Café con Leche

The book is good but it's over-rated. I missed the "insight" that others have raved about. It does not offer any new insights or solutions to the political climate.

About the Book
In The Audacity of Hope he draws on his experience as a senator and lawyer, a professor and father, a Christian and a skeptic, to illuminate the greatness of America's original ideals — and to remind us how vital it is to keep them before us. Along the way he explores such charged topics as globalization, the notion of American exceptionalism, the function of religion in public life, and the struggle to find a shared language in a nation torn by differences. While sharing his personal views on family, faith, and values, he argues that our very survival depends on finding common ground. - From the Publisher

Pundits and voters alike have hailed Senator Obama as a man of uncommon vision in an age of partisan opportunism. The Audacity of Hope is a book of transforming power, a foundation for those who long for a politics that acknowledges the nobility and complexity of our lives.

Posted by Rosa at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The title about the book sounded interesting. I was expecting to read about how music affects the minds but instead found it to be a collection of anecdotal stories of the strange effect of brain injuries on people. Some of the stories were interesting but most were repetitive, long, and uninteresting.

About the Book
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does — humans are a musical species.

Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people — from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; from people with "amusia," to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds — for everything but music.

Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson's disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer's or amnesia. - From the Publisher

Posted by Rosa at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
A well-written and well-documented look at our Supreme Court. The author explores the personalities, the cases and political landscape that have shaped the court over the last 30 years. The best non-fiction book I've read this year. Reminds me of another great book, The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court, I read about the Supreme Court some years ago.

I found the bits of information on Justice David Souterto be very interesting. How does a person who leads such a low-tech lifestyle end up on the Supreme Court? He writes with a fountain pen, moves his chair around his office to catch the light. Does not use use email, doesn't have a cell phone, answering machine or television. When he arrived at the Supreme Court he had never heard of Diet Coke. In 2003 he reveal that he had never heard of the group The Supremes. Yet he has written the most technical opinion on file sharing.

Synopses
Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most important — and secret — legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land.

Just in time for the 2008 presidential election — where the future of the Court will be at stake — Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of conservative disgust with the Court have finally produced a conservative majority, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.

Based on exclusive interviews with justices themselves, The Nine tells the story of the Court through personalities — from Anthony Kennedy's overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas's well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter's odd nineteenth-century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the-scenes story of Bush v. Gore — and Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office.

The Nine is the book bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin was born to write. A CNN senior legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, no one is more superbly qualified to profile the nine justices.

Posted by Rosa at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)