Michael J. Stedman
Goodreads Author
Born
South Boston, Massachusetts, The United States
Website
Twitter
Genre
Influences
Member Since
June 2012
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/michaeljstedman
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A for Argonaut
4 editions
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published
2012
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
“Thanks to your Disposal Service Representative friend at DRAMS, we have no trouble getting all the Defense Department’s Form 1348s and other required certification documentation we need to claim the equipment as demilitarized and move it out of DOD’s Out-of-Country Distribution Depot in Bahrain, still as deadly-effective as the day it rolled out of the arsenal factory.” “You’ve”
― A for Argonaut
― A for Argonaut
“there was little linkage between the 1929 Crash and the Depression and that FDR’s New Deal failed to reverse the catastrophe—that”
― A for Argonaut
― A for Argonaut
“The truth, he knew, was that both were statist, subverting individualism to the state, and that the line was not horizontal but a circle, with U.S. democracy on one pole and the extremes of the Left and the Right joined together in communist and fascist totalitarianism at the opposite. Maran”
― A for Argonaut
― A for Argonaut
“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.”
― The God of the Machine
― The God of the Machine
“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
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“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
― Alice in Wonderland
― Alice in Wonderland

“It was a dark and stormy night. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled across the sky. Rain spattered a mysterious, hooded stranger who peered over the ...more
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message 4:
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Michael
Aug 05, 2013 03:08AM

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