The Lost Island

The Lost Island: A Gideon Crew Novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Recipe for disappointment, August 12, 2014 This review is from: The Lost Island: A Gideon Crew Novel (Hardcover) Pour two cups of Homer into a medium saucepan Add a dash of King Kong. Sprinkle with the Origin of the Species. Stir. Set on medium heat for an hour. Allow to cool. Next mix in a tablespoon of James Hilton. Then add five pounds of pure baloney, finely chopped. Stir again and half bake at 350 degrees for the seven hours it takes you to finish reading this convoluted mess. Serve with embarrassment.

Religion and the Supreme Court

No Catholic served on the Supreme Court until 1836 when Chief Justice Taney assumed the bench. After his death in 1864 none were appointed again until 1894. Justice Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, was confirmed in 1916.

The present composition of the Supreme Court is six Catholics and three Jews. The problem isn't their religion it is that an alignment of five male a Catholic justices on an important Constitutional issue which happens to coincide with the traditional anathema of the Roman Catholic Church to contraception in the Hobby Lobby case undermines public confidence that the federal courts are judicial and not political institutions.

HL actually presents an expansion of First Amendment rights which I might have welcome in another context. However, in thee context of religious zeal today, it will spawn litigation whose aim is to authorize discrimination against gays, women, Muslims, and even Jews. Like Citizens United, another opinion radically upending traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, HL was a mistake for which our nation will long suffer the consequence.

 

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Why I do what I do for a living

A friend of mine posted on Facebook an account of a young fellow South Floridian who is graduating from college and high school this weekend at age 16. She is African-American and has somehow become an iconic figure among conservatives. What I objected to was my friend's use of her achievement to claim that "liberals" a group which includes me apparently, think that Aferican Americans are victims who have no capacity to achieve success on their own. 

This is my response:

What I have fought for is equal opportunity. I have seen that no matter one's race, creed, color, sexual orientation, disability, or  gender we all pretty much aspire to the same things-good jobs, good educations for our children, comfortable homes, and respect from our neighbors. 

The problem is that doors open easier if you are a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male like you and I are. I usually refer to people like us as having been given the keys to the Kingdom.  

When an individual can achieve something special in spite of having to pull harder to open that door or having to kick it in, I always wonder what he or she could have achieved without such obstacles. Some, I am convinced, would achieve far less for the struggle against discrimination may have inspired them onward. For many however, our society is lesser for we have prevented our fellow Americans from reaching their true potential. 

So please do not presuppose that my commitment to justice and opportunity is because I lack faith individual achievement. Rather I mourn its suppression. That is why I have spent my professional career helping fellow human beings kick doors down.

Slogans

We often credit slogans more than thought itself. The reason for that is that they contain elements of truth. Here is a discussion with my boarding school roommate Bill about how freedom is maintained.

 

Blood and freedom

• Bill Watson Let's hope we stay that way, but that type of freedom has always been purchased and maintained with blood. I wonder if it will always continue to be.
  
• Ware Cornell That expression about purchasing and maintaining freedom and blood strikes me as a slogan which overstates the value of armed conflict and understates the value of the third branch of government. I actually work to maintain freedom. Our system of laws and our adherence and respect for those laws puts everybody on the same page. The fascists gave lots of blood for their cause. The Russians lost 20 million citizens and did not gain freedom until 1989. Very few died then.
• Bill Watson Yes, but there will always be the Adolph Hitlers who can be defeated no other way but by the shedding of blood. You cannot assume that everyone will always have adherence to and respect for law. It they did, there would be no need for a military or, indeed, a domestic police force. You can make all the laws you want, but when it comes down to brass tacks, a willingness to shed blood to protect those laws must be in place or the law is nothing but a piece of paper. That's just the way it is.
  
• Ware Cornell Bill, my point is that it's just a slogan. The Soviets had very advanced written Constitutions and their laws were scraps of paper when it came to individual liberties. But they also fought furiously against the Germans in World War II. It wasn't that blood that made their laws meaningless, and we cannot brush off the patriotism of the Russian people. The reality is that it is something far more complex than the text of laws or the patriotism of a people that will determine whether laws and liberties will be respected.
  
  In America I point to the Civil War. We in the South believed that the danger to our way of life was in Washington and we separated from the Union and as a result over 600,000 of of countrymen died. That bloodshed, futile from the Southern cause's perspective, was in fact necessary to cement the Union. Within ten years of the end of the Civil War we were truly one nation, a nation which sixty five years later, along with our Allies including Russia, would save the world.
  
  The Civil War settled in blood a Constitutional question: is this country one sovereign or is it a compact amount fifty sovereign states?. This is why I get so upset with people like Rick Perry, who try to stir up the "base" with talk about secession when he doesn't like certain laws. john C Calhoun tried this and thirty years later we paid dearly for that arrogance.
  
  The Civil War also undercuts your hypothesis somewhat. Lincoln had to fight. There was no other choice once Beauregard shelled a federal fort. But our ancestors did not have to fight. Our insistence that laws were pieces of paper had tragic consequences. What of the blood of our mistaken ancestors? Inadvertently, it advanced our freedom. Out of it we got the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, without compensation. We also got the Fourteenth Amendment which applied the Bill of Rights to the states.
  
  This is America and we are governed by laws which our federal and state legislatures have passed. They are not pieces of paper. They are the collective will of our fellow citizens and it is our courts, not a bunch of self-sytled "patriots", which stand to protect us from tyrannical acts of the majorities.

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The Target

A plot trick often used in the thriller writing game is to string three or four separate threads together with only the most tenuous connect. It delivers that roller coaster ride that makes thrillers thrill. In The Target featuring Will Robie and Jessica Reel, CIA fixers which is to say at times they kill for America.

The Target opens on Alabama's death row and hurls us to Paris, Pyongyang, rural Alabama, New York City and Nantucket. Robie and Reel prove almost invincible, which is to say they need help at times. We meet their counterpart, a young North Korean assassin, a Tinman-like operative only too well aware she no longer has a heart. Jessica's own awful past is revealed in pages you cannot put down. Weak and delusional leaders in the United States and North Korea make tragic blunders which create a context for all that follows.

After a poor outing with King and Maxwell (King & Maxwell), a book seemingly designed to promote a cable series, it is good to see David Baldacci at his best. Unlike some popular thriller writers, Baldacci writes his own stuff. And like the trial lawyer he was, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. The verdict on the Target is clear. It is a huge win!

A young nation

In 1815 the United States was a large and young republic. Its political life was still heavily influenced by the founding fathers, one of whom James Madison was faced with the prospect of rebuilding the seat of government following the burning of the Executive Mansion, the Congress and the Library of Congress by British forces. A coat of white paint was put on the Executive Mansion which quickly and forever became known as the White House. 

While Madison may have been the father of the Constitution, he was a very mediocre President, who led his country into a war so senseless that the decisive battle was fought at New Orleans weeks after a peace treaty had been signed at Ghent. The slowness of communications in 1815 was thus a reality that contributed to political and military events, and cost thousands of lives. By 1848, America had domestic telegraphs and railroads, and transatlantic steam ships that cut weeks if not months off the crossing. 

The United States by 1848 occupied most of what is now called the lower 48, the last piece in southern Arizona and New Mexico being acquired in 1853 by treaty instead of conquest. America was a land divided and the politics of slavery and anti-slavery dominated a nation well on its way to becoming the 19th century version of a global superpower. 

This is a comprehensive account of thirty three of the most important years in American history. It covers the social. economic, religious, intellectual, literary, political and military events of that era. It recounts with foreboding gloom the political and economic miscalculations that would lead in less than two decades to both the near-destruction and rebirth of "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Those were the days

What follows is a post on the creation of a new student newspaper in the spring of 1970 at Emory:

Rodney Derrick asked me to explain the events the led to the creation of the Emory New Times.

In the spring of 1970, two candidates for editor of the Wheel, Steve Johnson and Randy Bugg, sought election by the Publications Board.

We had all been friends but these were difficult times. Kent State occurred just about the same time as the election and there was not a lot of studying going on, particularly among the people on the Wheel staff.

Steve won, but only after Dean Don Jones, a Bugg supporter, had to leave the meeting. The election begat an actual trial before some sort of student court, and Johnson again prevailed. Randy had a lot of influence within the newly elected SGA and we were able to split the SGA funding between the Wheel and the newly established New Times. Randy was the first editor, and Calder Sinclair was the second the following year.

The Bugg faction however favored the traditional newspaper model of straight news and with opinions presented only on the editorial pages. The Johnson faction was very much in favor of a newspaper along the model of the underground papers like Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird. Despite these differences in style, politically we were all opposed to the war in Vietnam, the biggest issue of the day

The best writer on either staff was Carl Hiaasen, who was a freshman in the fall of 1970. Carl only went to Emory for two years before transferring to Florida.

The New Times merged back with the Wheel several years later. All of the people at the heart of the schism had long since graduated.

The New Times had several staffers who went on to significant journalistic careers. Gail Bronson, for instance, was a national reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.