Audrey Niffenegger

From : The New York Time

Photo : Dennis Hearne/MacAdam

Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel .

Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. It is an especially significant sum at a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty in the publishing world.

After a fiercely contested auction, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to publish the new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” in the United States this fall. The book is a supernatural story about twins who inherit an apartment near a London cemetery and become embroiled in the lives of the building’s other residents and the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat.
The auction for Ms. Niffenegger’s second novel involved several large New York publishing houses, as well as the original hardcover publisher of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” MacAdam/Cage, the San Francisco-based independent, and the publisher that holds paperback rights to the first novel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Ms. Niffenegger, a visual artist who is also a faculty member at Columbia College Chicago, Center for Book and Paper Arts, became a publishing sensation with “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” her debut novel.
“Her Fearful Symmetry” is set to go on sale at the end of September, and will coincide with the British publication by Jonathan Cape this fall. The film adaptation of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” directed by Robert Schwentke and starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, is scheduled for a February release.

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Bookyards Editor: For more biography, Bookyards section is here.

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Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

From :POWELL`S BOOKS

Photo :http://www.powells.com

Bagdad Theater, Portland, OR
In Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf), two Pulitzer Prize winners issue a call to arms against the oppression of women in the developing world.

From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.
With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.
They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS.
Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women's potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it's also the best strategy for fighting poverty.

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What We Owe Our Soldiers

From : Powell`s Books

Photo: Powell`s Books

The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veteransby .

Aaron Glantz

When Army Specialist Thomas Wilson asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at a 2004 town hall meeting in Kuwait, why the Army was so ill-equipped to protect its soldiers, Secretary Rumsfeld pasted on his best avuncular scowl and said, "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have." Wilson's pointed question shocked some, Rumsfeld's heartless reply prompted competing choruses of outrage, and we all began to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into while we were busy adding new terms like "IED" and "Hillbilly Armor" to our collective vocabularies.What we didn't do, and Aaron Glantz's The War Comes Home makes this mortifying point again and again, is step back to consider the full implication of Specialist Wilson's question, which might take the form of another question: "What else did we forget to do when planning this thing?" But Glantz's book actually presents two more damning possibilities: "We didn't forget anything" and "We're still not prepared to properly account for, much less fix, the Army we broke." It's true that this is more than a twice-told story (and precedes this war: an expression I learned early, and heard often, in the Marine Corps was "fucked again!"), but Glantz has pulled off a remarkable feat in The War Comes Home: in addition to presenting series after series of gasp-inducing data (78,000 wounded; 324,000 VA claims filed for traumatic brain injury, PTSD, or other illness; 49,523 veterans discharged without benefits for some combination of drug, alcohol, behavioral, or personal problems), he has created the first full narrative of these disasters and done so in a series devastating individual stories.

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Bookyards Editor: For more books on Commentary , war go here...

Civil War Wives

From : The Christian Science Monitor

Photo : http://features.csmonitor.com/

The three women whose lives are explored in Carol Berkin’s latest book,

Civil War Wives, came from Southern, socially elite saveholding families. Through marriage to prominent men, they gained access to power, but had none themselves. They were autonomous – to a point. Although they differed temperamentally and as to how they negotiated 19th-century ideals of “proper” conduct, each experienced privileges, sacrifices, and restrictions that few others could imagine.
And unlike many notable wives who had access to generals and statesmen, Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis and Julia Dent Grant left behind an abundance of direct, unfiltered source material – letters, essays, memoirs, and diaries—making them ideal biographical subjects, as Berkin notes, and allowing us “to glimpse aspects of the nineteenth century that might otherwise be lost in the roar of cannon and heated debate.”
“I did not want to reconstruct a lunar landscape, filled with women who could be known only in the reflected light of their husband’s commentary,” Berkin writes, citing as an example Mary Anna Lee, Robert E. Lee’s wife, who was also in the public eye but left a scant record told in her own voice.
In contrast, the accounts by Weld (wife of an abolitionist), Davis (wife of a Confederate president Jefferson Davis), and Grant (wife of Ulysses S. Grant) illuminate their lives in rich detail, and offer insight into how women wrestled with the demands made upon them.
Angelina Grimke is arguably the most compelling character – and, as one of the preeminent antislavery orators of the 1830s – the most transgressive. Early on, she rejected her family’s genteel life in South Carolina. Along with her sister, Sarah, she became an impassioned abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, writing to a friend that “it is not the cause of the slave only which we plead, but the cause of woman as a responsible moral being.”

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The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President by Taylor Branch

From : Time on line

Photo : Stephen J. Carrera

(Stephen J. Carrera) to not show image description -->
Former President Clinton contemplates a response during an interview with Senior Pastor Bill Hybels at the annual Leadership Summit at the Willow Creek Community Church, Thursday, Aug.10, 2000, in South Barrington, Ill.

The story behind this book reads like the plot of a Hollywood movie. It is November 1992. The distinguished American historian Taylor Branch is at home in Baltimore. The telephone rings. Would Branch care to come to a dinner in honour of President-elect Bill Clinton? Branch is mystified. He hasn’t seen Clinton for 20 years — not since they both worked in Texas for George McGovern’s failed presidential campaign. When he arrives he finds, to his astonishment, he has been seated next to Clinton himself. “Can you believe all this?” asks Clinton cheerfully. He then makes his former colleague an offer: will he come to the White House every few weeks to tape Clinton’s private reflections, for the historical record?
It gets better. Because of the risk of subpoena, the existence of the tapes must be kept secret, even from the president’s closest aides. And so, on more than 70 occasions over the next eight years, mostly at night or at weekends, Branch is smuggled into the White House and whisked upstairs to the family’s private apartments, where Clinton — in between watching sports on TV, chewing on an unlit cigar, filling in the New York Times crossword, playing solitaire and taking calls from his cabinet — describes his impressions of events to Branch. At the end of each session Branch gives the tapes to Clinton, who hides them in his sock drawer.
Almost a decade later, Branch has published not the tapes — which were used by Clinton for his memoirs — but, more interestingly, his account of how they were made. The result is an unexpected treasure-trove. Here is Clinton out of hours and off his guard: alarmingly exhausted (“his irises rolled up beneath his eyelids and he would be gone for 10 or 15 seconds”), frail (“I noticed that his hands were especially pale and yellowish, almost jaundiced”), clearly besotted with his wife (“I fidgeted through their mysteriously long embrace”) and yet unable to resist betraying her (Clinton on the Lewinsky scandal: “I think I just cracked”).
As in all good movies, the two main characters make an odd couple. Clinton is the earthy political boss, Branch the cautiously high-minded academic. Once, when the president wants to describe Hillary’s tense mood, he declares she is “tighter than Dick’s hatband”. Branch notes primly: “I didn’t understand the phrase and debated whether to ask.”

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Bookyards Editor: For more works on American Presidents, Bookyards section is here.

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Kashmiri cuisine for all

From : The Hindu

Photo : The Hindu

KOSHUR SAAL - Traditional, quick and easy Kashmiri Cuisine: By Chandramukhi Ganju; Published by James A. Rock & Co., 900 South Irby Street, # 508 Florence, South Carolina 29501. Price not mentioned.

Kashmiri food is alluringly unfamiliar. Kashmiri food is comfortingly familiar. This contradiction is Koshur Saal’s greatest advantage. Written by Chandramukhi Ganju — yet another Non-Resident Indian cookbook author — Koshur Saal is a resolute, practical, and authoritative attempt to record the culinary culture of her community.
The reason why so many NRIs write recipe books is probably that distance brings the necessary perspective to understanding nuances and recording processes. After all, the food your mother and grandmother cook may seem ordinary, even boring, as long as you are at home eating it every day. It’s only when you try recreating it in a completely different set-up that you appreciate the techniques, skills, and measures necessary for every recipe.
The advantage of having someone like Ganju — who now lives in California — hand-hold you through this book is that she’s familiar with the challenges of creating a reasonably authentic meal in a situation that’s a world away from the recipes’ origins. More importantly, thanks to her popular Koshur Saal website, which draws Kashmiris from across the world hankering for a taste of home, Ganju is used to explaining processes to amateur as well as seasoned cooks.
The book’s precise instructions are accompanied by all kinds of tables, photographs and charts, listing everything from the customary glossary of translations (with meanings in Kashmiri, Hindi, and English) as well as step-by-step picture guides to help deal with vegetables like the unusual kohlrabi ( similar to a turnip). You can choose how much, or how little, information you want to use.
For Kashmiris who live all over the world and dream incessantly of creamy Yakhean mutton curry, or pulav interspersed with juicy morel mushrooms, or simple rice bread paired with kahwa tea fragrant with cinnamon, this is a realistic guide, empowering them to make these meals almost anywhere.

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Nepal: Off the beaten trek in the Himalayas

From : The Telegraph

Photo : telegraph.co.uk

Nigel Richardson gets away from the crowds – and the cars – on a new hiking route in the Annapurna region of the Himalayas.

On July 13 last year, 34-year-old Frenchman Olivier Glaise shouldered his backpack and walked out of the village of Jomsom, in the Annapurna region of the Nepalese Himalayas. He was sighted five days later on a high pass to the north, but has not been seen since. How could a person just disappear in one of the most popular outdoor destinations in the world, a place teeming with Western hikers and described by The Rough Guide to Nepal as the Costa del Trekking?


My mountain guide is familiar with the Frenchman's case. It follows the pattern of other disappearances over the years. To save money, Glaise had decided not to hire a guide and he had ventured away from the main trekking route, perhaps because he wished to avoid the new motor road.
"It is risky because they think: 'I can do it, I am strong'," says Durga Katel, who is 30, from the Everest region of Nepal, and has been guiding for 11 years. "But this is trekking in Himalaya, this is not the city." And he enumerates the multiple dangers: AMS (acute mountain sickness), diarrhoea, broken leg, avalanche, fall, hypothermia.
We are standing in Jomsom's main street next to a poster bearing Glaise's photograph. And it strikes me that I am doing precisely what the Frenchman attempted – trying to get away from the crowds and, in particular, avoid the new road that is blighting the trekking experience in this area. The difference is, I am in the safekeeping of a mountain expert who assuredly knows the difference between Chiswick High Road and the High Himalaya.

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Will Amazon Open The Kindle To Developers?

From CNET:

We're heading into the holiday buying season, which means the introduction of new gadgets and the media's annual anointment of the season's hottest tech toy. Plenty of pundits think electronic book readers will sell briskly this year, which got us thinking: Will Amazon update its Kindle e-book reader in time for the holidays?

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What Does Your Bookcase Say About You?

From BBC News Magazine:

It has held books upright in millions of rooms around the world for 30 years. As Ikea's Billy bookcase enters its fourth decade, why do we display our reading material rather than just store it away?

Billy is a behemoth of the bookcase world. Designed by only the fourth employee for Ikea, 41 million have been sold since 1979. The factory where the bookcases are made knocks out 15 Billys a minute; 3.1 million a year.

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My Comment: I predict that in 10 years it will be your e-book reader or Kindle that will have more to say about you than your bookshelf.

The Great British Bobby by Clive Emsley: review

From : Telegraph

Photo : Telegraph.co.uk

Philip Johnston on a history of the police force, The Great British Bobby by Clive Emsley.

By Philip Johnston

Many of us have a policeman in our family backgrounds. My grandfather was an officer, as was the father of Clive Emsley, the author of this informative jaunt through the history of the modern British bobby. It was to connect with a father that he did not know (killed in the war) that Emsley has constructed a composite picture of the police constable by way of vignettes of individuals who have held a warrant card. From the 1830s, the emphasis was on creating a quintessentially British civilian constabulary in contrast to Continental paramilitary police forces used largely to suppress political discontent.
Emsley captures well the drudgery of much beat police work, with many constables invalided out of the force with varicose veins caused by pounding the streets, as well as the dangers of assault. Inevitably, George Dixon, the fictional bobby that many of us grew up with on television, is seen as the apogee of the Golden Era of policing and certainly it changed little in its essentials from 1829 until about the Seventies.

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Bookyards Editor: For more books on crime go here...

Brazil Book On Nuclear Weapons Draws Scrutiny

The Gadget. First nuclear device exploded at the Trinity site. 1945

From Secrecy News:

A book published this year in Brazil on “The Physics of Nuclear Explosives” prompted concerns at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it revealed classified nuclear weapons design information and that it might signify a renewed interest by Brazil in developing such weapons. The U.S. Government also requested further details on the matter, the Brazilian press reported.

According to the Jornal do Brasil, which first disclosed the controversy on September 6, the IAEA “wanted the book to be recalled” and demanded more information on the author’s work. The government of Brazil refused to censor the book and rejected what it described as IAEA interference.

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Update: A dangerously explosive book? -- Short Sharp Science/New Scientist

My Comment: Books do not kill people. People do.

The Year That Changed the World

From : Christian Science Monitor

Photo : Christian Science Monitor

Two decades later, a journalist remembers the rapid crumbling of European communism.

In Europe, 1989 was a hinge of history. The obscene Berlin Wall suddenly fell, after 28 years of seeming impregnability. The cold war, and with it the nuclear balance of terror, vanished after 44 years, without setting off Armageddon.
The great Russian empire imploded; Moscow lost its post-World War II external clients and its internal vassals of two centuries (or more, in the view of Ukrainians). The Soviet Army that had quashed the East Berlin workers’ revolt of 1953, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, and, vicariously, Poland’s Solidarity in 1981, withdrew 1,000 miles to the east. Overnight, the specter of Communism ceased to haunt Europe.
Incredibly, all this transpired without bloodshed, except in Romania. Additionally, the vexing “German question” of a century and a half – how to prevent progressive ascents of the German behemoth from tipping the European imbalance into war, as in 1870, 1914, and 1939 – was finally resolved. Washington forced the balky French and British to accede to the reuniting of West and East Germany into a single state that now loomed over its neighbors in population as well as economic might.
Yet this time European peace was assured by embedding Germany in the European Union, surrounding it with new democracies to the east as well as the west, and, above all, by the aversion of post-Hitler Germans to power politics.

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Bookyards Editor: For moreEuropean history book , go here...

Taking pleasure in the female form !

From : Telegraph.co.uk

Photo : Brigitte Bardot Photo: PA

Stephen Bayley

Taking an educated pleasure in the shape and style of women is not belittling, it is elevating, says design critic Stephen Bayley.

And God Created Woman. At least according to Roger Vadim, who made the film Et Dieu Crea la Femme, which was Brigitte Bardot's launch vehicle into stellar celebrity.
Bardot created a role that defined one version of modern woman: the feral sexpot not so much exploited by men as an exploiter of nature's raw energy. Oh yes, and she was blonde and wore a bikini.
The orthodox feminist view is that knuckle-dragging, male, sexist gorillas "objectify" woman by fashioning her image in a way that gratifies their crude lust. Maybe, but a great deal of objectification of woman was, in fact, by women.
That blonde hair? The popular idea that blondeness is a desirable attribute we owe to Anita Loos, a Hollywood scriptwriter the title of whose book, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is known to people who have never read it. Thirty years later, and just a couple of years after Bardot, another woman established the blonde cult.
This was Shirley Polykoff, a copywriter in an ad agency on Madison Avenue. One of her clients was Clairol, the hair products company. Polykoff was Jewish and self-conscious about her dark complexion. For Clairol she created advertisements that expressed thwarted yearning among women. Polykoff got the idea that "if I have one life, let me live it as a blonde", and then wrote a series of brilliantly persuasive ads to advance this proposition.
Few people now see blondeness as necessarily superior to any other colourway, but the chemical acquisition of it is an example of how we use artifice to create "ideal" versions of woman. Notions of perfection may change with time, but what is indisputable is that in any historic period the dominant version of the ideal woman betrays the fears and preoccupations of the era.

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Bookyards Editor: For more biography, Bookyards section is here.

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James Joyce for Ordinary Blokes?

From : The Chronicle

Photo : Lipnitzki, Roger Viollet, Getty Images

On June 5, 2009, a first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses was sold in London for £275,000 (around $450,000),

On June 5, 2009, a first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses was sold in London for £275,000 (around $450,000), the highest price ever paid for a 20th-century book. According to the dealer, Pom Harrington: "The book is unopened and unread, except for the famous last chapter which contains all the naughty bits." Another copy of Ulysses, in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, belonged to Ernest Hemingway, who said about Joyce: "I like him very much as a friend and think no one can write better, technically, I learned much from him." Yet, except for its first and final pages, that volume, too, remains uncut. Since its publication (and clandestine distribution, to foil the censors), in 1922, Ulysses has been widely admired as the greatest monument of modern fiction. In 1998, when the editorial board of the Modern Library compiled a list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, Joyce's great work ranked No. 1. It was inevitable that Ulysses, too, became grist for the current popularizing mill, the fad of finding practical applications in formidable literary classics.

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Trends in global poverty

From : The Hindu

Photo : http://www.hindu.com/

REDUCING GLOBAL POVERTY — Patterns of Potential Human Progress, Vol. 1: Barry B. Hughes, Mohammod T. Irfan, Haider Khan, Krishna B. Kumar, Dale S. Rothman and Jose R. Solorzano; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 995.

Analysing historical data as was done by Simon Kuznets or Colin Clark is a different ball game, compared with those engaged in forecasting economic trends. Futurology is as alluring as it is treacherous. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been churning growth and poverty forecasts and revising them as often. During the current crisis, they seem to have lost their shine.
So, when an academic centre — The Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures — attempts to forecast fifty-year trends in global poverty, it strains credibility.
The Center is a part of the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. International Futures (IFs) is a large-scale, long-term, integrated modelling system.
It is said to represent demographic, economic, agricultural, socio-political and environmental subsystems for 183 countries interacting in the global system. In the early years, IFs’ role was confined to technology and security issues along with RAND. It is now engaged in producing a series of annual volumes on ‘Patterns of Potential Human Progress (PPHP).’ The one under review is the first in the series and is devoted to poverty reduction issues.

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Bookyards Editor: For more books on Economics go here...

What Van Gogh’s letters reveal of his life

From : FT.COM

Photo : www.appartementprovence.fr

The Complete Illustrated EditionBy Vincent van GoghEdited by Leo Jansen, Hans .

Even if van Gogh had destroyed every canvas he painted, his letters would still fix his place in history. The most complete, vivid, authentic and agonisingly frank account of the creative life ever written, the letters, like his drawings, form a day-to-day record of what passed before his mind and eye. Compulsively set down, dashed off and posted as soon as the ink was dry, they were composed – without a thought to publication – by an artist who lived and died unknown and isolated, too grim and cantankerous to manage social relations in person, but determined to communicate in his own way. “I can’t count on living a great many years”, he writes to his brother Theo in 1883, “but I have a certain obligation and duty – because I’ve walked the earth for 30 years – to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings and paintings in gratitude.”

After van Gogh’s death in 1890, his correspondence was discovered almost as soon as his paintings, and became famous with them. A selection appeared in 1893; almost all 900 extant letters were published in the Netherlands in 1914 and translated into English in 1958. They have always been an essential academic resource and, like all the artist’s work, entrance everyday readers for their immediacy and dizzying emotional accessibility. Intimate, compelling and comprehensive, the letters make a serious formal biography both redundant and impossible.
Nonetheless, a century after first publication, cultural and biographical references are obscure and, in the case of foreign editions, translations have dated. This new sumptuous, scholarly international edition in six volumes is, therefore, enormously welcome. The product of 15 years’ work by experts at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and at the Huygens Institute, it is the most important art publication of 2009, if not of the decade. Its innovative approach and ambitious scope significantly deepen our understanding of the great founder of modern art.

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Bookyards Editor: For more works on Art , Bookyards section is here.

The Coming Ebook Reader Flood

The Microsoft Courier leads the way in the coming onslaught of ebook readers.
(Screen shot from YouTube)

From Christian Science Monitor:

The Amazon Kindle ignited an ebook reader industry and created many rivals for itself.

“Kindle” indeed.

Amazon’s popular Kindle ebook reader has sparked some fiery competition. Several companies recently announced plans to produce their own ereader-like device, and signs point to more on the horizon.

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Nocturnes

From : Christian Science Monitor

Photo : Christian Science Monitor

The author of "Remains of the Day" offers up his first book of short fiction.

It’s pretty wonderful when an established author still has the capacity to surprise readers after more than two decades and six novels – as Kazuo Ishiguro does in Nocturnes, his first book of short fiction.
Ishiguro has tackled the theme of the banality of evil from multiple angles, most notably in characters so wrapped up in the minutiae of their quotidian lives that they fail to assess the darker, big picture – like the devoted butler in his Booker-Prize-winning third novel, “The Remains of the Day” (1990), and the students in his most recent, disturbing dystopia, “Never Let Me Go” (2005).
Compared to his novels, “Nocturnes” is light – but by no means lightweight. It is a cycle of five not-quite-novella-length stories linked by a shared concern with striving musicians and the challenges of art and love. His characters aspire to greatness yet scramble between hard, disappointing gigs playing saxophone, cello, or guitar for tourists in hotels or the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Their compromises raise questions about what defines success.
Although these stories, too, involve people absorbed in their narrowly focused interests, the confusing, surreal atmosphere that blankets “The Unconsoled” (1995), Ishiguro’s novel about a renowned pianist, is largely absent.Written in the first person, with a strong sense of voice, these stories – like his novels – also end largely on a note of resignation. But they are filled with dialogue, conversations between aspirants and has-beens that capture the eagerness for praise that drives these insecure performers.

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iRex Announces e-Reader with Barnes & Noble Catalog, Verizon 3G

iRex Reader

From Popular Science:

With a larger screen and 400,000 more titles, iRex's DR800SG forces a standoff against the Kindle and the Sony Reader.

Barnes and Noble first tipped their hand in July, when they announed their new e-book store and its 700,000 titles would be made available on the iPhone and BlackBerry platforms. Then in August, the bookseller announced a partnership with e-reader maker iRex, in addition to love for Plastic Logic and their devices. And today (drumroll, please) the company officially announced the iRex DR800SG reader, the first e-book reader with access to the Barnes and Noble catalog.

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A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch

From : The Guardian

Photo : guardian.co.uk

Rowan Williams believes an illuminating new survey of Christianity will have few, if any, rivals.

Rowan Williams

The provocative subtitle alerts you to the fact that this is going to be much more than a textbook. Diarmaid MacCulloch begins with what turns out to be one of many tours de force in summarising the intellectual and social background of Christianity in the classical as well as the Jewish world, so that we can see something of the issues to which the Christian faith offered a startlingly new response.
A History of Christianity
: The First Three Thousand Years
by Diarmaid MacCulloch
1,216pp,
Allen Lane

Greco-Roman religion had ended up with an uneasy mixture of the cult of the emperor (increasingly odd as the empire became a military dictatorship constantly changing hands after bloody conflicts) and a chaotic plurality of local rites and myths. The Jewish world was marked by a lively tension over how Jewish identity was to be understood. What Christianity brought into all this was a definition of Jewish identity that opened up to become a definition of human identity independent of any particular state apparatus; it created, you could say, the very idea of a religion as a form of belonging together that did not depend on political loyalties.
Of course, Christians rapidly worked out how to deploy political power and to enforce conformity. But MacCulloch resists the glib narrative of decline and fall which is always going to tempt the sceptical historian of the church. Instead, he traces the sheer variety of ways in which the basic forms of Christian life and faith were fleshed out. As a serious historian, he brushes aside the luxuriant growths of conspiracy theory - the Gnostics plus Mary Magdalene plus Knights Templar fantasy world. But he also cautions against the popular current assumption that minorities and dissidents in past ages were enlightened moderns in disguise - reminding us, for example, that Pelagius's opposition to Augustine on original sin was not a sunny and optimistic vision but part of a fiercely rigorous morality that left little room for the lights and shadows of human experience and the uneven quality of what we call freedom.

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Bookyards Editor: For more books on Christianity go here...

The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

From : Telegraph . co.uk

Photo : Telegraph .co.uk

Steve Jones hails Richard Dawkins's new book, which brings together his thinking on Darwin .

To wrestle with a blancmange is, in my experience, a mistake. Pink, sickly and smug, the sugary pudding happily takes any number of blows, absorbs the attack, quivers a bit and comes back – unperturbed – as a blancmange.
Creationists have the same talent. For them, evidence is of no interest. I once told someone who used the enormous gap in the fossil record between the chimp-human ancestor and modern chimpanzees as evidence against evolution that it had been partly filled: an ancestral chimp half a million years old had just been found. His face lit up: “See,” he said. “Now there are two gaps!” Richard Dawkins’s new book (which he describes as his “missing link”, presenting as it does the complete Darwinian case rather than – as in his earlier works – exploring parts in detail) gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts. He sets out to polish off their flummery. Dawkins compares creationists to Holocaust deniers and spoons, with relish, an acid sauce of mockery onto that absurd confection of half-baked ideas. .

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Where Will The E-Reader Revolution Take Publishing?

A commuter uses a Kindle while riding the subway in New York June 1, 2009. The publishing industry is trying to deal with the growing demand for online content and is looking at the music industry for lessons. Lucas Jackson / Reuters

From The Globe And Mail:

Some experts believe the devices will change our reading habits and throw several industries into turmoil -- that is, just as soon as Apple gets into the game.

Will it or won't it?

The Internet is burning up with speculation about Apple Inc.'s plans for an “iPad,” a potential new entrant in the e-reader market of low-power digital devices whose displays approach paper quality.

Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader together cracked the million-unit mark last year, but everyone – especially those in troubled publishing industries – is looking to the iPod maker to potentially bring digital reading into the mainstream, and transform their businesses forever.

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D-Day

From : guardian books shop

Photo : guaardianbookshop

From the author of "Stalingrad" and "Berlin.

Guardian Bookshop Notes:
From the author of "Stalingrad" and "Berlin", which have sold 250,000 copies in hardback. The Normandy landings was the biggest invasion fleet ever known, with some of the most ferocious and savage fighting of the War. Tensions mounted on both sides, while the French civilians caught in the middle endured horrific suffering. But the landings didn't just affect the course of the War and the generation that went through it; they changed much of the post-war world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe, yet this aspect has remained ignored for decades.
Publisher's description:
The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was simply awesome. What followed them was some of the most cunning and ferocious fighting of the war, at times as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front. This book offers an account of the battle of Normandy.

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Mutually Assured Friendship

For half a century, Paul Nitze and George Kennan wrestled with the Cold War, and with each other.



By Gregg Herken

From : Washinton Monthly

Photo : www.newamerica.net

The nation’s capital in those days, they inhabited two different worlds. Kennan was the self-doubting intellectual, the nagging Jeremiah, the dove; Nitze was the decisive man of action, the self-professed "problem solver," the hawk.
But, as Thompson points out, the truth was more complex than that, as were the two men and their conjoined history. Kennan-the-dove once mused speculatively that dropping ten atomic bombs on targets in the USSR might prompt the Kremlin’s leaders to surrender. Nitze-the-hawk decided to suppress the fact that Russians were flying the MiGs responsible for downing some American pilots during the Korean War, lest that revelation lead to a wider conflict. Significantly, both men promptly rejected the option of preventive war when it was raised in the early 1950s, vis à vis Russia, and again in 2003, over Iraq.

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Google Tackles Fears on Rights in Book Deal

From : The New York Times

Photo : Google

BRUSSELS — Google said it would limit the out-of-print books it plans to make available online in order to appease European publishers, authors and other copyright holders objecting to a proposed American court settlement allowing Google to sell digital books on the Internet.

Representatives of those groups spoke out sharply Monday at a hearing sponsored by the European Commission against the proposed settlement covering millions of books that the company has scanned in libraries around the world.
European opponents said the deal would give Google too much power, including exclusive rights to sell out-of-print works that remain under copyright, a category that includes millions of books.
A settlement proposal before a United States District Court judge would govern all books covered by copyright in the United States. European publishers are concerned that Google would gain rights to profit from their books in the American market.

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Philadelphia's libraries scheduled to close starting Oct. 2 due to budget deadlock

From : Los Angeles Times

Photo : pwbaker via Flickr

In a dramatic move, the Philadelphia Free Library System announced today that it will close all branch, regional and central libraries as of Oct. 2. There will be no book loans, no classes, no programs for seniors or children, no outreach to the community, no more community meetings at library locations. Starting today, the library began truncating its loan period.

The library system of one the nation's oldest cities -- which authors Ben Franklin, R. Crumb, Edgar Allen Poe, Louisa May Alcott and Ezra Pound all called home -- stands on the brink of complete closure.
Pennsylvania has yet to pass a budget for this year, and the Philadelphia Free Library is just one of the institutions and services caught in the deadlock. If the state Legislature were to pass a budget, the closure would not, in all likelihood, come to pass.
"Even as we remain hopeful that the State Legislature will act and pass the enabling funding legislation," reads the announcement from Siobhan Reardon, the library's president and director, "we wanted to notify all of our customers of this very possible outcome."
Our hopes to a speedy budget resolution, and maintenance of library services for the people of Philadelphia.
-- Carolyn Kellogg

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Better late than never

From : FT.COM


Photo : Jame Ferguson





DeathBy Todd MayAcumen £9.99, 119 pages



Who is afraid of the reaper? Not the logicians – they have long relished in tearing off Death’s robes, mocking his fabled sting and pointing and laughing at his bony behind.





“When we exist”, wrote the philosopher Epicurus, “death is not; and when death exists, we are not.”
In other words, for as long as we are alive, we are clearly not dead – so need not worry. As soon as we are dead, however, we are no longer in a position to worry about anything. “Death”, said the Greek thinker, “is nothing to us”: his scythe is blunt, and his danse macabre is just a girlish prance.
This view has given consolation to millions, especially those sceptical of religion’s promise of paradise. Julius Caesar was a convinced epicurean as, much later, was Thomas Jefferson. In today’s more materialist age, belief in an afterlife is lower than ever, and many of us are starkly confronting our own mortality. We might, therefore, expect Epicurus’s comforting view of a toothless Death to be on the rise. But it is not. Instead, the Grim Reaper is making a comeback.
In universities around the world, professors are now arguing that the Dark Angel deserves more respect. Contrary to Epicurus, Death is justly to be feared, say today’s academicians – the common folk had it right all along; we should humbly hand him back his scythe and then run for our lives. Four new books insist that we are right to panic when the reaper comes – and that our very civilisation depends upon it.
Imagine, writes Christopher Belshaw in Annihilation: The Sense and Significance of Death, what life would be like if death were really not bad for those who die: “There would be no proper justification for our grief and distress at the death of others, no reason to avoid runaway buses, intensive care units would have their funding cut, murder would be a lesser crime than assault and battery.”





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'The Lost Symbol'

From : The Los Angeles TIMES

Photo : larryfire.wordpress.com

Robert Langdon goes for another roller-coaster ride -- this time in a hunt for a Masonic treasure in Washington, D.C. -- in Dan Brown's follow-up to 'The Da Vinci Code.'

The wait is over. "The Lost Symbol," the follow-up to Dan Brown's 2003 mega-seller, "The Da Vinci Code," is here -- and you don't have to be a Freemason to enjoy it (although it wouldn't hurt).Like "Angels and Demons," published in 2000, and "The Da Vinci Code," "The Lost Symbol" solves puzzles, analyzes paintings and reveals forgotten histories -- all so that Brown's tireless hero, Robert Langdon, can find a legendary Masonic treasure despite special ops squads that are dogging him and a bizarre killer who has kidnapped his dear friend and mentor.There is one mystery, though, that remains unsolved after three books.Will Langdon ever get to rest?You'd think a 46-year-old Harvard symbologist's most strenuous chores would be grinding his Sumatran coffee beans in the morning or persuading bored undergrads to appreciate hidden meanings in the world around them. Langdon does these things, but he's also the guy who survived an antimatter explosion at the Vatican and a Paris manhunt and uncovered the truth about the Holy Grail (though, according to the new novel, he's kept this a secret). Not your average academic.The answer, then, to the question of rest is clearly no. Langdon, after all, specializes in what all esoteric evildoers need: rituals and their transcendent meanings. He finds crucial connections that other people can't see, even in the most difficult, chaotic situations.Consider an early incident in "The Lost Symbol," a scene that is as gruesome and allusive as the opening of "The Da Vinci Code" (in which a dying, blood-covered curator in the Louvre arranged his body into a puzzle).

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Queen of the Court: An Autobiography by Serena Williams

From :Guardian.co.uk

Photo :Guardian.co.uk

From gang violence to an inspiring trip to Ghana, the life of the younger Williams sister has been about much more than tennis, says Tim Adams.

I once talked to Venus Williams about the differences between herself and her sister, Serena. She thought about it for a while and then she suggested in her giggly way that it was a matter of inspiration versus perspiration: everything had always come easily to her, the elder sister by a year and three months, but "little" Serena had to work for her success.
Queen of the Court: An Autobiography
by Serena Williams


"You know I was always really very, very good," Venus said at the time, grinning. "Serena, on the other hand, wasn't very good at all. She was small, really slim and the racket was way too big for her. Hopeless. She started playing especially good tennis at around 15, which was soon enough – I mean, she won the US Open two years later – but still it was quite late compared to me." She then summed up the distinction in shorthand: "You know," she said, "I was always Venus …"
Serena, though, as this memoir makes clear, wasn't always Serena. Her book allows us to see how the younger half of the greatest sister act sport has known came out of the shadow of "V" through a process of intense self-invention. Serena recalls at one point how she was once asked how many grand slam titles she thought she would have won had Venus, her greatest rival, not stood in her way. She answered that she did not think she would have won any at all; Venus was her spur – her great advantage in life was that she knew from a very early age that if she could just beat her sister then she could beat anybody in the world.

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Near-Instant Book Printer Adds Google Books Titles

A morning's worth of output from the Espresso Book Machine, which used Google Books as the source of the data. (Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

From CNET:

Google is hell-bent on digitizing the world's books, but it's also aware that sometimes you just want to turn the pages.

On Demand Books, makers of the Espresso Book Machine, are expected to announce Thursday that they have been granted access to Google's library of public domain digital books for use with their product. The Espresso Book Machine can print a 300-page book in four minutes, complete with a cover and a bound edge. It ranges in price from $75,000 to $97,000, depending on the configuration, and is found mostly at universities, libraries, and institutions around the globe.

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE

From : The Hindu

Photo : Oxford press

How Thinking like an Economist Undermines Community: Stephen A. Marglin; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 795.

C. T. Kurien
In the early 1960s, Stephen Marglin was part of a group of young, bright economists from the United States who came to India, as “missionaries,” he says, bringing the “gospel of economic development” to what was then one of the poorest countries in the world. Their message of salvation consisted of rigorous economic theory, elegant models, and the mantra of mathematics. They were advisers to the Planning Commission.Wrong doctrines
Marglin felt that, as part of his missionary calling, he should understand the belief systems and ways of living of the heathens. So he went out to a village close to Delhi and along with missionaries of another order — The Ford Foundation advisers — he interacted with farmers and discovered that they were not against using fertilizers or adopting new technologies. But, to quote his words, “I learned something infinitely more valuable: an entirely different way of knowing and being in the world from anything I had ever imagined… I experienced something very different… not that people acted without rational deliberation, but that people lived their lives in deep connection with others — in short, in community.” The missionary who was taught to believe that self-interest was the only true rationality and that the market (actually the Market) was its manifestation had something of a conversion experience.
This volume is his confessions of the wrong doctrines he had learned and his search for an understanding of the mystery — community — that he had stumbled into in the East.
The central issue he ponders over is “How do we know?” He identifies two forms of knowledge — algorithmic knowledge and experiential knowledge. The Dismal Science of Economics, he contends, is of the former kind, a logical corpus derived from a set of axioms; chief among them are: self-interest, individual preferences that can be ordered, unlimited wants, limited resources to satisfy them, and maximisation of utility.

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Australian art takes evolutionary turn.

From : The sydney Morning Herald

Photo : smh.com.au

THE anniversary of Darwin's birth in 1809 and publication of Origin of Species in 1859 is connecting past to present, science to art, philosophy to biology, just as firmly as Darwin linked chimpanzees to humans. Evolution is being presented to us by all kinds of writers, artists and scholars in widely different registers.

The connection between Darwin, art and Australia is the hook that successfully picks up otherwise disparate historical topics in Jeanette Hoorn's Reframing Darwin. This collection of essays accompanied an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne and develops some of the links between Darwinism and Australian art already well known from F. W. and J. M. Nicholas's Darwin in Australia. But this book also presents a few entirely surprising associations. With an illustration on every page, Reframing Darwin offers genuinely new and readable scholarship in an elegant package.
A 1907 Melbourne controversy over the instalment of an anthropomorphised gorilla statue is one of the more intriguing stories, beautifully illustrated. Canonical artists — Tom Roberts and Conrad Martens, for example — are reconsidered in the light of Darwinism. Another chapter connects Gould's famed Birds of Australia, Darwin's sexual selection theory and the royals Victoria and Albert. A little stretched? That's what I thought. But there it is: a brilliant, insightful essay by Jonathan Smith in which Gould's lyrebirds become part of Darwin's data for The Descent of Man, all set against the tricky sexual selection of the gender-inverted Victorian royal family. The thing about evolution is that it connects just about everything: it's nothing if not ecumenical.

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Google Book Search: Why It Matters

From Times Online:

European publishers and copyright holders gathered in Brussels on Monday to submit their opinions to a European Commission hearing on the American Google Book Search settlement.

In a nutshell, the situation is this: Google has embarked on a project to digitise hundreds of thousands of out-of-print and out-of-copyright books in the United States.

Some of these works are still technically in copyright, and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers took Google to court. A proposed settlement was reached last year, under which Google will essentially agree to pay royalties to anyone whose book they inadvertently put on line.

The settlement will be ratified in a Manhattan court on October 7 this year, by which time any European reservations will need to be registered.

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Bootylicious

From : The New Yorker

Photo : The New Yorker

What do the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts?

by Caleb Crain

On the evening of April 1, 1719, an English slave ship came to anchor near the mouth of the Rokel River, off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone. In the hold were linen and woollen goods that could be traded for slaves, fava beans to feed them, and, for the officers, cheese, butter, sugar, and Westphalia ham, as well as live geese, turkeys, ducks, and a sow. The captain, a devout man named William Snelgrave, was apprehensive, because the west coast of Africa was rife with pirates, who prized slave ships, not only for their cargo but also for their size and sturdiness. At eight o’clock, a watchman heard a rowboat. Snelgrave called for lanterns and ordered twenty armed sailors on deck, and others down into the steerage, where they could fire out of the ship’s portholes. He then hailed the approaching boat, whose occupants replied that they had come from Barbados on a ship with the soothing name Two Friends. But they were invisible in the dark, and Snelgrave was mistrustful. Rightly so: soon after Snelgrave’s crew brought him light, the strangers opened fire.
None of Snelgrave’s armed men were on deck yet, and when he called out for those in the steerage to shoot, they didn’t. This was the first of several mysteries that Snelgrave encountered during his experience with the pirates. He went down to the steerage and found his men standing around, claiming that the chest in which they stored their muskets and cutlasses was missing. Unopposed, the pirates rushed aboard, firing guns and tossing primitive grenades. Reaching the steerage, they asked who the captain was, and Snelgrave admitted, as he later recalled in a memoir, that “I had been so till now.” How dare he order his people to shoot, a pirate said, sticking a pistol into his chest. Snelgrave brushed it away just before it went off, and the pirate crashed the butt of it over his head. Climbing to the quarterdeck, Snelgrave was attacked by another pirate, this time with a sword. “To avoid it I stooped so low, that the Quarter-deck Rail received the Blow; and was cut in at least an inch deep,” he wrote. This pirate, too, began pistol-whipping Snelgrave, until some of Snelgrave’s crew cried out, “For God’s sake don’t kill our Captain, for we never were with a better Man.” At this, the pirate left Snelgrave alone, and the one who had tried to shoot him took his hand and promised that “my Life was safe provided none of my People complained against me.” Here was a second mystery: among pirates, the fate of rulers was up to the ruled.

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Cache And Carry: A Review Of The Kindle

From Scientific American:

The best answer yet to what's black and white and read all over.

I’m not your classic “early adopter” when it comes to new electronic gizardry (a word I just made up that means a combination of gizmo and wizardry, with a secondary definition of bird digestion). I’m not even what one ersatz electronics guru referred to as an “early adapter,” although I do sometimes wonder if my purpose in life has been reduced to making sure my various devices are all plugged in correctly.

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Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

From : Guardian.co.uk

Photo : Guardian.co.uk

Anne Tyler has hit the mute button, finds Joanna Briscoe.

Anne Tyler springs few surprises. Since the glory days of The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons she has been consistently loved and admired, but the most memorable successes have been followed by a more low-key output, her recent studies of everyday eccentrics avoiding even the elegantly subdued pyrotechnics of the works that made her name.
Noah's Compass
by Anne Tyler
288,
Chatto & Windus

The premise of her 18th novel is hardly an uplifting one. Liam Pennywell, a 60-year-old redundant teacher, has had to downsize to a flimsy cinderblock rental on the outskirts of Baltimore to contemplate the void that is his life in what he sees as "the summing-up stage". However, events take a livelier turn when, on his first night at Windy Pines Court, he is hit on the head. Waking in hospital with scalp and hand wounds, his only memory is of the moments before he fell asleep in his new home, although he is told that his patio door had been left unlocked, allowing an intruder to inflict cuts and concussion. What follows is the victim's search for the hours his conscious mind has blocked, his almost obsessive need to retrieve events lending purpose to an otherwise meandering existence.
His daughters, sister and ex-wife - an oddly frosty and controlling group - gather round to help or interfere with varying degrees of reluctance, the teenage Kitty eventually moving in for the summer, and Liam's life begins to return even as it unravels. He is accustomed to the comforts of routine and his only strong emotion is his desire to recall his attack, so he consults a neurologist. Yet the doctor, like everyone Liam encounters, is dismissive of his "very common" memory loss. Through this visit, Liam comes across Eunice Dunstead, "rememberer" to a local property developer who suffers persistent memory loss. The 38-year-old Eunice is "plump and ringleted, wearing a voluminous Indian-print skirt and cloddish, handmade-looking sandals". With little fanfare, a gentle liaison develops which provides its own surprises.

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A Paradise Built in Hell

From :Christian Science Monitor
Photo :Christian Science Monitor

When disaster strikes, ordinary human beings very often do extraordinary things.





Disasters are terrible, awful things. No one could dispute that. But what do those extraordinary events tell us about ordinary humans? One view is that disasters crack society’s fragile social norms, releasing destructive primitive instincts in the form of hysteria, panic, crimes, and other acts of ruthless self-interest.
Another view says that disasters actually release what is best and, ultimately, most authentic about people, spawning amazing acts of compassion, generosity, courage, and self-sacrifice.In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit argues strongly on behalf of this latter view. And because it is overwhelming true in most cases, she says, it suggests new ways of thinking about how governments should approach disaster relief.
Looking principally at five North American disasters of the past century, Solnit finds that people caught in them generally behave remarkably well. Often the “heroes” of the disasters aren’t police or other official workers, but ordinary people caught up in the event, who organize themselves to do what is needed.“In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them,” she writes. “The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it.”Those who study disasters already know this, she says. The research includes more than 700 studies of disasters showing that public panic is rare.An engaging book, full of fascinating detail, “Paradise” especially deserves a close reading by political leaders at every level, as well as the news media who cover disasters.While research and statistics get their due here, Solnit’s book speaks most eloquently through the stories of individuals.





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How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters

From : Boston.com


Photo :www.ad-invaders.com

You can tell a lot about a book by its subtitle, which is basically its mission statement.





The one on Scott Rosenberg’s absorbing history of blogging hits a trifecta of big ideas: “How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.’’
In other words: Blogs have been around for only about 15 years, but they warrant a hardcover history because whether or not you’ve ever read one, their very existence has affected your life as their influence has grown in the marketplace of ideas.
Rosenberg is more qualified than most to write this piece of Internet history. He’s a cofounder of Salon.com and the author of “Dreaming in Code,’’ detailing the struggles of a group of programmers racing to develop new software.
Beyond his tech journalism credentials, Rosenberg knows how to tell a story. And it’s quite a yarn: how blogging went from a “hobby’’ dismissed by professional journalists as “essentially insignificant’’ to “something unprecedented in human history: a new kind of public sphere . . . sharing the characteristics of conversation and deliberation.’’
Not since the early days of personal computers have there been such riveting and quirky tales of “pioneers and innovators,’’ those men and women able to consider the possibilities of daily life in remarkable new ways.





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