Book notes

"Breach of Faith" by Jed Horne

• Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from Pennsylvania who was the only medical practitioner at a Katrina medivac, was ordered to stop giving chest compressions to a dying woman because he wasn't registered with FEMA. The woman and another patient died untreated in front of him. In response to questions about this incident, a FEMA spokewoman said, "We have a cadre of physicians of our own.

"Assasination Vacation" by Sarah Vowell

• The Lincoln assasination was actually a wider plot to kill the V.P. and Secreatary of State simultaneously. The Johnson and Seward attempts were unsuccessful.
• The term "his name is mud" apparently came from Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated Booth's wounds after the Lincoln assasination.
• There is no plaque marking the spot where James Garflied was shot, close to what is now the National Gallery. But there is a beach named after him where he eventually died -- Long Beach, NJ, which was THE glamour vacation spot of the 19th Century, now a real dump.
• Garfield's assasin, Guiteau, was a total kook, upset the Garflield wouldn't appoint him Ambassador to France. People attended his murder trial mainly for the comedic value.
• McKinley was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The exposition was supposed to build ties to Latin America but was postponed from 1897 until 1901, because the U.S. was busy invading Cuba.
• Amazingly, Robert Todd Lincoln was in the vincinity of all three presidential assasinations of the 19th Century -- he was in Washington when his father was shot, he was in the same room when Garfield was shot, and was just rolling into Buffalo as McKinley was shot in the train station.
• Loius Sullivan (of Lincoln's home state) really slammed the Lincoln Monument. Lewis Mumford said it is not at all a product of Lincoln, who was a down-home guy, not a Greek god. It was a product of the imperialist types of the early 1900's, when it was designed (1913).
• Picasso's art was very much influenced by Spain's great defeat in the Spanish-American War (Spain calls the that war The Great Disaster)
• Buffalo has a great constrast of the competing schools of architecture at the start of the 19th Century in the neo-classical Historical Society building, which was built in 1901 for the Pan American exhibition, and, around the corner, a Frank Lloyd Wright house built in 1903.
  

“The Fame Motive” by Orville Gilbert Brim. To be published. The book is based on data he has gathered and analyzed, with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

• For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.