Word: masterful
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...John Lee Hooker, blues master, is dead. I remember talking to Hooker just a few years back. I had called him up to interview him about his latest album. Even over the phone his voice had a sonorousness that had one reaching for nature metaphors in order to describe it: echoes in underground caverns, waves booming against shorelines, thunder rolling overhead. Hooker was 79 then, and his health was starting to fail. I asked if he planned to do any touring anytime soon. "I'll go out once in a while," Hooker told me. He added: "I've paid...
...then pricking it with a couple of puckish allusions to late-'50s guitar hits inspired by him: the monster chords of Link Wray's 'Rumble,' the seductive electronic weeping in Santo and Johnny's 'Sleep Walk.' Paul's fingers warm over the strings, coaxing, then hypnotizing them. The old master still has that supple touch...
...mountains around Kandahar ordering up global mayhem at the click of a mouse is more than a little ludicrous. Yes, the various networks of Islamist terror have made full use of the possibilities presented by technology and globalization. But few serious intelligence professionals believe Bin Laden is the puppet-master atop a pyramid structure of terror cells. It's really not that simple, but personalizing the threat - while it distorts both the nature of the problem and the remedy - is a time-honored tradition. Before Bin Laden, the face of the global terror threat against Americans belonged to the Palestinian...
...only thing missing from Hill's excellent biography is the voice of the Master himself. Although the book's subtitle emphasizes Southern's life and art (and it is obvious that, after a certain point, his behavior in public became his "art") sadly there are few quotes from Southern's published work. Therefore, the uninitiated are urged to supplement "Grand" with a look at Southern's finer writing, preferably "Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes." Those who are content to know Southern's work through viewings of "Strangelove" and "Easy Rider" will still be in for a treat, though...
...Cambridge, Mass., and flies to Jackson, Miss., to teach algebra at all-black Lanier High School. Moses, 66, is determined to make mathematical literacy as much a battle cry as voting rights were 40 years ago. He wants to overthrow what he calls "sharecropper education" by helping all students master algebra, preferably by the eighth grade, so they are ready to take college-prep math courses in high school...