The officer who shot a suspect in northeast Denver on Thursday night was with the Aurora Police Department's auto theft task force, officials said Friday.
Reported by Denver Post 13 hours ago.
Officer who shot suspect in Denver was from Aurora PD
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Owner of Aurora HOA management company allegedly took money from the funds
The owner of an Aurora-based community association management company surrendered his license after there were complaints he was diverting homeowner association funds for his personal benefit. David W. Martin voluntarily surrendered his community association manager license effective immediately. Martin is the owner and designated manager of PMG Enterprises Inc., a community association management company. The company’s license was also surrendered to the director of the Division of Real Estate,…
Reported by bizjournals 11 hours ago.
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Colorado cop slips on ice, accidentally shoots suspect
An Aurora, Colo., cop critically wounded a suspect after he slipped on ice and accidentally fired his weapon, authorities said.
Reported by NY Daily News 6 hours ago.
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Sweden is now housing refugees in ski resorts above the Arctic Circle
RIKSGRANSEN, Sweden (Reuters) - Far above Sweden's Arctic Circle, two dozen refugees stepped off a night train onto a desolate, snow-covered platform, their Middle Eastern odyssey abruptly ending at a hotel touted as the world's most northerly ski resort.It was Sweden's latest attempt to house a record influx of asylum seekers.
No one was here to greet them. Only a few, swaying lights flickered on the otherwise empty platform as women fruitlessly wrapped hijabs around their faces to protect themselves from the mountain blizzard.
"Where are we? Is this the final destination?" said Alakozai Naimatullah, an Afghan who worked as a U.S. military translator. He wore tennis shoes, buried in the snow.
His words went unanswered in the disorder of arrival. Their bare hands frozen, husbands, wives and children bent over to drag plastic bags filled with worldly possessions over a steep, snowy path to hotel lights a hundred meters below.
They joined around 600 refugees, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, holed up for two months in Riksgransen. It is some 124 miles (200 km) north of the Arctic Circle and a two-hour bus ride to the nearest town - if the road is not closed by snow.
It is an example of the extremes Sweden is going to in order to house some 160,000 refugees this year in a country of 10 million people. Shelters range from heated tents to adventure theme parks, straining resources.
The sun never rises in Riksgransen at this time of year and temperatures can plummet to minus 30 degrees Celsius. But the hotel offers food, shelter and security after a dangerous month-long trip from the Middle East by boat, train and bus.
The jovial hotel manager Sven Kuldkepp has helped arrange temporary classes and free sledges for children. There is a gym and boxing classes for adults. A room once used for meditation has been turned into a mosque. Yoga mats now face Mecca.
But the hotel mostly has the feel of an airport lounge with a delayed flight - with a two-month wait. Riksgransen will be home until the ski season starts in February, but many face more than a year's wait until they get news of asylum requests.
-SMARTPHONES-
-
-
Some refugees, only a hundred meters from ski slopes, still dream of Syrian beaches.
Wael al-Shater was a chef at a 60-table restaurant called Sky View in Homs, specializing in chicken. He had aspirations and applied to study as a chef in Cyprus, but never got a visa. He had friends in Dubai but didn't want to live outside Syria.
"Life was so easy. I made $1,200 a month," al-Shater said. "It was so safe that my friends and I used to drive 60 kilometers to the beach just to have a coffee late at night at two in the morning and return home."
But war came. His work day was cut in half as fighting erupted in the streets, and his father died of a suspected heart attack during fighting in Homs.
"I could not take him to hospital. He died on the street," Al-Shater said. He paid $1,200 to be smuggled by boat to Greece some 25 days ago and ended up in Riksgransen with his wife, an English teacher.
"In the end I had no option but to leave or join the killing. Or become a protester and get killed. I had to leave."
Sitting along dark corridors, refugees' faces are illuminated by flickering smartphone screens. Some play video games, others Skype friends. Most, like al-Shater, are eager to share memories, using their phones to swipe through photos.
One elderly man showed pictures of his wife and daughter at the beach in the Syrian town of Latakia, a seaside resort and near a Russian military airbase.
Smoking outside in the freezing dark, he raised his face to the sky, as if bathing in Latakia's imaginary sun.
"Please turn on the sun again," he laughed.
Another pale, old man had charmed hotel staff with tales of his perfume shop in Syria before he was moved to a Swedish hospital due to a heart ailment.
- MEMORIES-
Trauma and illness abound. Flu and chicken pox already spread through the hotel. But the most common ailment is insomnia, a sure sign, say nurses, of war trauma.
To make matters worse, few refugees venture outside, spending days in rooms. Many fear taking children out in such freezing temperatures, despite tourists spending thousands of dollars to visit a place famed for views of the northern lights.
"This place is like a desert island," said nurse Asa Henriksson in a makeshift clinic by the spa's swimming pool. "It is surrounded by a wall of mountains."
"When the aurora comes, we tell people to go outside, lay down in the snow, and look up," she added. "The refugees don't. Many people here think their children could die in this cold."
There have been cases of bus loads of refugees arriving in the north overnight, having a glance at the surroundings and refusing to get off, insisting on returning to warmer regions.
Some return to southern Sweden while others, like most in Riksgransen, accept their lot. In Riksgransen, many still want to visit the nearest town of Kiruna. They receive around 2 euros a day, some saving for days to buy small toys for children.
Al-Shater still yearns for his homeland.
"There is no human being who does not dream about returning to his country," he said. "But when it comes to Syria, this is simply impossible. We are planning our future in Sweden."
(Additional reporting by Michael Georgy in Cairo; Editing by Janet McBride)
NOW WATCH: This is the Marine Corps' monstrous new assault vehicle Reported by Business Insider 18 hours ago.
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Democratic Drama As Curtain Rises On New Hampshire Debate
If you aren’t going to a holiday party, seeing the new Star Wars movie, watching the New York Giants take on the Dallas Cowboys, or doing any of the other things people typically do on a weekend night in mid-December, maybe you should tune in to the Democratic presidential candidates’ third debate Saturday at 8 p.m.
The debate comes at an especially tense moment in the primary campaign. The Democratic National Committee cut off the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) from its national voter database after Sanders' campaign staffers accessed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s proprietary voter data during a brief breakdown in the firewall between the candidates’ files Wednesday. On Friday, Sanders’ campaign sued the DNC to try to restore access to its voter data file. The DNC restored Sanders' campaign's access to its voter file -- though the campaign said it would not drop the suit -- Saturday morning.
To add to the intrigue, the debate takes place in New Hampshire, the one state where Sanders often leads Clinton in the polls. (Clinton dominates in national polls, and in other early primary states.) New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary is set for Feb. 9, a week after the Iowa caucuses.
The debate is likely to draw a clear contrast between Democratic and Republican approaches to terrorism in the wake of the extremist attacks on Paris in November and the mass shooting that killed 14 in San Bernardino, California, this month. During the GOP debate on Tuesday, Republicans did their best to terrify the nation with dire warnings about “radical Islamic terrorism.” The Democratic candidates, though, have been saying the nation shouldn’t “give in to fear” or allow “demagogues” like businessman Donald Trump, who has called for “a total and complete shutdown” of all Muslims entering the United States, “to divide us up.”
But the three Democratic candidates are unlikely to agree on everything. Here are four major areas where Clinton, Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s policies may clash during Saturday's debate:
*Foreign Policy*
Clinton has given a number of speeches focused exclusively on terrorism and homeland security since the Paris attacks. She detailed her plan to “defeat and destroy” the Islamic State on Nov. 19, and her broad anti-terrorism strategy on Dec. 15, ahead of the most recent GOP debate. She combined main elements of these proposals in an op-ed for the New Hampshire Union-Leader on Thursday.
In the same paper earlier in the week, Sanders previewed his criticisms of Clinton on foreign policy, arguing that she has shown a flawed calculus when it comes to American interventions in Libya and Iraq. He attacked Clinton's vote to authorize the Iraq War in the last Democratic debate, arguing that the war led to the creation of the Islamic State.
Clinton defended her role advocating for U.S. airstrikes in Libya in the last debate, arguing that former Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi “had American blood on his hands” and that there was pressure for American action from European and Arab allies.
When it comes to the conflict in Syria, Clinton has advocating a no-fly zone. Both Sanders and O’Malley oppose such a move, with O'Malley arguing it “could lead to an escalation of Cold War proportions.”
*Gun Violence*
Clinton has repeatedly attacked Sanders for voting to give gun manufacturers and dealers immunity from lawsuits, bringing it up in the first Democratic debate in October and in the second one in November. O’Malley also has used that vote to criticize Sanders, and mentioned the parents of a woman who was killed in the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater massacre in 2012. The parents tried to sue the online company that sold ammunition to the shooter, but were prevented from doing so because of the immunity law.
Sanders, for his part, has said he would be open to amending the law, which he voted for in 2005 as a congressman. He also has taken heat for his votes opposing the Brady background checks bill in 1993. Sanders says he has to be responsive to his rural Vermont constituents.
In the second debate, Sanders got back at O’Malley after the former governor touted his efforts to pass additional laws regulating firearms in Maryland by pointing to Baltimore’s crime rate.
“I think it’s safe to say that Baltimore is not one of the safest cities,” Sanders said.
*Paid Leave and Universal Health Care*
The U.S. is one of the world's only countries that fails to guarantee paid maternity leave for new parents. Clinton, who supports paid leave, has objected to Sanders’ proposed mechanism for paying for three months of paid leave and for universal health care.
“If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes," Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon said in a statement Nov. 17, after the second debate. "Yet Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9 percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health care plan, and simple math dictates he'll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda.”
Fallon said Clinton “will make sure the wealthiest Americans finally start paying their fair share, not force the middle class to pay even more than they already do.”
Sanders supports paid family leave legislation in the Senate that would be funded by a payroll tax totaling $1.38 a week for a typical worker. The bill would also provide paid leave for workers diagnosed with a serious medical condition.
"What is her program? What does she intend to do other than talk about it?" Sanders asked the Des Moines Register. "If she thinks $1.38 a week is just too much to spend, let her explain that to the people of Iowa."
Clinton hasn’t said how she would structure her paid family leave program. She has suggested through her campaign aides that she’d finance paid leave through taxes that exclusively affect the wealthy.
*Wall Street *
Clinton committed what was widely perceived as somewhat of a gaffe when she tried to justify her receipt of donations from the financial services industry by saying she represented New York during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It will be interesting to see if O’Malley or Sanders mention this on Saturday, or instead point to a major disagreement between them and Clinton: Whether Glass-Steagall, the 1930s law that prohibited commercial banks from participating in the investment banking business, should be reinstated. (Its repeal was signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1999.)
Clinton has said that reinstating the Glass-Steagall firewall wouldn’t adequately deter bank risk-taking, that the law’s repeal had no connection to the 2008 financial crisis, and that major economists agree with her that repealing the law isn’t a silver bullet for protecting the economy. Sanders, for his part, has said Clinton's Wall Street reform plan is “not good enough.”
*And one area where the candidates are likely to agree*
On Friday, a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that more people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. last year than during any previous year on record. The national opioid and heroin epidemic has hit New Hampshire particularly hard. At a town hall in the state earlier this month, when Clinton asked for a show of hands from those who had been affected by a mental health problem or substance abuse problem, an overwhelming number of those in the room raised their hands.
Despite the severity of the problem, New Hampshire ranks second-to-last among states when it comes to substance abusers finding treatment, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
The three Democratic candidates all would likely offer potential solutions, and it would mean quite a bit to those affected for the debate moderators to raise the issue.
The debate, which will be moderated by David Muir and Martha Raddatz of ABC News, will be broadcast live from Saint Anselm College in Manchester. It’s hosted by ABC News, the New Hampshire Democratic Party and the Union Leader.
*Also on HuffPost:*
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 13 hours ago.
The debate comes at an especially tense moment in the primary campaign. The Democratic National Committee cut off the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) from its national voter database after Sanders' campaign staffers accessed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s proprietary voter data during a brief breakdown in the firewall between the candidates’ files Wednesday. On Friday, Sanders’ campaign sued the DNC to try to restore access to its voter data file. The DNC restored Sanders' campaign's access to its voter file -- though the campaign said it would not drop the suit -- Saturday morning.
To add to the intrigue, the debate takes place in New Hampshire, the one state where Sanders often leads Clinton in the polls. (Clinton dominates in national polls, and in other early primary states.) New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary is set for Feb. 9, a week after the Iowa caucuses.
The debate is likely to draw a clear contrast between Democratic and Republican approaches to terrorism in the wake of the extremist attacks on Paris in November and the mass shooting that killed 14 in San Bernardino, California, this month. During the GOP debate on Tuesday, Republicans did their best to terrify the nation with dire warnings about “radical Islamic terrorism.” The Democratic candidates, though, have been saying the nation shouldn’t “give in to fear” or allow “demagogues” like businessman Donald Trump, who has called for “a total and complete shutdown” of all Muslims entering the United States, “to divide us up.”
But the three Democratic candidates are unlikely to agree on everything. Here are four major areas where Clinton, Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s policies may clash during Saturday's debate:
*Foreign Policy*
Clinton has given a number of speeches focused exclusively on terrorism and homeland security since the Paris attacks. She detailed her plan to “defeat and destroy” the Islamic State on Nov. 19, and her broad anti-terrorism strategy on Dec. 15, ahead of the most recent GOP debate. She combined main elements of these proposals in an op-ed for the New Hampshire Union-Leader on Thursday.
In the same paper earlier in the week, Sanders previewed his criticisms of Clinton on foreign policy, arguing that she has shown a flawed calculus when it comes to American interventions in Libya and Iraq. He attacked Clinton's vote to authorize the Iraq War in the last Democratic debate, arguing that the war led to the creation of the Islamic State.
Clinton defended her role advocating for U.S. airstrikes in Libya in the last debate, arguing that former Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi “had American blood on his hands” and that there was pressure for American action from European and Arab allies.
When it comes to the conflict in Syria, Clinton has advocating a no-fly zone. Both Sanders and O’Malley oppose such a move, with O'Malley arguing it “could lead to an escalation of Cold War proportions.”
*Gun Violence*
Clinton has repeatedly attacked Sanders for voting to give gun manufacturers and dealers immunity from lawsuits, bringing it up in the first Democratic debate in October and in the second one in November. O’Malley also has used that vote to criticize Sanders, and mentioned the parents of a woman who was killed in the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater massacre in 2012. The parents tried to sue the online company that sold ammunition to the shooter, but were prevented from doing so because of the immunity law.
Sanders, for his part, has said he would be open to amending the law, which he voted for in 2005 as a congressman. He also has taken heat for his votes opposing the Brady background checks bill in 1993. Sanders says he has to be responsive to his rural Vermont constituents.
In the second debate, Sanders got back at O’Malley after the former governor touted his efforts to pass additional laws regulating firearms in Maryland by pointing to Baltimore’s crime rate.
“I think it’s safe to say that Baltimore is not one of the safest cities,” Sanders said.
*Paid Leave and Universal Health Care*
The U.S. is one of the world's only countries that fails to guarantee paid maternity leave for new parents. Clinton, who supports paid leave, has objected to Sanders’ proposed mechanism for paying for three months of paid leave and for universal health care.
“If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes," Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon said in a statement Nov. 17, after the second debate. "Yet Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9 percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health care plan, and simple math dictates he'll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda.”
Fallon said Clinton “will make sure the wealthiest Americans finally start paying their fair share, not force the middle class to pay even more than they already do.”
Sanders supports paid family leave legislation in the Senate that would be funded by a payroll tax totaling $1.38 a week for a typical worker. The bill would also provide paid leave for workers diagnosed with a serious medical condition.
"What is her program? What does she intend to do other than talk about it?" Sanders asked the Des Moines Register. "If she thinks $1.38 a week is just too much to spend, let her explain that to the people of Iowa."
Clinton hasn’t said how she would structure her paid family leave program. She has suggested through her campaign aides that she’d finance paid leave through taxes that exclusively affect the wealthy.
*Wall Street *
Clinton committed what was widely perceived as somewhat of a gaffe when she tried to justify her receipt of donations from the financial services industry by saying she represented New York during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It will be interesting to see if O’Malley or Sanders mention this on Saturday, or instead point to a major disagreement between them and Clinton: Whether Glass-Steagall, the 1930s law that prohibited commercial banks from participating in the investment banking business, should be reinstated. (Its repeal was signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1999.)
Clinton has said that reinstating the Glass-Steagall firewall wouldn’t adequately deter bank risk-taking, that the law’s repeal had no connection to the 2008 financial crisis, and that major economists agree with her that repealing the law isn’t a silver bullet for protecting the economy. Sanders, for his part, has said Clinton's Wall Street reform plan is “not good enough.”
*And one area where the candidates are likely to agree*
On Friday, a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that more people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. last year than during any previous year on record. The national opioid and heroin epidemic has hit New Hampshire particularly hard. At a town hall in the state earlier this month, when Clinton asked for a show of hands from those who had been affected by a mental health problem or substance abuse problem, an overwhelming number of those in the room raised their hands.
Despite the severity of the problem, New Hampshire ranks second-to-last among states when it comes to substance abusers finding treatment, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
The three Democratic candidates all would likely offer potential solutions, and it would mean quite a bit to those affected for the debate moderators to raise the issue.
The debate, which will be moderated by David Muir and Martha Raddatz of ABC News, will be broadcast live from Saint Anselm College in Manchester. It’s hosted by ABC News, the New Hampshire Democratic Party and the Union Leader.
*Also on HuffPost:*
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 13 hours ago.
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BookFilter: Last Minute Gift Ideas/Best Books of 2015
Don't panic. Or should I say, DON'T PANIC! Books make a great last minute gift. Put a little effort into it and they're personal and thoughtful...and easily returnable for another book if they've already read it or you've gone wide of the mark. (What? Your friend's son has already read The Hunger Games? But didn't the movie just come out?)
You've got just enough time to order online or head to your favorite local independent store or chain and pick out a book, wrap it and place it under the tree. Here are some great gift ideas from BookFilter -- each one is among the best books of the year. The next time you want to know what to read next or what books just came out or are coming out soon or you want to browse for some book ideas before heading to your favorite indie/library/chain or website, head to BookFilter for more great ideas like these. With literally hundreds of thousands of books coming out each year in North America, these picks are literally the tip of the iceberg.
So take a deep breath, grab your list, check it twice and put some of these on it for whomever has been nice (or naughty -- everyone deserves a good book). First, my list of some great books from 2015, followed by reviews pulled from BookFilter. Click on any title and you'll be taken to a page where you can quickly find links to buy the book from your favorite major retailer or indies like Powells. Happy shopping!
*THE GOLDEN AGE* By Jane Smiley
*A BRIEF HISTORY OF CREATION* By Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves
*PRETTY GIRLS* By Karin Slaughter
*THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE* By Steven Fraser
*SAVING CAPITALISM* By Robert B. Reich
*BRYANT & MAY AND THE BURNING MAN* By Christopher Fowler
*THE DAY THE CRAYONS CAME HOME* By Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
*CARRYING ALBERT HOME* By Homer Hickam
*DEAR MR. YOU* By Mary-Louise Parker
*AURORA* By Kim Stanley Robinson
*UPROOTED* By Naomi Novik
*THIS DIVIDED ISLAND* By Samanth Subramanian
*KILLING AND DYING* By Adrian Tomine
*MISTER MAX: THE BOOK OF KINGS* By Cynthia Voigt
*1944* By Jay Winik
*THE BOOK OF ARON*By Jim Shepard
*SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD* By M.T. Anderson
*ONE NATION, UNDER GODS* By Peter Manseau*THE GOLDEN AGE* By Jane Smiley
$26.95; Knopf
Elena Ferrante has been getting all the attention for her acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, which just finished. If you've got a hip friend who has been raving about them, turn them onto Jane Smiley's brilliant American Century trilogy. The first two books are out in paperback and the finale The Golden Age just hit hardcover. It tracks one hundred years of US history, from the Great Depression to the near future. Each chapter jumps ahead a year so there are one hundred in all. Starting on a small family farm in the heartland, you watch a family spin off children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and husbands and wives and lovers and on and on. It's pure narrative pleasure, along with Smiley's ambitious capturing of a turbulent century almost as an aside. She's especially remarkable at presenting the perspective of small children and even toddlers, not to mention the passage of time, current events becoming family history and then legend, showing empathy for a wide range of characters from every walk of life and so much more. Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres. This trilogy might be her masterpiece.*A BRIEF HISTORY OF CREATION* By Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves
$27.95; W.W. Norton
Got a science buff on your list? Or an agnostic or atheist or person of faith who is enlivened rather than threatened by knowledge? Then this is the book for them! How did life begin? It's arguably the greatest scientific question of all and certainly the one that goes to the heart of existence. This very readable and engaging history charts how that question has been tackled over the centuries, from inchoate early stabs in the dark to the latest experiments and theories drawing upon new technology and evidence collected in space. Mesler and Cleaves fill their story with petty rivalries, stubborn refusal to acknowledge facts, u-turns in theory, dead ends, eureka moments and more. Indeed, from microscopes to Hadron colliders, our understanding of the origins of life have gone hand in hand with technological breakthroughs. But some things remain: again and again, pioneers who watch their ideas become superseded can't bear to admit they've been lapped and cling to tired ideas. Others of course remain stubborn despite being laughed at but are redeemed when their theories gain primacy...only to see those built upon or passed by as well. From DNA to spontaneous generation (an idea we were taught to deride as schoolchildren but which has returned in more sophisticated form) this is popular history of the first order.*PRETTY GIRLS* By Karin Slaughter
$27.99; William Morrow
Mystery buff? Someone who told you they loved Girl On A Train? Give them this and they'll have something new to rave over. Karin Slaughter is a big name in mystery, a "brand name" author whose fans have bought her novels in the tens of millions around the world. Well, she's about to get bigger. Her new stand-alone thriller Pretty Girls is a roller coaster of a tale, filled with twists and turns, each one more jaw-dropping, unnerving and just plain fun than the one before. But it also retains Slaughter's gift for genuine, complex characters and that makes the danger palpable, the stakes real, the emotions raw. The story begins long after a tragedy. Claire and Lydia are the sisters who "survived" when their sibling Julia was abducted off a college campus two decades earlier. Of course their family was never the same. Their father became obsessed with the case and died alone; their mother won't discuss it; and the two sisters are estranged. Claire has the successful marriage, the country club membership and the showcase home. Lydia is a recovering addict (and sex worker) dating an ex-con. But nothing is as it seems: a violent murder upends Claire's world and pulls Lydia back into her orbit. Slowly we realize Lydia is on the road to recovery, Claire is on a slide into turmoil and they're both being haunted and hunted by a spectre from the past. Without ever shortchanging the adrenaline rush of a thriller, Slaughter has crafted characters far more compelling than the usual cardboard cut-outs which pass for people in most such genre fare. It's a triumph that will bring this author to a wider audience than ever. And that's saying something.*THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE* By Steven Fraser
$28; Little Brown & Co.
*SAVING CAPITALISM* By Robert B. Reich
$26.95; Knopf
*BRYANT & MAY AND THE BURNING MAN* By Christopher Fowler
$26; Bantam
A trio of books perfect for the anarchist, Bernie Sanders supporter, mystery buff (and British history buff), armchair economist, fan of the new movie The Big Short and more! Why didn't the populace rise up? That was one question after the Occupy movement dispersed and no financial figures of any note went to prison for well-documented crimes that have led to record fines (often softened by record government bailouts of Wall Street as well.) The fascinating history told again in The Age Of Acquiescence shows how in fact America has a long history of the people rising up and demanding change, of taking to the streets and paying for it in blood when their calls for a 60 hour (!) workweek and one day off on Sunday were decried as socialism or communism and worse. The last time inequality reached such levels, the nation was roiled by "riots" or protests, depending on your point of view. Those movements have been a regular occurrence throughout US history and are the norm, rather than the exception...until now. Fraser tells an informative, fascinating tale of protest and change that is compelling reading whatever one's politics.
Reich, on the other hand, will fall on deaf ears unless you're already won over to the idea that sometimes capitalism is its own worst enemy. He makes calm, clear-eyed mush of various paper tigers, like the idea that any new rules and regulations would interfere with unfettered capitalism (there's no such thing). He has a host of reasonable ideas and some doozies at the end that will take your breath away even if you do keep a Guy Fawkes mask at the ready. But it's capitalism explained for the general public and arms readers with intelligent take-downs of the Big Business argument that any rule is a bad rule.
Finally, Bryant & May are a pair of aging British detectives in the Peculiar Crimes Unit. The Burning Man is their 12th adventure and while the book proudly declares Bryant & May will be back, it certainly feels like a swan song. What's it doing with these other two books? Well, the duo most solve a string of bizarre murders taking place against a backdrop of riots that bring London to a standstill. Yet another financier has been found guilty of reckless crimes and seems to be getting off scot free. This revelation occurs during the week from Halloween (aka Mischief Night) and Guy Fawkes Day, when the quashing of an insurrection against the government is celebrated. However, Guy Fawkes has been turned from lead into gold: instead of celebrating the primacy of the government, it's become a celebration of defiance and free-thinkers. As the murders pile up, ever-growing demonstrations spread from the financial district to the entire city of London and the tone becomes nigh on apocalyptic. (It helps that the voluble, ever erudite Bryant sympathizes with the hoi polloi and holds forth at lengthy on inequality and the like.) Beyond the gripping backdrop, what makes this entry so special for fans of the series is the personal travails that bedevil our heroes, a very touching subplot surrounding the inevitable decline in mental faculties that will come to most everyone. It's been tried by authors portraying Sherlock Holmes in old age, but this one trumps them in poignancy. Buy a mystery buff the first book in the series or any lover of politics the latest and they'll soon start at the beginning and thank you for it.*THE DAY THE CRAYONS CAME HOME* By Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
$18.99; Philomel
Picture books are filled with sequels and series. And just like most current Hollywood movies, they're rarely worth the bother. But here Daywalt and Jeffers follow their blockbuster hit The Day The Crayons Quit! with this perfectly adorable sequel. In the first book, the crayons in a crayon box went on strike, writing letters to the little boy who keeps them, explaining their varied reasons for needing a break. It was so witty, clever and just plain fun any adult who read it kicked themselves for not having thought of the idea on their own. But don't be fooled: a "great" idea for a picture book is actually pretty darn easy. Actually creating a picture book with the perfect text and the ideal illustrations to bring them to life is pretty darn hard. They did it once and now Daywalt and Jeffers have done it again: this time, the crayons have written letters from their "vacation," whether it's a vacation hidden in the cushions of the couch or a vacation left by the pool outside or a vacation in the clutches of the family baby that scrawls and bites a crayon that would really, really like to come home. Each letter is amusing and they build on each other wonderfully. A delight.*CARRYING ALBERT HOME* By Homer Hickam
$25.99; William Morrow
*DEAR MR. YOU* By Mary-Louise Parker
$25; Scribner
Two very clever novels/memoirs that find just the right, unique way of telling their stories.
If I had a bookstore, I'm not sure where I'd stock this new book by Homer Hickam, the author of a string of memoirs and novels, namely "Rocket Boys" aka "October Sky" about his childhood in coal mining country. It's called "Carrying Albert Home" and since it's a sort-of true memoir about a road trip his parents took with their pet alligator down to Orlando, Florida during the Great Depression, at first glance the Biography section makes sense. Then you keep reading and the stories get wilder and more improbable -- bootleggers, smugglers, bank robbers, union radicals, a Hollywood movie, a hurricane and both John Steinbeck AND Ernest Hemingway -- make appearances. Well, maybe fiction makes more sense. By the end, after the ghosts and the wild mountain man spouting poetry with his salacious Muslim wife and that dancing fool, actor Buddy Ebsen, I'd be looking for the Tall Tales section. In the end, I'll just stock it up front by the door, so everyone can see the great cover, recognize the name Hickam, glance at a summary, and maybe open a page or two and find themselves sucked in and bingo, you've got another sale. Sweet, funny, and somehow clear-eyed but romantic at the end. And sort-of true.
What a clever fox Mary-Louise Parker proves to be. She gets the best of both worlds by a single stroke of genius: this memoir-ish novel (or novelistic memoir) is structured as a series of letters from Parker to the men in her life. They range from a poetic salvo that opens the book addressing them one and all to a moving finale to the man she imagines gathering the oysters that made up one of the last good meals for her dying father. Parker delivers a short story with a letter addressed to the dogs in her life -- not the animals but the boyfriends who behaved like dogs, here transformed into actual dogs in a head-spinning allegory that is funny and caustic and utterly unanswerable. (What guy can complain about it, since if they see themselves in it they are damning their own doggy ways?) Truth and better-than-truth (i.e. fiction) merge herebeautifully. Parker nails details of acting school with deadpan hilarity, skewers herself happily, celebrates her children and so much more. You won't find any dissection of her many theatrical triumphs or dishing of backstage dirt. Rather marvelously, "Dear Mr. You" is both disarmingly intimate (I feel like I know her) and a bravura performance that keeps us politely at arm's length with its talent. And isn't that what great acting (and great writing) are often about? This is her first book but surely not her last.
*AURORA* By Kim Stanley Robinson
$26; Orbit
*UPROOTED* By Naomi Novik
$25; Del Rey
Two of the best sci-fi and fantasy books of the year, ideal for fans of either or anyone who doesn't realize yet that they will be fans soon.
A brilliant stand-alone novel from one of our best writers. Kim Stanley Robinson's first bold gambit in this tale about colonizing the stars is to make the narrator an A.I. Early in the novel, we are on a ship that has been traveling for generations towards new worlds where humanity hopes to carve out new homes. In his Mars trilogy, Robinson built drama out of the practical and human challenges of terraforming Mars. Here he ponders the huge obstacles to simply making it intact to a planet light years away. When a key character orders her ship's artificial intelligence to start telling the story of their journey, it's a master stroke. This solves a constant problem in science fiction: since the narrator is an A.I., its exposition of technical info can be explained away easily by a computer's preference for facts over story. We get the hard data and slowly, beautifully, we see the A.I. learn and become a better narrator and eventually -- perhaps -- gain self-awareness. For a while this seems the book's major accomplishment. But then Robinson pushes further and plot twists make this story even more riveting. Fundamentally, it's about our innate need to survive and explore. It's like the end of the film "Gravity" but without the faux overheated drama; here the moment is earned. "Aurora" becomes deeply moving, as well as entertaining and compelling and provoking. In short, everything one expects from Kim Stanley Robinson.
Like most fantasy fans, I'm eagerly awaiting the ninth and final volume in Naomi Novik's wonderful "Temeraire" series that cleverly and smartly imagines what would happen if there were dragons in the Napoleonic Era. But the muse can't be denied. For whatever reason, Novik felt compelled to write this stand-alone tale and it's a wholly satisfying gem. Based in fairy tale, it begins in classic fashion with a corker of an opening line: "Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley." Novik has you immediately and never falters. The novel begins with a ritual: the once-a-decade ceremony when the local wizard (nicknamed the "Dragon") chooses a young maid to take away to his tower, where she serves him in ways the locals can't imagine but spend an awful lot of time trying. From the fate of our heroine Agnieszka to the fate of her valley to the fate of the kingdom and indeed the world, the scope of this story slowly but inexorably expands. So does the magic, whether the highly detailed, scientific magic of the Dragon or the more creative, "instinctive" magic that Agnieszka soon proves adept at. The chapters fly by; in reading it, I kept thinking, "Ok, just one more, just one more" over the two days I gobbled it down. And the medieval world Novik creates is as rooted in reality as her Napoleonic one. But unlike most fantasy, what I remember best is not the world but the vivid and complex characters. In what is ultimately a rather remarkable novel, I realized there were no genuine villains. Oh there was danger and evil aplenty (as symbolized by the malignant Wood that encroaches on Agnieszka's valley); armies clash, people struggle for power and so on. But time and again Novik reveals characters driven not by a black heart but by sincere if sometimes misguided impulses: indeed, nothing is scarier than someone doing great evil for what they consider a higher purpose. The real triumph is at the end where Novik displays the ability to make understanding your enemy just as thrilling as destroying them. I love what Novik has done in the Temeraire series but this is the best single novel she's written. So far.*THIS DIVIDED ISLAND* By Samanth Subramanian
$27.99; Thomas Dunne Books
*ONE NATION, UNDER GODS* By Peter Manseau
$28; Little Brown and Company
Religion -- or the excuse of religion --is at the heart of these two nonfiction books, one a tragic history of Sri Lanka and the other an absorbing history of faith in the United States.
Journalist Samanth Subramanian tackles the longest war of the 20th century. (Perhaps -- sadly it's up for debate depending on how one categorizes various conflicts). But there's no debate that Sri Lanka's deadly internecine turmoil of 30+ years was especially virulent. It dragged on for decades and ended with the slaughter of men, women and children (mostly Tamil) that has been decried as a war crime. Submramanian doesn't dive into an historical background or seem to address the broad sweep of the action. Instead, in what amounts to a travelogue of sorts, he goes to Sri Lanka and talks to anyone who will speak with him -- Tamil and Sinhalese, Buddhist and Hindu and Muslim, the bereft and the triumphant, the clear-eyed and the self-deluded. It's a remarkable, empathetic work of reporting. As an outsider, it's easy for me to say a pox on both houses: the Tamils had legitimate complaints but their rebellion/violence soon devolved into monstrous acts, while the Sinhalese have proven pitiless in victory. But the great gift here is not in just giving all sides a (morally complicated) voice. It's in bringing to life the tangled misery of so many people, from government officials to wives of rebels who still defend the indefensible like child soldiers to orphans and those who may be widowed or orphaned but just don't know. I won't soon forget a haunting passage where the author and others entered one battered area. A woman offhandedly asked him to write down the name and particulars of a missing relative. A villager overheard this and asked them to do the same and soon they were surrounded by desperate people yearning to give the particulars of their missing father/son/mother/daughter/brother/sister/neighbor. Never mind that the author isn't really in a position to help. They just want to be heard. Other vivid moments endure: a stolid mechanic who takes days of patient waiting before opening up, a pair of artificial legs waiting mournfully against a wall for the return of their presumably dead owner and on and on. Looming over it all is the inescapable sense that Sri Lanka's woes are far from over.
Call it "The People's Religious History Of The United States" and you'll capture the vividness and potential impact of "One Nation, Under Gods" by author Peter Manseau. He vividly captures the religious diversity that has defined the United States long before it even was the United States. This book journeys in time from a Muslim slave brought to the continent by the Spanish who ended up a god of sorts (trust me, it's not a happy ending for him) all the way to Barack Obama's inaugural address in which the President formally acknowledged the many faiths that make up our country. In between Manseau has you rethink everything from the Salem witch trials (not so crazy, actually ) to the Great Awakening to that hippie happening where they hoped to levitate the Pentagon. Manseau shows slave owners who initially were vehemently opposed to converting their "property" into Christians become slave owners eager to do so. (The reason for both stances? Money.) From the role of women in seeding new ideas to the role of Jews in the American revolution to the role of Buddhists in WW II (their refusal to assimilate in terms of language and faith made them hugely helpful to the Allied cause), Manseau's book repeatedly casts our common history into a new light. His synthesis of well-established facts with original reporting make this Book One for anyone who wants to be enlightened on the true story of religion in America.
*KILLING AND DYING* By Adrian Tomine
$22.95; Drawn & Quarterly
Adrian Tomine's new collection of short stories is just 121 pages long. But it took me two weeks to read it and longer to think about it and be ready to write something. And of course, he writes comics (or graphic novels, or comix or whatever term is preferred this day) so I could have read it all in an hour. But that wouldn't have done justice to a series of tales that are so sad and lovely and human. First, the entire book published by Drawn & Quarterly is just a pleasure to hold in your hand. It's beautifully designed, from the translucent cover to the haunting image imprinted on the front itself, a picture of a suburban street with its Denny's restaurant and strip malls and cars seemingly frozen in place. It has no people and a Hopper-like aura of loneliness that captures well the tone of the stories within. Each story plays with form in subtle ways. While every story feels of a piece, capturing people struggling to connect or give their life some purpose or explain their inchoate desires and fears; they also are jazz-like in their low-key visual differences. "A Brief History Of The Art Form Known As 'Hortisculpture'" is an homage to comic strips down to the color Sunday edition and has a tale of frustrated creativity anyone in a relationship with a closeted musician/painter/writer/sculpture will identify with. "Translated, from the Japanese" leaves the absence of the characters being talked about while they fly from one city to another wonderfully resonant. "Intruders" and its sketch-like visuals add a noir-ish vibe to the story of a returning soldier trying to find something to moor him to the country he's returned to but can't connect with. The writing is taut and telling but of course it's the combination of writing and visuals that make these short stories and graphic novels in general so unique and powerful. "Go Owls" shows the shock of physical abuse in a relationship in just a few brief panels. The title story "Killing And Dying" surprises us regularly with the journey of a stuttering, insecure daughter looking to stand-up for some confidence while her father undermines and awkwardly supports her at the same time. Yet it's the dad standing by while watching his wife through a window comfort their crying daughter that moved me more than any accusations, failed punchlines or heckles from hostile audiences. It's natural to compare Tomine to other graphic novelists but I kept thinking of William Trevor, an Irish specialist in short stories so heart-wrenchingly sad it could take me months to read any new collection he put out. One of the year's best books. Period.*MISTER MAX: THE BOOK OF KINGS* By Cynthia Voigt
$19.99; Knopf Books For Younger Readers
Perfect for middle grade readers, fans of theatrics, mysteries or anyone who loves a good tale.
Apparently, I need to catch up on my Cynthia Voigt. This excellent conclusion to her Mister Max trilogy has left me a little gobsmacked, if I'm honest. Did she plan the ramping up of the complexity and emotional depth the way it played out? I read all three books within a few weeks so perhaps that helped me appreciate the arc even more. Anyway, I suppose you could read the third book alone, but why would you? It's a trilogy and meant to be read that way. In Book One, Max lives in a quaint sort of turn of the century kingdom with his parents who run a theatrical troupe. Max loves them and the theater but it's not quite his thing. Exactly what his thing will be, this 12 year old boy isn't sure about. His parents are lured to a far-away country to establish a new national theater company and Max is accidentally left behind with his librarian grandmother. They realize the parents have been kidnapped and worry and worry and worry. To maintain his independence, Max becomes sort of a detective, though he insists on calling himself The Solutioneer. (Why the books aren't called The Solutioneer remains a mystery to me.) There's also a girl that annoys Max with all her questions and a boarder in Max's home who has a mysterious past and other dangling threads. So there's the set up. At first, Max solves rather mundane or obvious problems like finding a lost dog. In Book Two, however, Voigt takes a quantum leap forward: Max is now solving problems of the human heart and showing a great deal of insight. In Book Three, Max and his friends head off to rescue the boy's parents. The final volume is especially good, with complex passages depicting that awkward moment when a child sees their parents as people, flaws and all, rather than "parents," not to mention some completely earned but still bravura changes that make clear the pattern Voigt was creating from the very start. Read Book One alone and -- like me -- you might consider it a pleasant diversion, with so-so mysteries but appealing characters. Book Two is much better and Book Three deepens the entire work. It's like a magic trick the way she suddenly reveals the life Max was intended for all along.*1944* By Jay Winik
$35; Simon & Schuster
*THE BOOK OF ARON*By Jim Shepard
$23.95; Knopf
*SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD* By M.T. Anderson
$25.99; Candlewick
World War II is apparently an endless source of fascinating stories; we certainly won't run out of fresh approaches to that monumental event in our lifetime. Fans of history, great fiction and classical music will all be delighted by the following.
The title of Jay Winik's new work of history is a feint. While the book pivots on the year 1944, it's not really about that penultimate year of World War II, not really. Winik has a more devastating focus than that. Many books have been written about WW II. Many more about the Holocaust. But few if any have told both stories in parallel to such dramatic and awful effect. Because of course they're not two stories; they are inextricably intertwined. So we have here Winik's assured overview of world war, deft portraits of FDR and Churchill and Stalin and Eisenhower and Hitler, battle plans, political machinations, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the building of the atomic bomb, the imprisonment of Americans for the crime of being Japanese (while Americans of Italian and German descent remained unmolested) -- all in compelling detail and with a clear sense of how events seemed at the time. But again and again and again, Winik keeps alive the Holocaust. He shows what was happening, the build up of the death camps, the trickle of information and witnessing that turned into a flood and alongside that the moral failure of the free world. When tens of thousands of Jewish children might be rescued, excuses pour out. When tens of thousands of European children might be rescued, not a moment is lost. When prison camps can be bombed and war prisoners freed, no daring is too great. When death camps are bombed, it is only by accident because the bombs are meant for factories a few miles away. The US is not alone (though Churchill is the first to awake to the moral demands of this crime against humanity). Still, from 1942 on, we see a feckless State Department, foot-dragging bureaucrats and the tin-eared indifference of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who is given countless opportunities to act and fails to grasp them. The book is too nuanced to simply make a blistering case against FDR: his health was poor, the demands of war seemingly all consuming, etc. But no one can read this book and not agree with Winik that a great opportunity was lost. Lincoln transformed the Civil War into a war for freedom and against slavery. FDR might have made WWII about more than just winning; he night have transformed it into a war to defeat the Holocaust and similar crimes against humanity. Winik sees the decades since and their repeated timid failings in the face of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda and elsewhere as the awful fruits of 1944, fruits that make the victory the West achieved a little more hollow.
It's funny! Yes, "The Book Of Aron" is a story about a little boy who becomes a scavenger in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Yes, it's bleak and awful as we see his world slowly close in, the walls go up, the family members die off or disappear. But in his saddest, sharpest novel yet, author Jim Shepard captures the vein of black humor that runs through the despair of the Jewish people. The bickering of a husband and wife, the kvetching of the neighbors, the bleak wisdom of kids -- it's all here, all musical in the dialogue you can't help but speak out loud, all captivating and alive even as they slowly starve to death. Aron is, I suppose, a survivor, a boy who just tries to stay one step ahead of fate. (Good luck with that.) Morality doesn't come into it, but he steals and scavenges and helps feed his family and gets by. Aron is almost deliriously unaware of any other way of existing; everyone is always saying "Aron only looks out for himself" but Shepard shows this boy in all his humanity, a kid wondering exactly what he was supposed to do when pushed by everyone into talking with the local collaborators or when he has a gun held to his head and is told to do this or that or the other. He had a choice? Shepard's tale is bristling with tragic details -- Aron is always crying, it seems -- but it's a joy to read. One of the Warsaw Ghetto's tragic figures -- the child advocate Janusz Korczak -- figures prominently and beautifully, but like everyone else he is fully complex and contradictory and alive. The tale builds and builds but this isn't a story about what happens to Aron. It's richer, more satisfying than that. You'll read it quickly and then want to read it again. Unforgettable.
No serious reader I know cares about genre: is it mystery, sci-fi, romance, literary fiction, graphic novel, young adult, a chapter book, a biography, a history, poetry, play? Who cares? Is it good? That's all that matters. The foolishness of labels has never been more apparent than in the astonishing career of M.T. Anderson, who has produced a string of sophisticated, witty works under the label of "young adult." That term has covered his dystopian sci-fi, horror, contemporary teen, historical fiction and now this work of biography. Since "young adult" also encompasses the masterpiece "Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn," as complex and involving a work as there is, he should happily embrace it. Essentially, "young adult" means there is (probably) a young adult at the heart of the story. And yet, "young adult" indicates one initial audience for this work and that may explain why it's so particularly good. Anderson has wowed with "Feed" and his landmark two volume work "The Astonishing Life Of Octavio Nothing," fiction that captures the Revolutionary Era, shines a fresh light on the horrors of slavery and presents our nation's founding from a novel perspective. It's intensely detailed and utterly convincing. So now we have a work of nonfiction about composer Dimitri Shostakovich and how he created his Seventh Symphony during the Siege of Leningrad. It's a delight; no surprise since Anderson has evinced an enthusiasm for music almost as joyful as Shostakovich's love of soccer. What makes this book so good is that Anderson doesn't simplify the tale for its presumed audience. But he does clarify the story in an elegant manner that any historian or biographer should envy. With seeming ease, Anderson tells of Shostakovich's life, the unceasing terror of Stalin's reign, the invasion by Germany, the horrors of the siege, cannibalism, despair and the role of music and why it mattered so much. He also deftly captures the moral complexity of Shostakovich's life, surrounded as he was by friends and family who were murdered by the state or turned against him to protect themselves or depended on him for their survival. A children's book? Hardly. And definitely. This isn't dumbed down history. Indeed, more traditional doorstops about history might now seem clogged up, overstuffed as they are with unnecessary dates and detail when Anderson -- with a vivid image and pointed sentence -- can make his case with directness and verve. It leaves you with one exciting question: what will Anderson do next?Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of BookFilter, a book lover's best friend. Head to BookFilter if you want to find more great picks like this.
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You've got just enough time to order online or head to your favorite local independent store or chain and pick out a book, wrap it and place it under the tree. Here are some great gift ideas from BookFilter -- each one is among the best books of the year. The next time you want to know what to read next or what books just came out or are coming out soon or you want to browse for some book ideas before heading to your favorite indie/library/chain or website, head to BookFilter for more great ideas like these. With literally hundreds of thousands of books coming out each year in North America, these picks are literally the tip of the iceberg.
So take a deep breath, grab your list, check it twice and put some of these on it for whomever has been nice (or naughty -- everyone deserves a good book). First, my list of some great books from 2015, followed by reviews pulled from BookFilter. Click on any title and you'll be taken to a page where you can quickly find links to buy the book from your favorite major retailer or indies like Powells. Happy shopping!
*THE GOLDEN AGE* By Jane Smiley
*A BRIEF HISTORY OF CREATION* By Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves
*PRETTY GIRLS* By Karin Slaughter
*THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE* By Steven Fraser
*SAVING CAPITALISM* By Robert B. Reich
*BRYANT & MAY AND THE BURNING MAN* By Christopher Fowler
*THE DAY THE CRAYONS CAME HOME* By Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
*CARRYING ALBERT HOME* By Homer Hickam
*DEAR MR. YOU* By Mary-Louise Parker
*AURORA* By Kim Stanley Robinson
*UPROOTED* By Naomi Novik
*THIS DIVIDED ISLAND* By Samanth Subramanian
*KILLING AND DYING* By Adrian Tomine
*MISTER MAX: THE BOOK OF KINGS* By Cynthia Voigt
*1944* By Jay Winik
*THE BOOK OF ARON*By Jim Shepard
*SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD* By M.T. Anderson
*ONE NATION, UNDER GODS* By Peter Manseau*THE GOLDEN AGE* By Jane Smiley
$26.95; Knopf
Elena Ferrante has been getting all the attention for her acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, which just finished. If you've got a hip friend who has been raving about them, turn them onto Jane Smiley's brilliant American Century trilogy. The first two books are out in paperback and the finale The Golden Age just hit hardcover. It tracks one hundred years of US history, from the Great Depression to the near future. Each chapter jumps ahead a year so there are one hundred in all. Starting on a small family farm in the heartland, you watch a family spin off children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and husbands and wives and lovers and on and on. It's pure narrative pleasure, along with Smiley's ambitious capturing of a turbulent century almost as an aside. She's especially remarkable at presenting the perspective of small children and even toddlers, not to mention the passage of time, current events becoming family history and then legend, showing empathy for a wide range of characters from every walk of life and so much more. Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres. This trilogy might be her masterpiece.*A BRIEF HISTORY OF CREATION* By Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves
$27.95; W.W. Norton
Got a science buff on your list? Or an agnostic or atheist or person of faith who is enlivened rather than threatened by knowledge? Then this is the book for them! How did life begin? It's arguably the greatest scientific question of all and certainly the one that goes to the heart of existence. This very readable and engaging history charts how that question has been tackled over the centuries, from inchoate early stabs in the dark to the latest experiments and theories drawing upon new technology and evidence collected in space. Mesler and Cleaves fill their story with petty rivalries, stubborn refusal to acknowledge facts, u-turns in theory, dead ends, eureka moments and more. Indeed, from microscopes to Hadron colliders, our understanding of the origins of life have gone hand in hand with technological breakthroughs. But some things remain: again and again, pioneers who watch their ideas become superseded can't bear to admit they've been lapped and cling to tired ideas. Others of course remain stubborn despite being laughed at but are redeemed when their theories gain primacy...only to see those built upon or passed by as well. From DNA to spontaneous generation (an idea we were taught to deride as schoolchildren but which has returned in more sophisticated form) this is popular history of the first order.*PRETTY GIRLS* By Karin Slaughter
$27.99; William Morrow
Mystery buff? Someone who told you they loved Girl On A Train? Give them this and they'll have something new to rave over. Karin Slaughter is a big name in mystery, a "brand name" author whose fans have bought her novels in the tens of millions around the world. Well, she's about to get bigger. Her new stand-alone thriller Pretty Girls is a roller coaster of a tale, filled with twists and turns, each one more jaw-dropping, unnerving and just plain fun than the one before. But it also retains Slaughter's gift for genuine, complex characters and that makes the danger palpable, the stakes real, the emotions raw. The story begins long after a tragedy. Claire and Lydia are the sisters who "survived" when their sibling Julia was abducted off a college campus two decades earlier. Of course their family was never the same. Their father became obsessed with the case and died alone; their mother won't discuss it; and the two sisters are estranged. Claire has the successful marriage, the country club membership and the showcase home. Lydia is a recovering addict (and sex worker) dating an ex-con. But nothing is as it seems: a violent murder upends Claire's world and pulls Lydia back into her orbit. Slowly we realize Lydia is on the road to recovery, Claire is on a slide into turmoil and they're both being haunted and hunted by a spectre from the past. Without ever shortchanging the adrenaline rush of a thriller, Slaughter has crafted characters far more compelling than the usual cardboard cut-outs which pass for people in most such genre fare. It's a triumph that will bring this author to a wider audience than ever. And that's saying something.*THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE* By Steven Fraser
$28; Little Brown & Co.
*SAVING CAPITALISM* By Robert B. Reich
$26.95; Knopf
*BRYANT & MAY AND THE BURNING MAN* By Christopher Fowler
$26; Bantam
A trio of books perfect for the anarchist, Bernie Sanders supporter, mystery buff (and British history buff), armchair economist, fan of the new movie The Big Short and more! Why didn't the populace rise up? That was one question after the Occupy movement dispersed and no financial figures of any note went to prison for well-documented crimes that have led to record fines (often softened by record government bailouts of Wall Street as well.) The fascinating history told again in The Age Of Acquiescence shows how in fact America has a long history of the people rising up and demanding change, of taking to the streets and paying for it in blood when their calls for a 60 hour (!) workweek and one day off on Sunday were decried as socialism or communism and worse. The last time inequality reached such levels, the nation was roiled by "riots" or protests, depending on your point of view. Those movements have been a regular occurrence throughout US history and are the norm, rather than the exception...until now. Fraser tells an informative, fascinating tale of protest and change that is compelling reading whatever one's politics.
Reich, on the other hand, will fall on deaf ears unless you're already won over to the idea that sometimes capitalism is its own worst enemy. He makes calm, clear-eyed mush of various paper tigers, like the idea that any new rules and regulations would interfere with unfettered capitalism (there's no such thing). He has a host of reasonable ideas and some doozies at the end that will take your breath away even if you do keep a Guy Fawkes mask at the ready. But it's capitalism explained for the general public and arms readers with intelligent take-downs of the Big Business argument that any rule is a bad rule.
Finally, Bryant & May are a pair of aging British detectives in the Peculiar Crimes Unit. The Burning Man is their 12th adventure and while the book proudly declares Bryant & May will be back, it certainly feels like a swan song. What's it doing with these other two books? Well, the duo most solve a string of bizarre murders taking place against a backdrop of riots that bring London to a standstill. Yet another financier has been found guilty of reckless crimes and seems to be getting off scot free. This revelation occurs during the week from Halloween (aka Mischief Night) and Guy Fawkes Day, when the quashing of an insurrection against the government is celebrated. However, Guy Fawkes has been turned from lead into gold: instead of celebrating the primacy of the government, it's become a celebration of defiance and free-thinkers. As the murders pile up, ever-growing demonstrations spread from the financial district to the entire city of London and the tone becomes nigh on apocalyptic. (It helps that the voluble, ever erudite Bryant sympathizes with the hoi polloi and holds forth at lengthy on inequality and the like.) Beyond the gripping backdrop, what makes this entry so special for fans of the series is the personal travails that bedevil our heroes, a very touching subplot surrounding the inevitable decline in mental faculties that will come to most everyone. It's been tried by authors portraying Sherlock Holmes in old age, but this one trumps them in poignancy. Buy a mystery buff the first book in the series or any lover of politics the latest and they'll soon start at the beginning and thank you for it.*THE DAY THE CRAYONS CAME HOME* By Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
$18.99; Philomel
Picture books are filled with sequels and series. And just like most current Hollywood movies, they're rarely worth the bother. But here Daywalt and Jeffers follow their blockbuster hit The Day The Crayons Quit! with this perfectly adorable sequel. In the first book, the crayons in a crayon box went on strike, writing letters to the little boy who keeps them, explaining their varied reasons for needing a break. It was so witty, clever and just plain fun any adult who read it kicked themselves for not having thought of the idea on their own. But don't be fooled: a "great" idea for a picture book is actually pretty darn easy. Actually creating a picture book with the perfect text and the ideal illustrations to bring them to life is pretty darn hard. They did it once and now Daywalt and Jeffers have done it again: this time, the crayons have written letters from their "vacation," whether it's a vacation hidden in the cushions of the couch or a vacation left by the pool outside or a vacation in the clutches of the family baby that scrawls and bites a crayon that would really, really like to come home. Each letter is amusing and they build on each other wonderfully. A delight.*CARRYING ALBERT HOME* By Homer Hickam
$25.99; William Morrow
*DEAR MR. YOU* By Mary-Louise Parker
$25; Scribner
Two very clever novels/memoirs that find just the right, unique way of telling their stories.
If I had a bookstore, I'm not sure where I'd stock this new book by Homer Hickam, the author of a string of memoirs and novels, namely "Rocket Boys" aka "October Sky" about his childhood in coal mining country. It's called "Carrying Albert Home" and since it's a sort-of true memoir about a road trip his parents took with their pet alligator down to Orlando, Florida during the Great Depression, at first glance the Biography section makes sense. Then you keep reading and the stories get wilder and more improbable -- bootleggers, smugglers, bank robbers, union radicals, a Hollywood movie, a hurricane and both John Steinbeck AND Ernest Hemingway -- make appearances. Well, maybe fiction makes more sense. By the end, after the ghosts and the wild mountain man spouting poetry with his salacious Muslim wife and that dancing fool, actor Buddy Ebsen, I'd be looking for the Tall Tales section. In the end, I'll just stock it up front by the door, so everyone can see the great cover, recognize the name Hickam, glance at a summary, and maybe open a page or two and find themselves sucked in and bingo, you've got another sale. Sweet, funny, and somehow clear-eyed but romantic at the end. And sort-of true.
What a clever fox Mary-Louise Parker proves to be. She gets the best of both worlds by a single stroke of genius: this memoir-ish novel (or novelistic memoir) is structured as a series of letters from Parker to the men in her life. They range from a poetic salvo that opens the book addressing them one and all to a moving finale to the man she imagines gathering the oysters that made up one of the last good meals for her dying father. Parker delivers a short story with a letter addressed to the dogs in her life -- not the animals but the boyfriends who behaved like dogs, here transformed into actual dogs in a head-spinning allegory that is funny and caustic and utterly unanswerable. (What guy can complain about it, since if they see themselves in it they are damning their own doggy ways?) Truth and better-than-truth (i.e. fiction) merge herebeautifully. Parker nails details of acting school with deadpan hilarity, skewers herself happily, celebrates her children and so much more. You won't find any dissection of her many theatrical triumphs or dishing of backstage dirt. Rather marvelously, "Dear Mr. You" is both disarmingly intimate (I feel like I know her) and a bravura performance that keeps us politely at arm's length with its talent. And isn't that what great acting (and great writing) are often about? This is her first book but surely not her last.
*AURORA* By Kim Stanley Robinson
$26; Orbit
*UPROOTED* By Naomi Novik
$25; Del Rey
Two of the best sci-fi and fantasy books of the year, ideal for fans of either or anyone who doesn't realize yet that they will be fans soon.
A brilliant stand-alone novel from one of our best writers. Kim Stanley Robinson's first bold gambit in this tale about colonizing the stars is to make the narrator an A.I. Early in the novel, we are on a ship that has been traveling for generations towards new worlds where humanity hopes to carve out new homes. In his Mars trilogy, Robinson built drama out of the practical and human challenges of terraforming Mars. Here he ponders the huge obstacles to simply making it intact to a planet light years away. When a key character orders her ship's artificial intelligence to start telling the story of their journey, it's a master stroke. This solves a constant problem in science fiction: since the narrator is an A.I., its exposition of technical info can be explained away easily by a computer's preference for facts over story. We get the hard data and slowly, beautifully, we see the A.I. learn and become a better narrator and eventually -- perhaps -- gain self-awareness. For a while this seems the book's major accomplishment. But then Robinson pushes further and plot twists make this story even more riveting. Fundamentally, it's about our innate need to survive and explore. It's like the end of the film "Gravity" but without the faux overheated drama; here the moment is earned. "Aurora" becomes deeply moving, as well as entertaining and compelling and provoking. In short, everything one expects from Kim Stanley Robinson.
Like most fantasy fans, I'm eagerly awaiting the ninth and final volume in Naomi Novik's wonderful "Temeraire" series that cleverly and smartly imagines what would happen if there were dragons in the Napoleonic Era. But the muse can't be denied. For whatever reason, Novik felt compelled to write this stand-alone tale and it's a wholly satisfying gem. Based in fairy tale, it begins in classic fashion with a corker of an opening line: "Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley." Novik has you immediately and never falters. The novel begins with a ritual: the once-a-decade ceremony when the local wizard (nicknamed the "Dragon") chooses a young maid to take away to his tower, where she serves him in ways the locals can't imagine but spend an awful lot of time trying. From the fate of our heroine Agnieszka to the fate of her valley to the fate of the kingdom and indeed the world, the scope of this story slowly but inexorably expands. So does the magic, whether the highly detailed, scientific magic of the Dragon or the more creative, "instinctive" magic that Agnieszka soon proves adept at. The chapters fly by; in reading it, I kept thinking, "Ok, just one more, just one more" over the two days I gobbled it down. And the medieval world Novik creates is as rooted in reality as her Napoleonic one. But unlike most fantasy, what I remember best is not the world but the vivid and complex characters. In what is ultimately a rather remarkable novel, I realized there were no genuine villains. Oh there was danger and evil aplenty (as symbolized by the malignant Wood that encroaches on Agnieszka's valley); armies clash, people struggle for power and so on. But time and again Novik reveals characters driven not by a black heart but by sincere if sometimes misguided impulses: indeed, nothing is scarier than someone doing great evil for what they consider a higher purpose. The real triumph is at the end where Novik displays the ability to make understanding your enemy just as thrilling as destroying them. I love what Novik has done in the Temeraire series but this is the best single novel she's written. So far.*THIS DIVIDED ISLAND* By Samanth Subramanian
$27.99; Thomas Dunne Books
*ONE NATION, UNDER GODS* By Peter Manseau
$28; Little Brown and Company
Religion -- or the excuse of religion --is at the heart of these two nonfiction books, one a tragic history of Sri Lanka and the other an absorbing history of faith in the United States.
Journalist Samanth Subramanian tackles the longest war of the 20th century. (Perhaps -- sadly it's up for debate depending on how one categorizes various conflicts). But there's no debate that Sri Lanka's deadly internecine turmoil of 30+ years was especially virulent. It dragged on for decades and ended with the slaughter of men, women and children (mostly Tamil) that has been decried as a war crime. Submramanian doesn't dive into an historical background or seem to address the broad sweep of the action. Instead, in what amounts to a travelogue of sorts, he goes to Sri Lanka and talks to anyone who will speak with him -- Tamil and Sinhalese, Buddhist and Hindu and Muslim, the bereft and the triumphant, the clear-eyed and the self-deluded. It's a remarkable, empathetic work of reporting. As an outsider, it's easy for me to say a pox on both houses: the Tamils had legitimate complaints but their rebellion/violence soon devolved into monstrous acts, while the Sinhalese have proven pitiless in victory. But the great gift here is not in just giving all sides a (morally complicated) voice. It's in bringing to life the tangled misery of so many people, from government officials to wives of rebels who still defend the indefensible like child soldiers to orphans and those who may be widowed or orphaned but just don't know. I won't soon forget a haunting passage where the author and others entered one battered area. A woman offhandedly asked him to write down the name and particulars of a missing relative. A villager overheard this and asked them to do the same and soon they were surrounded by desperate people yearning to give the particulars of their missing father/son/mother/daughter/brother/sister/neighbor. Never mind that the author isn't really in a position to help. They just want to be heard. Other vivid moments endure: a stolid mechanic who takes days of patient waiting before opening up, a pair of artificial legs waiting mournfully against a wall for the return of their presumably dead owner and on and on. Looming over it all is the inescapable sense that Sri Lanka's woes are far from over.
Call it "The People's Religious History Of The United States" and you'll capture the vividness and potential impact of "One Nation, Under Gods" by author Peter Manseau. He vividly captures the religious diversity that has defined the United States long before it even was the United States. This book journeys in time from a Muslim slave brought to the continent by the Spanish who ended up a god of sorts (trust me, it's not a happy ending for him) all the way to Barack Obama's inaugural address in which the President formally acknowledged the many faiths that make up our country. In between Manseau has you rethink everything from the Salem witch trials (not so crazy, actually ) to the Great Awakening to that hippie happening where they hoped to levitate the Pentagon. Manseau shows slave owners who initially were vehemently opposed to converting their "property" into Christians become slave owners eager to do so. (The reason for both stances? Money.) From the role of women in seeding new ideas to the role of Jews in the American revolution to the role of Buddhists in WW II (their refusal to assimilate in terms of language and faith made them hugely helpful to the Allied cause), Manseau's book repeatedly casts our common history into a new light. His synthesis of well-established facts with original reporting make this Book One for anyone who wants to be enlightened on the true story of religion in America.
*KILLING AND DYING* By Adrian Tomine
$22.95; Drawn & Quarterly
Adrian Tomine's new collection of short stories is just 121 pages long. But it took me two weeks to read it and longer to think about it and be ready to write something. And of course, he writes comics (or graphic novels, or comix or whatever term is preferred this day) so I could have read it all in an hour. But that wouldn't have done justice to a series of tales that are so sad and lovely and human. First, the entire book published by Drawn & Quarterly is just a pleasure to hold in your hand. It's beautifully designed, from the translucent cover to the haunting image imprinted on the front itself, a picture of a suburban street with its Denny's restaurant and strip malls and cars seemingly frozen in place. It has no people and a Hopper-like aura of loneliness that captures well the tone of the stories within. Each story plays with form in subtle ways. While every story feels of a piece, capturing people struggling to connect or give their life some purpose or explain their inchoate desires and fears; they also are jazz-like in their low-key visual differences. "A Brief History Of The Art Form Known As 'Hortisculpture'" is an homage to comic strips down to the color Sunday edition and has a tale of frustrated creativity anyone in a relationship with a closeted musician/painter/writer/sculpture will identify with. "Translated, from the Japanese" leaves the absence of the characters being talked about while they fly from one city to another wonderfully resonant. "Intruders" and its sketch-like visuals add a noir-ish vibe to the story of a returning soldier trying to find something to moor him to the country he's returned to but can't connect with. The writing is taut and telling but of course it's the combination of writing and visuals that make these short stories and graphic novels in general so unique and powerful. "Go Owls" shows the shock of physical abuse in a relationship in just a few brief panels. The title story "Killing And Dying" surprises us regularly with the journey of a stuttering, insecure daughter looking to stand-up for some confidence while her father undermines and awkwardly supports her at the same time. Yet it's the dad standing by while watching his wife through a window comfort their crying daughter that moved me more than any accusations, failed punchlines or heckles from hostile audiences. It's natural to compare Tomine to other graphic novelists but I kept thinking of William Trevor, an Irish specialist in short stories so heart-wrenchingly sad it could take me months to read any new collection he put out. One of the year's best books. Period.*MISTER MAX: THE BOOK OF KINGS* By Cynthia Voigt
$19.99; Knopf Books For Younger Readers
Perfect for middle grade readers, fans of theatrics, mysteries or anyone who loves a good tale.
Apparently, I need to catch up on my Cynthia Voigt. This excellent conclusion to her Mister Max trilogy has left me a little gobsmacked, if I'm honest. Did she plan the ramping up of the complexity and emotional depth the way it played out? I read all three books within a few weeks so perhaps that helped me appreciate the arc even more. Anyway, I suppose you could read the third book alone, but why would you? It's a trilogy and meant to be read that way. In Book One, Max lives in a quaint sort of turn of the century kingdom with his parents who run a theatrical troupe. Max loves them and the theater but it's not quite his thing. Exactly what his thing will be, this 12 year old boy isn't sure about. His parents are lured to a far-away country to establish a new national theater company and Max is accidentally left behind with his librarian grandmother. They realize the parents have been kidnapped and worry and worry and worry. To maintain his independence, Max becomes sort of a detective, though he insists on calling himself The Solutioneer. (Why the books aren't called The Solutioneer remains a mystery to me.) There's also a girl that annoys Max with all her questions and a boarder in Max's home who has a mysterious past and other dangling threads. So there's the set up. At first, Max solves rather mundane or obvious problems like finding a lost dog. In Book Two, however, Voigt takes a quantum leap forward: Max is now solving problems of the human heart and showing a great deal of insight. In Book Three, Max and his friends head off to rescue the boy's parents. The final volume is especially good, with complex passages depicting that awkward moment when a child sees their parents as people, flaws and all, rather than "parents," not to mention some completely earned but still bravura changes that make clear the pattern Voigt was creating from the very start. Read Book One alone and -- like me -- you might consider it a pleasant diversion, with so-so mysteries but appealing characters. Book Two is much better and Book Three deepens the entire work. It's like a magic trick the way she suddenly reveals the life Max was intended for all along.*1944* By Jay Winik
$35; Simon & Schuster
*THE BOOK OF ARON*By Jim Shepard
$23.95; Knopf
*SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD* By M.T. Anderson
$25.99; Candlewick
World War II is apparently an endless source of fascinating stories; we certainly won't run out of fresh approaches to that monumental event in our lifetime. Fans of history, great fiction and classical music will all be delighted by the following.
The title of Jay Winik's new work of history is a feint. While the book pivots on the year 1944, it's not really about that penultimate year of World War II, not really. Winik has a more devastating focus than that. Many books have been written about WW II. Many more about the Holocaust. But few if any have told both stories in parallel to such dramatic and awful effect. Because of course they're not two stories; they are inextricably intertwined. So we have here Winik's assured overview of world war, deft portraits of FDR and Churchill and Stalin and Eisenhower and Hitler, battle plans, political machinations, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the building of the atomic bomb, the imprisonment of Americans for the crime of being Japanese (while Americans of Italian and German descent remained unmolested) -- all in compelling detail and with a clear sense of how events seemed at the time. But again and again and again, Winik keeps alive the Holocaust. He shows what was happening, the build up of the death camps, the trickle of information and witnessing that turned into a flood and alongside that the moral failure of the free world. When tens of thousands of Jewish children might be rescued, excuses pour out. When tens of thousands of European children might be rescued, not a moment is lost. When prison camps can be bombed and war prisoners freed, no daring is too great. When death camps are bombed, it is only by accident because the bombs are meant for factories a few miles away. The US is not alone (though Churchill is the first to awake to the moral demands of this crime against humanity). Still, from 1942 on, we see a feckless State Department, foot-dragging bureaucrats and the tin-eared indifference of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who is given countless opportunities to act and fails to grasp them. The book is too nuanced to simply make a blistering case against FDR: his health was poor, the demands of war seemingly all consuming, etc. But no one can read this book and not agree with Winik that a great opportunity was lost. Lincoln transformed the Civil War into a war for freedom and against slavery. FDR might have made WWII about more than just winning; he night have transformed it into a war to defeat the Holocaust and similar crimes against humanity. Winik sees the decades since and their repeated timid failings in the face of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda and elsewhere as the awful fruits of 1944, fruits that make the victory the West achieved a little more hollow.
It's funny! Yes, "The Book Of Aron" is a story about a little boy who becomes a scavenger in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Yes, it's bleak and awful as we see his world slowly close in, the walls go up, the family members die off or disappear. But in his saddest, sharpest novel yet, author Jim Shepard captures the vein of black humor that runs through the despair of the Jewish people. The bickering of a husband and wife, the kvetching of the neighbors, the bleak wisdom of kids -- it's all here, all musical in the dialogue you can't help but speak out loud, all captivating and alive even as they slowly starve to death. Aron is, I suppose, a survivor, a boy who just tries to stay one step ahead of fate. (Good luck with that.) Morality doesn't come into it, but he steals and scavenges and helps feed his family and gets by. Aron is almost deliriously unaware of any other way of existing; everyone is always saying "Aron only looks out for himself" but Shepard shows this boy in all his humanity, a kid wondering exactly what he was supposed to do when pushed by everyone into talking with the local collaborators or when he has a gun held to his head and is told to do this or that or the other. He had a choice? Shepard's tale is bristling with tragic details -- Aron is always crying, it seems -- but it's a joy to read. One of the Warsaw Ghetto's tragic figures -- the child advocate Janusz Korczak -- figures prominently and beautifully, but like everyone else he is fully complex and contradictory and alive. The tale builds and builds but this isn't a story about what happens to Aron. It's richer, more satisfying than that. You'll read it quickly and then want to read it again. Unforgettable.
No serious reader I know cares about genre: is it mystery, sci-fi, romance, literary fiction, graphic novel, young adult, a chapter book, a biography, a history, poetry, play? Who cares? Is it good? That's all that matters. The foolishness of labels has never been more apparent than in the astonishing career of M.T. Anderson, who has produced a string of sophisticated, witty works under the label of "young adult." That term has covered his dystopian sci-fi, horror, contemporary teen, historical fiction and now this work of biography. Since "young adult" also encompasses the masterpiece "Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn," as complex and involving a work as there is, he should happily embrace it. Essentially, "young adult" means there is (probably) a young adult at the heart of the story. And yet, "young adult" indicates one initial audience for this work and that may explain why it's so particularly good. Anderson has wowed with "Feed" and his landmark two volume work "The Astonishing Life Of Octavio Nothing," fiction that captures the Revolutionary Era, shines a fresh light on the horrors of slavery and presents our nation's founding from a novel perspective. It's intensely detailed and utterly convincing. So now we have a work of nonfiction about composer Dimitri Shostakovich and how he created his Seventh Symphony during the Siege of Leningrad. It's a delight; no surprise since Anderson has evinced an enthusiasm for music almost as joyful as Shostakovich's love of soccer. What makes this book so good is that Anderson doesn't simplify the tale for its presumed audience. But he does clarify the story in an elegant manner that any historian or biographer should envy. With seeming ease, Anderson tells of Shostakovich's life, the unceasing terror of Stalin's reign, the invasion by Germany, the horrors of the siege, cannibalism, despair and the role of music and why it mattered so much. He also deftly captures the moral complexity of Shostakovich's life, surrounded as he was by friends and family who were murdered by the state or turned against him to protect themselves or depended on him for their survival. A children's book? Hardly. And definitely. This isn't dumbed down history. Indeed, more traditional doorstops about history might now seem clogged up, overstuffed as they are with unnecessary dates and detail when Anderson -- with a vivid image and pointed sentence -- can make his case with directness and verve. It leaves you with one exciting question: what will Anderson do next?Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of BookFilter, a book lover's best friend. Head to BookFilter if you want to find more great picks like this.
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Gaylord Rockies Hotel in Aurora closes on $500 million loan
Marriott International and Rida Development Corp. said Monday they had closed on a previously announced $500 million construction loan for the 1,500-room Gaylord Rockies Resort and Conference
Reported by Denver Post 2 days ago.
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Developer of Aurora's Gaylord hotel signs $530M construction contract
The developer of Aurora’s Gaylord Rockies hotel signed a $530 million construction contract Monday with Mortenson Construction and Welbro Building Corp. to begin vertical construction on the long-anticipated project. Rida Development Corp. and property manager Marriott International Inc. (Nasdaq: MAR) announced the contract on the same day that they closed on a $500 million construction loan that they had first announced in October. The deals will clear the way for substantial work on the $824…
Reported by bizjournals 1 day ago.
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This is the bright spot in the commodity sector
Reuters/Ivan AlvaradoI reported last week that technology stalwart Tesla is looking at getting into the mining business. And this week we got a lot more interest in the same commodity the electric car maker is pursuing.
Lithium.
A number of big players this week said they are looking to focus on the lithium mining space. Including world-leading miner Rio Tinto, which noted it is looking at making its first moves into the minor metal.
The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday quoted Rio Tinto’s head of Diamonds and Minerals, Alan Davies, as saying that the miner is looking to jumpstart production through its Jadar lithium project in Serbia.
“Lithium carbonate would be new for us, but the world will need a lot more lithium in the future for electric cars,” Davies said.
Davis also noted that Rio Tinto would look to develop lithium as a “strategic partner either with a car manufacturer or a battery manufacturer.” Further suggesting that end users of lithium like Tesla are going to be a major force in driving funding and development in this sector.
Lithium has also caught the attention of another big player in the global mining sector: the government of Chile. With officials there being quoted in local press Wednesday as saying they will look to focus on this metal as copper prices fall.
Chile’s Minister of Mining, Aurora Williams, said that metals like lithium and gold will become increasingly important to Chile’s mining sector. Suggesting that the government may throw support behind this sector to aid Chile’s economic development during the current mining downturn.
That would be an important development for the global minerals sector. Potentially setting up lithium as one of the few “bright spots” for sentiment, funding, and project work in the mining industry today.
Watch for more deals being announced in Chile and beyond.
NOW WATCH: A hair surgeon explains what's going on with Trump's hair Reported by Business Insider 1 day ago.
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Aurora Council approves financing for East Sixth Avenue extension
AURORA — The Aurora City Council on Monday night approved financing for the long-awaited extension of East Sixth Avenue to connect it to E-470.
Reported by Denver Post 1 day ago.
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Aussie photographer catches incredible shots of the southern lights
If you've only heard about the northern lights, get ready to meet a more stunning cousin.
Photographer Lachlan Manley has captured these stunning photographs in Queenscliff, south of Melbourne in Australia. These are of the southern lights, a.k.a. the aurora australis, which were captured on Sunday night.
See also: Elon Musk: SpaceX rocket landing brings us closer to a city on Mars
Image: LACHLAN MANLEY
The natural light display of the southern lights is the result of charged particles from the sun getting caught in the earth's magnetic fields, which creates an array of colour when it hits gases at high speed in the Earth's atmosphere. Read more...
More about Photography, Australia, Watercooler, and Pics Reported by Mashable 1 day ago.
Photographer Lachlan Manley has captured these stunning photographs in Queenscliff, south of Melbourne in Australia. These are of the southern lights, a.k.a. the aurora australis, which were captured on Sunday night.
See also: Elon Musk: SpaceX rocket landing brings us closer to a city on Mars
Image: LACHLAN MANLEY
The natural light display of the southern lights is the result of charged particles from the sun getting caught in the earth's magnetic fields, which creates an array of colour when it hits gases at high speed in the Earth's atmosphere. Read more...
More about Photography, Australia, Watercooler, and Pics Reported by Mashable 1 day ago.
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Man dies in officer-involved shooting in Denver
A man was shot and killed and an Aurora police officer was injured at a Denver convenience store early Tuesday morning, authorities say.
Reported by Denver Post 20 hours ago.
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Children's Hospital Colorado Receives Highest Nursing Credential with Prestigious Magnet® Recognition for the Third Time
AURORA, Colo., Dec. 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Children's Hospital Colorado (Children's Colorado) has once again received recognition for excellence in nursing by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's (ANCC) Magnet Recognition Program®. This credential recognizes continuing...
Reported by PR Newswire 18 hours ago.
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Washington regulators allow limited 'Ride the Ducks' restart
(AP) — A Seattle tour company involved in a deadly crash in September must gain approval of a safety plan by the end of next month or else risk being put out of business, but in the meantime, Ride the Ducks of Seattle will be allowed to resume operating a limited fleet of its amphibious vehicles. "Truck Duck" vehicles have a different manufacturer, chassis and axle system than the "stretch duck" vehicle involved in the Sept. 24 accident in which five international college students were killed when the repurposed military "duck boat" swerved into an oncoming charter bus on the Aurora Bridge, a six-lane span with no median barrier. Ride the Ducks of Seattle owner Brian Tracey told the commission that he doesn't have a timeframe on when the 10 vehicles could be on the road, saying that drivers will need to be retrained and he wants to "make sure everything we're doing is perfectly buttoned down before we're up and running again." Others were more serious, including failures to conduct random alcohol testing of drivers, drivers violating limits on how many hours they can work on consecutive days, and one driver's failure to have an updated medical examiner's certificate.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 18 hours ago.
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Lazydays Launches Major Equestrian Market Initiative
Project includes new trailers, horse event sponsorships and specialized sales staff
Tampa, Florida (PRWEB) December 22, 2015
Lazydays, the RV Authority and world’s largest RV dealership, is launching a company-wide initiative that focuses on the equestrian market and the community of customers who live, work and play in the world of horses and horse competitions.
Going beyond Lazydays’ extensive legacy in RVs for vacationing, this new project includes a major sponsorship of equestrian events, a team of equestrian-focused sales and service staff, plus a broad new lineup of horse trailers, such “Living Quarters” trailers that accommodate both horses and people while they’re on the road. This December 28th, Lazydays will have some of the market’s most luxurious Living Quarters trailers on display at a major horse competition at the Florida State Fairgrounds.
“We see huge opportunity to provide a new generation of horse trailers to a community of customers often overlooked by other RV dealers,” said Lazydays General Manager Ron Fleming. “Often, equestrian families travel for weeks or months at a time to compete at shows for horse jumping, dressage and other events. We want to be their partner and help them succeed.”
For instance, Lazydays is reaching out to equestrian experts such as Caroline Rider of Ocala, Fla., who runs Rider Horsemanship, a nationally known horse training and rider coaching operation.
“Ocala is one of the world’s leading equestrian locations,” said Rider, who often manages a dozen horses, including her two main training horses Sundance and Smoky. “The New England area is a large audience for me, and I’d love to have an RV to travel with me and my horses. Instead of staying at a hotel somewhere, I could live two months a year, right near where my horses are staying.”
Since its founding in 1976, Lazydays has grown to become the world’s leading RV dealer. The Tampa campus already offers more than 1,400 RVs on site, with the nation’s largest selection of RV brands. The RV service center, also the nation’s largest, is adding staff and equipment to customize and service horse trailers and RVs.
Florida has several national hubs of equestrian activity, Rider said, meaning a largely untapped market sits in the backyard of Lazydays in Tampa. Besides Ocala, Florida is home to the major horse-breeding, training and racing markets.
“For me, I promote unity with your horses, and the behavior and psychology, as well as the performance,” Rider said. “So it’s key to have a good, safe and comfortable way to transport your horses. There’s an extensive equestrian community across the country that cares deeply for their horses. There are breeders, clinicians, trainers, racers and those who travel throughout the year to horse shows and want to stay with their horses, and they’re willing to invest in the equipment they need.”
More than just new products, Lazydays is launching a broader equestrian initiative company-wide that includes:· A major sponsorship of the Florida State Fairgrounds, with Lazydays staff and trailers on site for dozens of equestrian events each year.
· A specialized team of sales and service staff who focus on the equestrian market and who know the special features required by horse owners and riders. For instance, English and Western-style horses are different sizes – requiring different needs on the road.
· Offering the full lineup of Featherlite trailers, complete with the widest selection of trailers for equestrian, livestock and racing lifestyles.
· New outreach to Florida communities rich in horse culture and heritage, including Tampa, Ocala, Wellington, Naples, Sarasota and Miami.
“We have an enormous variety in our lineup, and this is all about filling the needs of all kinds of customers,” said Featherlite National Sales Manager Justin Queensland. “That could be just a place to carry a horse, or a luxury living quarters trailer for someone who is running a rodeo series and they live for eight months a year on the road.”
The front half of the Featherlite “Villa” luxury horse trailer, for example, is built out as a luxury living home for horse owners, with maple cabinetry, copper sinks and Western “Concho” style lighting.
For horses in the back, there is a large tack area with electric saddle rack, LED lighting and extra-durable spray-on floor lining. In all, there’s room for four horses, or three horses and a golf cart.
To reach more equestrian customers, Lazydays is sponsoring events across the Florida State Fairgrounds.
“We have scores of shows and competitions each year, many of which draw a thousand or more riders for regional and national competitions,” said Jim Coones, director of the equestrian complex at the Florida State Fairgrounds. “Support from Lazydays helps us stage successful shows and helps match up horse owners with the equipment they need, when they need it.”
Lazydays will have some of the most luxurious Featherlite Living Quarters trailers on display amid the December 28-31 “Florida Gold Coast Quarter Horse Circuit” event at the Florida Fairgrounds, an event that’s likely to attract 1,150 or more riders.
“For many people, RVs and trailers such as these are part of their daily life, and horses really become part of the family,” Fleming said. “We’re thrilled with the response we’ve already received from the equestrian community. Seeking out new markets like these is a major goal of Lazydays, and this is another example of how Lazydays is leading the RV industry.”
ABOUT LAZYDAYS
Lazydays®, founded in 1976, is the world’s largest RV dealership. Based on 126 acres outside Tampa, FL since 1996, Lazydays also has a dealership located in Tucson, AZ as well as the recent addition of three dealerships located in Johnstown, Aurora and Longmont, CO. Lazydays has the largest selection of RV brands in the nation featuring more than 1,700 new and pre-owned RVs, nearly 300 service bays, three accessories and parts stores and two on-site campgrounds with over 700 RV campsites. Lazydays has built its reputation on providing an outstanding customer experience with exceptional service and product expertise, and as a place to rest and recharge with other RVers. More than a quarter million RVers and their families visit Lazydays every year, making it “their home away from home.” Lazydays has been recognized as a “Top 50 RV Dealer” by RV Business and as one of Tampa Bay’s “Top Work Places.” The Lazydays Employee Foundation, supported by payroll contributions from more than 60% of Lazydays’ employees, has contributed more than one million dollars to make many historic changes for at-risk children in the Tampa Bay and Tucson communities. For most people, Lazydays isn't just the beginning of their journey; it's very much a part of their ride. To learn more, visit http://www.lazydays.com.
About Featherlite
Featherlite Trailers, America’s original aluminum trailer brand, is the nation’s leading aluminum specialty trailer manufacturer. Featherlite has highly diversified product lines offering horse, livestock, car, utility and recreational trailers. Featherlite is part of the Universal Trailer Corporation’s “Family of Brands.” For more information on Featherlite trailers, please visit their website at http://www.fthr.com.
### Reported by PRWeb 16 hours ago.
Tampa, Florida (PRWEB) December 22, 2015
Lazydays, the RV Authority and world’s largest RV dealership, is launching a company-wide initiative that focuses on the equestrian market and the community of customers who live, work and play in the world of horses and horse competitions.
Going beyond Lazydays’ extensive legacy in RVs for vacationing, this new project includes a major sponsorship of equestrian events, a team of equestrian-focused sales and service staff, plus a broad new lineup of horse trailers, such “Living Quarters” trailers that accommodate both horses and people while they’re on the road. This December 28th, Lazydays will have some of the market’s most luxurious Living Quarters trailers on display at a major horse competition at the Florida State Fairgrounds.
“We see huge opportunity to provide a new generation of horse trailers to a community of customers often overlooked by other RV dealers,” said Lazydays General Manager Ron Fleming. “Often, equestrian families travel for weeks or months at a time to compete at shows for horse jumping, dressage and other events. We want to be their partner and help them succeed.”
For instance, Lazydays is reaching out to equestrian experts such as Caroline Rider of Ocala, Fla., who runs Rider Horsemanship, a nationally known horse training and rider coaching operation.
“Ocala is one of the world’s leading equestrian locations,” said Rider, who often manages a dozen horses, including her two main training horses Sundance and Smoky. “The New England area is a large audience for me, and I’d love to have an RV to travel with me and my horses. Instead of staying at a hotel somewhere, I could live two months a year, right near where my horses are staying.”
Since its founding in 1976, Lazydays has grown to become the world’s leading RV dealer. The Tampa campus already offers more than 1,400 RVs on site, with the nation’s largest selection of RV brands. The RV service center, also the nation’s largest, is adding staff and equipment to customize and service horse trailers and RVs.
Florida has several national hubs of equestrian activity, Rider said, meaning a largely untapped market sits in the backyard of Lazydays in Tampa. Besides Ocala, Florida is home to the major horse-breeding, training and racing markets.
“For me, I promote unity with your horses, and the behavior and psychology, as well as the performance,” Rider said. “So it’s key to have a good, safe and comfortable way to transport your horses. There’s an extensive equestrian community across the country that cares deeply for their horses. There are breeders, clinicians, trainers, racers and those who travel throughout the year to horse shows and want to stay with their horses, and they’re willing to invest in the equipment they need.”
More than just new products, Lazydays is launching a broader equestrian initiative company-wide that includes:· A major sponsorship of the Florida State Fairgrounds, with Lazydays staff and trailers on site for dozens of equestrian events each year.
· A specialized team of sales and service staff who focus on the equestrian market and who know the special features required by horse owners and riders. For instance, English and Western-style horses are different sizes – requiring different needs on the road.
· Offering the full lineup of Featherlite trailers, complete with the widest selection of trailers for equestrian, livestock and racing lifestyles.
· New outreach to Florida communities rich in horse culture and heritage, including Tampa, Ocala, Wellington, Naples, Sarasota and Miami.
“We have an enormous variety in our lineup, and this is all about filling the needs of all kinds of customers,” said Featherlite National Sales Manager Justin Queensland. “That could be just a place to carry a horse, or a luxury living quarters trailer for someone who is running a rodeo series and they live for eight months a year on the road.”
The front half of the Featherlite “Villa” luxury horse trailer, for example, is built out as a luxury living home for horse owners, with maple cabinetry, copper sinks and Western “Concho” style lighting.
For horses in the back, there is a large tack area with electric saddle rack, LED lighting and extra-durable spray-on floor lining. In all, there’s room for four horses, or three horses and a golf cart.
To reach more equestrian customers, Lazydays is sponsoring events across the Florida State Fairgrounds.
“We have scores of shows and competitions each year, many of which draw a thousand or more riders for regional and national competitions,” said Jim Coones, director of the equestrian complex at the Florida State Fairgrounds. “Support from Lazydays helps us stage successful shows and helps match up horse owners with the equipment they need, when they need it.”
Lazydays will have some of the most luxurious Featherlite Living Quarters trailers on display amid the December 28-31 “Florida Gold Coast Quarter Horse Circuit” event at the Florida Fairgrounds, an event that’s likely to attract 1,150 or more riders.
“For many people, RVs and trailers such as these are part of their daily life, and horses really become part of the family,” Fleming said. “We’re thrilled with the response we’ve already received from the equestrian community. Seeking out new markets like these is a major goal of Lazydays, and this is another example of how Lazydays is leading the RV industry.”
ABOUT LAZYDAYS
Lazydays®, founded in 1976, is the world’s largest RV dealership. Based on 126 acres outside Tampa, FL since 1996, Lazydays also has a dealership located in Tucson, AZ as well as the recent addition of three dealerships located in Johnstown, Aurora and Longmont, CO. Lazydays has the largest selection of RV brands in the nation featuring more than 1,700 new and pre-owned RVs, nearly 300 service bays, three accessories and parts stores and two on-site campgrounds with over 700 RV campsites. Lazydays has built its reputation on providing an outstanding customer experience with exceptional service and product expertise, and as a place to rest and recharge with other RVers. More than a quarter million RVers and their families visit Lazydays every year, making it “their home away from home.” Lazydays has been recognized as a “Top 50 RV Dealer” by RV Business and as one of Tampa Bay’s “Top Work Places.” The Lazydays Employee Foundation, supported by payroll contributions from more than 60% of Lazydays’ employees, has contributed more than one million dollars to make many historic changes for at-risk children in the Tampa Bay and Tucson communities. For most people, Lazydays isn't just the beginning of their journey; it's very much a part of their ride. To learn more, visit http://www.lazydays.com.
About Featherlite
Featherlite Trailers, America’s original aluminum trailer brand, is the nation’s leading aluminum specialty trailer manufacturer. Featherlite has highly diversified product lines offering horse, livestock, car, utility and recreational trailers. Featherlite is part of the Universal Trailer Corporation’s “Family of Brands.” For more information on Featherlite trailers, please visit their website at http://www.fthr.com.
### Reported by PRWeb 16 hours ago.
↧
Aurora police: Shooting leaves 1 wounded Tuesday morning
One person was wounded Tuesday morning in an Aurora shooting, police say.The shooting was reported about 11 a.
Reported by Denver Post 15 hours ago.
↧
Forget Terrorists; Guns are Terrorizing America
Patrick Sherrill was unaware, as he killed 14 of his co-workers, that he was entering the lexicon. On August 20th, 1980, he walked into the Edmond, Oklahoma, branch of the United States Postal Service where he had been employed as a reserve driver for little over a year. He began by shooting his supervisor, Richard Esser Jr, who had reprimanded him the day before. He then looked for Bill Bland, the other supervisor who had taken him aside, but Bland had overslept and hadn't made it to work yet. Undeterred, Sherrill found other victims. Within fifteen minutes he had finished his murderous spree and put a bullet through his own forehead. He had, as common parlance would record, 'gone postal'.
Sherrill was not the first disgruntled employee to shoot up a post-office. That honour goes to Floyd Davidson who, in 1975, killed the Postmaster and postal tour superintendent in Gadsden, Alabama. It was Sherrill's attack however that was the tipping point; launching an eleven-year spate of killings that saw more than 40 people killed in over 20 separate incidents in US post offices.
It appeared, at first glance, that the recent San Bernardino shooting was of this mould. While the Inland Regional Centre is not affiliated with the Post Office, it is a government funded NGO, thus operating in the public sphere. Syed Rizwan Farook, who perpetrated the shooting with his wife Tashfeen Malik, was an environmental health specialist who had worked for the San Bernardino Department of Public Health for five years prior to the shooting. He sat patiently during an event in the banquet room, quickly leaving before a group photo. He returned with his wife, his face hidden behind a balaclava and brandishing an AR15 assault rifle. The pair fatally shot 14 people, seriously injuring another 22.
"Just another day in the United States of America" was how BBC News correspondent James Cook introduced the footage of bodies being wheeled out from the Inland Regional Centre. It was this tone of intense resignation that initially met the shooting-the second worst that California has ever seen, and the most deadly in the US since Sandy Hook in 2012. It seemed to be yet another mass shooting with yet another weak justification; mental illness or a workplace grievance-discrete gasoline set aflame by the flint-click of too easily available guns.
Geraldo Riviera of Fox News tweeted as the news broke that "the key now is for us to be as outraged by San Bernardino massacre as we would be if Muslim extremists were doing the killing. This is terror." This somewhat unfortunate tweet was quickly rendered obsolete as ties emerged between the attackers and ISIS. Moments before the shooting Tashfeen Malik posted ""We pledge allegiance to Khalifa bu bkr al bhaghdadi al quraishi" onto her Facebook page, which analysts at the FBI have argued is a reference to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; the self-proclaimed Caliph of the Islamic State. What had initially appeared to be a tragically run of the mill mass shooting now appeared to be a calculated terrorist attack with links to ISIS. This matters because what was briefly regarded as an outbreak of this uniquely American disease has been portrayed instead as the first shudders of an international plague.
It is still unclear the extent to which San Bernardino really is a terrorist attack in the traditional sense. Terrorism is commonly held to be politically motivated violence. Despite assertions that both Farook and Malik had radicalised separately before marrying and a few messages on social media indicating a desire to commit Jihad, the evidence is somewhat thin as to the true motives of the attacks, or the politics of the attackers.
There is, for instance, scant relevance of the Inland Regional Centre, a niche organisation in a town of little significance, to the wider political aims Farook and Malik may have been trying to expound. Moreover any concrete links to ISIS, aside from self-published associations made by the shooters on social media, are yet to be made. It appears that the shooters received no funding from an external organisation nor is there evidence that Farook or Malik gained any particular training overseas in preparation for the attack. Obama was cagey in his address to the nation saying, "It is possible that this was terrorist related, but we don't know. It's also possible that this was workplace related."
If the Inland Regional Centre seems odd for a terrorist attack, contrast it to the Colorado Spring's shooting at Planned Parenthood just days before. Robert Lewis Dear, the shooter who killed a police officer and two civilians, called himself "a warrior for the babies" in court. It was inevitable that, in the ever-churning washing machine of the news cycle, San Bernardino, with its higher death count and links to ISIS, would wash the Planned Parenthood shooting off screens. However the Planned Parenthood shooting is a much more clear-cut example of domestic terrorism than San Bernardino; the location was clearly symbolic and calculated to send a political message-in this instance unironically advocating pro-life policies by way of mass murder.
Mass shootings can be a tactic employed by terrorists, but not all mass shootings are terrorism. In the case of the recent Paris attacks or the Mumbai attacks in 2009 mass shootings were carried out by extremely well trained and organised groups of terrorists, who fanned out through their respective cities to maximise the bloodshed and spread thin the capability of emergency responders and police. The US has never seen such an attack, despite guns being far more prevalent. The closest the US came to seeing such an attack before San Bernardino was the Fort Hood shooting in 2009, though once again this was committed at the shooter's work place, blurring the lines between workplace violence and clear-cut terrorism.
However this hasn't prevented politicians from hijacking the narrative around San Bernardino to advocate for policies that are xenophobic and anti-Muslim. At the most extreme end of the spectrum Donald Trump, who comfortably leads polls for the Republican nomination, called for a "total and complete shutdown" of the country's borders to Muslims in the wake of the shooting, until an unspecified date in the future when "we are able to determine and understand this problem." The proposed ban would include Muslim Americans who happened to be out of the country at the time it was imposed. Despite the comment garnering bi-partisan condemnation and outrage from the media, the fallout from the shooting has seen a shattering increase of hate-crimes against Muslims. There have been up to three-dozen or more serious threats or actual attacks, including a pig's head being thrown at a mosque in Philadelphia and a mosque being set on fire in Coachella, California .
The association of San Bernardino with Islamic extremism has masked the bigger issue at hand. Mass shootings are terrorising the American populace, but they are not terrorism in a definitional sense. Adam Lanza, while deranged, had no political project. Eric Harris, the psychopath behind the Columbine shooting, had no grand vision beyond his own grandeur. Elliot Rodger, who shot three girls standing outside of a sorority house at UCSB in Isla Vista, had no ideology other than gaining retribution against women for rejecting his sexual advances.
Terrorism has a logic-a narrative arc that while unpalatable can be digested and shown to lack sustenance. It can be fought, not just physically, but on a normative level. There is no such recourse for the post-modern horror of mass shootings. Since 9/11 America has seen 42 people killed domestically in Jihadist terror attacks . So far in 2015 alone 457 people have died in mass shootings . America's gravest danger is not terrorism. The two largest domestic terrorist attacks since 9/11 have both been shootings that took place where the shooter was employed. Of the 42 killed in Jihadist terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11 39 have been shot. To point the finger at ISIS and Islamic Fundamentalism is a diversionary tactic; much like banning people from wearing Batman costumes to the cinema after the Aurora shooting. Whether terrorism, the banality of people 'going postal' or those enacting their psychotic fantasies on innocents in the lunchroom, the scarlet thread that binds them is access to guns.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 12 hours ago.
Sherrill was not the first disgruntled employee to shoot up a post-office. That honour goes to Floyd Davidson who, in 1975, killed the Postmaster and postal tour superintendent in Gadsden, Alabama. It was Sherrill's attack however that was the tipping point; launching an eleven-year spate of killings that saw more than 40 people killed in over 20 separate incidents in US post offices.
It appeared, at first glance, that the recent San Bernardino shooting was of this mould. While the Inland Regional Centre is not affiliated with the Post Office, it is a government funded NGO, thus operating in the public sphere. Syed Rizwan Farook, who perpetrated the shooting with his wife Tashfeen Malik, was an environmental health specialist who had worked for the San Bernardino Department of Public Health for five years prior to the shooting. He sat patiently during an event in the banquet room, quickly leaving before a group photo. He returned with his wife, his face hidden behind a balaclava and brandishing an AR15 assault rifle. The pair fatally shot 14 people, seriously injuring another 22.
"Just another day in the United States of America" was how BBC News correspondent James Cook introduced the footage of bodies being wheeled out from the Inland Regional Centre. It was this tone of intense resignation that initially met the shooting-the second worst that California has ever seen, and the most deadly in the US since Sandy Hook in 2012. It seemed to be yet another mass shooting with yet another weak justification; mental illness or a workplace grievance-discrete gasoline set aflame by the flint-click of too easily available guns.
Geraldo Riviera of Fox News tweeted as the news broke that "the key now is for us to be as outraged by San Bernardino massacre as we would be if Muslim extremists were doing the killing. This is terror." This somewhat unfortunate tweet was quickly rendered obsolete as ties emerged between the attackers and ISIS. Moments before the shooting Tashfeen Malik posted ""We pledge allegiance to Khalifa bu bkr al bhaghdadi al quraishi" onto her Facebook page, which analysts at the FBI have argued is a reference to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; the self-proclaimed Caliph of the Islamic State. What had initially appeared to be a tragically run of the mill mass shooting now appeared to be a calculated terrorist attack with links to ISIS. This matters because what was briefly regarded as an outbreak of this uniquely American disease has been portrayed instead as the first shudders of an international plague.
It is still unclear the extent to which San Bernardino really is a terrorist attack in the traditional sense. Terrorism is commonly held to be politically motivated violence. Despite assertions that both Farook and Malik had radicalised separately before marrying and a few messages on social media indicating a desire to commit Jihad, the evidence is somewhat thin as to the true motives of the attacks, or the politics of the attackers.
There is, for instance, scant relevance of the Inland Regional Centre, a niche organisation in a town of little significance, to the wider political aims Farook and Malik may have been trying to expound. Moreover any concrete links to ISIS, aside from self-published associations made by the shooters on social media, are yet to be made. It appears that the shooters received no funding from an external organisation nor is there evidence that Farook or Malik gained any particular training overseas in preparation for the attack. Obama was cagey in his address to the nation saying, "It is possible that this was terrorist related, but we don't know. It's also possible that this was workplace related."
If the Inland Regional Centre seems odd for a terrorist attack, contrast it to the Colorado Spring's shooting at Planned Parenthood just days before. Robert Lewis Dear, the shooter who killed a police officer and two civilians, called himself "a warrior for the babies" in court. It was inevitable that, in the ever-churning washing machine of the news cycle, San Bernardino, with its higher death count and links to ISIS, would wash the Planned Parenthood shooting off screens. However the Planned Parenthood shooting is a much more clear-cut example of domestic terrorism than San Bernardino; the location was clearly symbolic and calculated to send a political message-in this instance unironically advocating pro-life policies by way of mass murder.
Mass shootings can be a tactic employed by terrorists, but not all mass shootings are terrorism. In the case of the recent Paris attacks or the Mumbai attacks in 2009 mass shootings were carried out by extremely well trained and organised groups of terrorists, who fanned out through their respective cities to maximise the bloodshed and spread thin the capability of emergency responders and police. The US has never seen such an attack, despite guns being far more prevalent. The closest the US came to seeing such an attack before San Bernardino was the Fort Hood shooting in 2009, though once again this was committed at the shooter's work place, blurring the lines between workplace violence and clear-cut terrorism.
However this hasn't prevented politicians from hijacking the narrative around San Bernardino to advocate for policies that are xenophobic and anti-Muslim. At the most extreme end of the spectrum Donald Trump, who comfortably leads polls for the Republican nomination, called for a "total and complete shutdown" of the country's borders to Muslims in the wake of the shooting, until an unspecified date in the future when "we are able to determine and understand this problem." The proposed ban would include Muslim Americans who happened to be out of the country at the time it was imposed. Despite the comment garnering bi-partisan condemnation and outrage from the media, the fallout from the shooting has seen a shattering increase of hate-crimes against Muslims. There have been up to three-dozen or more serious threats or actual attacks, including a pig's head being thrown at a mosque in Philadelphia and a mosque being set on fire in Coachella, California .
The association of San Bernardino with Islamic extremism has masked the bigger issue at hand. Mass shootings are terrorising the American populace, but they are not terrorism in a definitional sense. Adam Lanza, while deranged, had no political project. Eric Harris, the psychopath behind the Columbine shooting, had no grand vision beyond his own grandeur. Elliot Rodger, who shot three girls standing outside of a sorority house at UCSB in Isla Vista, had no ideology other than gaining retribution against women for rejecting his sexual advances.
Terrorism has a logic-a narrative arc that while unpalatable can be digested and shown to lack sustenance. It can be fought, not just physically, but on a normative level. There is no such recourse for the post-modern horror of mass shootings. Since 9/11 America has seen 42 people killed domestically in Jihadist terror attacks . So far in 2015 alone 457 people have died in mass shootings . America's gravest danger is not terrorism. The two largest domestic terrorist attacks since 9/11 have both been shootings that took place where the shooter was employed. Of the 42 killed in Jihadist terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11 39 have been shot. To point the finger at ISIS and Islamic Fundamentalism is a diversionary tactic; much like banning people from wearing Batman costumes to the cinema after the Aurora shooting. Whether terrorism, the banality of people 'going postal' or those enacting their psychotic fantasies on innocents in the lunchroom, the scarlet thread that binds them is access to guns.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 12 hours ago.
↧
↧
Alleged threats made against Denver, Aurora police Tuesday night
Alleged threats made toward police officers prompted a safety bulletin sent to Denver and Aurora cops on Tuesday night, officials said.
Reported by Denver Post 4 hours ago.
↧
RE/MAX Realtor Lenny Maiocco Launches Video-Focused Website
Broker Lenny Maiocco, of The Maiocco Group at RE/MAX Alliance on Walnut, recently launched a revamped website integrating professionally produced videos to virtually show listings, city profiles, neighborhoods, preferred services and more.
Boulder, CO (PRWEB) December 23, 2015
“It’s pretty cutting-edge and all professionally produced in a studio,” said Maiocco. “There hasn’t been anything like it before in this area for this industry.”
In the videos, Maiocco discusses properties for sale or lease and their amenities over the backdrop of a slideshow about the property and immediate surroundings being featured. He had the idea to do videos for ten years, and it has been a work in progress for the past three months. The videos are informative, fun and interesting.
“It’s a great marketing tool that can be pushed on every social media platform: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, blogs, etc.,” said Maiocco. “The videos are quick and to the point, and I work with Denver-based Uli Productions to make them look slick and professional.”
The goal of the videos is to reach potential clients and give them an idea of how Maiocco does business and how he can help them achieve their goals; whether it’s selling or buying a home or investment property. It enables Maiocco to give homebuyers the best information about a property, while keeping him at the forefront of technology.
“My client demographic ranges from millennials to baby-boomers, so this allows them to thoroughly view a listing or neighborhood prior to scheduling an onsite appointment,” said Maiocco. “Video is the future, and the future is now.”
As for new enhancements to his already robust website, Maiocco plans to integrate an interactive 360-degree virtual tour. Visitors to the site will be able to view listings from their smartphones and the virtual tour will move throughout the home as you move your phone.
About The Maiocco Group, RE/MAX Alliance on Walnut
Lenny Maiocco, broker at The Maiocco Group, works with sellers, buyers, and investors. Go to eColoradoProperties.com for more info. They service the entire Front Range of Colorado including Boulder, Louisville, Superior, Lafayette, Longmont, Niwot, Broomfield, Westminster, Denver, Aurora, Erie, Fort Collins, Loveland, Firestone and Frederick. For more information, please call (720) 201-1114. The office is located at 1911 11th St., Suite 107, Boulder, CO 80302.
About the NALA™
The NALA offers local business owners new online advertising & small business marketing tools, great business benefits, education and money-saving programs, as well as a charity program. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361. Reported by PRWeb 29 minutes ago.
Boulder, CO (PRWEB) December 23, 2015
“It’s pretty cutting-edge and all professionally produced in a studio,” said Maiocco. “There hasn’t been anything like it before in this area for this industry.”
In the videos, Maiocco discusses properties for sale or lease and their amenities over the backdrop of a slideshow about the property and immediate surroundings being featured. He had the idea to do videos for ten years, and it has been a work in progress for the past three months. The videos are informative, fun and interesting.
“It’s a great marketing tool that can be pushed on every social media platform: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, blogs, etc.,” said Maiocco. “The videos are quick and to the point, and I work with Denver-based Uli Productions to make them look slick and professional.”
The goal of the videos is to reach potential clients and give them an idea of how Maiocco does business and how he can help them achieve their goals; whether it’s selling or buying a home or investment property. It enables Maiocco to give homebuyers the best information about a property, while keeping him at the forefront of technology.
“My client demographic ranges from millennials to baby-boomers, so this allows them to thoroughly view a listing or neighborhood prior to scheduling an onsite appointment,” said Maiocco. “Video is the future, and the future is now.”
As for new enhancements to his already robust website, Maiocco plans to integrate an interactive 360-degree virtual tour. Visitors to the site will be able to view listings from their smartphones and the virtual tour will move throughout the home as you move your phone.
About The Maiocco Group, RE/MAX Alliance on Walnut
Lenny Maiocco, broker at The Maiocco Group, works with sellers, buyers, and investors. Go to eColoradoProperties.com for more info. They service the entire Front Range of Colorado including Boulder, Louisville, Superior, Lafayette, Longmont, Niwot, Broomfield, Westminster, Denver, Aurora, Erie, Fort Collins, Loveland, Firestone and Frederick. For more information, please call (720) 201-1114. The office is located at 1911 11th St., Suite 107, Boulder, CO 80302.
About the NALA™
The NALA offers local business owners new online advertising & small business marketing tools, great business benefits, education and money-saving programs, as well as a charity program. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361. Reported by PRWeb 29 minutes ago.
↧
NTS Announces the Acquisition of EMC Integrity
Adds a Twelfth EMI / EMC Testing Laboratory to NTS’ Market Leading Position, Allowing NTS to Locally Serve Clients in the Rocky Mountain Region
Calabasas, CA and Longmont, CO (PRWEB) December 23, 2015
National Technical Systems, Inc. (“NTS”), the leading independent provider of environmental simulation testing, inspection, and certification solutions in the United States, announced today that it has acquired EMC Integrity (“EMCI”) of Longmont, Colorado. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Founded in 1994, EMC Integrity, which will become NTS Longmont, operates a 17,000 square foot, state-of-the-art emissions and immunity testing facility that offers ample land for expansion and is centrally located between Denver, Boulder, and Ft. Collins, Colorado. EMC Integrity’s two fully accredited 10-meter chambers represent a regional best-in-class capability that NTS plans to extend with additional capital and personnel investments to serve EMCI’s world-class customers in the information technology, medical, aerospace, and commercial markets.
NTS Longmont is the twelfth NTS laboratory offering EMI / EMC emissions, immunity, and mitigation testing services in the United States and adds an important geographic location that further supports NTS’ nationwide coverage. Additionally, as a CB Testing Laboratory (“CBTL”), NTS Longmont allows NTS to expand the services it currently offers to the medical device market.
“We are excited to add a Rocky Mountain location to the NTS network, enhancing our ability to serve our clients in the region, and we look forward to expanding EMCI’s capabilities to drive future growth,” noted William C. McGinnis, CEO of NTS. McGinnis added, “Local access, cutting-edge capabilities, and schedule availability have all been part of a successful acquisition strategy, which has allowed us to add eight new testing locations over the last two years in furtherance of our goal to provide our industry-leading environmental simulation testing capabilities on a nationwide basis.”
Vince Greb, founder of EMC Integrity, added, “EMCI has a great reputation in the local market that, when combined with NTS’ respected national brand, will allow NTS Longmont to enter its next phase of growth. Our folks are very excited to be part of the NTS team, and we look forward to further investing in our local capabilities to serve our clients and all of their EMI / EMC and other testing needs.”
NTS is a portfolio company of Los Angeles-based Aurora Capital Group.
About National Technical Systems
National Technical Systems, Inc. (NTS) is a global independent provider of environmental simulation testing, inspection, and certification services, serving a broad range of industries, including the civil aviation, space, defense, nuclear, telecommunications, industrial, electronics, medical, and automotive end markets. During its more than 50 years in business, NTS has built the broadest geographic presence and sole national footprint in the United States, an unparalleled breadth of capabilities, and has fostered continuous innovation, making NTS a unique one-stop resource to meet its clients’ demanding and evolving requirements. Operating through a network of over 25 technologically advanced testing laboratories across the United States, this geographically diverse footprint puts NTS facilities in close proximity to its more than 4,000 clients, allowing NTS to serve the nation’s most innovative companies with industry-leading accessibility and responsiveness. NTS’ offering spans more than 70 distinct environmental simulation and materials testing categories, including climatic, structural, dynamics, fluid flow, EMI/EMC, lightning, product safety, acoustics, failure analysis, chemical, and other industry-specific tests, allowing it to handle its clients’ most demanding needs. Additionally, the company is accredited by numerous national and international organizations, which allows NTS to have its test data nearly universally accepted worldwide. NTS operates its inspection division under the Unitek brand, providing a wide range of supply chain management services. NTS’ certification division, which operates under the NQA brand, is one of the largest and most respected global ISO registrars, with active certifications in more than 75 countries. For additional information about NTS, visit our website at http://www.nts.com or call 800-270-2516.
# # # # Reported by PRWeb 20 hours ago.
Calabasas, CA and Longmont, CO (PRWEB) December 23, 2015
National Technical Systems, Inc. (“NTS”), the leading independent provider of environmental simulation testing, inspection, and certification solutions in the United States, announced today that it has acquired EMC Integrity (“EMCI”) of Longmont, Colorado. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Founded in 1994, EMC Integrity, which will become NTS Longmont, operates a 17,000 square foot, state-of-the-art emissions and immunity testing facility that offers ample land for expansion and is centrally located between Denver, Boulder, and Ft. Collins, Colorado. EMC Integrity’s two fully accredited 10-meter chambers represent a regional best-in-class capability that NTS plans to extend with additional capital and personnel investments to serve EMCI’s world-class customers in the information technology, medical, aerospace, and commercial markets.
NTS Longmont is the twelfth NTS laboratory offering EMI / EMC emissions, immunity, and mitigation testing services in the United States and adds an important geographic location that further supports NTS’ nationwide coverage. Additionally, as a CB Testing Laboratory (“CBTL”), NTS Longmont allows NTS to expand the services it currently offers to the medical device market.
“We are excited to add a Rocky Mountain location to the NTS network, enhancing our ability to serve our clients in the region, and we look forward to expanding EMCI’s capabilities to drive future growth,” noted William C. McGinnis, CEO of NTS. McGinnis added, “Local access, cutting-edge capabilities, and schedule availability have all been part of a successful acquisition strategy, which has allowed us to add eight new testing locations over the last two years in furtherance of our goal to provide our industry-leading environmental simulation testing capabilities on a nationwide basis.”
Vince Greb, founder of EMC Integrity, added, “EMCI has a great reputation in the local market that, when combined with NTS’ respected national brand, will allow NTS Longmont to enter its next phase of growth. Our folks are very excited to be part of the NTS team, and we look forward to further investing in our local capabilities to serve our clients and all of their EMI / EMC and other testing needs.”
NTS is a portfolio company of Los Angeles-based Aurora Capital Group.
About National Technical Systems
National Technical Systems, Inc. (NTS) is a global independent provider of environmental simulation testing, inspection, and certification services, serving a broad range of industries, including the civil aviation, space, defense, nuclear, telecommunications, industrial, electronics, medical, and automotive end markets. During its more than 50 years in business, NTS has built the broadest geographic presence and sole national footprint in the United States, an unparalleled breadth of capabilities, and has fostered continuous innovation, making NTS a unique one-stop resource to meet its clients’ demanding and evolving requirements. Operating through a network of over 25 technologically advanced testing laboratories across the United States, this geographically diverse footprint puts NTS facilities in close proximity to its more than 4,000 clients, allowing NTS to serve the nation’s most innovative companies with industry-leading accessibility and responsiveness. NTS’ offering spans more than 70 distinct environmental simulation and materials testing categories, including climatic, structural, dynamics, fluid flow, EMI/EMC, lightning, product safety, acoustics, failure analysis, chemical, and other industry-specific tests, allowing it to handle its clients’ most demanding needs. Additionally, the company is accredited by numerous national and international organizations, which allows NTS to have its test data nearly universally accepted worldwide. NTS operates its inspection division under the Unitek brand, providing a wide range of supply chain management services. NTS’ certification division, which operates under the NQA brand, is one of the largest and most respected global ISO registrars, with active certifications in more than 75 countries. For additional information about NTS, visit our website at http://www.nts.com or call 800-270-2516.
# # # # Reported by PRWeb 20 hours ago.
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