the last book I ever read (Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning, excerpt two)

from Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch:

Whether or not they thought about it, all good improvisers called upon those resources. But Charlie Parker wanted to be more than good; he wanted to be different. Part of your statement was your sound, and the one he was developing struck some more conventional musicians as brittle or harsh. Parker didn’t care. He didn’t want the kind of rich vibrato that characterized the sound of older players—Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges—that would almost force each note in his compulsively swift phrases to seep into the next. He needed pitches that came out of the horn quicker, that were as blunt as snapping fingers when the inspiration demanded. His tone was absolutely unorthodox, as much like a snare drum or a bongo as a voice. It was assertive, at times comic or cavalier, and though often sweet, it could also sound almost devoid of pity. One trumpeter thought it sounded like knives being thrown into the audience.

When he arrived at the Woodside that night, Charlie smiled. “The sap is flowing,” he said—code for “I’m going to blow my ass off tonight.”

“Yeah, Bird,” McShann responded, “I’m sure it is.”

the last book I ever read (Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning, excerpt one)

from Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch:

Charlie Parker had been to New York before. He had hoboed up to Chicago in the early part of 1939, escaping a marriage that had gotten in the way of his music, fighting past influences, zeroing in on his own individual voice. After blowing out every alto player in town, he’d hopped a train to New York, where he spent about a year. Just as he’d started getting work, though, and earning the respect of fellow musicians, a death in his immediate family brought Parker back to Kansas City. After briefly working with another outfit, he had rejoined McShann’s new big band. Parker had been overwhelmed by the wild living he’d experienced in New York, but now he had more self-control and got back into the fold. In the next two years, he grew and grew, able to do more and more of what he wanted with the saxophone.

the last book I ever read (Promises to Keep by Joe Biden, excerpt sixteen)

from Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics by Joe Biden:

I made a mistake. I underestimated the influence of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the rest of the neocons; I vastly underestimated their disingenuousness and incompetence.

the last book I ever read (Promises to Keep by Joe Biden, excerpt fifteen)

from Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics by Joe Biden:

In the first months after he took office, George W. Bush reached out to the ranking Democrat of almost every Senate committee, but not to me. I didn’t take it personally. I was the lead Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Bush wasn’t much engaged in foreign policy. He was like most of the other governors I’d seen take office. Carter, Reagan, and Clinton had all been shy about taking on big issues in foreign policy unless and until forced by circumstances. Bush seemed even more uncertain.

And it worried me that he had put in place a team that was essentially at war over foreign affairs. On one side was Secretary of State Colin Powell, an old-school Republican internationalist who seemed to want to engage in the world. On the other side were the neo-isolationists like Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The Rumsfeld clique was talking about pulling out of the Balkans, walking away from the international global warming pact called the Kyoto Treaty, and canceling President Clinton’s signature on the international treaty that set up the new International Criminal Court for prosecuting individuals for genocide and other war crimes. They were so intent on going ahead with Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense shield that they were willing to pull out of earlier arms control treaties to get there—inviting, in my view, another arms race. The missile defense system seemed to be the perfect metaphor for the neo-isolationist policy. Let’s arm the heavens, they were saying, and protect the United States of America, the rest of the world be damned.

the last book I ever read (Promises to Keep by Joe Biden, excerpt fourteen)

from Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics by Joe Biden:

While looking at Bureau of Justice crime statistics in 1990, I was struck by a particular number. The violent crimes perpetrated against men had fallen greatly in the previous ten years; the number of violent crimes against young women trended up. My initial hunch was that because of the women’s movement, more women were willing to come forward and report rapes or domestic violence. But as I looked into it, there was much more than that going on. In fact, I quickly came to see that violence against women was a cultural expectation shared by men, women, and children. I remember reading shocking statistics from a survey of middle-school children done in Rhode Island. If a man takes a woman out on a date and spends $10 on her, one question asked, does he have the right to force sex on her? A quarter of the boys said he did, which stunned me. But the bigger surprise was that a fifth of the girls agreed. This was a big problem, and it was deeply ingrained in our society. I later learned that one in ten American males believed it was okay for a husband to hit his wife if she didn’t obey him. That meant millions of women were at risk of being beaten in their own homes.

I knew from experience that it wasn’t just uneducated thugs who thought this way. I had never forgotten a scene back in 1981 when the Judiciary Committee was rushing to get a big new crime bill out of committee for a vote on the floor. The clock was running out on the session of Congress and I was pushing this to get this bill out the door. We had the votes to report the entire package favorably to the floor. The committee was meeting in a small room just off the Senate floor; Chairman Thurmond called for a committee vote, unless there were any objections. Alabama senator Jeremiah Denton objected, and loudly. Denton was angry about a provision I wanted in the bill that made marital rape a crime indistinguishable from any other rape. “Damn it, when you get married,” he said that day, “you kind of expect you’re going to get a little sex.”

the last book I ever read (Promises to Keep by Joe Biden, excerpt thirteen)

from Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics by Joe Biden:

What came clear to me as I wrote the speech was very simple: The central lesson I received from the Catholic Church, my Catholic school education, and my own parents had always been the governing force in my political career. To wit, the greatest sins on this earth are committed by people of standing and means who abuse their power. That was a message constantly reinforced in Sunday sermons, in school, and at home. Jesus didn’t spend time with the Pharisees. Jesus hung out with the prostitutes, with the lepers, with the bad guys. That’s what I remembered about my faith. In my own house the lessons about the abuse of power were constant, big and small—from the Nazi party in Germany to the father on our street in Mayfield who chastised his children with a belt. “It takes a small man to hit a small child,” my dad used to say. My father never once raised his hand to any of his children. I remember Mom and Dad talking in our living room about a friend of theirs slapping his wife across the face. My father, who was not given to temper tantrums, was pacing the floor, enraged.

With power and privilege, I was taught, comes a responsibility to treat others with respect and fairness. Generosity is not simply a virtue; it’s a Commandment. And when we see people abusing power, it is our duty to intercede on behalf of their victims. As I worked on that Georgetown speech, I saw that the lessons I had learned growing up had always been the guiding principles of my career in politics, and that the issues that captured my attention had always all related to the abuse of power. From civil rights and voting rights to my interest in putting police on the streets to protect people from violent criminals in their own neighborhoods, to stopping banks from redlining practices that made it nearly impossible for people living in black neighborhoods to get loans, to pushing for federal guidelines that made criminal sentencing more fair and uniform, to fighting violence against children, to the disgust I felt at watching Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover abuse their high offices (I was one of the few senators who voted against naming the FBI building after Hoover), to the fight against the drug cartels of the 1980s, there was a single common thread. As I looked back on my career, it was obvious that what had always animated me was the belief that we should stand up to those who abused power, whether it was political, economic, or physical.

the last book I ever read (Promises to Keep by Joe Biden, excerpt twelve)

from Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics by Joe Biden:

Later in the speech I reminded some of my colleagues of their own place in the history of “advice and consent.” The ranking Republican on Judiciary, Strom Thurmond, had himself invoked ideology in the confirmation process of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the bench. Senator Thurmond emphasized the importance of balance: “This means that it will require two additional conservative justices in order to change the tenor of future Supreme Court decisions.”

Thurmond, I noted, had expressed similar sentiments the next year when lame-duck president Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as chief. “It is my contention,” he said to the Chamber, “that the Supreme Court has assumed such a powerful role as a policymaker in the Government that the Senate must necessarily be concerned with the views of prospective justices—of Chief Justices—as they relate to broad issues confronting the American people, and the role of the Court in dealing with these issues.”