Books and Music
Ashcroft, a member of the Assemblies of God church, authored the book Lessons From a Father to His Son.
While attorney general of Missouri, Ashcroft and his wife co-wrote a textbook titled College Law for Business.
Ashcroft composed a paean called "Let the Eagle Soar" which he sang at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in February 2002, which was satirically featured in Michael Moore's 2004 movie Fahrenheit 9/11 and has been frequently mocked by comedians such as David Letterman, Stephen Colbert and David Cross, to name a few. The song was also sung at Bush's 2005 inauguration by Guy Hovis, former cast member of The Lawrence Welk Show. Ashcroft has penned and sung a number of other songs and created compilation tapes, including In the Spirit of Life and Liberty and Gospel (Music) According to John.
With fellow senators Trent Lott, Larry Craig, and James Jeffords, he formed a barbershop quartet called The Singing Senators.
Sometime in the 1970s, Ashcroft recorded a gospel record entitled TRUTH: Volume One, Edition One with Missouri legislator Max Bacon, a Democrat.
Other books written by Ashcroft are On My Honor: The Beliefs that Shape My Life and Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice.
Read more about this topic: John Ashcroft
Famous quotes containing the words books and/or music:
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)