Word: self
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...Lowdown: The new year is upon us. Break out the optimism, the resolutions and the thinly-veiled self-help books. There are some, like Henry Alford's How To Live that hide their chicken-soup soul within the well-structured tale of a fruitful personal journey. Then there are those such as Rich Like Them, whose vigorous attempts to shake off the label ("It's not what you think of as a traditional self-help book...I chose instead to look at the context of these lives, to tell people's stories"), just end up making the author sound slightly...
...political positions. The impulse comes from a lack of experience and from a lack of faith in the experience of predecessors. The view presumes that virtually all of the political leaders that have come before now have either failed to realize something obvious or, worse, are too misguided or self-serving to seek solutions that prioritize anyone other than themselves. It is precisely because of this view that so many Harvard students and their contemporaries are hoping to attend Barack Obama’s inauguration: We’ve miraculously chosen...
...Lowdown: With its self-helpish title, How To Live might easily be mistaken for a book full of aphorisms and life lessons - a Chicken Soup for the Non-Elderly Soul. Thankfully, Alford is smarter than that, and his book is impressively understated in its desire to actually impart wisdom. It's more a collection of mini-profiles on fascinating senior citizens - the aforementioned Granny D., whose advanced age does nothing to lessen her spunk, the self-obsessed actress Sylvia Miles, and the simply bizarre hitchhiking, dumpster-diving Eugene Loh. The inclusion of Alford's elderly mother, who decided to divorce...
Gonzales, Alberto •self-pity of - "What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" - leads to writing of setting-the-record-straight book...
...formalized bargain. But not all the constraints laid out in the security pact are binding. A commanding coalition general still wields the power to authorize any operation unilaterally, and U.S. troops don't need to consult the Iraqis if responding to an imminent threat or in self-defense - a provision so broad that most of the limits on U.S. troop operations could effectively be bypassed if commanders deem it necessary to do so. "I would not view them as loopholes," Vermeesch says. "I would view them as provisions to allow U.S. forces in everyday situations to protect themselves...