If I Bring a Little Music I Can Fit Right In

Congratulations to Mr. Jeffrey McCain for correctly naming "Gone for Good" by the Shins as the 2nd Monday Song of the Day. Jeff, I'm afraid the Running Down a Dream Song of the Day scoring system does not award style points for the manner in which answers are delivered, but if style points were available, your response would have received a perfect 10. Well, at least from the Russian judge.

Future Reading

• The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back by Andrew Sullivan

In this bold and powerful book, Andrew Sullivan criticizes our government for acting too often, too quickly, and too expensively. He champions a political philosophy based on skepticism and reason, rather than certainty and fundamentalism. He defends a Christianity that is sincere but not intolerant; and a politics that respects religion by keeping its distance. And he makes a provocative, heartfelt case for a revived conservatism at peace with the modern world, dedicated to restraining government and empowering individuals to live rich and fulfilling lives.

Synopsis from Barnes and Noble.

• Blood of the Liberals by George Packer (I know, it sounds like a horror movie directed by Karl Rove)

An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history

George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century--an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s.

The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

Synopsis from Barnes and Noble

• Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero by Jeff Pearlman

Pearlman, former staff writer with Sports Illustrated and Newsday, delivers a fully realized, if hardly appealing, portrait of baseball slugger Barry Bonds, who has perplexed teammates, fans, and the press for years with sometimes-indifferent play, an almost-joyful cruelty toward seemingly everyone (except kids), and a near-total disregard for the rules of the game, if allegations of his use of performance-enhancing drugs are true.

At the same time, Pearlman's Barry Bonds is a man of astonishing talent and, on occasion, humanity. Bonds' career is fully traced here--from his pampered boyhood as the son of another gifted but troubled player (Bobby Bonds) through his successes at Arizona State, through his years as a superstar with the Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants, including his pursuit of Hank Aaron's home-run record.

Drug-use allegations aside, it's hard not to boo Barry Bonds for the teammate and man he appears to be, so damning is Pearlman's profile. Yet the reader is always reminded of Bonds' supreme talent. A highly readable companion to Fainaru-Wada and Williams' recent Game of Shadows, which relates in greater detail Bonds' alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Review from Amazon.com

• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

It's hard to think of a work that has so influenced our understanding of the United States as this—still the most authoritative, reflective set of observations about American institutions and the American character ever written. That its author was a Frenchman, and an aristocrat at that, and that he was balanced and penetrating has often occasioned rueful surprise.

However, de Tocqueville's distance from his subject is precisely what lends his observations such continuing currency. A few decades ago, for instance, we read Tocqueville for his prediction that Russia and the United States would one day contest for pre-eminence. Now, we ought to read him (Iraqis and Afghans should, too) for his classic analyses of the link between political parties and free associations and for his reflections on such matters as religion and public life, and "self-interest properly understood."

Review from Amazon.com