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National Journal Restoration Roundtable

Somehow I became intrigued with the undead just long enough to read Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Good Laawwd. My sincere apologies to all you vampire fiction fans…but this was an extraordinarily boring, choppy and pointless piece of unliterature. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how I stuck with it. Perhaps Seth Grahame-Smith will have better luck with the screenplay for the Tim Burton resurrection of Dark Shadows, but I was largely unimpressed with this one.

I guess I can only be thankful that I read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin a few years ago, so I have a more esteemed view of our 16th president.

Have a BBQ. Toss and shatter your plates. Watch as the birds eat it up…

Love.

Original Post at Food Republic.

I picked up this awesome picture book, Iggy Peck, Architect a few months ago.

I’ve read it aloud a few times recently and then I found the following pictures that Elliot drew. I love how dangerous and creative my son is…

Read books.

I’m nearing the end of reading “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander and it’s reopening my eyes to the modern system of enslavement that we still have in our drug war culture. It’s a mechanized system of mass incarceration that ingests people and spits out the corpse with the brandished label of a “criminal.”

Too often we can create tunnel vision excuses for panoramic systems of injustice because we only analyze a problem based on the top 10% of the iceberg that’s in our face, meanwhile a behemoth lurks beneath the surface unnoticed. Michelle Alexander’s work in this book helps complete the picture. She dives down to get beneath the superficial anecdotes. She relays the history, identifies tipping points along the way and uses broad strokes and individual stories to make the message clear: Slavery may have ended, civil rights may be written into law, but there is a still a purposeful and intentional modern Jim Crow war against communities of color, and African Americans in particular, that can’t be denied.

I strongly suggest if you’re a person of justice or seeking understanding, that you pick up The New Jim Crow.

Here’s an article where Alexander scratches the surface.

Great book.

I recently read Millard’s other major work, The Destiny of the Republic about the assassination attempt on President James Garfield and the crude medicine that killed him.

Also a great read.

The Millennium Trilogy

These books are so good. Such strong female characters. Highlights the appalling and yet commonplace global culture of violence against women. Book 1, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is very dark, descriptive and challenging to read through because of the sexual violence subject matter. But, if you can make it through Book 1, the subsequent two books, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are much less sexually violent and really pull together to make a strong series with a justifiable resolution to the story.

Highly recommend.