3 comments about My Life (Transaction Large Print Books).

1. This is truly the best book out there about Marlene Dietrich. She gives a personal account of many entertaining stories throughout her life. I found this an easy and interesting book to read, and I hope this has been helpful.



2. For someone who spent her last years alone,a prisoner,jailed by a vanity so huge,it engulfed her,i didnt expect her to reveal much in this,and she dosent,she tells lie after lie,and contradicts herself time and again,all she gives us is what is left of the astute mind,that lay behind the actress,and you know what,we actually dont want to know, why, becauce everyone knows that fame is as phoney as a seven dollar bill,but now and again there comes along someone who transends this,hypnotising everyone into a trance.It was written that she wrote this only for the money becauce she was broke,unforgivible in another,but not marlene,for a soldiers daughter has to survive somehow,whose to argue maybe she will need all her energy to fight another war,such is the legend of marlene.



3. For someone who spent her last years alone,a prisoner,jailed by a vanity so huge,it engulfed her,i didnt expect her to reveal much in this,and she dosent,she tells lie after lie,and contradicts herself time and again,all she gives us is what is left of the astute mind,that lay behind the actress,and you know what,we actually dont want to know, why, becauce everyone knows that fame is as phoney as a seven dollar bill,but now and again there comes along someone who transends this,hypnotising everyone into a trance.It was written that she wrote this only for the money becauce she was broke,unforgivible in another,but not marlene,for a soldiers daughter has to survive somehow,whose to argue maybe she will need all her energy to fight another war,such is the legend of marlene.

5 comments about Standing Next To History: An Agent's Life Inside The Secret Service.

1. I found this book extremely enlightening as to what life as an Agent in the USSS will be like. Petro does a wonderful job at writing about what he is allowed to disclose yet still keeping the reader engaged. If you are interested in the USSS, you should read this book during your application process since little is know about the Service.



2. If you have any interest in the presidency of Ronald Reagan or the Secret Service, I highly recommend this book. The tone is very matter-of-fact, but what comes through is what an honorable person Joseph Petro is. He lost out on a possible N.F.L career when he was drafted for the Viet Nam War, but our country, and especially its elected officials during the time of his service, gained a great deal.
   
   A very engaging book.



3. This book is well written with just enough detail to keep you in every scene. It hooked me from page 1 and kept me interested all along.



4. I wanted to get a little more background on the life of a Secret Service Agent. I found this book filled with interesting tidbits of information. It was an easy read that I found entertaining, as well. His recounts of what it was like working around the Reagan administration, the Pope's US visit, etc. kept me interested for several hours worth of reading. It personalized some of the details that the public often may not realize.



5. This is another book I read cover to cover in one sitting. I'm sad that it's over. The thoughtfulness and ethics and, well, honor of the writer touched me. Lots of cool insider info without compromising security. No bitchy backstabbing. No gratuitous back-slapping either. A very easy read that I couldn't tear myself away from. A couple months back, the current president was in my city for a couple of hours and the amount of disruption to traffic was startling. I now have far more appreciation for how difficult these visits are and how much orchestration they involve.

No comments about A Child of the Thirties (Reminiscence).

1 comments about The Journeys of David Toback: As Retold by His Granddaughter Carole Malkin (Walker Large Print Books).

1. I purchased this book because it appealed to my interest in Jewish history, and because I thought perhaps it also discussed the historical relationships of Muslims and non-Muslims in the Caucasus in the late 19th century. (Not to mention its low price.)
   
   Alas, David Toback (or rather, his grand-daughter, who adapted the book from his 1888 and 1889 journals) only once mentioned the Caucasus Muslim communities, despite travels over several years of extreme duress. This consequence stemmed from his apparent lack of contact with Muslims, however, undoubtedly not from their respect for dhimmis around them.
   
   In any case, Toback's saga has much to hold the reader's interest in its own right, and I was delighted with the book, which I tore through in one marathon four-hour sitting last summer. Toback relates, after all, the extreme poverty of the Jewish communities during those times, their pious, even righteous religious orthodoxy, and the afflictions imposed upon them by hateful tsarist troops, peasants and lawmakers, who deprived Jews of lives, liberty and property at their routine whim.
   
   Certainly in current times, one cannot say that Jews anywhere in the world live wholly without fear and some concern about the future, as anti-Antisemitism has made a frightening and extraordinary comeback only 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz and 50 years after 1 million Jews were driven with nothing but the clothes on their backs from their homes and businesses within the Arab Muslim world.
   
   Despite the recent turn of events, however, this book provides a very real reminder that things can always be worse. Indeed for David Toback, they almost always did get worse, until he finally convinced his wife to flee to the US., a feat which took several years to accomplish.
   
   In truth, there is not so much difference between the attacks, firebombings, murders and forced evacuations suffered by Toback's people and family and the situation of Jewish people today in Israel and France and in Moscow and the Caucasus, where Muslim fundamentalists think nothing of blowing up pizza parlors, buses, theaters and schools.
   
   A question this book raised for me is why North American Jews remain so complacent. This book showed the perilous possibilities that can and do sometimes flow from ignoring the past and the trends of one's times.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen

No comments about Aspects of Somewhere Else (Isis Nonfiction).

No comments about On Something (Large Print Edition).

No comments about Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy (Large Print Edition).

5 comments about Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond.

1. In this melancholy memorir of sorts, he reminates about his life growing up on the Great Plains in small-town Texas, about the vast emptiness of the Texas landscape and it effect it has on the natives. There is a vast loneliness and he feels he has been born too late so he develops an interest in vanishing breeds. The Old West has come and gone. Some time ago, I reviewed his book, THE COLONEL AND LITTLE MISSIE.
   
   He extolls the virtues of the Archer City Dairy Queen (no where else to go back then (we still have some of those places here in Knoxville) in the Eighties where he'd go to read as he drank a strasnge concoction of Dr. Pepper with lime. Now, you can get a lime Slushie with a real cherry at Sonic, the drive-in of today.
   
   He'd started on a translation of the German philosophre, Walter Benjamin's 'Illuminations,' a group of essays. He particularly liked "The Storyteller," and refers to it often as he thinks back on his life "to think about place, his life, literature and his relation to it." For twenty-five years, he has been telling his stories in book form, some of which were turned into movies, like LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, BUFFALO GIRLS and TERMS OF ENDEARMENT.
   
   He compares Benjamin's life in Europe with that of his grandparents settling in Texas, "while my grandparents were dealing with vast emptiness...Europe was approaching density (absolute and perhaps intolerable." There is no comparison, as they were on completely opposite polars.
   
   He'd gone on a lifelong quest to study European literature to learn their culture that spawned his own pioneer family, a quest which comes full circle, with his reminiscences for this book. He loves to remind folks of the way things used to be and this erudite elegy for the lost paces in American life and of the cowboy" comes forefront. He doesn't care much for Paul Theroux's early mentor, V. S. Pritchett.
   
   He gives an intelligent assessment of his career and the demise of oral storytelling. He promotes the need for reading and appreciated the works of Proust. He comes across as a bitter, cranky old man as he tells about his childhood and feeling 'soul-less' after his heart surgery. He's had a great career studing life and writing some strange novels. Some others are THE EVENING STAR, TEXASVILLE, and STREETS OF LOREDO.



2. This sat on my shelf for years and I finally pulled it down. I'm glad I did. He expounds on aging, the west, books, his own writing, and reading. His writing is conversational and comfortable. Very enjoyable!



3. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry. Larry McMurtry was influenced by an essay he first read in a Texas Dairy Queen by Walter Benjamin. The essay he was reading was about the dissipation of memory and the loss of narrative power in fiction today.
   
   Larry McMurtry writes about growing up on a ranch in Archer City, Texas. He shares discovering reading and books as a teen, going to college at Rice University, knowing virtually nothing about literature, transferring to North Texas State University to finish his bachelor's degree as a workaround for a troublesome Rice professor, and then doing his Master's at Rice University.
   
   He tells some about writing, his love for books that leads to his becoming a book scout and antiquarian book dealer. Across from the Archer City court house he has a giant bookstore containing a quarter-million used books, and the dying legacy of the cowboy. He shares little about his personal life except his love for reading and his quadruple bypass surgery which was very traumatic. It may be as close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry. The work is well written, wide, but not deep. We do not get to know McMurty at a level most would like to experience.
   
   Read and reviewed by Jimmie A. Kepler.



4. Larry McMurtry is, as Proust and Virginia Woolf are to him, my Nile of literature. The quality of his prolific output has been inconsistent, but I find myself constantly returning to his work. Like all writers, McMurtry has his faults. But he is the best I have encountered in warding off, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, that dark inertia to which we are all susceptible.
   
   One of McMurtry's rare pieces of non-fiction, this is an intensely readable book - intentionally so, it seems, following the path of the oral tradition. McMurtry mourns the demise of this tradition, while at the same time seeking to find the positive in the historical developments that have killed it. McMurtry's yarns describe his childhood, his discovery of books, and his bouts with depression, including his ruminations on literature's place in his life, and his life's place in this country's physical, historical, and literary landscape.
   
   All of the tributary themes of the book join together as the book progresses, through McMurtry's own White and Blue Nile of Proust (who I personally like) and Woolf (with whom I have never been able to connect)and into a general inspiration to literature. McMurtry says that he early identified books as the central and stable activity in his life. This book is a testament to the joys and comforts of doing the same.



5. Written when McMurtry was 62, WALTER BENJAMIN AT THE DAIRY QUEEN is probably best classified as a memoir, although it is not presented as such. Rather, the construct (perhaps "artifice" is the more apt word) is McMurtry sitting in the Dairy Queen in hometown Archer City, Texas reading an essay on storytelling by Walter Benjamin, which then prompts McMurtry to reflect on and then pass along some of the stories of his life. This Dairy Queen/Walter Benjamin construct comes across as a tad contrived, maybe a little too self-consciously "artsy," but on the whole the stories McMurtry tells are well worth listening to.
   
   The two principle subjects of the book (tracking, one assumes, the two principle preoccupations of McMurtry's life) are (i) the American West -- including that pocket of the West local to Archer County, Texas where McMurtry grew up and his grandparents were pioneering settlers -- and (ii) books, reading, and writing. Throughout the book, seamlessly interwoven with reflections about larger themes such as the West, the doomed and mythical cowboy, and literature are themes or events personal to McMurtry, such as growing up on a hard-scrabble North Texas ranch, his father, going in his teens to the big city and later Rice University, returns to Archer City relating to "The Last Picture Show", and his quadruple-bypass surgery and its extended psychic aftermath.
   
   I see that previous reviews have characterized McMurtry as "crusty" or "cranky," which in my view does him and the book a disservice. Without any obvious effort to ingratiate himself with the reader, McMurtry comes off as personable and likeable. It is not much of a stretch to envision him actually relating these stories and reflections after the meal around a dining room table or maybe even a campfire (albeit not any Dairy Queen of my experience). Yes, in such circumstances McMurtry probably would tend to monopolize the discussion, but he knows more than most of us and, as his fiction suggests, he is a better storyteller than most.
   
   I vascillate between giving the book 4 or 5 stars. If possible, I would settle on 4.5. Because that's not possible, I am rounding up to 5.

No comments about First Finds: A Yorkshire Childhood (Reminiscence).

No comments about Fen Boy First: Childhood in the Fens of England (Isis Reminiscence Series).