The Week In Review(s)

It has been an interesting week. I started off with The Scatterlings Of Africa by Peter Davies. This is a very curious book, it is set in what was then Rhodesia in the early 70's. The UN sanctions were beginning to have a real effect, and the internal race issues were peaking. Although this is a work of fiction, much of the general story is anchored in reality. This was a particularly turbulent time in the country that we now call Zimbabwe.I liked the book, and I am looking forward to interviewing Peter Davies.

After Scatterlings I tackled Death Is On The Down Beat by Richard Winston. How I came across this book is a good story in itself. Richard is one of the writers for Blogger News Network. So I (being an editor) thought that we should give 'one of our own' some publicity. I have not quite finished the book, but so far it is an entertaining read. Hopefully I will have a review up sometime this weekend.

The real fun part of the week tho has to go to the Music area. About two months ago I expressed an interest in a CD, it was due to be released in mid June, and is a tribute to the late great June Carter Cash.
The featured list of artists reads like a 'who's who' of country music. Well I sent of a request, and received a polite email saying that I was on the list and the CD would be shipped near the release date. Well I am pretty 'long in the tooth' when it comes to release dates, they change like the damn weather here in Calgary. I was not in the least surprised when two weeks later the CD arrived in the mail.

I listened, and I really liked, so I wrote a glowing review. The folks that read the review liked it so much it got syndicated to a whole lot of high profile regional newspaper sites. Now you would think the the PR company would be happy? Not so, there was a screw up in Nashville, I had the only copy of this CD in the wild. Man were they pissed off at me! Some very acrimonious emails were exchanged. Well I can only assume that the the 'official' press pre-release copies are now out, because on Tuesday they sent me another copy of Anchored In Love. I laughed till my sides hurt.

The other big event happened on Thursday, a cardboard box with 9 CD's and DVD's arrived, all of which need reviewing, as my wife Jan put it "Boy you are going to have a busy weekend!".