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I would like to give a thanks to Derek and his wife for raising money with the 6th Annual Mustache Pub Crawl. They donated the proceeds to the “One Foundation” for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. There was a great turn out as usual. And it was a blast even tho the bartender shut me off at the Hong Kong lol… I'm counting down the days until next years crawl…
7th Annual mustache pub crawl next year Saturday June 14th 2014!!!!! Be There… For more info check out Drunknothings.com…
“Joseph Barboza is the most dangerous individual known.”–FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 1965
Joe Barboza knew that there were two requirements for getting inducted into the Mafia. You had to be Sicilian. And you had to commit a contract killing. The New Bedford-born mobster was a proud Portuguese, not Sicilian, but his dream to be part of La Cosa Nostra proved so strong that he thought he could create a loophole. If he killed enough men, if he did enough of the Mafia's dirtiest biddings, then they would have no choice but to make him a Made Man.
Barboza's brutal rise during one of the deadliest mob wars in U.S. history became the stuff of legend, both on the bloodied streets of Boston and in the offices of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney General. He took sick joy in his crimes, and it became increasingly difficult for the mob to keep the Animal on his leash. But soon the hunter became the hunted. Betrayed by the mob and now on the run, Boston's most notorious contract killer forged a Faustian bargain with two unscrupulous FBI agents–a pact that would transform the U.S. criminal justice system. From false testimony and manipulated evidence that sent mob leaders to death row, to the creation of the Witness Protection Program so the feds could protect their prized, cold-blooded witness, this was the horrific, dramatic first act in a story of murder and FBI corruption still being played out today in the news and the courtroom with the capture and trial of Whitey Bulger. Barboza's legacy, buried for years thanks to the murders or deaths of its participants, is finally coming to light and being told in its unvarnished brutality by one of America's most respected crime writers.
(Book discription by Amazon)
For you true crime fans out there I would highly recommend you read “Animal”. Being from Boston I may be a little bias do to the fact the books setting is my backyard . But it still reads brilliantly. Casey Sherman did a lot of homework on the subject of Joe “The Animal” Barboza. As a kid who grew up in and around Boston you would here stories of these larger than life Mobsters, and to read it in print you can't believe the stories really happened. The book starts out with Barboza as a youth and swiftly progresses to how Joe got the nickname “The Animal”. And that nickname fits perfectly. I don't think there is a better name for him. A ruthless killer who's only dream was to be the first Portuguese to become a Made Man in the Italian Mafia. By being the most vicious killer Barboza thought the Mob Bosses would have to let him in. So if you like good Mafia related books defiantly give “Animal” a try. I personally couldn't put it down.
Boomer
Introduction
Have you ever stood in a bookstore aisle, trying to choose a book in your favorite genre? You weren’t influenced by customer reviews posted next to each book. The only customer input you saw was incredible praise for how awesome the book was on the back cover or first pages. There wasn’t anything negative posted about any of the books.
In the pre-internet days, if you wanted to see a written review, you had to browse newspapers and magazines. The only way to receive input from other customers who read the book was to meet them in person and ask them.
How times have changed! Now Amazon allows all customers to share their feedback, and this information is publicly posted on the book’s detail page.
Is this helpful? Let’s consider some of the major criticism. Note that Amazon has recently released an article clarifying, to some extent, what is…
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The Silver Linings Playbook
by Matthew Quick
4.04 of 5 stars 4.04 · rating details · 28,888 ratings · 4,356 reviews
A HEARTWARMING DEBUT NOVEL, NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!
Meet Pat. Pat has a theory: his life is a movie produced by God. And his God-given mission is to become physically fit and emotionally literate, whereupon God will ensure a happy ending for him — the return of his estranged wife Nikki. (It might not come as a surprise to learn that Pat has spent time in a mental health facility.) The problem is, Pat's now home, and everything feels off. No one will talk to him about Nikki; his beloved Philadelphia Eagles keep losing; he's being pursued by the deeply odd Tiffany; his new therapist seems to recommend adultery as a form of theraphy. Plus, he's being hunted by Kenny G!
In this enchanting novel, Matthew Quick takes us inside Pat's mind, showing us the world from his distorted yet endearing perspective. As the award-winning novelist Justin Cronin put it: “Tender, soulful, hilarious, and true, The Silver Linings Playbook is a wonderful debut.”
(Description from GoodReads.com)
I found this novel by accident and I am happy I did! Not only was this book moving, it was absolutely hilarious. Although this book is about mental illness it doesn't make light of it. It is a heart warming story that takes you on a “Bi-polar” roller coaster with a lot of ups and downs. You really end up rooting for the main character Pat as he tries to piece his life back together. Pat was introduced to his best friends sister inlaw Tiffany and Pats life is turned upside down.
I would defiantly recommend this book if you are looking for a feel good book with a lot of laughs. And once you finish the book you HAVE to watch the movie. Bradley Cooper (The Hangover) was genius in his role and so wasn't Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games). Robert DiNiro (Goodfellas) plays Pats Dad and is amazingly funny. Check out the preview on the IMDB link below .
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2225369/?ref_=tt_cl_t2
Boomer
Like many fans of Jonathan Tropper, I have been eagerly awaiting a new book since his breakout novel, This Is Where I Leave You, was published in 2009. Often compared to Nick Hornby, Tropper has proven to have a unique gift in capturing the essence of comically flawed and American males and their dysfunctional families.
Tropper’s latest novel, One Last Thing Before I Go, has all the qualities Tropper fans love about his previous novels, with new depth.
The story focuses mostly on the middle-aged Silver, once the drummer of a one-hit-wonder band whose life has since fallen apart. His college-bound daughter has revealed to him that he’s pregnant and his ex-wife is soon to be remarried, to a doctor who can perform life-saving surgery on him that he has decided not to have. Silver has decided he’d much rather make peace with those he’ll leave behind, rather than continue with a life that has gone down the toilet and done no one else much good.
Unlike Tropper’s previous novels, One Last Thing Before I Go is written in the third person, shifting between the story’s main characters, allowing the reader to understand each character’s perspective of the story as it unfolds. Classic Tropper with a new twist.
Review By Seatlepi.com
I personally love Jonathan Tropper books and this one is by far up at the top of the list. After reading “This is where i leave you” Tropper is one of my favorite authors. He has a way about his writing that brings his characters to life and you will find yourself laughing out loud and at times crying because your laughing so much. “One last thing before i go” Is a tragicomedy and i would highly recommend it. I started it on the 29th and was done by the 31st. I could not put it down.
I give it 5 Stars…..
Boomer
They’re calling it the Storm of the Century, and it’s coming hard. The residents of Little Tall Island have seen their share of nasty Maine Nor’easters, but this one is different. Not only is it packing hurricane-force winds and up to five feet of snow, it’s bringing something worse. Something even the islanders have never seen before. Something no one wants to see.
Just as the first flakes begin to fall, Martha Clarendon, one of Little Tall Island’s oldest residents, suffers an unspeakably violent death. While her blood dries, Andre Linoge, the man responsible sits calmly in Martha’s easy chair holding his cane topped with a silver wolf’s head…waiting.
Linoge knows the townsfolk will come to arrest him. He will let them. For he has come to the island for one reason. And when he meets Constable Mike Anderson, his beautiful wife and child, and the rest of Little Tall’s tight-knit community, this stranger will make one simple proposition to them all:
“If you give me what I want, I’ll go away.”
Above is the back summary of the book.
I rate this book, on a scale of 1-10, a 9/10. I love how it is written as a screenplay. I think it’s much easier to read that way. The story itself is absolutely brilliant. The character base is strong and the ending is a tear jerker. King definitely struck gold with this one. Best of all is if you aren’t much of a reader, you can watch the movie since this screenplay is the one they used for the movie.
Check out my book The Nation on Amazon.com
-Ben
Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald have decided to take a trip out to the summer house in Maine for a day, maybe two. Gerald had recently taken an interest in handcuffing Jessie to the bedposts when the became intimate with each other, but Jessie has gotten sick of it. As she lies in the bed, handcuffed yet again, she tries to convince Gerald to have sex the old way, but Gerald thinks she’s just playing into his game making him even more hornier than he was before. Fed up with it, Jessie kicks him with both feet causing Gerald to have a heart attack and die on the spot. Now she is alone and handcuffed in her bed, making it her own prison, with no way to the keys which lie on the dresser ten feet away. With the help of the voices in her head she tries to come up with ways to escape and in order to do this she must face a past she hadn’t bothered to out of fear.
I rate this book, on a scale of 1-10, a 3/10. Although King goes through the book with intense description, he has to since 90% of the book is her on the bed, it is easily the worst book I’ve read. I feel that if it was any other author, other than King, this book wouldn’t have been used for more than toilet paper.
Check out my book on Amazon The Nation!
-Ben
Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, American Psycho is about the daily life of wealthy young investment banker Patrick Bateman. Bateman, in his late 20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by nightfall. Through present tense stream-of-consciousness narrative, Bateman describes his daily life, ranging from a series of Friday nights spent at nightclubs with his colleagues — where they snort cocaine, critique fellow club-goers’ clothing, trade fashion advice, and question one another on proper etiquette — to his loveless engagement to fellow yuppie Evelyn and his contentious relationship with his brother and senile mother. Bateman’s stream of consciousness is occasionally broken up by chapters in which he directly addresses the reader in order to critique the work of 1980s Pop music artists. The novel maintains a high level of ambiguity through such devices as mistaken identity, and contradictions which introduce the possibility that Bateman is an unreliable narrator. Characters are consistently introduced as other people, people argue over the identities of others they can see in restaurants or at parties. Whether any of the crimes depicted in the novel actually happened, or were simply the fantasies of a delusional psychotic, is deliberately left open.
Bateman comes from a privileged background; he works as a vice president at a Wall Street investment company and lives in an expensive Manhattan apartment on the Upper West Side, where he embodies the 1980s yuppie culture. As Bateman describes his day-to-day activities, the mundane details become interspersed with descriptions of brutal murders he carries out in secret. After killing one of his colleagues, Paul Owen, one evening, Bateman appropriates his apartment as a place to kill and store more victims. In addition to describing his daily life, Bateman also details his sexual relationships. He is dating a fellow yuppie named Evelyn, though he possesses no deep feelings for her. He frequently solicits sex with attractive women, whom he refers to as “hardbodies.” Bateman also documents his interactions with his estranged family, specifically his mother and his brother, Sean Bateman, who is a main character in Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction.
Bateman’s control over his violent urges deteriorates. The description of his murders become increasingly sadistic and complex, progressing from stabbings to drawn out sequences of torture, rape, mutilation, cannibalism, and necrophilia, and the separation between his two lives begins to blur. He introduces stories about serial killers into casual conversations, and on several occasions openly confesses his murderous activities to his co-workers, who never take him seriously, do not hear what he says, or misunderstand him completely, hearing the words “murders and executions” as “mergers and acquisitions”, for example. Bateman begins to experience bizarre hallucinations such as seeing a Cheerio interviewed on a talk show, being stalked by an anthropomorphic park bench, and finding a bone in his Dove Bar. These incidents culminate in a shooting spree during which he kills several random people in the street resulting in a SWAT team being dispatched in a helicopter. Bateman flees on foot and hides in his office, where he phones his attorney, Harold Carnes, and confesses all of his crimes to the answering machine.
Later, Bateman confronts Carnes about the message only to find Carnes is amused at what he considers to be a good joke. Carnes tells Bateman that he is too much of a coward to have committed such acts and claims that he had dinner in London with Paul Owen a few days previously. Bateman re-visits the murdered Paul Owen’s apartment, where he had killed and mutilated two prostitutes. Bateman enters the perfectly clean, refurbished apartment which shows no trace of decomposing bodies, but is filled with strong-smelling flowers, as though meant to hide a bad odor. He runs into a real estate agent showing the apartment to prospective buyers, and who appears suspicious of Bateman.
The book ends as it began, with Bateman and his colleagues in a club on a Friday night, engaging in mundane conversation. Bateman comes to the conclusion that he is proud of who he is, but fails when he attempts to articulate why.
The above taken from Wikipedia
I rate this book, on a scale of 1-10, a 5/10. The way Ellis describes Bateman’s murders is so in depth and disturbing, but that is not why I ranked this book so low. The only time I was genuinely interested in the book was when he was killing someone. I don’t like this book because of how boring the majority of the book is. I understand that it is supposed to show that everyone looks the same and a upper class man like Bateman could get away with murder so easily, but i learned that in the first couple of chapters. Ellis didn’t need to make so many chapters about what they did on this night and with who. In short I felt like screaming, “Kill somebody already!!!!”. But then again a lot of people liked the book and this is only my opinion, but it is an opinion I fell very strong about.
Check out my book on Amazon The Nation
-Ben