there it is

posted by jack at 06:54 CET in / reading

I finished reading Dude, Where's My Country a couple of days ago. It's a very quick read, and pretty much follows the mold of Michael Moore's other books , but there's some interesting new content in there, including:

• The concept of Dead Peasants Insurance. This was a new one to me, and if you haven't heard of this before, prepare to be disgusted: Large corporations including Disney, Dow Chemical, and Walmart routinely purchase life insurance insurance policies for their employees - wherein the company is the beneficiary! So if you work for one of these companies and have no life insurance of your own, and you have the misfortune of dying, your widow and children will be left penniless while your erstwhile employer rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars! I understand that this kind of thing is legal (so far), but man, that is sleazy.
• Moore claims that numerous polls show that Americans are, on average, more progressive on most issues than commonly believed. My standpoint is to initially assume that he's accurately citing poll data (based on the principal of "innocent until proven guilty"), so I'm not going to bother looking up this poll data. However, I'm really curious about whether people I know (family, friends, etc) might not also actually be more "leftist" than they consider themselves to be! More on this later.

Tarttilicious

posted by jack at 15:17 CET in / reading

I just finished reading The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I really liked her previous book, The Secret History when I read it a decade ago, so I figured I'd give it a go. It's a good read, with some really gripping moments and highly believable characters. The only complaint I have with the book is that the ending doesn't really tie up all the threads that are laid out during the telling; I suppose that's the whole idea, that the book is primarily a character study, but it's a shame that a fine, nicely written story has such a lackluster conclusion. It almost feels like the first four-fifths of a book rather than a complete work.

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