Elmore Leonard (Oct. 11, 1925 - August 20, 2013)

"Elmore Leonard, the prolific crime novelist whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky and Glitz established him as a modern master of American genre writing, died on Tuesday at his home in Bloomfield Village, Mich. He was 87.

     His death was announced on his Web site.
     To his admiring peers, Mr. Leonard did not merely validate the popular crime thriller; he stripped the form of its worn-out affectations, reinventing it for a new generation and elevating it to a higher literary shelf.
     Reviewing Riding the Rap for The New York Times Book Review in 1995, Martin Amis cited Mr. Leonard’s 'gifts — of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing — that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.'
     As the American chapter of PEN noted, when honoring Mr. Leonard with its Lifetime Achievement award in 2009, his books 'are not only classics of the crime genre, but some of the best writing of the last half-century.'”
— Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
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( ☐ Black ☐ White ) House

U.S. paperback cover on the left; U.K. paperback cover
on the right.

"Barack Obama's candidacy has got me thinking of Irving Wallace's 1964 novel The Man, which imagines an America led by a black president. But Wallace's hero, Douglas Dillman, isn't elected; he's a Midwestern senator who inherits the White House after the president and the speaker of the House are killed in a freak accident. The vice president has recently died, and since the novel was published before the adoption of the 25th amendment the office remains vacant. As president pro tempore of the Senate (a ceremonial post he was chosen for to appease the party's liberal wing), Dillman is therefore next in line.

     Unlike with Truman and LBJ, the country doesn't rally around the new president: sixty-one percent disapprove of him. Dillman can't fault them; he holds a low opinion of himself too. Racial insecurity bedevils him. 'I am a black man,' he says, 'not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President.'"
— Ariel Gonzalez, Huffington Post (May 19, 2008)
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"No justice, no peace. In the most devastating and detrimental blow to Americans, the electoral process and our Constitutional right to vote, the Supreme Court has struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 4, which maps the areas that must have pre-clearance from the federal government before making any changes to their voting laws, was ruled 'unconstitutional' in a 5-4 decision today, and the ball was thrown into Congress' court. Eliminating Section 4 is just a slick, polished way of eliminating pre-clearance all together — the very basis of the Voting Rights Act. This outrageous ruling puts African Americans, other minorities, the poor and all oppressed groups now at the mercy of state governments, yet again. It's as if we're in pre-1965 America….
     Almost immediately following the Court's reprehensible ruling, we see voter suppression tactics at play. According to the latest news reports, Texas' Attorney General Greg Abbott announced: 'With today's decision, the State's voter ID law will take effect immediately. Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.' In other words, those that are impacted the most by carefully concocted methods of disenfranchisement, will now be at the mercy of the states creating those schemes."
— Rev. Al Sharpton, Huffington Post (June 25, 2013)
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"messy, dangerous and jittery"

Cigarette card from the Nineteenth Century: Steampunk Skype (From: The Sun)

“‘The future,’ science fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke once said, ‘isn’t what it used to be.’ A clever, ironic statement, superficially quite ridiculous of course, containing nevertheless two nuggets of wisdom for the price of one. Because what the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey was talking about, naturally, was futurology, the fusion of informed scientific analysis and inspired guesswork about the future at which he has excelled for over fifty years.”

— Jonathan Margolis (from A Brief History of Tomorrow) via Apostrophe Books
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"As I read through the novel again [Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem] – first published in 1971 – I am struck how much less surreal the setting seems when viewed in the context of today’s messy, dangerous and jittery world. […]
     Such scenes are strongly reminiscent of recent events in Tripoli, Cairo, Tunis and especially Toronto. At least we can take comfort that the powers that be haven’t (yet) employed psychotropic agents to resolve any confrontations, such as deploying LTN (Love Thy Neighbour) bombs dropped by military aircraft – as occurs in the novel. Of course, chemical weapons, even when non lethal, have a habit of making dangerous situations deadly. In The Futurological Congress, the LTN bombs initially induce a loving, calming effect on the revolutionaries – at least until the fumes begin to affect the police […]"
— Jürgen Zimmermann, Sumsphere
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Food, Shelter, Clothing, Kindness

"FALLS CHURCH, Va. — E.L. Konigsburg [February 10, 1930 – April 19, 2013], an author who twice won one of the top honors for children's literature, has died. She was 83.

     Her son Paul Konigsburg says the longtime Florida resident died Friday at a hospital in Falls Church, Va., where she'd been living for the past few years with another son. She had suffered a stroke a week before she died.
     She won the John Newbery Medal in 1997 for her book The View from Saturday and in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The Newbery is one of the top honors for children's literature. Her family says she wrote 16 children's novels and illustrated 3 picture books.
     Her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth was also a Newbery honor book in 1968, making her the only author to be a winner and runner-up in the same year.
     In 1997, the Newbery committee called her story of a sixth grade Academic Bowl team and their coach 'a unique, jubilant tour de force characterized by good humor, positive relationships, distinctive personalities and brilliant story telling.'"
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"[Scholastic Books:] Why is it important to do random acts of kindness?

I think it's important to experience kindness, so that you can experience it more in the future. I believe that patterns of emotional behavior are set down before adolescence. And I think that if you have not observed kindness, you will not recognize it. You have to experience kindness in order to be kind. And you have to lay down those emotional pathways.
     For example, they're finding that kids coming out of those awful orphanages in Romania have never experienced kindness. When they're adopted, they cannot bond with people and experience kindness, because the pathway has never been laid down inside their heads. I think that as our population grows, it becomes increasingly important to be kind."
— E.L. Konigsburg (From an interview with Scholastic Books)
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