Thursday, December 31, 2009

Goodbye decade of 2000s, we hardly knew ye....

A word of farewell to the Decade of Naughts

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:

Golden lads and girls all must,
as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

Fear no more the frown o' the great;
thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:

The sceptre, learning, physic,
must all follow this, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

Fear no more the lightning flash,
nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
thou hast finish'd joy and moan:

All lovers young, all lovers must
consign to thee, and come to dust

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

Wm Shakespeare

Posted New Year's Eve
End of a decade, start of a new one,
the last such embarking under the current world order?
Thursday, December 31, 2009

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For what may lie straight ahead, we recommend to you our top pick of the decade in nonfiction:


Not all stories end in an Extraordinary Comeback

You may recall Pat Tillman as a former NFL star who walked away from a $3 million contract to serve his country in the aftermath of 9/11. His harrowing tale is told here:



Very sobering stuff, on every level. But as a treatise on "how stuff works," in the real world, this is a masterpiece.

Strength in what remains

The remarkable and moving story of one "Deo" -- a young man who fled Burundi, an African nation neighbor to Rwanda during the 1993 genocide, and after a sojourn and an Ivy League education in the USA, courtesy philanthropic friends, returns to build a medical clinic. Highly recommended.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Irony: while we were writing about a comeback hero, he was having a major setback, hospitalized for depression

Irony is never far from us here on planet earth. While we were writing about comeback exemplar Sen. Max Cleland in Extraordinary Comebacks, he was having a crushing meltdown that put him back in Walter Reed Army hospital.

He tells the story in his new book. "Heart of a Patriot - How I Found The Courage To Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed, and Karl Rove," by Max Cleland, with Ben Raines (Simon and Schuster, 2009) ISBN 978-1-4391-2605-9. Promotion excerpt follows:



But during his (2002) reelection campaign he is singled out by Republicans, who smear him as "unpatriotic." He loses his seat and begins another steep tumble. A long-dormant case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, awakened after 9/11 by the invasion of Iraq, pushes Max to the brink. Forty years after Vietnam, having reached -- and fallen from -- a pinnacle of power, Max returns to Walter Reed as a patient, surrounded by veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Among them, Max again finds the faith and endurance to regain control of his life.

In a memoir free of bitterness but frank about the costs of being a soldier, Max Cleland describes with love the ties America's soldiers forge with one another, along with the disillusionment many of them experience when they come home. He spares no one his humiliations and setbacks in this gut-wrenching account of his life in the hope it will keep even one veteran from descending into darkness. Heart of a Patriot is a story about the joy of serving the country you love, no matter the cost -- and how to recover from the deepest wounds of war.

Monday, December 14, 2009

New book from David Walker

What could be more significant to us all: