Video Saturday #18 - Susan McDougal

It’s Video Saturday again, and if you are wondering whatever the heck happened on last Saturday (and Music Monday, for that matter), let me just tell you that I was preparing for a job interview and then went off to Ireland for that, so I was a little distracted. But now I’m back and I bring to you today: Susan McDougal!

It’s been a while since I read her amazing book The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk, which I wholeheartedly recommend to you. I mostly read it because I watched the documentary The Hunting Of The President, and while I found the documentary confusing, somehow what Susan McDougal said stood out. Since they wrote in the credits that she wrote a book, I decided to get my hands on it, and well - I think it’s very interesting and Susan McDougal is quite an amazing woman.

Basically what happened was that in the Whitewater scandal, nothing illegal had really happened, and someone jumped on it because one of the people involved said he could help bring down Bill Clinton. So from the very beginning, they asked Susan McDougal to testidy against Clinton, or to say that she’d had an affair with him, which of course would’ve been a lie. Since she refused to testify against Clinton, they put her in jail for 18 months to get her to talk.

So, today I present to you the videos I could find of her online (sadly, that’s all I could find - if you know of any other videos, do tell me!). They’re on a website called Truthdig.com and they’re from 2007. Enjoy, and feel free to comment!

Click on the image to watch the videos.

PS: If you’ve read the book, you might also be interested in these Excerpts From Session That Led to the Indictment of Susan McDougal as published in the New York Times in 1998.

Girl Meets Boy

Until a few weeks ago, I had never even heard of Ali Smith, but this week I think the money I spent to visit the Frankfurt book fair (a.k.a. die Frankfurter Buchmesse) was absolutely worth it. They eventually sold off books cheaply because I went on Sunday, the last day of the fair, and I suppose the publishers didn’t want to have to take all their books back with them. So, in the last hour of the book fair, I bought three books for a total of 10 EUR:

1. Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis by Ali Smith
2. Hollywood Undercover: Revealing the Sordid Secrets of Tinseltown by Ian Halperin
3. Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member by Kody Scott

Number 1 and 2 aren’t even officially out yet, so I’m especially excited about those. I already read Girl Meets Boy and it only took me three days, which is quite quick for me (I’m a slow reader). I completely enjoyed this book. Ali Smith is a discovery for me and I will be reading more of her books in future. I really enjoy the way she writes, how her characters talk and think, how they interact. I enjoyed the humor in it and the politics and the love story and I felt the book was a real page turner. I also enjoyed the “pop culture” references. I enjoyed it as a whole. I don’t know what else to say about it (I’m bad with reviews) other than get it when it comes out.

I think I’ll be reading Hollywood Undercover next, although it is a big book, and big books are not as enjoyable in crowded subway trains as small books are. But it sounds interesting and might be a quick read.

As always, by the way: reading suggestions are welcome.