped taxpayers: $165 million in bonuses paid out at bailed-out AIG.
Pence: Return AIG donations
(Politico)
Politico - House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence is urging politicians from both parties to strongly consider returning campaign contributions from AIG.
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Top Stories
AIG head shares US anger of bonuses but backs them
(AP)
AP - The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath. "I share that anger," Edward Liddy, chairman and CEO of the American International Group Inc., said in testimony prepared for Congress.
Obama seeks greater rein on financial institutions
(AP)
AP - President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to pass legislation giving the government greater regulatory authority over financial institutions like American International Group.
Consumer prices rise by largest amount in 7 months
(AP)
AP - Consumer prices rose in February by the largest amount in seven months as gasoline prices surged again and clothing costs jumped the most in nearly two decades.
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