I desperately need dental work. Another tooth started chipping away today while I was eating a bacon and cheeseburger. Not a good feeling. Those old filings are finally taking a toll on my teeth. I don't know if I will do any fundraisers for that this summer. I am not very good at the art of persuasion in raising much money at all.
A few books I am currently reading:
Sons of Wichita by Daniel Schulman (2014). It's also out in paperback. I have read perhaps 60 pages of this so far, and I really like it. If you want to know just what this pernicious group of brothers is all about--and actually, only two of them are really the shits because they are so much alike--this is the book to read. I am reading it in chronological order, something I don't always do with non-fiction. Whatever one thinks of the Kochs, I do have to say their dad, Fred, did NOT spoil them. He made them work their asses off when they were young. They may have wound up going to boarding/prep schools, but they had to shovel the shit and do the chores around their dad's various ranches. The brothers also go into fist fights.
Two of the four Kochs, Frederick, Jr., and Bill, have little to do with politics, preferring art and/or philanthropy. Of course those other two, Charles and David, more than make up for their brothers' apathy.
Unless I read something different in this book to change my mind, anybody who is interested in right-wing politics should get hold of it. If I change my mind about this book, I will do a more thorough review of it.
Elvis and Ginger by Ginger Alden (2014). The King's last main girlfriend, Ginger Alden, did in fact pen this memoir herself without any assistance from a ghostwriter. I am about one-third the way finished with it. It is not a bad book at all, although many Elvis fans, judging from the "reviews" over at Amazon.com, are still mad at her and her family over her supposed behavior when he died and her mother unsuccessfully suing the estate some years later. Some people just need to get a life. Unless you have been there, you really don't know how you would handle a situation like Elvis with the pills and the bat-like lifestyle. Ginger, who based a lot of this book on diary entries from years ago, looks back on the short time she had with Elvis from the vantage point of a 20-year-old. What people tend to forget here was her extreme youth and naivete. I am not hard on her or any of the other women who played a part in his life. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to change places with them.
Alden spends a lot of time talking about how much Elvis was into spirituality. He appeared to have been extremely well-read on religion and various other beliefs. He was a man constantly in pursuit of finding what his purpose was in life. The rest of the world might of thought he did have a purpose in life that he fulfilled as an entertainer, but Elvis didn't feel that way.
It is not a necessary book if you are an Elvis fan, but it is good as another perspective into his life. It did take her many, many years before she decided to write about it.
Books I recently finished (in the past week) include Janice Raymond's Not a Choice, Not a Job, about prostitution and trafficking, and efforts to eliminate both; Golden Boy by Bob Thomas, about William Holden by somebody who personally knew him; and Cold Storage, by Don Lassiter, about the Denise Huber murder case. She was the woman whose body was found in a freezer in a rental truck some three years after she disappeared. Her killer, John Famalaro, is currently on death row.
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