Author name: davidswanson

Thieves in High Places By Jim Hightower

They say a great actor can read the side of a cereal box and make you cry. I doubt it. Jim Hightower couldn’t read the side of a cereal box if you paid him, not without dragging in about 85 analogies and bits of wisdom his neighbor told him about how to relate to hogs and chickens. But by the time he was through improving on that cereal box, you’d be stomping your feet and clutching your sides to control the laughter, and in the process you’d read more

“The Revival of Pragmatism,” by Morris Dickstein.
February, 1999

The Washington Post, Feb. 7, 1999: “CINCINNATI — An appeals court has overturned a rapist’s 51-year prison sentence because a judge turned to the Bible while deciding his punishment.”

THE REVIVAL OF PRAGMATISM, edited by Morris Dickstein, 1998, contains a section on “Pragmatism and Law.” The first essay in this section is an excellent one by Richard Posner discussing legal pragmatism read more

The Heat is On
The Heat: Steelworker Lives & Legends, Cedar Hill Publications.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.”

That quote can be found at the front of “Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller. Setting aside Emerson’s sexism, mysticism, and read more

“The Nurture Assumption,” By Judith Rich Harris.

THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION: Why children turn out the way they do; parents matter less than you think and peers matter more, by Judith Rich Harris, Foreword by Steven Pinker.

This book appears to be very carefully put together. It’s not your usual genes vs. environment infotainment. The author, and the author of her foreword, seriously overplay the outsider autodidactic myth. Harris studied at a top graduate school, has co-written read more

Christian Parenti’s Iraq Uncensored
December 19, 2004
“The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq” By Christian Parenti, The New Press, 208 pages.

Parenti’s book provides a first-hand description of life in occupied Iraq, primarily the life of the occupiers, but also that of the occupied. None of this has been seen on the network news or read about in the corporate transcriptions of Pentagon PR that pass for newspapers in the United States. Yet much of it will read more

“A Very Long Engagement” by Sebastien Japrisot.

“A Very Long Engagement” by Sebastien Japrisot, translated from French by Linda Coverdale, is a wonderful little book, a best-seller and heart-wrenching tear-jerker in the best sense (and there is a good sense of those terms). A girl’s fiance’ is reported dead in World War One, but she has reason to doubt the report. She tracks down leads for years, with the sort of perseverance only such a motivation brings. In read more

An Expendable Man by Margaret Edds
Feb. 25, 2004

“An Expendable Man” by Margaret Edds does a superb job of telling the story of how an innocent man, Earl Washington, was put on Virginia’s death row and ended up spending 18 years in prison. I know she does a superb job because some years ago, when Washington had still not been pardoned but when things were looking hopeful, I researched this case and wrote a series of articles about it in the Culpeper News, the small-town paper read more

“God of the Rodeo,” by Daniel Bergner.

“God of the Rodeo,” by Daniel Bergner, 1998, is a great book, an excellent account of life incarcerating and being incarcerated in Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary, a former slave plantation on which much has changed and much has not. The book is also about the struggle required in order to write such a book, a struggle that has recently been made much harder. Compare the following quotes.

(1)”There are countries in which read more

“HOSTILE CLIMATE: Report on anti-gay activity, 1999 edition,” produced by People For the American Way

“HOSTILE CLIMATE: Report on anti-gay activity, 1999 edition,” produced by People For the American Way (http://www.pfaw.org) is an overwhelming document, a 250-page book briefly chronicling 292 incidents of discrimination against homosexuals in the United States during 1998.
Excluded from this list are hate read more

“180 Ways to Walk the Recognition Talk”

Folks at the University of Virginia have been having some good – if sad – laughs over an almost unbelievably stupid and cruel book that was recently distributed to every department manager there. The state of Virginia is trying out a new pay plan on its underpaid university staff. The basic idea behind the plan seems to be avoiding pay raises. The basic idea behind the book seems to be moronic alternatives to pay intended to pacify read more