The Shadow Elite by Janine R. Wedel

The Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market by Janine R. Wedel

This title may sound like some conspiracy theory. But contrary to what the title may sound like, this expose was not written by some right or left wing pundit or some "over the edge" conspiracy theorist, who sees a conspiracy behind every major event. This is a scholarly work written by an anthropologist.

Janine R. Wedel is a Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Using her expertise in Eastern European communist governments, Wedel has pulled together a shocking expose of those individuals dismantling U.S. democracy from the inside.

I will warn you, it is a slow read and the first chapter might discourage you from reading on. But once you get through the first chapter, where Wedel labels the new breed of U.S. political operators as "flexians," and their personal networks as "flex nets", the rest of the book flows a little easier. She defines "flexians" as lobbyists, government insiders or elected officials that converge into a single network "snaking through official and private organizations, creating a loop that is closed to democratic processes."

Wedel shows how a flexian can gain extraordinary insider knowledge and influence in order to custom-tailor a version of the "truth" benefitting the highest bidder. In this way, they not only "co-opt public policy agendas" but "craft policy with their benefactors' purposes in mind."

Wedel does more than just create descriptive labels, she names names and provides concrete examples of the connections between these flexians and their various organizations. These same influential people seem to reappear time after time in different professional guises, pressing their own agendas in one venue after another.

Wedel charts how this shadow elite, loyal only to their own, challenge both governments’ rules of accountability and business codes of competition to accomplish their own goals. From the Harvard economists who helped privatize post-Soviet Russia and the neoconservatives who have helped privatize American foreign policy (culminating with the debacle that is Iraq) to the many private players who daily make public decisions without public input, these manipulators both grace the front pages and operate behind the scenes. While you will recognize many of the names, it is their actions and how they manipulate events to their advantage that remain in the shadows.

Death in La Fenice by Donna Leon

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

This mystery practically reads like a screenplay. You can visualize each scene as you are reading. This is the first in a mystery series with Guido Brunetti as the vice-commissario of police and detective genius. And to be honest it won't be my last. I enjoyed this book. It is a quick and engrossing read. Plus the setting of story is Venice. Having recently visited Venice, it was easy for me to visualize the descriptions provided by Leon, who currently resides in Venice. Just as the author is enamored by the location, so am I. You quickly become fascinated with anything that has to do with Venice. Leon's description of the city at night, jives with my memory. Unlike other major European cities that come alive at night, Venice settles down at night, making you wonder, where did all those people go that were crowding the calli (alleyways of Venice) during the day.

Beautiful and serene Venice is a city almost devoid of crime. But that is little comfort to Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor who is poisoned one night during intermission. As Guido Brunetti, vice-commissario of police and a genius of detection, pieces together the clues, a shocking picture of depravity and revenge emerges.

As Library Journal states, "you certainly won't want to go to Italy, especially Venice, without bringing a few Donna Leon mysteries featuring Commissario Brunetti, whose love of good food and despair about corruption in Italian politics play prominent roles in every book."

So pick up Donna Leon and start following the exploits of Commissario Brunetti.

A Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin

A Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin

This is the second novel in Franklin's Mistress in the Art of Death series. The first novel, with that as its title, introduces Franklin's strong female protaganist, a Medieval forensic specialist by the name of Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar.

The first in the series, Mistress of the Art of Death, is set in the era of Henry II of England, who calls on his cousin the King of Sicily-whose subjects include the best medical experts in Europe-and asks for his finest "master of the art of death," an early version of the medical examiner, to help uncover a killer of small children in Cambridge, England. The King of Sicily sends his best "forensic pathologist", who just happens to be a young woman, Adelia Aguilar. In Medieval England, a woman doctor would never be accepted, and most likely viewed as a witch. Adelia has to travel with a male companion, Mansur, a Moor, who speaks Arabic. Adelia is able to pose as the intrepreter.

This series needs to be read in sequence, because all the main characters are introduced in Mistress of the Art of Death, and subsequently appear in The Serpent's Tale. In this sequel, King Henry II's mistress is found poisoned, and suspicion falls on his estranged queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The king orders Adelia, expert in the science of death, to investigate-and hopefully stave off a civil war.

The third in the series, of which I am currently engrossed is entitled, Grave Goods. While I have enjoyed all of this series, Grave Goods, really delivers the goods in terms of suspense (a page turner) and historical fiction. Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series is a beautiful blend of history, forensics, mystery and suspense. You could call this series, Bones in King Henry's court.
This is a relaxing, enjoyable and an engrossing series, with a great female protagonist. I would recommend investing your time in this series.

Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill

Blackwater : the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army

This is a scary book. Even if you thought you knew something about the rise of this private firm, that provides "military troops for hire", and its close ties to the Department of Defense, you will be taken aback by how insidious this whole trend toward privatizing our military really is. President Eisenhower, who warned us of the possibility of allowing the military industrial complex to learn what has transpired in regards to our military and the Department of Defense.

In this brilliant expose by investigative journalist, Jeremy Scahill, you will meet BLACKWATER USA, the world's most secretive and powerful mercenary firm. Based in the wilderness of North Carolina, it is the fastest-growing private army on the planet, with forces capable of carrying out regime change throughout the world.

Blackwater was founded by an extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian mega-millionaire ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the scion of a wealthy conservative family that bankrolls far-right-wing causes. This book is the dark story of the rise of a powerful mercenary army, ranging from the blood-soaked streets of Fallujah to rooftop firefights in Najaf to the hurricane-ravaged US Gulf to Washington DC, where Blackwater executives are hailed as new heroes in the war on terror.

It took me awhile to pick this book up, because I knew it would disturb me. But it is a story that needs to be told and read, not just by U.S. citizens, but by the people in power, who might be motivated to pass legislation that would transfer control of the military back to the people and elected officials in the executive branch, as well as the Department of Defense and the State Department.

MN Author Will Weaver to visit RHS

Award winning Minnesota Author, Will Weaver

will be visiting Rosemount High School on Friday afternoon, April 16 during periods 6 and 7. His program will be held in the Performing Arts Center, so there should be plenty of room for several classes.

Will Weaver writes fiction for adults and young adults. He was born in northern Minnesota in 1950 and grew up on a dairy farm. His novels and short stories have earned the praises of reviewers from coast-to-coast for their unflinching realism. Each novel in his Billy Baggs series (Striking Out, Farm Team, and Hard Ball) was honored as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.

His novel Memory Boy (2001) is used widely in schools across the United States. Following the novel, Claws (2001), his novel Full Service (coming of age in the Vietnam era) won starred reviews and was also listed as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Defect (about being different) was a winner of the 2008 Minnesota Book Award, is the story of a young man with a miraculous birth abnormality.

A Prolific Writer

Saturday Night Dirt, a novel focused on stock car racing, was released in April, 2008. A sequel, Super Stock Rookie, was released in April 2009. And a third in the trilogy, Checkered Flag Cheater, is due ouit this month. A sequel to Memory Boy should be out in late 2010.

Weaver describes his presentation as an integrated program on reading and the process of writing. He states, “My presentation comes at reading, literacy and the value of books from a “stealth” direction: through the attention-getter of a race car, and then to my novels for young adults, and then Q & A about how a writer writes, and so on."

Be sure to visit his website for more information....

http://www.willweaverbooks.com/pages/youngadult.php

The Last Campaign by Thurston Clarke

I had just turned 18 a week before Robert F. Kennedy was shot. I remember my father coming down to wake up my older brother and myself, and breaking the news that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It was somewhat devastating then, but being 18, I wasn't really into politics.

More than 40 years later, much more involved and informed, and reading this book by Thurston Clarke hasn't made it any easier. Clarke provides an insight into Bobby Kennedy, the man and the politician, that could only be obtained from the people that knew and campaigned with RFK in the last 82 days of his life. Anyone who would like to gain greater insight and a better understanding of this charismatic leader should pick this book up.

After JFK's assassination, Robert Kennedy--Jack's political warrior--almost lost hope. He was devastated by his brother's murder, and by the nation's inabilities to solve its problems of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. Bobby sensed the country's pain, and when he announced that he was running for president, the country united behind his hopes. Over the action-packed days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy's promise of a better time. And after an assassin's bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds in the thousands lined up along the country's railroad tracks to say goodbye to Bobby as his funeral train made its way from New York to Washington D.C.

Historian Clarke provides an absorbing historical narrative that goes right to the heart of America's deepest despairs and tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened personal, racial, political, and national dramas of his times.

The Angel's Game

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I was really looking forward to reading this novel by Spanish writer, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I really enjoyed his first novel, translated into English, entitled "Shadow of the Wind". Shadow of the Wind is a beautifully written story about a young boy and the mystery that surrounds a book he chooses, or it may be the other way around, from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. However this is a much darker and sinister story.

The Angel's Game once again incorporates a secret visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for David Martin, the main character. This is an intricately plotted novel, with parallels to Great Expectations (the book by Dickens does play a role in the story) and Faust by Goethe. David, who starts out as cub reporter for a Barcelona newspaper, and is recruited by the editor, because he has a talent for telling tales, to write serial stories for the paper, entitled ''The Mysteries of Barcelona''. David moves on from the newspaper work and begins to write cheap "B" grade tales for a local publisher under a pseudonym. This success enables him to buy an abandoned tower house he was always interested in. His life begins to unravel, from the pressure of pumping out the cheap, sensationalized novels and the mysteries that surround his new home.

David is given the opportunity to break out of his literary rut, when a French publisher, Andreas Corelli, offers him a significant sum to write just one novel. This Faustian bargain that David enters into, unfortunately, further leads to his unraveling. The literary project in which Corelli has enlisted David winds up involving him in all manner of deceptions and outright crimes, including a fair number of violent deaths (NY Times Book Review).

Zafon at times is a beautiful writer and quite a storyteller. His prose, at times, flows like poetry. I thoroughly enjoyed Shadow of the Wind. However, while the Angel's Game started out with that same mystical and mysterious tone, it seemed to spiral out of control like a promising horror film that ultimately turns into just another slasher film. But I will say, his closing chapter pulled me back from that dark abyss that David Martin was in, and brought tears to my eyes. Zafon weaves such a spell that you will stay with David and ultimately find yourself caring for what happens to him.