An archive of close to 7 million documents taken from Saddam Hussein's Baath party headquarters will be temporarily housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.The Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a Washington, D.C. based group, has been in possession of the archive since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq five years ago. After spending time in the basement of the foundation director's parents home in Baghdad and at a U.S. military facility in West Virginia where they were digitized the archive has now been moved to Stanford.According to Richard Sousa, senior associate director at Hoover, the institution's agreement with the IMF...
The Role of the Book in the Ascent of Barack Obama
If you're going to run for President, or any office for that matter, there are two things that will need to be addressed pretty early on; how am I going to raise money and how am I going to get my name out there.Barack Obama has excelled at both. Building on Howard Dean's online success in 2004 Obama has taken to the internet to reinvent campaign financing and to build his name recognition he turned to the book and the book tour to raise Obama awareness and to spread his message.In his piece in the Times of London on the...
Violence Against Books : Is There an Acceptable Form?
"Violence against books is understood by all parties involved as being comparable to violence against people and/or ideas and that violence against a book can quickly lead to other forms of conflict." Cordell Waldron, Iconic Books blog.But what if the violence is not motivated by politics or religion but by commerce?Earlier this month word got out that a U.S. soldier used a Quran for target practice.Here's the video of the AP story and the apology by Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad. To think that this was an isolated incident would be a bit of a...
Books Hit the Campaign Trail
Looks like the photo of Barak Obama holding his copy of The Post American World during a stop in Bozeman, MT might just be the beginning of a biblio-campaign.The book quickly jumped 3 spots on the Amazon's Top 100 moving from #7 to #4. The following day campaigning in Florida Obama responded to a question about possible running mates with this biblio-reference:I can tell you this. My goal is to have the best possible government. And that means me winning. So, I'm very practical in my thinking. I'm a practical guy. One of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln. Awhile back,...
A Holistic Approach
On Reading Ahead, the blog of the National Book Foundation, Executive Director Harold Augenbraun offers us this nugget regarding the state of reading in this country.If literary reading is on the decline, one way to stem that decline is to create a holistic approach along a spectrum of age-appropriate activities and to allow flexibility, which the balkanized literary culture will most likely not be able to do because of varied cultural, political, and social ideologies that have very little to do with inculcating a love of reading. If we leave the creation of readers to ideologues—and I use that word...