Great resource.

I just finished reading David Halberstam’s last book: “The Coldest Winter“. This work is a fascinating look at the key players in and around the Korean War. Well worth reading. Amazon Link. Powell’s Review and the NY Times review.

Microtrends via Amazon:

From Publishers Weekly
From “Soccer Moms,” the legendary swing voters of the mid-1990s, to “Late-Breaking Gays” such as former Gov. Games McGreevey (out at age 47), Burson-Marsteller CEO (and campaign adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton) Penn delves into the ever-splintering societal subsets with which Americans are increasingly identifying, and what they mean. For instance, because of “Extreme Commuters,” people who travel more than 90 minutes each way to work, carmakers must come up with ever more luxury seat features, and “fast food restaurants are coming out with whole meals that fit in cup holders.” In a chapter titled “Archery Moms?”, Penn reports on the “Niching of Sports”: much to the consternation of Major League Baseball, “we don’t like sports less, we just like little sports more.” The net result of all this “niching” is “greater individual satisfaction”; as Penn notes, “not one of the fastest-growing sports in America… depends substantially on teamwork.” Penn draws similar lessons in areas of business, culture, technology, diet, politics and education (among other areas), reporting on 70 groups (“Impressionable Elites,” “Caffeine Crazies,” “Neglected Dads,” “Unisexuals,” “America’s Home-Schooled”) while remaining energetic and entertaining throughout. Culture buffs, retailers and especially businesspeople for whom “small is the new big” will value this exercise in nano-sociology.

WWW Site.

Carrie Meyer:

A story both intimate and epic that paints a vivid picture of Midwestern farm life.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II, farm wife May Lyford Davis kept a daily chronicle that today offers a window into a way of life that has all but disappeared. May and her husband Elmo lived through two decades of prosperity, the Great Depression, and two World Wars in their Midwestern farming community. Like many women of her time, Davis kept diaries that captured the everyday events of the family farm; she also kept meticulous farming accounts. In doing so, she left an extraordinary record that reflects not only her own experiences but also the history of early twentieth-century American agriculture.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson:

If this novel, Johnson’s first in nearly a decade, is-as the promo copy says-about Skip Sands, it’s also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse; Trung, a North Vietnamese spy; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, misguided GIs who haunt the story’s periphery. And it’s also about Sgt. Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest. As with all of Johnson’s work-the stories in Jesus’ Son, novels like Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and Fiskadoro-the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. In Johnson’s honest world, no one story dominates. For all the story lines, the structure couldn’t be simpler: each year, from 1963 (the book opens in the Philippines: “Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed”) to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. Readers familiar with the Vietnam War will recognize its arc-the Tet offensive (65 harrowing pages here); the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK; the fall of Saigon, swift and seemingly foreordained. Skip is a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Sands, known as the Colonel. Skip is mostly in the dark, awaiting direction, living under an alias and falling in love with Kathy while the Colonel deals in double agents, Bushmills whiskey and folk history. He’s a soldier-scholar pursuing theories of how to purify an information stream; he bloviates in gusts of sincerity and blasphemy, all of it charming. A large cast of characters, some colorful, some vaguely chalked, surround this triad, and if Tree of Smoke has a flaw, it is that some characters are virtually indistinguishable. Given the covert nature of much of the goings-on, perhaps it is necessary that characters become blurred. “We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself,” says Storm. “Right where it turns into a dream.” Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. What serious writer, after tuning in to Johnson’s terrifying, dissonant opera, can return with a fresh ear? The work of many past chroniclers- Graham Greene, Tim O’Brien, the filmmakers Coppola, Cimino and Kubrick, all of whom have contributed to our cultural “understanding” of the war-is both evoked and consumed in the fiery heat of Johnson’s story. In the novel’s coda, Storm, a war cliché now way gone and deep in the Malaysian jungle near Thailand, attends preparations for a village’s sacrificial bonfire (consisting of personal items smashed and axed by their owners) and offers himself as “compensation, baby.” When the book ends, in a heartbreaking soliloquy from Kathy (fittingly, a Canadian) on the occasion of a war orphan benefit in a Minneapolis Radisson, you feel that America’s Vietnam experience has been brought to a closure that’s as good as we’ll ever get. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Washington Post:

At the beginning of Keillor’s hilarious new novel, Evelyn sets in motion a circus of zany events when she dies in her sleep — despite the fact that she’s an inveterate insomniac. In a no-nonsense note to her daughter Barbara, Evelyn stipulates that she wishes to be cremated, with her ashes sealed up in a bowling ball and “dropped into Lake Wobegon off Rocky Point.” What’s more, in the same letter Evelyn unapologetically reveals that for years she’s been conducting a passionate love affair with a retired TV weatherman.

Amazon link to Pontoon.

A New Book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games”>by Tenant Bagley. A fascinating look at the Cold War battles between the CIA and KGB, among others. Bagley’s perspective is largely one of “counter-intelligence”. He includes some fascinating tales, including the Soviet’s use of plants and “false borders”. The book also provides an interesting look at Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Well worth reading.

Da Nang airport bookstore scene: Hilary Clinton’s book above Ho Chi Minh, George Bush and Fidel Castro.