In Fed We Trust

From : FT.com

Photo : FT.com

In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great PanicBy David WesselCrown Business .

$26.99, 336 pages

A few months ago Gao Xiqing, president of the powerful China Investment Corporation, quipped that when China looked at the United States nowadays it saw “socialism with American characteristics”. He was only half-joking.
In the space of the last year, the US government has taken over most of its domestic car industry, pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into its banking system, assumed the operations of huge tracts of the formerly private credit markets and entered into a new era of trillion-dollar fiscal deficits.
And all without even the hint of a blush. Even more noteworthy from a Chinese perspective, much of this unprecedented expansion in the US government’s role has been conceived and executed by an institution staffed by unelected officials that finds no mention in the US constitution.

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Sony Sides With Google in ‘Library of Future’ Settlement

From Epicenter/Wired:

n the battle to win readers for the books of the future, Sony has sided with Google over a controversial, proposed copyright lawsuit settlement that lets Google build out the library and bookstore of the future.

That pits Sony and Google against Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon, all of which have allied in opposition to the settlement. (See Wired.com’s Google Book Search FAQ to learn more.)

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Google Book Search: Protecting Privacy As The Library Moves Online

Google's ambition to create an uber-library on the Internet raises some concerns for privacy experts. (ABC News Photo Illustration)

From ABC News:

Google's Plan to Digitize Millions of Books Is Not Without Controversy.

Imagine having online access to virtually any book, at anytime, including millions of books no longer in print. Imagine being able to browse through this extraordinary collection of much of the world's knowledge, search for quotes and key passages, annotate pages with your own thoughts, and share the marked-up page with friends and colleagues.

Now imagine that this uber-library never closes; that it's always just one mouse-click away.

This isn't fiction, it is the ambitious vision of Google Book Search, an online service that stands to revolutionize the way people access and interact with books.

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Such a Sad, Sad Story

From :The Washinton Post

Photo : bartcop.com

THE SECRET LIFE OF MARILYN MONROE .

By J. Randy Taraborrelli
Grand Central. 560 pp. $26.99
A quarter-century ago, reviewing "Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe," by Anthony Summers, in this newspaper, I wondered whether, with the publication of what was the 39th book about her, "enough has at last been said about this sad story." Obviously my wonderings were very much in error. How many other books about her have been published between then and now I do not know, but here comes J. Randy Taraborrelli with what his publisher calls "the definitive biography . . . explosive, revelatory, and surprisingly moving."

You will not be surprised to learn that in fact "The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe" is none of the above. Taraborrelli, a freelance journalist who specializes in gossipy fan bios of supermarket tabloid favorites -- his subjects have included Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross and (of course) Jackie Kennedy -- stakes his shaky claim to originality on two aspects of Monroe's life: the three women who were central to her troubled childhood and adolescence, and the strong current of mental instability that ran through her mother's side of the family. But these matters are well known to anyone who has followed Monroe's life and career, and there is nothing "explosive" or even "revelatory" in Taraborrelli's discussion of them.

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Hunting Evil

From : Thelegraph.co.uk

Photo : Thelegraph.co.uk

A fascinating history traces the mundane lives of Nazi war criminals .

If there’s anything people love more than a mystery, it’s a conspiracy. Blend them together and spice with top Nazi war criminals, and you have a shelf of sensational paperbacks, many of them selling in the hundreds of thousands. Guy Walters’s book about the hunt to bring the war criminals to justice is different. While not sparing us details of their atrocities, it is not sensationalist. It is very thoroughly researched. And rarer still of all, it is true.
More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, there are still Nazi mass murderers and concentration camp guards among us who have escaped real justice. Over a bottle of red wine, Walters interviewed Erich Priebke, a sprightly nonagenarian living in a comfortable Rome flat, who in 1944 helped gather together 335 Italians for a reprisal killing, after 33 German policemen had been killed by a bomb the day before. Priebke collected the men and checked them into a cave where SS men shot them in the back of the head. As the bodies mounted, victims were forced to climb the bleeding pile to be added to it. Erna Wallisch, formerly a guard at the death camps of Ravensbrück and Majdanek, was the seventh most wanted Nazi war criminal on the Wiesenthal Centre’s list: she had beaten women and children towards the gas chambers. She lived peacefully in Vienna where she was protected by a statute of limitations. Protected by her neighbours too, since Austria, which in 1986 elected as its president a former Nazi officer complicit in genocide, has taken a more liberal view of these matters. Walters could only take her picture before she slammed her door.

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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen

From : TimeonLine

Photo : Timeonline

It was the event that changed the face of Europe.

It was the event that changed the face of Europe, and almost everyone has claimed credit. With the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, the Iron Curtain was decisively breached, six former Soviet vassals were liberated and a dictatorship that for 40 years had stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic disintegrated amid its own incompetence.
The Poles say that it was their election on June 4 — the first in Eastern Europe when communists were challenged and defeated — that knocked over the first domino. The Hungarians say that it was the picnic organised on the border with Austria that opened the gate to freedom and allowed thousands of East Germans to flee. In East Germany, the Stasi State began to crumble when Erich Honecker fell ill in September and no one had authority to order the suppression of the candlelit demonstrations that filled the centre of Leipzig night after night.

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William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey: review

From : Telegraph.co.uk

Photo : Telegraph.co.uk

William Golding was fascinated by suffering and violence, but he also enjoyed Carry On films, finds Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in John Carey's brilliant biography .

By Robert Douglas-FairhurstPublished: 3:32PM BST 28 Aug 2009

People who met William Golding towards the end of his life were often surprised by his appearance. With his deeply creased face and neat white beard, he had the look of an old sea dog about to break into a shanty, or possibly advertise fishfingers, but hardly that of a Nobel laureate who had produced some of the century’s most startlingly original fiction.
In 1966, when the BBC asked the sculptor and painter Michael Ayrton what sort of man Golding was, he described him as “a cross between Captain Hornblower and St Augustine”. The nautical allusion was well chosen: Golding had joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in 1940, took part in the sinking of the Bismarck, and ended up commanding a rocket ship during the D-Day landings. Ayrton’s other model was less convincing, unless he had in mind the pre-conversion Augustine who came up with the prayer “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”. For in his own eyes Golding was far more sinner than saint. “One day, if my literary reputation holds up,” he wrote in his journal, “people will examine my life, and they will come to the conclusion that I am a monster.”

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That Old Cape Magic

From : Christian Science Monitor

Photo : Christian Science Monitor

Wry humor and middle-aged meditation give flavor to Richard Russo’s novel about two beach-side weddings.

Encountering Richard Russo at the beach is like finding a moose sunning himself in the tropics. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author (“Bridge of Sighs”) has become synonymous with dying Northeastern towns, such as those chronicled in his novels “Nobody’s Fool” and “Empire Falls.”
And yet, as That Old Cape Magic opens, hack-screenwriter-turned-­college-professor Jack Griffin is heading across the Sagamore Bridge. As he journeys to a wedding, Griffin remembers other summers as the only child of warring English professors, for whom their vacations symbolized the life they were supposed to be leading.
Instead of fighting over Jack, his parents – who were candid about their dislike of kids – fought for sole possession of Cape Cod. Griffin tried to fashion a life as far from their ideal as possible (hence the Hollywood screen gig), but his wife, Joy, points out that he’s nonetheless managed to pick up the worst traits of each of his parents – both of whom remain close at hand.

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Mercenaries make sympathetic subjects

From : Boston.com

Photo :aviationweek

There are tens of thousands of military contractors - mercenaries - in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the US companies Xe (formerly Blackwater) and Triple Canopy. They’re guarding diplomats and fuel convoys, and attacking opium crops. They are also ungoverned, and some might say ungovernable. In one 2007 instance, Blackwater guards killed 17 civilians and injured 20 in Baghdad.

Last year, then-Senator Hillary Clinton tried to ban their use in Iraq. Now secretary of state, she employs them. In 2007, then-senator Barack Obama wrote to President George W. Bush saying he was “disturbed’’ by the use of military contractors in war zones. Recently, President Obama announced he is taking away Xe’s diplomatic-security contract in Iraq - and replacing it with Triple Canopy, from his hometown, Chicago.
Now comes British journalist Tony Geraghty with “Soldiers of Fortune: A History of the Mercenary in Modern Warfare.’’ A collection of post-World War II vignettes grouped into three sections, this loosely connected narrative focuses almost solely on British companies and their relationship with their government. But unlike other writers in this burgeoning field (Jeremy Scahill in “Blackwater,’’ Robert Young Pelton in “Licensed to Kill,’’ Steve Fainaru in “Big Boy Rules’’), Geraghty makes no bones about his sympathies for the mercenaries, who may today be ex-soldiers looking to pay off the mortgage but decades ago were often idealists fighting communism.

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A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

From : The Globe and Mail

Photo : AFP Getty

Ernest Hemingway's memoir of Paris was edited after his death by his fourth wife, who made changes that reflected her opinion of his earlier wives. Now Hemingway's original unedited version of A Moveable Feast is available, but does that really make it the 'correct' version?

In 1920s Paris, Hemingway cut the figure of the quintessential American, attending the famous parties dressed in sneakers and a patched jacket. His fashion style, like his prose, was lean and stripped down. Posthumously published in 1964, Hemingway's classic memoir lovingly explores Paris as the city of great writers such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Hemingway's eyes, ears, tongue and nose nostalgically linger in the Paris cafés (including the toilets!), hotels, lending libraries and salons, allowing us to see, feel, hear and taste how these spaces shaped his own style and identity as a writer.
The book is also a love story dedicated to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, but the happy tale of sex and experimentation ends in a tangled web of betrayal. Hemingway leaves Hadley for his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, who is presented as the wily intruder in the final chapters.
Now, Pauline and Ernest Hemingway's grandson, Seán Hemingway, has edited the restored version, giving Pauline a more sympathetic representation. But is this really a case of a literary classic being tampered with for the sake of a sentimental memory, as Hotchner charges? Not according to Seán, who asserts that the restored edition offers “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

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Is conservatism dead?

From : The New Criterion

Photo : ashleyenglish

A response to Sam Tanenhaus's new book Conservatism Is Dead.

When in 1962 Clinton Rossiter published a revised edition of Conservatism in America, he gave it the subtitle The Thankless Persuasion. A decade earlier, Raymond English had touched upon a similar theme in an article in The American Scholar titled “Conservatism: The Forbidden Faith.” Their point was that conservatism as a political philosophy runs against the American grain and thus will always play something of an incongruous and subordinate role in a revolutionary nation dedicated to equality, democracy, and restless change. While the conservative case for order, tradition, and authority may be useful as a corrective for the excesses of democracy, it can never hope to supplant liberalism as the nation’s official governing philosophy. As Rossiter put it, “Our commitment to democracy means that Liberalism will maintain its historic dominance over our minds, and that conservative thinkers will continue as well-kept but increasingly restless hostages to the American tradition.” Liberals will always set the tone for public life, he argued, leaving conservatives with the thankless task of fighting liberal reforms and then adjusting to them after they have been adopted.
Rossiter, like other liberal observers of the post-war scene, such as Richard Hofstadter, Lionel Trilling, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Bell, lamented the fact that an authentic conservative movement was difficult to locate in the United States. To be sure, there were some thoughtful conservatives to be found, such as the author Russell Kirk and Senator Robert Taft, but they were eccentrics, who had little in the way of a popular following, and whose views on policy were hardly distinguishable from those of the business community. On the other hand, the new American right that arose in the 1950s to challenge the New Deal and the Cold War policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations did not seem to fit into the conservative tradition at all. Populist in tone and suspicious of leaders from both parties, the new right seemed to have more in common with extremist movements than with conservative parties that traditionally distrusted democracy and defended elites. The radical right, as the liberals called it, was especially frightening because it mobilized huge popular followings behind figures like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the various fundamentalist ministers who spread their messages through the radio waves. The very idea of a President McCarthy or, more realistically, a President Nixon, was enough to send chills down the spine of any right-thinking liberal. Naturally, those liberals preferred to deal with “real” conservatives like Sen. Taft than with populist figures like McCarthy and Nixon who, because of their popular appeal, actually threatened to topple them from power.

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Karla Kuskin, 77; wrote, illustrated children's books

From : Boston.com

Photo : Boston.com

NEW YORK - Karla Kuskin, a noted children’s author and illustrator whose work combined sly wit and propulsive vitality with deep thoughtfulness about the essential natures of people, animals, and things, died of a neurological disorder Thursday at her home in Seattle. She was 77.

The author or illustrator - often both at once - of more than 50 books for young people, Ms. Kuskin was known in particular for the volumes of rhymed verse she wrote and illustrated. They include “In the Middle of the Trees’’ (Harper, 1958); (Harper & Row, 1963); “The Rose on My Cake’’ (Harper & Row, 1964); and “Soap Soup and Other Verses’’ (HarperCollins, 1992).
Ms. Kuskin’s poems are known for their stealthy humor, deceptive simplicity, and unforced though carefully worked-out rhymes.
The listener is buoyed along on a flowing metrical current, as in this verse, from her collection “Near the Window Tree’’ (Harper & Row, 1975)

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The Pain of Elizabeth Edwards

From : the Atlantic

Photo : the Atlantic

A new memoir by the politician’s wife shows that the pain of infidelity pales in comparison to the loss of a child.
by Christopher Hitchens .

Potential readers should not be deterred by the vaguely Hallmarkish cover—and subtitle—of this book, both of which may be blamed on the publisher. I’m assuming that Broadway Books has a packaging-and-editing style all its own, because on page 88 it makes Elizabeth Edwards tell us something that “Edmund Wilson, the incomparable twentieth-century literary critic, said.” Perhaps someone at the firm felt that this would explain just exactly who Wilson was to a reader who didn’t know, but the effect is to be condescending and to diminish the impact of reading a senator’s wife who is well able to cite Edmund Wilson in her own right. Elsewhere Mrs. Edwards gets her own way, quoting with familiarity and aptness from Sophocles and Millay and making astute comparisons between the novelistic characterizations of John Updike and of Henry James. (Her husband’s “campaign biography” book, Four Trials, was co-written with him by my friend John Auchard, editor of the somehow perfectly titled Portable Henry James and an academic colleague of Elizabeth’s; few such workaday volumes can boast this sort of step-parentage.)

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The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

From : Guardian.co.uk

Photo : Guardian.co.uk

Michael Moorcock traces the roots of an atmospheric steampunk tale.

If rural nostalgia fuels the continuing appeal of Trollope or Tolkien, then its urban equivalent is most commonly found in Dickens pastiches such as Philip Pullman's Ruby in the Smoke, in Holly Black's gritty fairy stories and in the steampunk genre. These days, you can barely pick up a speculative fantasy without finding a zeppelin or a steam-robot on the cover. Containing few punks and a good many posh ladies and gents, most of these stories are better described as steam operas. The Manual of Detection formalises many of the genre's themes and includes a dash of cyberpunk noir.
The Manual of Detection
by Jedediah Berry
279pp,
Heinemann,
£14.99


Cyberpunks were what the likes of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson called themselves when first signalling their break with conventional SF. What identified cyberpunk was a sophisticated interest in current events, a guess that the Pacific Rim might soon become the centre of world politics, a keen curiosity about the possibilities of post-PC international culture and a love of noir detective fiction. Characteristically, cyberpunk revived the noir thriller and might as easily be considered a development of the mystery as of science fiction. Sterling and Gibson's The Difference Engine was an early example of cyberpunk merging into steampunk, proposing a Victorian world with Babbage computers and airships. Airships also appear in The Golden Compass and Watchmen, among other recent movies: they signify you are in an alternate

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The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars

From : The National

Photo : Harry Todd / Getty Images

Richard Overy’s comprehensive account of the fear of ‘civilisational decline’ that gripped Britain between the world wars, writes Matthew Price, poses more than a few challenges for the doomsayers of today.

The West, it seems, is living through a golden age of civilisational anxiety, marked by endless agonising about the uncertain future: its loss of power, the climate crisis, terrorism, rogue nuclear weapons, economic collapse, the unchecked flow of immigrants across borders. Whether the calamities envisioned by today’s Cassandras will come to pass cannot be determined, but our vivid imagination for disaster has long and deep roots. Indeed, the story of the West might be seen as tale of progress married to peril. Advances in technology, governance, and standards of living have been accompanied by new anxieties and an uneasy self-consciousness about the fragility of such gains. Technology appears as wonder and horror alike, both panacea and mortal threat. We twitter blissfully away on our laptops, worrying all the while about the collapse of the electronic infrastructure on which we now depend – or the malignant ends to which it could so easily be turned. One law of civilisation might be cast as follows: Every strength needs to be opposed by a perceived existential threat.
The sum of these fears – or their apotheosis – is the belief that civilisation (read: “the West”) is fated to decline, to be subdued from without or collapse from within. This too, is not a new idea. History, it is true, has often been narrated as a Whiggish tale of continual progress – that “It’s getting better all the time”, as Sir Paul McCartney put it. But this uplifting Enlightenment sentiment has always been opposed by a darker view, one that stresses the cycles of history, the tendency for what has risen to fall again – a physics of decline with its own martial undertones, including the unmistakable implication that the West, fat and happy with the fruits of its technological and cultural sophistication, is blithely tottering on the brink of oblivion.

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Oceanographer Follows the Flotsam Trail to Understanding

From : The Oregonian

Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science

You may have heard the saga of the seafaring Nikes. On May 27, 1990, a cargo vessel en route to Los Angeles hit a sudden storm. Five containers of Nike shoes washed overboard. The next winter, shoes showed up on Vancouver Island beaches.
As winds shifted, so did the path of the Nikes, until thousands landed on the Oregon coast. The phenomena caught the attention of oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. Using tracking numbers on the shoes combined with information provided by Nike, he began to chart the precise path the shoes had taken, thus beginning a midlife specialty in floating objects.
In Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession With Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, Ebbesmeyer teams up with Seattle science writer Eric Scigliano to deliver a compelling story of the ocean and what it means to us. Ebbesmeyer shows how the continents have always been connected. Materials like coconuts and bamboo have floated from one place to another. Columbus knew it. So did the Vikings and the Greeks. It's only lately that we've come to understand that floating objects travel through great whorls called gyres, where they can sometimes be stuck for decades or more.

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Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957

FROM : POWELL` BOOKS

The Lost Years

The large segment of the Haitian population that is unable to read or write inhabits an oral history culture, which produces, when looking into the past, a curious foreshortening. First comes the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the only successful slave revolution in history and an event with whose fundamentals practically all Haitians are reasonably conversant. Then there's a compressed, indeterminate period of confused and repetitious instability, ending with President Woodrow Wilson's decision in 1915 to use the collection of outstanding American and French loans as a pretext for installing Marines in Haiti to prevent the election of an anti-American president. Following the close of the US occupation in 1934 is another indeterminate period of confusion, ending with the erection of the Duvalier dictatorship, a pere et fils monolith that, in its iron duration from 1957 to 1986, still stands taller than anything else on the Haitian historical horizon except for the founding revolution. (Jean-Claude Duvalier assumed power upon the death of his father, Francois, in 1971.) This foreshortening effect is not without certain advantages; ordinary Haitians tend to feel much more immediately connected to the events of their nation's origin than we in the United States do to ours. Yet how Haiti got from the radicalism of the revolution to the corrupt and bloody Duvalier regime, and thence to the ever more desperate conditions of the present, still tends to be a matter of mystery, both to Haitians and also to outside observers.

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The Calligrapher’s Daughter

From : The Christian Science Monitor

Photo : The Calligrapher’s Daughter By Eugenia

A novel set during the 30-year oppression of Korea by the Japanese.

It might be the fashion today to name girls after cities: Brooklyns, Savannahs, and Parises show up in plenty of elementary classrooms. But in 1915 Korea, it was rather a different matter.The protagonist of The Calligrapher’s Daughter was born the year Japan occupied Korea, and her father, a scholar whose art had won favor with the royal family, couldn’t bear to name her.
So for years, Eugenia Kim writes in this debut novel based on the life of her mother, she was known as “the daughter of the woman from Nah-jin.” That rather unwieldy title got shortened when a missionary, whose Korean was a little shaky, misunderstood and inadvertently christened her Najin. This wasn’t exactly an auspicious moniker, at least as far as her Confucian father Han was concerned. But then, his only daughter didn’t really please him at, well, anything.
In fact, while he knows it isn’t fair, Najin remains for him a symbol of his beloved country’s oppression and his own family’s decline. Fortunately, she spends most of her time with her mother, Haejung, a model of Christian serenity – at least until her beloved daughter’s welfare is at stake. She fights tenaciously for Najin to get an education, without ever once raising her voice or nagging.

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Cherry Tree? Let's Negotiate

From : The Wall Street Journal

The Father of Our Country as a Sammy Glickish 'man on the make.

The winter of 1777-78 that the Continental Army spent at Valley Forge was one of privation and misery amid the constant drilling that would prove vital to the troops' success against the British when warm weather arrived. The Valley Forge winter was also one of seemingly nonstop political gamesmanship by the army's leader, George Washington, according to historian John Ferling.
Aware that a movement was under way to convince Congress to remove him as commander, Washington worked feverishly behind the scenes to undercut his ­rivals, Mr. Ferling says. One of Washington's main ­detractors was a brigadier general named Thomas ­Conway, who happened to be a friend of the Marquis de Lafayette, a devoted Washington loyalist. "The American commander," Mr. Ferling writes, "played the young ­officer like a virtuoso," complaining to the Frenchman about Conway's "dirty Arts and low intrigues." Lafayette obediently threw Conway "to the wolves," we're told, denouncing the plotter to Congress.

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Delighted by the Joy of Bad Things

From: The New york times

The West Coast essayist and social critic Rebecca Solnit is the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesn’t produce often enough. It’s been fascinating to watch her zigzagging career unfold.

In her previous 10 books she has written about disparate topics like Eadweard Muybridge’s photography, San Francisco’s urban landscapes, the history of walking and the nature of political dissent, always stalking her mental prey from oblique angles.
Ms. Solnit’s writing, at its worst, can be dithering and self-serious, Joan Didion without the concision and laser-guided wit. At her best, however — and the best and worst in Ms. Solnit coexist in the same book and sometimes the same sentence — she has a rare gift: the ability to turn the act of cognition, of arriving at a coherent point of view, into compelling moral drama.

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Divided loyalties

From : Gardian.co.uk


Traitor or peace-broker? Julia Jones is intrigued by the contradictions of Arthur Ransome.





"I think of England as a sort of dream country," Arthur Ransome wrote to his mother in July 1917. He was the Daily News foreign correspondent in Petrograd - "a sick city", as he described it then. Half a million soldiers had been killed on the Galician front and deserters were streaming home. There was hunger, mutiny, political chaos."It really was jolly hearing about Tabitha and you playing at retrieving grouse," he continued wistfully. "All that, however, seems so very far away and every sentence in your letter which touched on Russia showed that people in England, even intelligent birds like yourself, have no notion of the condition of things here."
Later, Ransome expressed fury at the failure of his mission to explain. "Shouting in daily telegrams across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunk man asleep in the road in front of a steam roller." He hated "the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence" that prevented his fellow countrymen making the necessary leap of imagination to understand the Russian situation.





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'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe' by Christopher Caldwell

From : Los Angeles Times

In Europe, the author argues, the clash between Western civilization and the Muslim world has already been lost -- in the latter's favor.

When an author with Christopher Caldwell's impeccable conservative credentials glosses Edmund Burke in his book's title, it's a safe bet that he's engaged a question whose implications he believes are absolutely fundamental.Burke's great masterpiece of political criticism -- "Reflections on the Revolution in France" -- is, after all, both the foundational text of contemporary conservatism and a continuing inspiration to classical liberals. Caldwell's closely argued thesis in "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West" is that the massive migration of Muslim immigrants into Western Europe now represents as much of a consequential break with Europe's cultural traditions as the utopian rationalism of revolutionary France did for Burke.Wherever a reader may fall on the political spectrum, those familiar with Caldwell's work as a senior editor for the Weekly Standard and, particularly, as a columnist for the Financial Times, know him as an opinionated but fair-minded writer of impressive range and bracing clarity. "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" does not disappoint, though many may find its essentially despairing conclusion debatable, if sobering.

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How Rome Fell

From : The Christian Science Monitor

Rome’s decline began at the top, contends British historian Adrian Goldsworthy.

The first thing you need to know about the Roman Empire is that everyone didn’t run around with British accents like they do in the movies. Got that? Good. Now comes the hard part: Figuring out what on earth happened to the ancient superpower. The Roman Empire declined and fell, of course. This much we think we know, if only because of the title of a famous 18th-century book. Now, new theories are arriving on the scene courtesy of cocky British historian Adrian Goldsworthy, who has no qualms about knocking his colleagues off their pristine perches.
They haven’t gotten it all wrong, Goldsworthy writes, but they’ve missed a lot. He tries to set the record straight in How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, a dense, academic and sometimes enlightening look at an empire that’s not nearly as remote as it seems.
As Goldsworthy says on the first page, “the fall of the Roman Empire remains one of the great mysteries of history.” The empire survived for 500 years after the death of Julius Caesar, managing to become amazingly modern with its aqueducts, bureaucracy, glass windows, and central heating. Many educated Romans even believed the world was round.

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Indian inspirations to enliven a weeknight

From : boston.com

When it comes to ethnic cookbooks, authors either tend to go authentic, delving into the culture and history of a region and ingredients you can’t often obtain, or they start from a basic flavor premise and then take a flying leap into modernity, with streamlined techniques and mix-and-match ingredients.

“Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen,’’ by Monica Bhide, a food writer and cooking teacher, falls solidly in the second category. Although these flavorful, brisk recipes reference Bhide’s cosmopolitan pilgrimage from New Delhi to Bahrain to Washington, they’re also clearly the work of a mom cooking on weeknights. If the recipes are occasionally uneven, they are rarely boring.
Wonton wrappers make a remarkably easy and stylish casing for a sweet green pea filling for chili pea puffs, which are fine on their own and downright addictive with a little mint chutney. Cilantro-lemon corn pops (that’s popcorn) is the kind of snack that reduces you to a gobbling, mouth-stuffing fool, with its combination of tart, salty, and crunchy - at least till the lemon juice soaks everything.

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Florence Nightingale

From : telegraph.co.uk

The life and legend of Florence Nightingale, a history of Byron's publisher and where Vermeer's hat came from

Florence-mania swept the Victorian public with posters, pamphlets and porcelain figures. But the image of “The Lady with the Lamp” obscured the true work of this extraordinary woman. Mark Bostridge’s masterful biography picks out the nuance of her life – and the age. Escaping with difficulty the confines of her upper-class family, she found the “appalling horror” of the Scutari hospital in the Crimea.
Though canonised for her tenderness, her nightly round was probably the only time she saw a patient. Her genius was for administration: battling the Army’s bureaucracy, training nurses and fighting for hygiene. Ironically, it was her popular fame (“all that ministering angel nonsense”, she thought) that allowed her real contribution to medical reform after the war, revolutionising sanitation, hospital designs and workhouse nursing. Compelling yet scholarly, Bostridge succeeds spectacularly in prising the life from the legend.
Jonathan Bray

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‘Marx’s General’

From : The New York Times

'Marx’s General,' by Tristram Hunt: Fox Hunter, Party Animal, Leftist Warrior.

Thanks to globalism’s discontents and the financial crisis that has spread across the planet, Karl Marx and his analysis of capitalism’s dark, wormy side are back in vogue. But what of Friedrich Engels, Marx’s best friend and closest ally, the co-author of “The Communist Manifesto” and the man who selflessly supported Marx while he wrote “Das Kapital”?

In his new book, “Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels,” Tristram Hunt argues that Engels has become a convenient scapegoat, too easily blamed for the state crimes of the Soviet Union and Communist Southeast Asia and China. “Engels is left holding the bag of 20th-century ideological extremism,” Mr. Hunt writes, “while Marx is rebranded as the acceptable, postpolitical seer of global capitalism.” Mr. Hunt, a young British academic and a columnist for The Guardian, embarks on a two-part rescue mission in “Marx’s General.” He wants first to show us the human Engel, portraying him as gregarious and bighearted. He also works mightily to defend Engels against most of the calumnies later committed in his and Marx’s names.

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The key to Dan Brown’s success

From : Timesonline

Critics hate him, readers devour him, publishers are in awe of his Midas touch. As the clock ticks down to Dan Brown’s latest opus, we unlock the mystery of how an Elton John wannabe became the defining author of our time


The famous man looked at the wooden lectern. On May 7, 2005, the horror author Stephen King gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Maine, his home state. In it, he half-joked: “If I show up at your house in ten years from now ... and find nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel ... I’ll chase you to the end of your driveway, screaming, ‘Where are your books? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?’ ”

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There’s more to Calvin than dourness and asceticism

From: spiked review of book

We have forgotten that John Calvin was not only a severe Christian but also a key figure in the intellectual making of the modern world.

This year is the five-hundredth anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, but while the occasion is being marked by his followers (1), in the wider world the Protestant reformer is remembered with little affection. ‘Calvinism’ is regarded as a harsh and humourless creed, whose founder lacks even the glamour of his German counterpart Martin Luther. While the French thinker influenced Protestant churches internationally, in Britain he is mostly associated with the strict Presbyterianism once prevalent in dreich old Scotland.
It is true that the Calvin-infused, Hellfire-preaching Kirk was a stifling influence on Scottish culture for centuries, and there are still parts of the Western Isles where the McTaliban holds sway; though the pious inhabitants of the island of Lewis have recently been shaken, first by Sunday ferry sailings, and then by the inevitable consequence: same-sex civil partnership! (2) But the name Calvin is rarely heard in modern Scotland outside the phrase ‘the dead hand of Calvin’, his legacy seen as a grim one best left in the past.

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A biography of Friedrich Engels

From: Economist.com

A very special business angel,The self-effacing friend who enabled “Das Kapital” to be written.

WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.
The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital.

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The Author Himself

from THE ATLANTIC:

In every case of literary immortality there is present originative personality ... origination which takes its stamp and character from the originator, which is his substance given to the world, which is himself outspoken."
by Woodrow Wilson

WHO can help wondering, concerning the modern multitude of books, where all these companions of his reading hours will be buried when they die; which will have monuments erected to them; which escape the envy of time and live. It is pathetic to think of the number that must be forgotten, after being removed from the good places to make room for their betters.
Much the most pathetic thought about books, however, is that excellence will not save them. Their fates will be as whimsical as those of the humankind which produces them. Knaves find it as easy to get remembered as good men. It is not right living or learning or kind offices, simply and of themselves, but something else that gives immortality of fame. Be a book never so scholarly, it may die; be it never so witty, or never so full of good feeling or of an honest statement of truth, it may not live.

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Muriel Spark: The Biography by Martin Stannard

From : The Sunday Times

The progress, or otherwise.

Martin Stannard’s biography of Muriel Spark has provided enjoyable literary gossip for many years. There were rumours at one point that Spark had taken offence and forbidden publication altogether. Another report, attributed to AS Byatt, was that Spark was “very upset”, but had gone through Stannard’s text line by line “to make it a little bit fairer”. Stannard’s own account is that Dame Muriel selected him as her biographer back in 1992, was “extraordinarily generous” from the outset, gave him free access to her archive, demanded no veto on what he wrote, and devoted a lot of time to helping him revise the first draft.
She would surely be pleased with the finished product, which is microscopically researched (she was always fanatical about absolute accuracy) and zealously pro-Spark. When it transpired, after her death in 2006 at the age of 88, that she had left her whole estate to her companion of 30 years, ­Penelope Jardine, and disinherited her son Robin, her .

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The vitures of the other Elizabeth Taylor

From : Telegraph.co.uk

Despite the sneering of Saul Bellow, Claudia FitzHerbert argues that the writer Elizabeth Taylor was a brilliant writer .

Some weeks ago I heard a distinguished (male) novelist remark with surprise that he had recently read a novel by Elizabeth Taylor – Hide and Seek, he thought it was called – and found it terribly good.
My first instinct was to murmur something chippy about chaps called Elizabeth sometimes delivering the goods, my second to give him the benefit of the doubt and ascribe his surprise to the effect of Taylor, rather than the fact of her gender. Not for nothing did Taylor describe herself as “the most celebrated and well-known ‘least well-known novelist’ in the business”.

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Sex and the Married Man

from :The ATLANTIC`

How Helen Gurley Brown inspired a generation of home-wreckers, and brought down John Edwards.

he’s 87, still kicking, and almost certainly still dieting, and the old bird has earned herself a scholarly biography the hard way; if Helen Gurley Brown’s journey from the outhouses and tent revivals of the Ozarks into the cocktail parties and four-color closings of the Hearst Corporation can’t make a corker of a story, nothing can. Bad Girls Go Everywhere, by Jennifer Scanlon, a gender and women’s-studies professor at Bowdoin, is a comprehensive report on HGB theory, which is in a revisionist phase. It rejects the earlier view, long held by giants of the women’s movement such as Gloria Steinem, who believed (per Scanlon) that Brown was a scourge who “enhanced men’s rather than women’s lives by turning women into sexually available playmates.” Instead, we are asked to consider Brown “a pioneer, a founder of the second wave.” Brown “has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism’s emergence and ascendance,” and this book purports to correct the record, telling the true story behind her “very particular and still-relevant brand of feminism.”
The central argument, in précis: second-wave feminism—with its endless reading lists and casually divorced breadwinners, its stridently unshaven armpits and Crock-Pots of greasy coq au vin—was fine for the educated set, the B.A.-in-anthropology, little-bit-of-money-put-aside women who could get themselves master’s degrees in library science, peel off the Playtex 18-Hour Living Girdle one last time, and divest themselves of the whole maddening, saddening, 24-Hour Living Death of mid-century housewifery. But the movement wasn’t much of a starter for the young women of the American steno pool—call them the Seven Thousand Sisters—who barely made it all the way through Doctor Zhivago, let alone The Second Sex, and who, moreover, had no desire to go through life looking like Sasquatch and feeling angry all the time

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The Real Mary Magdalene

from : Times Literary Supplement

All that is known about Mary Magdalene can be quickly told. She is mentioned in all the gospels as one of the witnesses to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and once in Luke’s Gospel among other women followers of Jesus, where it is also said that she was a person from whom "seven devils had gone out". On one occasion only (though a highly significant one) she appears alone: it is she, according to a haunting passage in John’s Gospel, who was the first to encounter Jesus in the garden after the resurrection. From this meagre information the most it is possible to infer with any confidence is that she was Galilean (Magdala is on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee), that she had been cured through an exorcism (presumably performed by Jesus), and that she was one of a small group of women who were close to Jesus both during his ministry and at his death, and who also had an experience of the risen Jesus. Mary Magdalene is distinguished from the other women solely by the fact that in John’s Gospel she is vouchsafed a dramatic meeting with the risen Jesus on her own.

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Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

FROM TELEGRAPH.CO,UK

Thomas Marks assesses Aleksandar Hemon's new collection of short stories

One of the reasons for learning at least one foreign language well,” T S Eliot once wrote, “is that we acquire a kind of supplementary personality.”
It’s a good way to think about what makes Aleksandar Hemon’s fiction so strange and original. As the Serbian blockade of his native Sarajevo began in 1992, Hemon found himself marooned in Chicago: he was a latecomer to the English language but rapidly forged it into his own idiom. And although this has encouraged critics to compare him to Conrad and Nabokov, his writing is more interested in comparing many versions of its own author.

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The real war poets

FROM TIMESONLINE

The Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy

It is wholly admirable that the new Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, should have commissioned a slew of modern war poetry. “War, it seems, makes poets of soldiers and not the other way round,” she wrote in her accompanying text. “Today, as most of us do, poets largely experience war — wherever it rages — through e-mails or texts from friends or colleagues in war zones, through radio or newsprint or television, through blogs or tweets or interviews.” The new poems, by Paul Muldoon, Daljit Nagra, Carole Satyamurti, Sean O’Brien, Jo Shapcott and others, have provoked much discussion about how 21st-century poets can “bear witness” to conflict. But still, this was war, as Duffy admitted, at a distance.

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True book-lovers will never love Oxfam

FROM TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

Hannah Adcock says the second-hand bookshop is here to stay, despite the rise and rise of its rival

Not all second-hand bookshops have the stuffed head of a water buffalo on the wall, as ours does. But they all have their own atmosphere and ethos, whether rare and respectable, or dog-eared and fusty. Most often, they are run by bibliophiles, whose expertise has been gained over the decades by plenty of rummaging, researching and heavy lifting.
So we can pity these veterans of the trade, who say that they are struggling against the growing professionalism of charity bookshops like Oxfam (described by one disgruntled owner as the "Tesco of second-hand books"). Traditional booksellers have already faced many challenges: the explosion of online competition, increases in rent and rates, and the painstaking rise of the health and safety culture, which has a deep-seated mistrust of the step-ladder.

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Lonely Planet Guide

From The Telegraph:

Guide to where and when to see the greatest wildlife wonders

Seeing sand cats sunbathing in the Sahara or catching a glimpse the climbing coconut crabs of Christmas Island are some of the highlights of a new guide on the world's greatest wildlife wonders.From the million wildebeest stampeding across the Serengeti in June, to killer whales surfing Argentinian beaches in March to the "greatest shoal on Earth" – the sardine run off South Africa in June, the book highlights nature's most spectacular must-sees.
The Lonely Plant Year of Watching Wildlife is a collection of 192 of the world's best wildlife watching events and destinations.

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Shakespeare's Storm

From The Washington Post:

A BRAVE VESSEL
The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown.

The fierce storm that leaves a small band of travelers stranded on a magical island in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" -- the last of his great plays, probably written in 1610-11 -- was considerably more than a product of the playwright's fertile imagination. Though scholars have squabbled over its exact source, there is general agreement that it is based on the hurricane that caused the wreck of the ship Sea Venture on Bermuda in 1609, and that an account of this event composed by an aspiring writer named William Strachey was among Shakespeare's chief sources. As Hobson Woodward writes in "A Brave Vessel":

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Bogus Theories, Bad for Business

From The Wall Street Journal:

The follies of ‘management science’ and the consulting that promotes

By PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON

Three years ago, Matthew Stewart published a ­provocative article in The Atlantic magazine blasting modern management theory and ­education. His advice to anyone considering an MBA was “don’t go to business school, study philosophy.”The ­secrets of business, he said, were to be found in ­history, literature and the classic ruminations on life and existence, not in the half-baked ramblings of ­business academics, consultants and “gurus.” In “The ­Management Myth,” he expands the Atlantic article into a devastating bombardment of managerial ­thinking and the profession of management consulting. As a former management consultant, Mr. Stewart lived long enough in the belly of the beast to know its ­nature.
Mr. Stewart quotes Bruce Henderson, the founder of the ­Boston Consulting Group, who describes consulting as “the most improbable business on earth” and who goes on to ask: “Can you think of anything less ­improbable [sic] than taking the world’s most ­successful firms, leaders in their businesses, and ­hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their ­businesses, and they are willing to pay ­millions of dollars for their ­advice?”Read more.....

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The Storm of War

FROM TELEGRAPH .CO.UK

The Storm of War - A New History of the Second World War by Andrew Roberts: review


The Second World War was undoubtedly the greatest conflict in history and probably the worst single catastrophe the human race has suffered. For people today, 70 years after the start of that conflict, it is almost impossible to imagine the scale of the war. Some 50 million people were killed between 1939 and 1945 – or, to put it another way, one person every four seconds for six long years. In the west, where the Nazis controlled an area twice the size of the Roman Empire, the fighting took place almost everywhere from the northernmost tip of Finland to the edges of the Sahara Desert. In the Far East, it raged from China all the way to the shores of Australia, as the Japanese conquered more than 32 million square miles of the Earth’s surface. There was barely a man, woman or child on this planet who was not affected.

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Preaching the Gospel of Maybe

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

THE EVOLUTION OF GOD
By Robert Wright

Thank God for agnostics. Over the past decade, our public conversation about religion has all too often degenerated into a food fight between the religious right and the secular left. Now comes journalist Robert Wright with a gentler approach: a materialist account of religion that manages (sort of) to make room for God .

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Cures for the Common Cold War: Postwar Polish Poetry

From Nation :

Jaroslaw Anders's Between Fire and Sleep, a collection of essays that first appeared in American periodicals, especially The New Republic, when Eastern Europe was digging out from under the wreckage of Communism, is the best book of its kind available in English and, quite likely, any other language. Granted, the field of nonscholarly books that synopsize modern Polish literature is admittedly narrow, so such praise may sound slight, a little like Spinal Tap exclaiming that they're huge in Japan.

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Who Lincoln Was

From The New Republic:

The past three generations of historians have agreed that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president in American history and that Franklin Pierce was one of the worst. Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat, gave political cover to fractious slaveholders and their violent supporters in the 1850s. His softness on the slavery issue encouraged the southern truculence that later led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. Apart from their closeness in age--the bicentennial of Pierce's birth passed virtually unnoticed four and a half years ago--about the only things that he and Lincoln had in common were their preoccupation with politics and their success in reaching the White House.

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