walter_severs

historyman Those who forget History are doomed to repeat it. This is why the powers that be don't won't students to have any knowledge of what happened before they were alive. Just give them Bread and Circuses, the Roman leaders new this and the concept continues today with entertain and feed. Here we have Weiner and Arnold. Our great Nation is being sold down the river and all we get is more Weiner's twitters. Our National Debt is crazy. What do we want the politicians to do? Give us more bread stimulus or start cutting to the bone. Something for nothing, but everything always costs and someone pays. Who pays the piper? The over worked taxpayer. We need more great movies, not the tripe we get today. What ever happened to movies made by John Ford and David Lean? __The Searchers__ and __The Bridge Over The River Kwai__ are so head and shoulders above the dribble we receive from the newest Hollywood. The critics hail a new movie as great and I attempt to view it, but it is always disappointing. Books are great, especially if they are written by writers like Pat Conroy, Charles McCarry, Frank McCourt, Bernard Cornwell, and, thank goodness, there are still many good ones. The late Frank McCourt, a 30 year veteran public school teacher, finally got to have a second act in his life after he wrote __Angela's Ashes__, which was published when he was 66 years old. McCourt followed with '__Tis__ and __Teacher Man__. These were great books and I'm glad he managed to have a second act in life. Charles McCarry writes, what I consider some of the best spy novels ever written. I consider McCarry's __Leaves of Autumn__ a classic spy novel. His take on the assasination of JFK is some what different. The South Vietnamese connection is interesting, but unlikely. McCarry is a former deep cover CIA agent, so what he wrote had to be okayed by the CIA. So, I would say that the South Vietnamese had nothing to do with the JFK demise. If you want to read a good Southern novel of the past 40 years, you can't go wrong with the novels of Pat Conroy of South Carolina. A favorite is __The Great Santini__. This book was a classic disfunctional family epic of the modern South. It was based on Conroy's family with the names changed, except he did use his father's nickname the "Great Santini." His father, after the book was published, threw it on the floor and stomped it. Pat Conroy's mother scolded him, "How could you tell our family secrets?" Later when __The Great Santini__ premiered as a movie starring Robert DuVall, the Conroy family were in the front row. Pat's younger brother looked at him and pointed to Robert DuVall, on the screen, and pointed to their Dad, "Duvall is Bambi, compared to Dad."