Mark Rylance, Tony Award-winning actor and Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre 1995-2005 recommends the book, writing:

“This book is the most positive and balanced work ever done on a great and beautiful question: Who was William Shakespeare? Diana Price brings a disciplined and enlightened scholarship to the subject. She does not offer fanciful hypotheses. On the contrary, she reveals many of the known facts about William Shakespeare that have been previously ignored or interpreted to suit a theory. She then compares his documentary evidence to that for other writers of Shakespeare’s time. If you are sceptical, take a minute to read the appendix. If you want to know what we know about the actual William Shakespeare, this is a book to read and keep in your library as a reference. Absolutely fascinating and essential to understanding why there is an authorship question. I recommend it first, always, to anyone who asks me who Shakespeare was.”
 
 

Full of imagery, symbolism … one big metaphor.
This tale, in essence, is deep adult’s “children’s story”. As the cover asks, Blasphemy or reverence? You decide.

Ultimately, however, the dishonesty of the man is shown by a persistence until 1964, the day of his death, in his assertion that all blame belonged to Roosevelt. There is no mention of anything that Mr. Roosevelt did as respects WWII that emerges as praiseworthy, despite his having played a huge role in saving the world from fascist domination.
 
This is not to say that Mr. Roosevelt & the US Army did not fail Jews during WWII. As Bendarsky’s tome shows, there was much to be regretted. But it should also be remembered that the cause of war was not the salvation of Jews, but the end of ceaseless, murderous territorial conquest, one of the consequences of which was the Shoah. Had Germany not conquered territory, the 600,000 Jews within its confines would very likely have found sanctuary, perhaps in the East African British colony that Mr Hoover thought might serve as a homeland; the irony of this when juxtaposed to Germany’s Mozambique idea did not appear to dissuade the editor from using it as evidence of Mr. Hoover’s true love of Jews. 
 
In sum, the words of the worst President in US history, whose actions in part cause WWII to consume 60,000,000 lives, damn him far better than any other explication possibly could.

A great insight into the psychological underpinnings of the kind of thought Goldberg skewers is offered by social scientiest Jonathan Haidt in his new book “The Righteous Mind. Haidt offers a Rosetta Stone for understanding political thought not only of today but through the ages. I was surprised to find only one post about Haidt in a search of your site. I highly recommend that you read his book and review it on your blog.

Moral foundations are some of the core elements of fundamental human nature, instilled in us over half a billion years of natural selection so that humans can create “Moral systems [of] interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.” (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, page 270)
Haidt sees six foundations, instilled in us by natural selection, that each of us uses in differnt amounts to construct our own morality. They are harm/care, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression.

The first three foundations are focused on the individual, the second three are focused on suppressing or regulating self-interest and increasing cooperation.  Liberal morality rests largely on the first three, and of those mostly care/harm. Conservative morality rests on an equal balance of all six.   I would further suggest that conservative morality is focused on finding the right balance between the individualizing foundations and the binding ones.   
In my view, Moral Foundations tell us even more about human nature than even Haidt suggests. The way I see it:

1) Moral foundations are the color receptors of the moral eye. The more color receptors one employs the more of the building block of human nature one perceives.

2) Moral foundations work together to give us our “gut feel” about right and wrong; our instantaneous, automatic-process reaction of like or dislike, approach or avoid, fight or flee that results from half a billion years of evolution.

3) Moral foundations are the tools of the controlled-process cognition conscious thought. They are the hammer, saw, pliers, screw driver, et al, we use to process and understand what our moral eye perceives – to make sense of the social world around us – and to construct the reasoned arguments of persuasion. Reason evolved to serve our intutions. Reason is for winning arguments, it is not for finding the truth (but under rare circumstances it can be used to work toward the truth.) Only the tools associated with the intuitive senses are available to our conscious thought, and in the same proportions.

In other words, Moral Foundations define the the scope, the limits, of one’s perception, understanding, and prescriptions of and for human nature and the social world.
Moral Foundations define our moral “vision” in every sense of the word.
Understand Moral Foundations and you’ll never look at a political debate the same way again.

Lost in Zombieland is more than a political satire: it is an adventure story about the future of the America. It is hysterically funny and thought provoking. It is scarey too. The USA is on brink and it could go either way. Read the book and see my vision of where this nation is and where we could be heading.
 
JT

     Three hundred pages of political satire could get kind of tiresome.  So “The Prettiest Snake in Hell” is also a comic opera, a love story, a spiritual allegory, and a science fiction tale.

Sound familiar people?

It’s better than the last 2 books in the series, notably due to better adventures of Merlin Athrawes. He was the central figure in the first book, and it was awesome only in so far because it was about his actions and adventures. The later books became more socio-political world building tests. While there still isn’t as much action concerning Merlin Athrawes as there was in Off Armageddon Reef, the slot he got was very enjoyable. Most of the story was split between Charis, the Temple Lands, and HMS Destiny with the midshipman. Charis represented socio-political maneuvering, the Temple Lands represented evil megalomaniacal lords plotting to do more evil, and HMS Destiny represented the down to earth physical naval action.

 I Prefer Brandon Sanderson’s endings, as they had higher dramatic tension and impact. Weber’s world building is good, but due to the number of details, starts to diffuse too much and take attention away from the central figures (namely Merlin Athrawes, which I reread his parts in Off Armageddon Reef many many times). The same is true in Honor Harrington starting from book 8 or so. It is not yet true for the March UpCountry series, probably due to the script writing style of John Ringo, the co-author of that series.

 Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson was mentioned before, and others, who did not like the length and content of Wheel of Time, seem to be taking his more compressed plot and more logical world building, into their stride.

I’ve read all of Sanderson’s Alcatraz series, his young adults line, and it is quite witty, funny, entertaining, and compact. It has a simple plot, done elegantly with sufficient interpersonal development and introspection on the main character’s part, that it has “depth” other stories of the same usually lack. 

Peter V Brett’s Demon Spear series (Painted Man, Desert Spear) were better than I had expected. It’s akin to a dark fantasy, where the night belongs to demons and towns and cities must setup defensive barricades to prevent them from being killed. It is very survival and horror natured in the first novel. And it is a story about 3 people, told from their own life perspective as they grew up, learning to use their particular talents and gifts to retake the night from the demons. The plot is compressed so years roll by (whereas HFAF takes the time of 1 year a book normally) from beginning to finish. That cuts down on a lot of the tedium and introduces you to the character’s early life, but it gets more interesting once they grow up and have to take on other issues.

 
The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan is a story about redemption and how one person tries to escape his criminal past. What’s interesting is that the setting is in New Orleans and is full of Leftists or Democrats conducting murder, corruption, and all kinds of other stuff. Thus it presents a “verisimilarity” to the real world, which can be great for immersion if you agree with the author’s fundamental premises. Klavan is the guy who does the funny one shots of various current events, at PJ media. I found the novel entertaining in a sense of good vs evil drama. Klavan did his research on inner city violence quite well, as nothing he described sounded disharmonious or inconsistent with my own research.

 Although as a personal decision, I wouldn’t have let the gang go so easily in one of the scenes.