Clinton Books

This book is a self-published memoir penned by Charles L. Parks, a retired Alabama attorney who came from humble beginnings and made quite a success of his life. The book is well written and has a conversational style that made me imagine I was on a big southern veranda in a rocking chair sipping mint juleps (or shots of tequila in my case) while listening to Parks' fascinating stories.

This book covers Parks' experiences growing up in Anniston in the 40s and 50s, attending college and law school from 1959 - 1967 at American University, working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Sen. William Fullbright, and summaries of some of his interesting legal experiences as a trial lawyer. Parks met, worked with, and has stories about several notable persons, including then Senator John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, a co-worker with Parks on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff from 1966 - 1967.

Parks holds forth on the unquestioned legal power of county Child Services bureaucraries in child welfare and sexual assault cases. Parks tells it like it is concerning his representation of several "guilty as hell" people - something I imagine many attorneys would like to shout to the world - and ends his book with a passionate plea for renewed ethical standards in the legal profession and court system.

I think you will enjoy Parks' easygoing style and the amusing (and sometime scary) parade of characters - wild young bachelors, spoiled trust fund felons, racist white trash murderers, assorted connivers, and eccentric poor folks, who had the luck to know Parks or have the benefit of his services.

Very Informative! I learned things about the founding fathers of our great country that I never knew. Why isn't this taught in our schools?

This book is a combination of Doug Marlette's editorial comic strips and his political "Kudzu" comic strips covering the 1992 presidential election and Clinton's win. In addition, Doug has done several new strips especially for this book. There are also a few pages of text where Doug writes about Faux Bubba's and his thoughts/accounts of the '92 election (including his meeting with Bill Clinton). While it's obvious that Doug voted for Clinton and is left-of-center in his political views, the strips are mostly funny and mostly told from a southerner's prospective.

This is the diary of James Bennett, a young man who enlisted in the U.S. Dragoons in 1849 and served 7 years on the frontier at various posts in New Mexico. He encountered many figures known to history and traveled widely over the frontier from Texas to Wyoming to California.

Bennett's service saw him involved in battles with Indians, surveying the Gadsden Purchase and involved in the life of communities where American and Mexican cultures intermingled.

This book is a must for anyone interested in military history or life on the frontier prior to the Civil War

If you are unfamiliar with the ecstatic religious poetry tradition - Rumi, Mirabai, ... this is not the volume to start on; read Mirabai's For Love of the Dark One first. However, if you have some familarity with the tradition, you'll find this book fascinating - this is more recent (18th century) and closer to the tribal origins of the worship of Kali/Uma/Pavarti/Gauri/Tara. These poems are popular in the sense that they have been kept alive through oral transmission rather than written manuscripts. One poem with a surprising rural flavor stands out: ".../My body is Tara's field/ in which the God of Gods/ like a good farmer / sows his seed with a great mantra. / Around this body, faith / is set like a fence / with patience for posts ..."

This book is written by a very detailed researcher, so at first it seems a lot to wade through--but the process changed my life and has transformed my work. Heartily recommended. Worth the effort.

It was imagination and healthy self-interest that drove young Jack Mahaney to leave the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania and take a train to college and freedom from what bode fair to become a short life and painful death. Imagination and a need for danger then propelled him to a stint in the Navy in World War II, in charge of a 30-man gun crew on various merchant vessels.

In Mombasa Mr Mahaney dared Masai warriors dancers to do him in. Later as an agricultural inspector he ate, drank and sometimes even slept well on luxury ocean liners . He saved California from fruit flies inadvertently smuggled from Hawaii to San Diego by U.S. Navy cooks. Even as Jack Mahaney aged and slowed a bit, he still had the energy to join U.S. missionaries in the Venezuelan Amazon where he tried in vain to teach primitive Indians how to leap beyond slash and burn agriculture and plant more nourishing crops. Later, before he retired to Western North Carolina, Jack Mahaney's last hurrah was as a volunteer in the White House, screening and pigeonholing love letters sent to then President Bill Clinton from adoring women everywhere.

Nonagenarian Jack Mahaney' writes as clearly and punchily as Ernest Hemingway. Like Robert Louis Stevenson and his 20 years younger Mountain Carolinas contemporary Lewis W. Green (OF HUMAN INTEREST), Mr Mahaney is a born "teller of tales," a sometimes caustic observer of the passing parade but more often a good humored log keeper on board The Ship of Fools. He is a late but valued arrival in that increasingly crowded "nest of singing birds" of poets, novelists and other writers living in or near Asheville, North Carolina. -OOO-

John Brummett is (was?) a journalist for one of the Arkansas papers. He covered Clinton as a governor and wrote this book to give others some perspective on the figure of Bill Clinton. This particular book was written while Clinton was serving his first year in office as president.

Does the book offer anything new? In 1993 or 1994, it did. The author discusses the different issues that arose for the Clinton presidency and gives some explanation on what happened. He then puts Clinton's handling of the issue into perspective based on what he knows of Clinton in Arkansas. By reading the book, you see that Brummett does not seem to be surprised by anything he saw that first year.

He does not cover Clinton's childhood; this book is not really a biography in that sense. It is merely an explanation of the first year in the White House. Would I recommend reading the book? Only if you were doing a research project on Clinton. This could give you some insights. Otherwise, After watching Clinton for eight years, you probably already have an idea of how Clinton handles political issues.

Warner using Clinton's past interviews and comments from her friends and colleagues, details the evolution of the first lady from teenager to college student to lawyer, mother, activist, and politician's wife. Clinton's strong personality and intellect seem to have made her a success in her own right, and appear to be crucial elements in Bill Clinton's rise to the top. I would recommend that you read the newer Revised and Updated release of this book.

Imagine you find the manuscript of a novel about the machinations that were performed to Buddy, Bill Clinton's dog. Harvard scientists installed a mechanical brain and computer chip controlled by his nipples. The dog then becomes a principal witness in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent trial of the President of the "Essential Nation of the Universe."

The book is light, fluffy and reads very fast, but it is quite funny.

Warning; for you cat lovers, Mr. Sanchez is not kind to the feline species.