I've been reading Parting the Waters over the past few days. It's the first volume in Taylor Branch's 3-volume biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the powers that be have given it about every award you can give a work of history like this. The deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and the release of the third and final part of Branch's MLK trilogy, Canaan's Edge, got me interested in the subject of King in particular, and the civil rights struggle in general. I picked up the first two books in the trilogy and I've just now started into the first one. As a reader, I'd avoided biographies for a long time. I'm not sure exactly why; maybe I thought they were mostly dry recitations of dates and place and know now that great biographies can be every bit as absorbing and compelling as great novels. It's good, I think, to fill in the skeleton of American and world history I got from my public-school education with the muscle and sinew I get from biographies like this. Anyway, I'm not going to go into book report mode because I've only gotten through 150 pages of the massive tome that is Parting the Waters, but I'm already enjoying the hell out of it. Another 850 pages of eye-popping race-on-race action await me!Well, it's getting on to midnight. I got to work on my Literary Smackdown entry so I can post that thing before too much more time passes.
Have a great weekend. I'm out.
5 comments:
Your two week bloop hiatus is over.
My next bloop on Crane:
http://ebaumsworld.com/videos/runawaytire.html
Hey dude, I've been calling you, like, three times an effin' day, but you must be really busy with all that lounging and blog reading. I was gonna call you on your cell, but the number I have is an 818 number, so I'm sure it's old.
Actually, dude, believe it or not, I have been kinda busy the last couple days. But have no fear: I will talk to you soon, and you can fill me in on all the bloops you have planned for me. And that video on ebaum's world is frickin' crazy. What kind of cruel gods colluded to have that guy steamrollered by a pair of errant big rig tires? Ridiculous. I do wonder what happened to that guy, though. Couldn't help but notice he didn't get up afterwards.
It's proof there's no God.
Crane wrote on filmslack.blogspot.com:
"Dude. You were going too hard. You have a job. It's too hard to blog everyday while employed. And write? Forget about it. Once a week, man. That's all. Once a week. You can swing that, yeah? C'mon, dude. It's a good blog. The number of blogs I have to check are dwindling precipitously, and the number of good blogs are going to dwindle to two if you go out. I need more blog. If you have to quit, I understand, but for those few weeks, Film Slack was good stuff. (sniff) Once a week. Think about it."
Did little good, huh, Crane? Did little good. You know, come to think of it, I don't remember you making such a fuss when my blog went bye-bye... in fact, I remember you typing "yeah, it's probably a good time to bail out, dude."
GRRR!
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