For posterity:


Now that I look at this, have you read Loose Girl, NewPhin?

I saw it at Target and was immediately intrigued even though I'm not in the target audience by a long shot. It fits in your memoir slot.

I haven't read loose girl. By the way, if you're working with at risk, low-literacy kids. Check out the Bluford Books from Townsend Press. You can buy them for $1 a piece from them, and they're absolute gems for that audience. Also look into the Orca Series. Finally there is a new one called Hip Books, but I haven't actually read any of them yet. They look promising. They're not great literature, but they are high interest and they will hook some kids on reading who have never read an actual book.

Carl Sandburg's series on Lincoln, for the umpteenth time. Something invariably comforting when you know the outcome but are repeatedly impressed with the resolve, wisdom and patience to deal with all impediments to the resolution of challenges that must be confronted to resolve conflict and restore order. And yes, to kill and kill some more if that is what it takes to do so.

Just finished Huxley's Brave New World, pretty amazing that it was written nearly 80 years ago.

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Pretty amazing book. The authors make some pretty inflammatory claims that, if true, would brand Mao Zedong a greater, more bloodthirsty sociopath that Hitler or Stalin.

http://aede.osu.edu/programs/anderso...ZZ_%5B1%5D.jpg

From the Amazon.com Review...

In the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, "Today, Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." For Chang, author of Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to history, but to decency. Mao: The Unknown Story does not contain a formal dedication, but it is clear that Chang is writing to honor the millions of Chinese who fell victim to Mao's drive for absolute power in his 50-plus-year struggle to dominate China and the 20th-century political landscape. From the outset, Chang and Halliday are determined to shatter the "myth" of Mao, and they succeed with the force, not just of moral outrage, but of facts. The result is a book, more indictment than portrait, that paints Mao as a brutal totalitarian, a thug, who unleashed Stalin-like purges of millions with relish and without compunction, all for his personal gain. Through the authors' unrelenting lens even his would-be heroism as the leader of the Long March and father of modern China is exposed as reckless opportunism, subjecting his charges to months of unnecessary hardship in order to maintain the upper hand over his rival, Chang Kuo-tao, an experienced military commander.

Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao's ascent to power and subsequent grip on China in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon's visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao's unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao's ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors' consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. --Silvana Tropea

Breakdown of a BIG Book: 5 Things You'll Learn from Mao: The Unknown Story

1. Mao became a Communist at the age of 27 for purely pragmatic reasons: a job and income from the Russians.

2. Far from organizing the Long March in 1934, Mao was nearly left behind by his colleagues who could not stand him and had tried to oust him several times. The aim of the March was to link up with Russia to get arms. The Reds survived the March because Chiang Kai-shek let them, in a secret horse-trade for his son and heir, whom Stalin was holding hostage in Russia.

3. Mao grew opium on a large scale.

4. After he conquered China, Mao's over-riding goal was to become a superpower and dominate the world: "Control the Earth," as he put it.

5. Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "half of China may well have to die."

Finished The World Is Flat and just started The China Study.

I'm reading a book that is likely far stranger than anything anyone else on this forum would want to read (with the exception of Hamas). It is called The Post-Human Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu. Its an instructional text about how to live a life in spirit with Dada in what Codrescu dubs the "post-human age," where technology and availability of information is seemingly infinite. The text is set up against the backdrop of an imagined game of chess played between Tristan Tsara (perhaps THE founder of Dada) and Vladdy Lenin, setting up an argument that the 20th century was in large part an intellectual contest between Dada and Communism.

The book is part historical text, part scholarly criticism, part funny essay and altogether strange and kind of brilliant.

Codrescu lives in Arkansas, now. Exquisite Corpse (and the Oxford American) is housed in my hometown of Conway.

His move away from Louisiana caused me to immediately take off LSU from my list of graduate programs to apply to.

I think he still spends a lot of time in NO, but he evidently has a pretty sweet little place on the Buffalo.

Is there any good literature out there, nonfiction especially, that extols the virtues of The Natural State? I find that I don't know what the real Arkansas is, that I don't even know much about a caricatured Arkansas.

Well, if you don't subscribe to the Oxford American, you need to. It has quite a few literary articles about Arkansas. Donald Harrington is good. Miller Williams for poets. Myra McClarey is a pretty good southern woman writer.

I don't know if I'd want to read something that in depth about it, but I read Travesties by Tom Stoppard which includes Tzara, Lenin and Joyce as characters. It was good.

Now Reading The Shining by Stephen King

That's hilarious, given that I've presented about post humanism at a conference.