September Reader's Rants

Our Endangered Values by Former President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter is still active within many circles of social and political life in America. Indirectly, he supports and maintains several humanitarian missions like “Habitat for Humanity” and the “Carter Center” in his hometown of Atlanta. Here he analyzes some fundamental issues foreign and domestic, social and political that he feels threaten our current standard of living. Things such as religious fundamentalism, the growing economic divide between the upper and lower classes, global warming, and American military presence abroad are subjects which Carter evaluates and expresses with his own viewpoints. No matter what your political leaning, anyone should be able to appreciate someone as involved and influential as Carter speaking up on the existing state of the nation.

The Shame of a Nation: the Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol is a former Harvard graduate and veteran Civil Rights advocate who’s been engaged in American public schools in one way or another for over forty years. Stating that social reforms originally established to eliminate segregation of American public schools have backslidden, he argues that our nation’s public schools (particularly in highly diverse inner-city communities) are at a worse state now than they were in the pre-Civil Rights era. Using an abundance of personally observed conditions and interviews with politicians, administrators, teachers, and students (some as young as 4 or 5), Kozol makes no debate about what the problem is, the source of it, and who is to blame. This book is very “leftist” but not without validity concerning where the nation is headed if the educational system is not reformed. The book is a good read for anyone who is involved in some area of the public schools – be it directly as a parent/teacher or indirectly as a taxpayer.

The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

Acclaimed author of The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing is back again with a new novel confronting young people’s difficulties and concerns as seen through one girl’s transition into womanhood. We meet Sophie Applebaum as an early teenager in suburban Pennsylvania struggling to cement an identity while encountering the issues of people in her life. Sophie emerges as a single New York woman more confident but still feeling around for confirmation and affection. This book is for individuals with a more sincere interest in chick lit rather than the over-the-top, Janet Evanovitch style. Personally I felt a little detached from Sophie’s character, perhaps due in part to Bank’s more laid back style of revelation. Purely seen as a story, however, The Wonder Spot won’t disappoint too many readers.

Encyclopedia of Juvenile Justice (see Reference Dept.)

This is a locally edited and published reference book dealing with the present day juvenile justice system. Topically indexed alphabetically, subjects like delinquency, petty vandalism, and misdemeanor or addressed in a well referenced and documented form. Cross-references to related subject headings make for a very solid syndetic scheme. This reference book is something we may not have a lot of “out-right” reference questions about. But it nonetheless provides some fluid information on the maintenance and operation of our nation’s juvenile justice system.

Cell by Stephen King

King’s latest macabre extaordinaire rewards the many long-time faithful readers of his horror classics with another solid, well-paced tale of conformity gone mad. Cell has just the right balance of drama, action, and curiosity along with--as always--blood and gore for most readers. A master storyteller who fashions literature anyone will gravitate toward, King modernizes this horror tale with a little ingenuity by creating a virus spread by cell phones. This virus or “pulse” is spread as a person holds their cell phone to his or her ear as radio waves are dispersed from the satellite signals. The immediate influx of literally millions of infected persons creates a frenzy of zombie-like maniacal beings reaking havoc through the streets. The plot for the story is almost immediately set down as we see the “normies” (people without cell phones and who haven’t used one since the virus began) are at war with the infected converts. King will never go wrong in appealing to the mass market readers. But anyone looking to graduate from overly-sympathetic characters and saccharin themes of good, evil, hypocrisy, and sentimentalism might need to look elsewhere.