Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

Just a sort of standard history so I don't have much to complain or praise. I did like the author mentioning how many times Truman rewrote events in his memoir even from his own diary and often mostly semi-irrelevant conversations to make other people look like jerks. Also, the image on the cover doesn't look this bad and looks fine, wtf Goodreads what did you do to this.



Similar to the above I don't have a lot to say other than one thing. The book spends all its time disproving the title, there was no miracle, instead a sustained deliberate effort that started with a number of advantages. Namely that half the people hated Seward and also most of his non-Lincoln opponents. As if determined to make clear it was not a miracle the book spends some time on how the Lincoln guys, because the convention was in Chicago, got to decide where delegates sat so they stuck New York away from everyone else and put the Lincoln states next to all the swing states so Seward people couldn't get over to grease palms and shake down people during the convention itself.



This was fine but it's mostly interviews with producers and executives. The "newest" name rapper to be interviewed was Ice Cube and he was only interviewed about NWA. So while like a lot of these books it's pretty interesting as it starts it skips over stuff and drags as it moves more towards today. Though most of the narrative of this book stops around 2000 anyway, I'm not really complaining about just a small discussion about Kanye or whoever, I mean like Jay-Z gets talked about in context of his first recording but everyone is talking about him as JAY-Z JAY-Z so you get a sort of "Jay-Z was a good rapper and he went to record an album... yada yada... he's a billionaire mega force married to Beyonce."

The other complaint is how much of the book is people talking about their region and everyone talking about how important regions are. "He had a Houston-LA flavor with Miami beats over Memphis vibe." "He from the Bronx so we don't fuck with dat we ride Brooklyn style." Nobody knows what the fuck this means, especially not us cacs. But it's whole pages and chapters of this. The thing is that the chapters about the smaller cities are more interesting than the NYC borough wanking that's the bulk of the book. Nobody outright says it but the book strongly suggests that a lot of the independent dudes in places like Houston, Atlanta, etc. were making tons more money than stars making it big in NYC and LA. Because the big labels, even stuff like Def Jam, are giving you pennies per copy sold while indies gave you many dollars and because of that region stupidity you would sell large in the region just on this factor. It wasn't until they were talking about Master P and No Limit that the reason why people weren't doing this, it took a lot of work, you had to actually go around and talk to people and understand pressings, inventory and so on. Ironically, though not mentioned in the book, the internet has essentially levelled this by eliminating the physical distribution problems. No wonder the labels have hated it forever.