Lin Zhang Zhang itibaren Texas
This is Faust's first book, but wasn't published until 10 years later, after other of her books. It definitely has the feel of a Christa Faust story, but it reads like a first book. The writing is often a little gimmicky and there are several plotlines that just vanish rather than resolve. But it's a good read and the main character's growth is quite well handled. Control Freak is set in early 90's NYC. Our protagonist is Caitlin. She is a writer and when her cop boyfriend is assigned to a particularly gruesome murder she decides she might want to write a true-crime book on the case. With the unsuspecting aid of her boyfriend's information and the help of a hacker friend she stays ahead of the police in her investigation and traces the victim to a the BDSM scene in lower Manhatten. She goes to the clubs and discovers she has natural skill for, and unsuspected interest in, being dominant. Since the early nineties, the US BDSM scene has mainstreamed quite a bit. Clubs and parties invite fetishwear and light bondage in even small cities across the US. It is important to remember that this was not the case in the book's timeframe. The clubs in the book are also more tolerant of certain unsafe behaviors that would raise eyebrows in much of even the fetish scene today. Fewer people then had been exposed to fetish play beyond the Betty Page movies and what Caitlin discovers is new and scary to her; presumably it was supposed to be new and scary to the reader as well. Caitlin's love of the scene and talent for it draws her further in to the more underground--and dangerous--clubs where the victim was well-known, and she makes friends in the community who are all suspects in the case. Her involvement begins to scare her hacker friend and becomes trouble for her boyfriend, eventually leader to her complete separation from her old life. The mystery story is good and doubles into itself as we discover multiple interrelated mysteries. Caitlin's descent into an artificial world is well-handled and will be familiar to many people who have lost months or years of their lives in any inbred subculture of druggies, sex addicts, activists, or other groups. It is also kept separate enough from her introspection about power play and sex that she and the reader are able to keep from tainting one with the other. The resolution of the mysteries is interesting, although not completely unexpected, and leads to some oddly (but not badly) paced action scenes and nice layers of betrayal. All in all, it's a good read. Be warned: this is the first book to squick me in years. The event that affected me came very late in the book and didn't diminish my enjoyment of the scene, the chapter, or the story, but there are some harsh descriptions. I didn't find any of the BDSM scenes or the sex to be extreme or explicit; it's the detective story that has the potentially-disturbing parts.
Let's be honest: some chunks of this book are just tiresome. Many of the short essays, mini-satires originally from The Beast, that are collected between the longer sections, are throw-aways, though funny enough. I'll admit to finally skipping some in the second half. But the longer sections are not just smart, and not just funny - the longer sections are important. The first essay, about the wild under-counting of an anti-war protest (especially in light of the more recent over-counting of the Restoring Honor Rally) is valuable and disturbing, as is his campaign reporting on Howard Dean and the Democratic primaries (which involves hallucinogens and a Viking costume). But the long-form essay Bush Like Me, where he goes undercover as a Republican on the Bush campaign in Florida, is one of the most important essays on American politics I've ever read. Liberal America doesn't understand what conservatives think , nor why we can't seem to beat them in politics. Our stereotypes of the inbred redneck or the wealthy and evil CEO aren't as damaging as their stereotypes of the welfare queen or the sex-crazed hippie, but they're no more sophisticated. Taibbi's portrait of how the conservative mind operates is often vicious, but weirdly empathetic, and it exposes a lot of the ways the Democratic party is woefully ineffectual, no matter how good its intentions. For that essay alone, it'd be worth reading. But it's also very funny, and provides a good dissection of how the media works in relation to politics (hint: not very well). Makes ya want to write articles.
I found The Obama Revolution to be eye opening and thoughtful. It was very interesting to see the Obama campaign through the eyes of one of the people who lived it. Kennedy-Shaffer puts in a lot of facts to support his statements. He also put a lot of time and effort into writing this book and it shows. Kennedy-Shaffer looks in the past to show that this is not the first time that a presidential candidate has run on change and won. He shows us how the campaigns of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were similar to Obama's and how Obama takes his campaign to the next level. I found this very interesting. As I was reading The Obama Revolution I thought that the Obama Campaign was the perfect storm. The Campaign was doing the right things at the right time and of course the right candidate. How staffers incorporated the old with the new. Staffers going out and making personal contact with potential voters as well as using the Internet to get the Obama rhetoric out. Even when mistakes were made Obama learned from those mistakes, which made his campaign better. Kennedy-Shaffer puts in 10 speeches that Obama delivered during his campaign. These speeches were considered important to the campaign. If you want to learn more about the Obama Campaign and how Obama was able to win the Presidency this book is for you. A very good introduction to the rhetoric and what happens in a presidential campaign.
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21 months - the moral of this story find a kitty and trade it in for a new model... A puppy instead. I don't know why I can't keep from thinking this every time we read this story. You of course enjoy any Curious George story.