Argo

Few years ago I read the book Our Man In Tehran by Robert Wright. The book is about american hostages in Iran and Canadian involvement in that crisis from the point of view of the Canadian ambassador in Iran during those days, Ken Taylor. I also wanted to read the book Argo when it was released but never found the time to do so until the movie started to make lots of noise and eventually winning the Oscar. I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie.

I got the audio-book of the Argo from the library. The narration is done very well and the book is well written which made me to want to keep listening. I find this book more entertaining to read than Our Man In Tehran but the latter gives more realistic information about the whole situation. I got the feeling that the author either knowingly or just by mistake describing scenes in a way to make them more dramatic. One example of this is the reference to the revolutionary guards walking at night on the streets and blowing their whistles. I was living in Tehran during that time and I know that because of the increase in theft during and after the revolution some neighbors hired security guards to watch out for the cars and the houses in their neighborhoods. These guards were not part of the revolutionary guards but in Argo they are referred to as being part of them.

As I was reading both books I was asking myself that there must have been few people inside Iranian government who were aware of the situation and this report on the CBC kind of answered this question.

Here Comes Trouble

Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life

I listened to the audio-book of this title which I got from our library. Part of the reason I choose this book was that I couldn't find the audio-books in my to-read list in the library. This has happened to me before, looking for a specific book and not finding it and coming across a title that was intriguing enough to borrow it, and I 'd been pleasantly surprised with these books. I usually check the online reviews, some negative and some positive, for the books that I want to read. I did the same for this title. Some of the negative reviews were more based on the author, Michael Moore, and his previous works rather than this book. For most part the reviews were good and I decided to go ahead and listen to it.

This book is a collection of stories about the author from different stages of his life and is narrated by himself. I enjoyed both the narration and the stories.

Following is the list of the stories in this book:

The Execution of Michael Moore

Crawling Backward

Search Party

The Canoe

Piet

Tet

Christmas

A Holy Thursday

The Exorcism

Boys State

Zoe

Getaway Car

Two Dates

Twenty Names

Milhous, in Three Acts

Crisis Intervention

A Public Education

Raid

Bitburg

A Blessing

Abu 2 U 2

Hot Tanned Nazi

Parnassus

Gratitude

In the "A Blessing" he tells the story of George Zabelka, the Roman Catholic priest who blessed the Enola Gay before its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The dialog between Michael Moore and the priest is very interesting, specially now with the trial of Bradley Manning underway. The story revolves around the sense of guilt the priest has about his moral support for the bombing.

George: "... it is the responsibility of every human to know their actions and their consequences and to ask questions and to question things when they are wrong."
Michael: "but George this was war no one is allowed to ask any questions."
George: "and it is exactly that kind of attitude that continues to get us into more wars, no one asking any questions specially in the military."