Saturday: Alma Mater’s Asian Alumni Lunar Banquet at Peking Park Restaurant, midtown. Food was okay; company was interesting.
February/March reading:
Gideon’s Trumpet, by Anthony Lewis, on the US Supreme Court’s Gideon v. Wainwright, right to counsel in a criminal trial. Lewis was at his best towards the end, in detailing the results and the growing dilemmas of the 1960’s – almost editorial, even if he was trying to be observational. And, even though it was published in 1964, it felt timeless – and yet very contemporaneous – clearly the feeling of reading a primary source, or at least a book that did not know or could be certain what the next 40 years might bring.
Monster Careers: Networking, by Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com, and Doug Hardy, editor in chief of Monster – liked this book. Broke down what is networking at a very basic level.
And, the passing of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., historian. I’ll spare blog readers of my idea of linking just about everything written so far in observance of Schlesinger (great stuff, I might add – Schelsinger being a scholar but also a participant of history), but I’ll note that American historians – particularly the Schlesingers (father and son), the Beards (Charles and Mary), Richard Hofstadter – were who I read when I was taking AP American History in high school – such great stuff that later inspired me to become an American History major in college, and – maybe? – what made me care about what this country may mean. I may not have always agreed with their outlook, but their writing and learning from their work made me think. As for Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., we might be missing a certain type of historian/intellectual/political participant; we all still have much to learn.