Great Reads

I have more than 12 books and five magazines on my night table. I can't seem to get more than a few pages into any one of them before being compelled to move on to something else. I guess that may be the strange benefit of the horror of these difficult times. Amazing journalism that cuts through all of the crap (can you hear me, CNN, ye master of yesterday's "News Alert" on Britney's custody battle?).

Two books worth noting are Washington Post reporter Thomas Rick's Fiasco, an amazing, jaw-dropping synthesis of everything that went wrong leading upto and into the Iraqi War. And, now I am reading Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, a Pulitzer-Prize winning account of the rise of Al Quada. Journalism in the best sense of the world. We've all heard and read far too much about what has gone wrong over the past five years, but i encourage you to pick up one or both of these books. You'll be angrier, certainly, but I can't help but believe that knowing what has happened will make all of us do more to ensure that it doesn't happen again. Sure, I am a big fat liberal democratic, but the hubris of government of any kind shouldn't be taken lightly by any of us.