A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1992 Simon & Schuster The trouble with history, particularly modern history, is that events can be interpreted and presented in different ways. Consider, for instance, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some books, such as Jim Bishop's The Day Kennedy Was Shot and Gerald Posner's Case Closed , point the finger at Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman. Others, such as David Lifton's Best Evidence , claim there was a vast conspiracy to shoot Kennedy in Dallas, Texas and to cover this violent coup d'etat up so Lyndon Johnson could be President and escalate the Vietnam War. I don't believe the conspiracy theorists and they'll never get a dime from me, but nevertheless there are plenty of people who do believe Lifton and his other "there was a second gunman in the grassy knoll" compadres. By taking a fact here, adding a supposition there, and by presenting information selectively to make it fit an author's particular ...

After nearly nine years of being an online reviewer at both Amazon and Epinions (and, for a time, anyway, at the now-terrible Viewpoints), I have decided to compile some of my reviews and publish them in book form.  (We can't survive on IS income alone, right?)  I can't take the time or money to hire an agent or go through the process of sending out manuscripts to the big publishers in hope of getting published, so I decided to "self-publish" through Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace (both Amazon companies). The book, Save Me the Aisle Seat , is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, and within a week it should be available in print at Amazon and maybe a few other places. I'd like to thank my friend Leigh Egan for her valuable assistance in completing this challenging project. I hate to have to shill my book like a medicine salesman selling snake oil, but if anyone here has a Kindle (of any model), please, please consider buying it!  It's price...

The Lady Loses The best story about Coolidge's taciturnity, told by his wife, concerns the society woman who said, as she sat down next to him at a dinner party, "You must talk to me, Mr. Coolidge. I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you." "You lose," said Coolidge. How to Charge Once when Lincoln was in the War Department an officer who was in a big hurry slam-banged into him, then offered "ten thousand pardons" when he saw who it was. "One is enough," smiled Lincoln. "I wish the whole army would charge like that." -- From Presidential Anecdotes, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. One of the most curious -- and vexing -- flaws in the U.S. public education system is the way that American history, especially its political history, is taught in all the 50 states. Having attended public schools in the 1970s and 1980s, I still have vivid memories of (a) textbooks with tons of illustrations but dry, boring...