Time of the Toad: Reflections on the Last Decade

Publisher Marketing: Everyone lost something during the decade of 2000-2009. Too many lost everything. Not for nothing is George W. Bush considered the worst modern American president. Inequality increased, even median income fell, union membership declined, jobs were lost, and in the world at large unnecessary wars destroyed, wracked, or threatened millions. Each of our Senators and Representatives became ten years older without learning or changing anything. We Americans continue to bowl alone, awash in commodities, while our children entertain themselves and communicate electronically. Something was askew. Much of the passion directed to Barack Obama---as Ralph Nader called him, "the first liberal evangelist in a long time"---played out against a backdrop of Bush and Bill Clinton, a man of extreme reaction and a misbehaving man of the right center. Racism under lays much of the passionate opposition to Obama. That and extraordinarily high, unmet expectations. My "Nightingale at Large" web log posts selected for this book may offer a way to put that past decade behind, to get over it, or at least to look again at what we went through. In the web log posts you can see indications of the book I wish I had written. Never mind that. As it stands, the book is a quilt. As with the lost decade itself, there is repetition and some flaying around. However, the point of it all is to sum up, move on, and come to make a difference for the future. Contributor Bio:  Coleman, James James Julian Coleman, Jr., a native New Orleanian, came from a Louisiana family that has long been associated with the Mississippi River and its commerce. His great-grandfather owned a rice plantation and constructed there the first rice mill to be built in the South; it was at Pointe-a-la-Hache in Plaquemines Parish where St. Maxent built Fort St. Philip. Coleman, who studied at Princeton, Oxford, and Tulane, was the youngest man ever to address the Louisiana Historical Society.