Tony Curtis - An American Prince

American Prince by Tony Curtis

Tony gives a very candid description of the events in his life. He starts the book with his brief romance with Marylin Monroe when they both first arrived in Hollywood. He met her before she was blond and spoke with her characteristic breathy voice.  He later relays struggles he and Billy Wilder had working with her and her managers on the set of Some Like It Hot.  His often quoted remark that kissing Marlyn Monroe was like "Kissing Hitler" was meant to be sarcastic.   He describes each of his movies and his co-stars including Natalie Wood, Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Roger Moore and others.

His childhood was perfect training for his life in the movies as he spent most of it on the streets of New York developing athletic prowess that he used in his films including Houdini.   He was lucky to avoid being killed by a mob after dropping liquid filled condoms on a parade of Nazi sympathizers in the lead up to WWII. His disfunctional parents did not provide a good role model for his personal relationships.

After a roller coaster life that included a hellish decent into the drug culture of the 80's, he finally found peace with his last wife. He spent this time painting and taking care of former race horses in Las Vegas Nevada.

A tribute to Tony Curtis - 3 minutes

The book, American Prince: A Memoir is available from Amazon.com.

Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett

Krista Tippet's book Speaking of Faith, covers the faith journey of the public radio host.  She describes her journey to have conversations with people of different religions around the world. 

I was particularly interested in her differentiation between thin and deep faith.  An example of thin faith would be that practiced in Rwanda where church goers attacked and killed their neighbors because they were of different height.  Deep faith or religion provides a more fuller understanding of the nuances of the whole religious experience and does not focus on only a small slice. 

She describes a conversation between a Jewish scholar and a Muslim holy man.  They attempted to differentiate acts of faith from those that were done for other reasons. When an act increases the beauty in the world through music, caring, improving life, reducing misery then people are following the practices of their religion. When an act destroys or makes things ugly then it comes not from the long history of religious practice but from a flawed interpretation. For me a simpler dichotomy is compassion vs. hatred.  It's a good check on understanding motivation. The compassion does need to be effective as pious good intentions without organization or follow through can be a source of frustration and a waste of time.

Krista describes her time in West and East Germany in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. At this point in her life she put aside religion and looked for relevance in the political sphere.  She contrasted the maturity of her East German friends attempting to live life under oppression and the rich, powerful and often immature people she met while working at the West German Embassy. 

Reconnecting with Compassion- Ted Talk - Krista Tippet


The book, Speaking of Faith is available from Amazon.com

Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever

The book, Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard is a tightly written book about the last days of the Lincoln presidency.  Starting with his second inaugural speech and ending with the investigation of his assassination.  The authors provide more details into the activities of John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators as they work on a plan to take down the US government. 

The last battles of the Civil War are also described in rather graphic detail giving a sense of the raw brutality of the battles.  The back history of Lee and Grant provides a better depth of understanding between the two very different men. 

Lincoln's sleepless nights and realization that his time on earth may be short cast a foreboding shadow over the future.  This is an excellently written suspense thriller that provides gritty details to a very tragic era in American History.

For the those looking for Abe Lincoln quotes Good Reads has an extensive collection

A section from the audio book

The book, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever is available from Amazon.com

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon has written a short a pithy book about the unoriginal origins of artistic creation.  He wrote this book as a note to a himself as a younger person after learning these insights working on the creative process.  He believes all artistic and creative work is derivative.  It is a reaction to what has happened in the past.

Highlights:  Don't spend all of you time on one creative outlet.  Feed yourself with multiple projects in different areas.  Play music, go for a walk in nature, write blogs.  If you focus just on one aspect your life ceases to be whole.   Go ahead procrastinate and bounce from one to another and give the creativity in another area a chance to well up.  Do not write what you know but write what you want to read.  Try to emulate your favorite artists.  Because we can not copy another person we discover our unique quirks and talents when we try to be like them. 

His advice to add tactile offline methods to creativity is a good one.  He finds time on the computer is a time to produce.  The time with clay, post it notes and pieces of paper is the time to be creative.

The book, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative is available from Amazon.com

The Watchers by Shane Harris

In The Watchers, Shane Harris describes the birth of the modern technological American surveillance state.  He follows the exploits of John Poindexter, the NSA head during the Reagan Administration, while weaving in details about computer programs designed to capture data and come up with patterns that would detect terrorist cells.  Programs such as Able Danger and others that existed before 911 would find patterns that suggested Al Qaeda had a global terror network with cells in the US, Europe, the Middle East and SE Asia before the CIA had this information.  They combined Internet searches with proprietary government data bases to develop possible leads for terrorists.  Repeatedly, the analysis of these data bases had to be destroyed because program produced inadvertent co mingling of US citizens with foreign terrorists.  This violated US privacy laws and laws governing US military surveillance. 

The book covers the topic with empathy towards the surveillance staff attempting to protect America from foreign terrorists while complying with laws that made their task extremely difficult.  I am interested in how America will balance the competing interest of privacy and security in the future.  It is also fascinating to learn how the NSA attempts to make some sense of the vast amounts of data it retrieves.  Prior to 911 the analysis of the data was not systematic and led to a fragmented response.

Speeches and interviews of Shane Harris.

Presidential candidate, Barak Obama, offers his opinion on privacy vs security in 2007

His current opinions on this appear to have changed according to a June 7, 2013 Washington Post article .

The Guardian reports that US technology companies are confused about the reports of the NSA PRISM program and seem unaware about nonspecific data mining June, 2013. 

The book, The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State is available from Amazon.com

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