Sunday, September 16, 2007

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and Alan Greenspan's New Book, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a new World

This month, there is a series of good books that will be coming out. Among them, Mr. Greenspan's book, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World" is sure to be a bestseller as soon it comes out tomorrow morning. In it, Greenspan criticizes the Bush Administration for not responsibly handling the nation's spending and racking up big budget deficits. Mr. Greenspan who has served more than 5 presidents before retiring last year and was replaced by Bernanke did not mince his words. He is free to say and write whatever he wants to. "Greenspan takes his own party to task for forsaking conservative principles that favor small government. "My biggest frustration remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending," Greenspan wrote.


So far, critics are saying that it is one of his best books. It will stand as his legacy. "The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure."


Another book you may have heard so many things about is "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It is a book about her search for good foods in Italy, spiritual connection or renewal in India and love in Bali where she met her future husband, a Brasilian businessman who swore he would never marry again. But in order to live with Elizabeth in the US, he had to marry her. That was the catch.

Another book I am reading is "If I Did It: The Confessions of a Killer" written by O J Simpson, but acquired and published by the friends of Fred Goldman. Lo and behold, Simpson is back in the news this weekend. He is arrested by armed robbery in Las Vegas over some memorabilia at Palace Station.

Other books to check out: Inquiry into Daniel Goleman's Social Intelligence, Raising Smart Kids and Becoming Successfu and Young Man, Go West: Eat, Pray, Love, Shop and Dance







Do you want to get some divorce and relationship advice, go to DivorceConfidentialPost


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Sunday, September 02, 2007

New York Taxi Driver Wrote Book but Continues to Get Inspired by Driving

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New York City Gay and Jewish Cabbie on the Literary Map: Melissa Plaut, blogger and author Released Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab (Villard, $21.95)

Mss Melissa Plaut is one of the few female taxi drivers that you will meet in New York City. She has long realized that she has to take her destiny in her own hands. After graduating from the University of New Mexico, she found a job as a concierge with Miramax Films in Manhattan. She realized that working was hard labor there. She left the job and started traveling in Europe and Morocco. She returned to New York to get some other jobs. She was still trying to find out what she wanted to do. She quickly realized that she needed to do something to earn some money. She went to a Taxi-driving school. She became a taxi driver, a job that would help her with her fear of the unknown and satisfy her curiosity. She received her hack licence on her 29th birthday. She realizes that she has to keep moving to get some returns on her investment. She had to lease the cab, spend on gas and put in many hours without taking a break or dinner.

Melissa Plaut soon discovered that taxi driving is dominated by males, especially immigrants with Pakistani and Indian backgrounds. As she wrote about her new job, she could not get used to her new status. She felt "frustrated by my utter helplessness and powerlessness.. and irritated by the second-class citizen status that is assigned to you the second you sit behind the wheel of a yellow cab, no matter what race, sex, nationality or color you are."

She was ready to experience what non-white, no-American-born people experience on a daily basis. She was just experience the tip of the iceberg. Even though she was very tired, she wrote her observation and thoughts in Newyorkhack.blogspot.com. She also uploaded her pictures and filled in the details before forgetting them. She becomes our cab driver who writes or the writer who drives a cab. No matter what, she follows in the footsteps of 1935 musical comedy Broadway Gondolier from Dick Powell and 1976's Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro.

Melissa likes the experience of listening in on complete strangers who share her vehicle. The book describes why she began driving a taxi, what she has learned and passengers she remembers. She keenly remembers the passenger who introduced herself to her as a Dominatrix. She was complaining about her Wall Street clients. She is referring to the brokers, bankers, investors, hedge funds managers who consider themselves as self-important masters of the universe. They were lousy tippers. Melissa prefers passengers who are dominatrices, escorts, hookers and pimps. These people are in the service industry. They understand the importance of adding a few more dollars to the fares. Yet, moving to get the fares was a constant struggle for her. By the way, the dominatrix tipped her generously.

Melissa Plaut considers her moving taxi as a mobile theater. Her passengers have role to play. She writes about the young couple who were using telephone to talk to each other while riding in the taxi. Even other vehicles become characters in her moving play. She talks to other vehicles whose drivers want to cut in front of her. By the time she returns to the garage at the end of her shift, she knows how much she has made or whether she has recouped her investment.







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Sunday, August 05, 2007

Charles Simic, 2007 Poet Laureate: Writer, Poet, Editor, Teacher and Translator



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Charles Simic is the professor of English at the University of New Hamshire. He is a prolific poet and essay writer. He has published his books in various languages including French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian etc. He is the new Poet laureate for 2007. What can we learn from him? In 1990, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems.

A Fly in the Soup by Charles Simic
A Wedding in Hell by Charles Simic
Another Republic by Charles Simic & Mark Strand
Charon's Cosmology by Charles Simic
Classic Ballroom Dances by Charles Simic
Jackstraws by Charles Simic
My Noiseless Entourage by Charles Simic
Nine Poems by Charles Simic
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk by Charles Simic
The Horse Has Six Legs by Charles Simic
The Voice at 3:00 A.M. by Charles Simic
Unending Blues by Charles Simic
Walking the Black Cat by Charles Simic
Weather Forecast for Utopia and Vicinity by Charles Simic
White by Charles Simic

Some of the honors, accolades and occupations of Charles Simic include:

Guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992
Elected the Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000 (he still holds this position)
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation
Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation

Friday, July 20, 2007

Oprah Winfrey's Book Selection, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy: What's Inside?

Here are some of the themes you will find in The Road:
Man vs. Nature: Coevolution of Social and Ecological Networks
Like Father, Like Son: Genetic Conflict, Negotiation and Shared Fate
Honesty and Deception in a Complex World
The Golden Rule: Selfishness and Altruism
The Struggle for Survival: Conflict and Creativity
The End of the World: Extinction and Reemergence of Life

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of the new selections by Oprah for her book club.





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Where to Find "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:" Book Cover, Harry Potter T-shirt & Discount

In less than a few hours, the wait is going to be over. After years, months and weeks of high security, the genie is coming out of the bottle. J K Rowling's last baby is going to come out. J K Rowling's fans from all over the world will be ready to buy their copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the very successful series. Just a few days ago, the movie made from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released to great reviews. Movie buffs have been flocking to the theaters to get clues and build the buzz for the last release.

After looking at the price of various online sellers, I settle down with deepdiscount.com's price. It is being advertised for $25.00 per copy. It is the cheapest I have seen it listed so far. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is already on the site.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" hits the shelves at a minute past midnight Saturday in a carefully orchestrated release designed to maximize suspense and sales from London and New York to Mumbai and Australia's Outback.

But it has been marred by leaks of the contents of the book on the Internet, both real and fake, and by a mistake made by an online U.S. retailer that meant a small number of hard copies were sent to buyers days ahead of publication.









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Thursday, May 24, 2007

Oprah's Father, Vernon Oprah, is Shopping New Book, "Things Unspoken"



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Things Unspoken is a memoir gossip about the media mogul. When Oprah was made aware that the book is being peddled to agents, she was shocked and disappointed. What should Oprah do? Buy the book and never publish it? Or just fill him with money? Which one should be the answer. The book is set to reveal some painful moments in the superstar's life. Most of them were already made public by herself on the show. But the father feels there are some other episodes that would rivet the public.

"Our daughter was out of hand, an unruly child," Vernon quotes Oprah's mother, Vernita, as saying, "She said she stayed out all times of the night and lied regarding her whereabouts, said she made herself known to boys," he writes.

That interesting euphemism is just the beginning.

"She had secrets," writes Oprah's father. "Dark secrets," he continues. "Some I didn't discover till she was a grown woman, till it was too late."

The New York Daily News gave a heads up to Oprah who was not too happy about her father's dealings. "The memoir gossips about Oprah as a child, when she was living in Milwaukee with her mother and visiting her estranged father in Nashville, Tenn."

Is this a way to cash in?

Saturday, May 19, 2007

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: The New Oprah Book Club Selection

Oprah has selected her new book of the month. The author who is lucky enough to have his book featured to all viewers and readers is Comack McCarthy. The Road is a book about the type of destruction that humans are capable of creating. It is also a meditation of the best that we area capable of. In this book, Mr. McCarthy gives us some warnings and foods for thought. "The Road is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."

What can you say about this book's setting?

"Set in the smoking ashes of a post-apocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road tells the story of a father-son journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched countryside and blasted cities “held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” [p. 181]."









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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

A Sport & A Pastime and The Secret to Success by Rhonda Byrne

James Salter's new book, A Sport and a Pastime was published in 1967. It describes the erotic road trips of Dan, a Yale dropout in his 20s, and Anne-Marie, a gorgeous young woman not yet out of her teens. They meet in a Dijon cafe an doff they go, exploring the French countryside and each other. Salter's narrator admits he is telling untruths and dares us to care. The novel becomes pure unbridled erotica. The most arresting passages can not be quoted here. The point isn't passion, but process. It is about how we perceive and remember and describe our sensory experience of life and how we fill the gaps with the words and images of others.


The Secret by Rhonda Byrne is hot. The book is riding the wave of a publicity boost from the Oprhah show. Oprah invited the author of the Law of Attraction to her show twice. The Secret is a self-help compilation by Rhonda Byrne. Since its publication, Americans have been flocking to bookstores such as Barnes and Noble, Borders and online stores such as Amazon.com to purchase their own copies. They want to have access to the hidden secret to success. In this book, Byrne writes about the choices we make that can affect every aspect of our life and well-being. Is that true? Find out for yourself.






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Wednesday, January 24, 2007

One of the Most Interesting Memoirs I have Read: Born on a Blue Day



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What if the world of the author suddenly became the normal world you and I had to live in? Would we be all savants? Would we be diagnosed with this rare neurological condition called synesthesia? On the plus side, we would have a huge brain capable of memorizing pi to more than 22,000 places. Enter the world of Daniel Tammet in this book titled Born on a Blue Day. This is the memoir written by a high-functioning autistic young man. I heard about him on NPR for the first time. Then, I decided to read more about him. He was on a book tour in the US. After hearing him speak and reading parts of his book, I start questioning whether the brainy folks we have come to know can compete with him. How will Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Nobel laureates and the Googlers do? Like Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man, Daniel is part of a handful of autistic savants. He is good in language and numbers. He perceives numbers and letters as shapes and colors. He is a very sensitive person who tries to block out anything else. He has such a great facility with languages. He is also well-traveled. He comes to give hope to parents of autistic children everywhere. On NPR, he answered questions that parents posed to him. Many people could identify with some of his examples.