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Category: Books

  • A FEW QUOTES FOR THE DAY

    Russian expression: A puppet thinks he is free if he loves his strings. ( sounds like the Stockholm Syndrome). Be just around the corner Just down the street, Everything we’re looking for, every time we meet. Honesty must always be brutal, or it grows dangerously close to self-deception and then on to lies. Shadow Strike-…

  • THE GLASS BEAD GAME

    The final novel of Hermann Hesse, which Hesse wrote between 1931 and 1943, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature. It was not allowed publication in Germany in 1943 because of it’s anti- fascist views. Set in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead…

  • AYN RAND ON STEROIDS

    There have always been those individuals who would put making money and/or attaining power above all else. Even going so far as to sell their souls. The difference between then and now, is that now it is considered the right thing to do. “Greed is good”, the underlying philosophy expounded by Gorden Gekko in the…

  • THE SAVANT SYNDROME: AN EXTRAORDINARY CONDITION

    Some of the amazing skills Savants have displayed include :Kim Peeks memory abilities were astounding. During his life, he memorized over 12,000 books including the Bible, and was an expert on 15 subject areas including geography, music, literature, history, and sports. Amazingly, Kim could actually read two pages at once, his left eye read the…

  • ONE OF THE BEST

      Martin Cruz Smith died last week. I was in the middle of his latest book , (Hotel Ukraine), that had just come out two weeks ago. The book, the last in the Arkady Renko series, takes place at the time of the Russian incursion into Ukraine. For years, he was one of my favorite…

  • HOW EASILY GREATNESS CAN GO AWRY OR NOT

     Hermann Hesse's mother Marie wrote: "The little fellow has a life in him, an unbelievable strength, a powerful will, and, for his four years of age, a truly astonishing mind. How can he express all that? It truly gnaws at my life, this internal fighting against his tyrannical temperament, his passionate turbulence […] God must…

  • The Past As Prologue Of The Future

    In 1831 Thomas Macaulay addressed the House Of Commons:              "All history is full of revolution, produced by causes similar to those which are now operating in England. A portion of the community which had been of no account expands and becomes strong. It demands a place in the system,…

  • Hemingway Quotes

    I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen. Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything. “The best…

  • A POEM AND TWO QUOTES

    “Hay mas tiempo que vida.          “Life is short. Seize the moment.” “It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.” –Floyd Patterson                                          Sometimes when I’m…

  • SOME MORE INTERESTING QUOTES

    “Neither a monkey who misses a branch nor a man who misses his chance can be saved”  – Old Indian Saying A Toast-   “Some ships are wooden ships, and other ships may sink,  but the best ships are friendships and to those ships we drink”  –As told to Bob Dylan by David Crosby The moral…

  • LIES ARE SO MUCH MORE FUN

    NEW BEST SELLER- [HOW TO ATTAIN PROFIT AND POWER BY LYING AND COMMITTING FRAUD]   Written by George Santos, with a forward by Donald Trump and pictures supplied by Marjorie Taylor Greene BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE IN PRODUCTION WITH CAMEOS BY JIM JORDAN AND RAND PAUL CLASSES START IN THE FALL AT ALL MAJOR UNIVERSITIES

  • OMAR KHYYAM- MATHEMATICIAN, POET, ASTRONOMER, HISTORIAN, AND PHILOSOPHER

    Oh! My beloved! fill the cup, that clears to-day of past regrets and future fears. The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. To wisely live your life, you…

  • A True Sportsman

    Golf is the ultimate gentleman’s game, played with honor, nobility and pride. It is a game that tests a person’s mettle, examines their character, shows how they handle adversity and what they do when a bending 30-footer somehow finds the hole. Want to find the true makeup of a person? Take them to the golf…

  • QUOTE OF THE DAY

    "Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."…

  • The Betrayal of an Honest Man- First Page of the New Book

    The man was watching the news when it was announced that three states, previously thought to be in the bag for his opponent had  put him over the top, by a combined total of fewer than 110,000 votes. The electorate in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,and Michigan had just made him the President elect.   It is said…

  • Some thoughts of the day

      Let others praise you. It is unbecoming to praise yourself.  Coolidge devotedly articulated Garman’s ethics forty years later: “There is a standard of righteousness that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means, and that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting…

  • Albert Wohlstetter

                                                      In all honesty, I can lay no claims to having been a star student. That role was reserved for my younger brother Albert, recognized by all around him as a prodigious talent well before he went on to become a renowned mathematical logician and defense intellectual. At seventeen, while a student at…

  • International Living’s Annual Global Retirement Index 2014

      The Categories and Scores  Accurately scoring the world’s top retirement locations is a complex process. So, we’ve broken down each of our categories to give you a “behind the curtain” look at how we put the Index together. Real Estate: Countries where real estate prices are low and the purchase of real estate is relatively…

  • COMMAND AUTHORITY

    Just as Wag The Dog, a movie from1997, was ahead of it's time portraying politicians manufacturing situations to further their agenda, Command Authority, a fictional novel by Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney is incredibly prescient in it's forecasting of events that are unfolding in the Ukraine right now. The book published in December of 2013,…

  • ELMORE LEONARD-GREAT WRITER OF WESTERNS AND CRIME NOVELS

    Some thoughts and advice: "Try to leave out the parts that people skip."         "When something sounds like writing, I rewrite it," “I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said,…

  • Money And Security

    Identity theft, computer hacking, customized consumer advertising, and personal data accumulation, by every company we do business with, has become a part of every day life as tying our shoes or going to the store. Billboards have facial recognition and can change what they advertise to appeal to whoever is passing by them at the…

  • Donald Trump- An Embarrassment of American Culture

    C'mon man;  In his latest act of buffoonery, Trump has pulled out of his moderator's role in the Republican debate which all but two campaigners refused to attend in the first place.  Self promotion is what gets Donald Trump out of bed each morning. The fact that he initiated the debate to coincide with the release of a…

  • Winston Churchill- A Few More Quotes From The Master

    I hope these spur you to look up other of his quotes. "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.  A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is…

  • Full Black

      Doesn't develop his characters as well as he could, but for action and technical innovation it's top notch.  

  • Will History Repeat Itself?

      The following is an excerpt taken from the book 'Franklin Delano Roosevelt', by Alan Brinkley.   Most damaging of all to the administration was a serious recession that began suddenly in August 1937, which seemed to be a direct result of Roosevelt's own actions. For years, goaded by his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau,…

  • Enough

           EnoughThat's the title of Vanguard founder John Bogle's fantastic book about measuring what counts in life. The title, as Bogle explains, comes from a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and novelist Joseph Heller, who are enjoying a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager.  Vonnegut points out that their wealthy host had made…

  • Mark Twain on Biographies

     "What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!  His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself…His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world…and they are so trifling a part of his bulk!  A mere skin…

  • Known for Greatness, Admired for Humanity

                    " I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty."  "Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."  "My mind rebels…

  • If It Works Use It

     Advice on how to forget something painful.  "The mind is like a basin.  Pull the plug and the memory drains away."–from the novel,"The Rembrandt Affair", by Daniel Silva.  

  • On Changing Parties

     In 1906, Winston Churchill ran for a seat to parliament representing the city of Manchester. It had been two years since Winston had defected from the conservative Tories and took up the banner of the liberals. While campaigning, "a heckler presented him with a pamphlet quoting his past scorn for his present party [the Liberals]."* "Winston tore it…

  • The Lost Symbol..Anticipated and Received

    I am on page 138 and looking forward to getting back into it.  So far the book is slowed down a little by repetition.  It is a little wordy and over done in it's historical references, but it is those links to the past that make Brown such a noteworthy story teller.   The character of Sato has not been impressive…

  • Another Greenspan Conundrum

    Alan Greenspan is making the rounds of the talk shows selling his new book.  As difficult as it is to take exception with anything the chairman says, one of his views on Geo-politics regarding Saddam Hussein is hard to let go unquestioned. He said that Hussein "Had to be taken out of power'.  He advanced…

  • Maintaining the Center

    The I Ching or Book of Changes, has been highly thought of by many, and dismissed by others.  Whether you are an adherent to it's basic philosophies or to it's more intriguing prophetic capabilities, it has endured over the centuries. The positive approach of it's answers to every day questions make it a comfort and…

  • A Great Story Line Revisited

    One of the greatest characters in fictional history has had his reincarnation in the form of Dr. House, the main protagonist on a popular TV show. The Doctor has a serious physical ailment and takes massive amounts of a pain killer to cope with the pain. His pain diminished, he then diagnoses diseases and medical…

  • Stacking The Deck

    The Afghan, the latest espionage book by Frederick Forsythe hit the N.Y.T. best seller list top 10 in it's first week of release. I have enjoyed Forsythe novels in the past, however you could wonder why the lukewarm reviews didn't dampen the public's appetite for this novel. Bob Dylan's newest album, Modern Times, came out…