Day: January 11, 2011

Before I Forget by Leonard Pitts, Jr. – A Review

Before starting this review I must first say I will try to limit any spoilers. It is not my intent to give away the story, but I will probably offer more detail than I have in other reviews. So consider yourself warned.
We’ve all heard the old adage “like father like son” and at first glimpse that seems to be the message in “Before I Forget” by Leonard Pitts, Jr. Pitts uses different points of view to tell the story of the three James Moses Johnsons, each dealing with his own dilemma and less than perfect father-son relationship.
We start out with the “junior” of the bunch, Mo Johnson, an aging 70’s soul singer who is confronted with a medical condition that forces him to re-evaluate his life. If this was not enough to deal with, Mo learns five days later that his 19 year-old son Trey, is in trouble with the law. While not estranged from young Trey, Mo has not been the model father or a regular presence in the young man’s life. As if all of this drama was not enough, Mo also learns that his estranged father, Jack, is also suffering from a serious medical condition.
All of this conflict happens within the first 75 pages of “Before I Forget” which definitely piques the interest of the reader and will keep you reading. Set between Baltimore and Los Angeles, the remaining 280 or so pages takes Mo and Trey on a cross country drive and a better understanding of one another. Along the way an old would is healed, but the story does not end there.
To offer depth to this story, Pitts introduces secondary characters and story lines that instead of taking away from the story had flavor, and substance. The underlying story of absentee fathers was presented in a light that is rarely seen – the father’s perspective. Although the reasons noted are not all forgiving, you are at least given a glimpse into the inner workings of some young fathers.
“Before I Forget” is a well written story with a number of intermingled story lines that work very well together. I really enjoyed the character development and the realism exhibited in this work. I would highly recommend this book.

Service with a smile – Please!?

At the very beginning I would like to point out that the following is my opinion and is only based on my experiences. This blog is basically all about my opinion, yet many times I do try to offer viewpoints based on some research and in the future I will use this space to do some reporting. Any reporting will be based on actual research and interviews.
That being said I will take this time today to RANT! Almost daily we are greeted, particularly on national broadcasts, with the grim facts that this country is in a deep financial crisis. Many are edging away from the term recession, however I still believe we are in a recession but then again recessionary like conditions existed in my world before the government wanted to admit it was a country-wide issue.
I don’t offer this description just to let you know that I try to keep up on the news, but to offer perspective for my RANT. So on to the rant. This afternoon I stopped at a national Chicken franchise to grab a bite to eat and was once again confronted with an employee who did not want to be at work! She was very dry, not mean nor did she offer a lot of attitude, but it just left me with a horrible experience.
Now I know that many of you may be saying, ‘Well you don’t know what happened in her life today, she may just be having a bad day’. Granted that could be the case, but on a somewhat regular basis you run into folks with customer service level position who don’t want to offer pleasant service, and that I believe is a disservice to the customer.
With unemployment reaching into the double digits in many communities, I’m sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of people who would give anything to HAVE A JOB!
As a nation I think we need a wake-up call because entry level customer service jobs are leaving this country daily and then we look around and scratch our heads asking why. The reasons are numerous, but at some point we have to look internally and say, ‘what role did I play’.
That’s my rant, and all I want is a little pleasant service – more often than not!