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There’s a Colbertesque book joke hiding in here somewhere….
Bookcase ‘trap’ killed US woman
The body of a missing US woman has been found by her family, wedged upside down behind a bookcase in her room.
Mariesa Weber, 38, is believed to have fallen over and become trapped as she tried to reach behind the bookcase to adjust the plug for a TV set.
Her family spent nearly two weeks searching for her, fearing she had been kidnapped from the house she shared with them in Florida.
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Tagged: books bizarre weird darwin+awards
A few months back, I mentioned that DefCon was starting book club in March. First on their list was Esther Kaplan’s With God On Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy and Democracy in George W. Bush’s White House. I actually did read it as promised; it just took me a wee bit longer than I’d anticipated. Two months longer, to be exact.
But finish it I did, and lawdy, lawdy, it’s some scary shit. Even if the Dems win back Congress and the White House in ‘06 and ‘08, it’s gonna take “us” (the Dems aren’t exactly my people, but they’re as close as I’ll ever get to the White House) decades to undo all the damage that GW has wreaked, particularly in regards to his judicial appointments. We’ve gotta wait years for these unqualified zealots to drop dead before we can reinstate judges that, you know, agree with the Constitution and all its amendments. Maybe we can just pray to Jeebus. (Hey, it kinda-sorta worked for Pat!)
Anyway, thought I’d share my Amazon review, since y’all have been so patient.
By the way, my review appears under the book’s hardcover listing, but it’s available in paperback, too.
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Islamofascists don’t corner the market on lunacy!
Once DefCon (The Campaign to Defend the Constitution) announced that they’d kick off their new book club in March 2006 with Esther Kaplan’s WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE: HOW CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS TRAMPLED SCIENCE, POLICY AND DEMOCRACY IN GEORGE W. BUSH’S WHITE HOUSE, I checked out a copy from my local library, post-haste. Unfortunately, I never did finish it in time for the online chat with author Kaplan, but not because it was a boring, tedious read; in fact, just the opposite. I was so shocked, outraged, and just plain pissed off about what I learned in WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE that I found myself throwing the book down every third page so I could rant to anyone within earshot about GW and his Bible-beating cronies. I mean, I knew that the current administration let their evangelical faith guide their policies; I guess I just didn’t realize how far their zealousness had taken them.
Kaplan focuses on several areas in which GW shapes government policy and programs to fit his conservative Christian worldview to an egregious extent: foreign policy (specifically, the “War on Terror” and the conflict in Iraq), science (including stem cell research and any science surrounding sexual matters, such as AIDS and condom effectiveness), faith-based initiatives, gay marriage, and reproductive rights (with an emphasis on contraception, abstinence-only programs, and abortion). Kaplan discusses the impact of Bush’s policies both in the United States and abroad (for example, the Global Gag Rule has had a deleterious effect on women in developing nations). The issues are complex, the violations many, yet Kaplan does an excellent job of nailing down the significance of each and showing how they are all interrelated.
Perhaps more interesting than George W. Bush’s faith-based politics is his stubbornness, his dogged determination to “stay the course,” his unrelenting single-mindedness and his intolerance for inconvenient “facts” (like Stephen Colbert, I believe GW prefers “truthiness” to “book learning”). He is “the decider,” and as such, his words are gospel. Should any of his staff or government employees (or any recipients of government largesse) disagree with him, they had better shape up or be prepared to ship out. Kaplan serves up example after example of GW’s disdain for dissent. Scientists who pursue controversial research or publish data at odds with the Bush admin’s ideology are selectively audited, driven out of office, or have their grant money yanked out from under them. Staffers and cabinet members who dare disagree with Bush in public must renounce their blasphemous ways or risk being thrown overboard to satisfy the conservative sharks that make up GW’s base. More so than any president before him, George W. has consistently stifled science, censored his critics, and generally abused his position of power.
WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE was first published in early 2004, prior to the 2004 Presidential Elections. Although Kaplan is clearly disgusted with the “trampling” of “science, policy, and democracy” that she so eloquently describes, she still manages to maintain a somewhat optimistic tone – perhaps because she hopes that the good citizens of the US will vote this schmoe out of office when given the chance. Unfortunately, we all know what happened in 2004. I can’t help but wonder if GW would have been defeated if more voters (and potential voters) had read WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE before making their dates with the Diebold machines. Like his evangelical base, Bush is a master at concealing his true goals, as well as the unconstitutional activities he uses to pursue them.
I should also note that Kaplan documents her sources exhaustively. Nothing annoys me more than an investigative piece of nonfiction with a sloppy reference list tacked on as an afterthought (or, heavens forbid, such a book that’s completely devoid of any references at all!). Kaplan’s “Notes” section weighs in at a healthy 35 pages, making it easy for skeptics to track down her resources and verify her claims. (Yes, it’s all true, and it’s every bit as scary as it seems!) And, while Kaplan may take issue with Bush’s flouting of the wall of separation between church and state, she is herself religious – Jewish, to be exact. She’s not anti-religion or an atheist (like moi), but rather opposes Bush’s evangelical antics because they’re an affront to the First Amendment and are more often than not counter-productive in terms of science, foreign policy, human rights, and democracy.
In the words of one reviewer, WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE is “a truly shocking dossier of recent religious fundamentalist incursions into the soul of American democracy.” Every American must read this book – and keep Kaplan’s lessons in mind as they head to the polls this fall.
After responding to this action alert from Act For Change, I was rewarded with a an advert for blogger Glenn Greenwald’s new tome, How Would a Patriot Act?:
As Jon Stewart might say, it’s ballsalicious!
Seriously, though, WTF!?
Heathens and skeptics, take note: on March 17, DefCon will launch a book club, which will give DefCon supporters the opportunity to chat with members of the DefCon advisory board about their published works. Each month will feature a different board member and his or her book.
Kicking off the series is Esther Kaplan, author of With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush’s White House. April will bring Isaac Kramnick (Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State), while Michelle Goldberg (Kingdom Coming) is slated to speak in May.
I’m taking this as an excuse to cram yet more reading into my schedule - after all, I gotta get it done by the deadline if I want to learn anything, right? Of course, I’m still a cheapskate, so I have to wait for my copy of With God on Their Side to arrive at the library.
I haven’t been able to find details on their site yet (the book club announcement was in a recent e-newsletter), but my bet for a relevant site update would be their reading list or blog.
I am, like, so jealous. - K
One Well-Read Home Has Some New Pets: 1,082 Penguins
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Nov. 11 - Rushing to evacuate her home as a forest fire lapped at the edges of this high-desert town in May 2000, Kathryn Gursky took with her just one book, a British edition of “The World of Pooh,” by A. A. Milne, bought when she and her husband were vacationing in Dorset some 11 years earlier.
When she returned to Los Alamos after the fire, Ms. Gursky, a 49-year-old former librarian, found that the rest of her 2,300-volume personal library had burned, along with her house and everything in it. […]
In September, Ms. Gursky received a birthday gift from her husband that earned her the envy of her book-loving friends: the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000. […]
Ms. Gursky’s collection arrived in mid-September packed in 25 boxes, shrink-wrapped on a pallet and weighing nearly 700 pounds. Since then, Ms. Gursky has spent countless hours unpacking, shelving, categorizing, alphabetizing and rearranging the books. Oh, yes - and reading; she said she had completed more than 30 of the books in the last eight weeks. Even at that rather remarkable pace, it would take her about six years to make her way through the entire collection.
So where did she start? “I ran my finger along the shelves, closed my eyes and stopped on one,” Ms. Gursky said, sitting in an overstuffed chair in her new library, 31 rows of great literature looming behind her.
A Clockwork Orange (1963)
Author: Anthony Burgess
“In the first 20 pages, Alex and his lackies beat a guy senseless and rob him; they steal a car and trash it, they get into a vicious gang fight; they attack a couple at their home, destroy the husband’s life work (his book, A Clockwork Orange), beat him and his wife senseless, and rape the wife. This really ticked me off.”
Read this and other one-star Amazon reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present.
Via Bitch Ph.D. (via Apostropher and - of course - The Morning News).
Woman sues Stephen King over Misery character
Yup, you read that right.
Now, you’re probably thinking what I was thinking - assuming you haven’t yet read this in your local rag, of course! Namely, that the woman’s suing King because she claims to have created the Annie Wilkes character, which King somehow managed to appropriate for use in Misery. Probably an innocent mistake; at most, King’s Wilkes is unintentionally similar to another literary character created by the as-of-yet unnamed woman. Right?
Well, not quite:
In the chilling novel-turned-movie Misery, a famous author is held hostage by a psychotic nurse.
She tortures him into writing one more book, whacking his feet with a sledgehammer when he doesn’t write it the way she wants.
In reality, a New Jersey woman claiming to be the psycho nurse wants Stephen King to stop writing about her.
Anne Hiltner, a freelance writer, says she is the inspiration for King’s sadistic nurse, Annie Wilkes.
Oh, awesome!
This was actually the first thought that popped into my head, but I quickly dismissed it - it seemed so bizarre, like something that only my cynical imagination could conjure up.
But it gets better. Way better:
Hiltner, 58, filed a $US500 million ($645 million) federal lawsuit this month against the author, his publishers and several movie studios, accusing them of violating her privacy.
The lawsuit also accuses King and his distributors of defamation, copyright infringement and violation of antitrust laws for allegedly using her private diaries to create psychic Sally Druse, a similarly frightening character in King’s TV miniseries The Journals of Eleanor Druse: The Kingdom Hospital Incident, which aired in the US last year.
In a similar 1991 suit that was ultimately dismissed, Hiltner accused King of breaking into her home numerous times and stealing several manuscripts written by her and her brother.
Sounds like she just offered up King’s next plot on a silver platter!
And finally, my favorite line in the article:
The jumbled lawsuit doesn’t detail how King allegedly pilfered the diaries or what was in them.
Hmmm, I wonder what the reporter thinks of all this?
Someone get that psychowitch a Stella Award A-SAP! Or a straitjacket. Your call.
BTW, I’m a huge Stephen King fan, but I’d have a lot more sympathy for the man if not for the recent Entertainment Weekly article in which he defends the “Teflon Molester” - errr, Michael Jackson.
King opines:
This came down to a prosecutor either so sure Jackson was bad or so offended by Jackson’s combination of celebrity and wackiness that he rushed into a case that looked shaky from hello. It looked worse as Tom Sneddon went along, and had become nearly ludicrous by the time Jackson’s ex-wife left the stand. No matter how pure Sneddon’s motives may have been (and I’m not saying they were, believe me), he began to look like a man pursuing a vendetta, one whose chief hope of securing a conviction lay in the obvious fact that the trial was a sideshow and the accused was . . . well, a freak.
Ahhh, yes, yes…Poor Michael, everyone’s out to get him, trying to keep the black man down. Uh, wait…
The media first turned the trial into a freak-show by emphasizing Jackson’s peculiarities rather than his humanity…
Humanity? How’s that? Because he let his prepubescent charges play with his pet chimp before he fondled them?
Ah, but it doesn’t matter now. The Pale Peculiarity has floated out of the courthouse to his black SUV for the last time.
Well, we can only hope so. Ol’ Wacko has promised not to share his bed with boys anymore, but please. As Stephen Colbert pointed out, SoCal is a criminal’s dream; in order to be convicted of a crime, you have to murder someone in front of the jury, and maybe splatter some blood on ‘em for good measure. First O.J., then Robert Blake, now Jackson. Not guilty by reason of celebrity, indeed!
- K
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