Showing posts with label Biographies & Memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biographies & Memoir. Show all posts

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius Summary

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius Summary

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius

A Memoir Based on a True Story
Published: 13, February 2001

Author: Dave Eggers
Genres: Biographies & Memoir, Comedy & Humor, First Person Narrative, Satire



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Summary

Dave Eggers and his siblings, Bill, Beth, and Toph (who is 13 years younger than his next-eldest sibling, Dave), live in Lake Forest, Illinois, when their father dies suddenly from lung cancer. After a protracted battle, their mother dies a month later from stomach cancer.

Following that, Eggers, Beth, and Toph relocate to California. Bill, who plays a minor role in the story, finally relocates to Los Angeles. The remainder of the family resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eggers and Toph start living on their own in a run-down, wild environment. Eggers oscillates between believing that his approach to parenting is deliberate and wonderfully crafted to raise Toph to be well-adjusted and fearing that his hands-off attitude and devotion to personal pursuits would cause Toph to be maladjusted. Eggers' personal attempts to live a regular life as a young adult typically entail quite routine meetings with women and drinking, but the author portrays them as strange. He feels robbed of his youth as a result of his parents' deaths and his responsibilities to care for Toph, and this feeds his pursuit of sex and recklessness.

In San Francisco, Eggers and his pals launch Might, an independent magazine, and become immersed in the Generation X milieu. The book depicts much of the magazine's history. In a twist on the concept of exhibitionism, Eggers auditions for MTV's The Real World.


Rating: 75/100
Recommended: 80/100 Yes.

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A Promised Land Summary

Published: November 17, 2020

Author:  Barack Obama

Genre: Biographies & Memoir, Political Memoir, Leaders & Notable People, US Presidents

Check out the review of this book here: 


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Summary:

The memoir starts with Obama's childhood, goes through his first campaigns, and covers the majority of his first term as President, all while remaining focused on Obama's political career. The events leading up to Osama bin Laden's assassination in May 2011 are detailed in the book, culminating in a meeting between Obama and the Navy SEALs who carried out the raid. The first 200 pages or so of the book are devoted to Obama's life and career up to and including his time in Chicago, while the book remains primarily about politics.

College

Obama admitted that when he was in college in the 1980s, he used to read Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse in order to impress potential love interests. "It's embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know those first two years of college," Obama said. "My pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless as a strategy for picking up girls," Obama said of his college reading.
 

Politicians

Obama paints a positive picture of many of the staffers and other politicians he meets throughout his early life and presidency. Obama's "affection for his first-term inner circle" was "moving," according to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her New York Times review, and he "makes heroes of people" in his descriptions of others. In the memoir, Claire McCaskill is praised for "voting her conscience" on the Dream Act, and Tim Geithner is praised for his handling of the 2008 financial crisis.
 
Obama also criticizes other world leaders, claiming, for example, that Vladimir Putin's "satirical image of masculine vigor" is the result of "the fastidiousness of a teenager on Instagram." "The easy confidence of someone who'd never been pressed too hard by life," Obama says of British Prime Minister David Cameron.
 

Nobel Prize

Some critics remarked on Obama's reaction to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, writing in the book that his simple response was "for what?" Obama elaborated when he arrived in Oslo for the Nobel Prize ceremony: "It seemed illogical to believe that I, or anyone else, could bring order to such disorder... On some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Eli Stokols both called the reaction "incredulous" in their reviews. Following an early morning phone call, Obama informed Michelle Obama of the news, to which she replied, "that's wonderful honey," before returning to sleep. In analyzing the response, Adichie observed that Obama "considers his public image overinflated; he pushes pins into his own hype balloons."
 

United Nations

Obama writes in his book, "During the Cold War, the chances of reaching an agreement were slim, which is why the UN stood by as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and US planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside. Even after the Cold War ended, divisions in the Security Council hampered the UN's ability to solve problems. Its members lacked the financial and political resources to rebuild failing states like Somalia or prevent ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka."


Rating: 100/100
Recommended: 100/100 YES.

Buy the Kindle version here:


Free with free Audible trial: (Narrated by Barack Obama)


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Any kind of support, even a simple 'like, thumbs up or a small comment' is enough and helps me grow, create and freely do more stuff and work on projects for the benefit of many.
Help me grow into a global force: https://www.patreon.com/namsu
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