Monday, November 30, 2009

A Good Fall' by Ha Jin


From : Los Angeles Times



The immigrant experience in contemporary America.


Figuring out what to keep, what to adopt and what to discard: These are the challenges for immigrant and exile alike. In his collection of lectures, "The Writer as Migrant" (2008), novelist Ha Jin considered the special case of a writer's displacement from his native land: Should he switch linguistic communities as well? If he does write in a foreign tongue, will he impoverish his craft or enrich it, be tarred with disloyalty or win new readers?
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Other People’s Mail


From :London Review of Books



Bernard Porter


The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 by Christopher AndrewAllen Lane, 1032 pp, £30.00, October 2009,

It seems to be widely acknowledged today that states need secret intelligence services. It is generally accepted, so long as those states are thought to be legitimate, trustworthy, and to represent a public as well as a more partisan interest. But it wasn’t always the case. For most of the 19th century, espionage was thought to be a low and foreign practice that the British – or at any rate the English – should not stoop to in any circumstances. This was for a number of reasons: because it used deception, which was immoral; because the state could not always be relied on not to abuse it; and because it was counter-productive, since foreign espionage was often claimed as a cause of war, and domestic surveillance was considered intrinsically damaging to the trust people needed to have in their governments, and in each other, if they were to be content and thus politically stable.




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Vladimir Nabokov, reduced to notes


From : The Washington Post



Photo : http://www.washingtonpost.com/


By Michael DirdaThursday, November 19, 2009

THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA .



Should this book have been published? Certainly all the work of a great writer like Vladimir Nabokov ought to be available to scholars and interested readers. To my mind, Dmitri Nabokov was clearly right to ignore his dying father's request that he destroy these fragments of an unfinished novel. But that doesn't mean "The Original of Laura" actually deserves the attention of anyone but the most rabid Nabokov fanatic. Apart from a few enchanting phrases -- "the orange awnings of southern summers" -- there's just not much here.
But first a little background.


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Sunday, November 29, 2009

Shallow Graves


From : The New Yorker



The novels of Paul Auster



Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch.






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Saturday, November 28, 2009

The Good Parents by Joan London


From : The Guardian



Clare Clark on a tangled family web


Maya de Jong, an 18-year-old girl from small-town western Australia, moves to Melbourne. There she tentatively embraces her adult self, renting a room in the house of an experimental film-maker and embarking on an affair with her boss. She cannot imagine what her backwoods parents will make of her new life when they visit. But when Toni and Jacob arrive, Maya is gone. Her message says only that she has gone on a business trip. She does not know when she will be back.



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Friday, November 27, 2009

The Persians



From : The Guardian





The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran by Homa Katouzian, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs by Ray Takeyh.


What thread runs through this heap of ruins and centuries? The British thought it had all to do with revenue, because revenue is what principally interests an imperial people. According to the last of the great British Persianists, the late Professor Ann Lambton, subsistence agriculture in an arid land could only support so much of a government and military apparatus without a resort to conquest. The sudden and urgent requirement for a modern court, army and bureaucracy in the 19th century strained the revenue system till it broke, and brought in train the constitutional revolution of 1906, the oil concession and, by extension, the modernising autocracy of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79) and the 1979 revolution.







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'Invisible: A Novel' by Paul Auster

From : The Los Angeles Times


Photo : http://www.latimes.com/


Multiple levels of meaning and identity figure in the author's new novel about a dying man remembering his student days.





Riffle through the novels of Paul Auster and you will see how steadily a sense of irreality imposes itself. His oeuvre is replete with writers, who may create characters only to suffer confusions of identity with them. His work returns ever to themes of the elusiveness of human nature and the insufficiency of language to investigate the matter (or even to faithfully record experience). In "City of Glass," from his New York Trilogy, he cites Lewis Carroll and raises Humpty Dumpty's question of who is the master, language or us?




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Los Angeles Times bestsellers for Nov. 22, 2009


Fiction
Weeks on list
1.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam: $24.95) The lives of a maid, a cook and a college graduate become intertwined as they change a Mississippi town.
24
2.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper: $26.99) A writer's escapades encompassing 1930s Mexican artist communities and Cold War America.
1
3.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel ( Henry Holt: $27) The rise of Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell.
2
4.
Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown : $27.99) An LAPD detective travels to Hong Kong to solve the murder of a Chinese immigrant.
5
5.
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (Doubleday: $25.99) Harvard professor Robert Langdon uses his symbology skills to find a missing Freemason in Washington, D.C.
9
6.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney (Amulet: $13.95) Greg desires to spend summer vacation indoors despite his mother's wishes for outdoor family fun.
5
7.
Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving (Random House: $28) A father and son on the run in 1950s Northeast logging communities.
2
8.
The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (Tor: $29.99) Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, attempts to unite kingdoms and alliances in preparation for the Last Battle.
3
9.
Ford County by John Grisham (Doubleday: $24) A collection of short stories set in the same locale as "A Time to Kill."
1
10.
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (Riverhead: $25.95) A woman acquaints herself with the songwriter whose album caused the breakup of her recent relationship.
5
11.
Pursuit of Honor by Vince Flynn (Atria: $27.99) Two counterterrorism operatives deal with the fallout from a deadly terrorist attack.
5
12.
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy (Knopf : $28.95) A bank heist sets off an escapade through '60s L.A. with run-ins with the mob, the FBI and Howard Hughes.
7
13.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules by Jeff Kinney (Amulet : $12.95) Greg navigates middle school while trying to keep his brother from revealing a secret.
2
14.
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (Knopf: $28.95) An Istanbul bourgeois pursues a shopgirl, collecting objects associated with her.
1
15.
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson (Knopf: $25.95) A hacker implicated in two murders must revisit her past to prove her innocence.
13
Nonfiction
1.
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown: $27.99) A collection of the author's writings of everyday and extraordinary people.
3
2.
SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow: $29.99) More funny, informative facts and questions to ponder.
4
3.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown: $27.99) An exploration of the background of high achievers.
50
4.
Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom (Hyperion: $23.99) Albom's observations of a rabbi and a pastor on an eight-year journey of faith.
7
5.
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (Little, Brown : $25.99) An examination and behind-the-scenes look at factory farming.
1
6.
Save the Deli by David Sax (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt : $24) The history behind and search for the best delis across America.
2
7.
Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon (Harper: $26.99) A collection of autobiographical essays reflecting on what it means to be a man and father.
5
8.
It's Your Time by Joel Osteen (Free Press: $25) Finding inspiration and faith during difficult times.
1
9.
The Queen Mother by William Shawcross (Publisher: $40) The biography of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon and a century of devotion to the British monarchy.
1
10.
Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday: $27.95) A chronicle of Pat Tillman, the NFL star turned Army Ranger whose death in Afghanistan stunned the power structure.
8
11.
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's: $24) The disappearance of a Syrian American father and good Samaritan in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
14
12.
Lit by Mary Karr (Harper: $25.99) The author's descent into alcoholism and recovery.
1
13.
The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons ( ESPN: $30) An encyclopedia of all you need to know about the NBA.
3
14.
Open by Andre Agassi (Knopf: $28.95) The tennis star's memoir and personal odyssey of a lost childhood, drug use and comebacks.
1
15.
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking: $32.95) A behind-the-scenes account of the players behind America's financial crisis.
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FOOD SECURITY



From : The Hindu





Functioning of PDS in Tamil Nadu

A. NARAYANAMOORTHY
Discusses the problem of food security in the context of the PDS, with its focus on Tamil Nadu.

Food security has been a perpetual problem in a country like India possibly because of three main factors: increasing population, an unpredictable foodgrains production, and a corrupt distribution system. An additional factor, sometimes, is price rise in the world market. While reduced availability of foodgrains and price rise impact the people in general, the poor are affected the most. Of all the intervention programmes launched over the years in India to protect the vulnerable sections, the Public Distribution System (PDS) is notable.


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Thursday, November 26, 2009

Hospitality Department



From : The Wall Street Journal








How a Jewish family fled Nazi Germany and built a Deep South shopping empire




The last time I set foot in a well-known department store, I was shopping for a shirt. I left hot under the collar. A rude, gum- smacking clerk had no idea about sizing, zero interest in learning and could barely tell me where the exit was.
That soul-corroding experience is almost universal these days. So it was with great relish that I opened "We Were Merchants," a wistful tribute to Goudchaux's, a name that in south Louisiana, where I grew up, once conjured the same superior customer service, quality goods and name recognition that Nordstrom's does in much of the rest of the country today.










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How Human Psychology Drives the Economy,




From : London Review of Books




Photo : jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk







We simply do not know!
John Gray
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller.

The last two years, in which capitalism has suffered one of its periodic shocks, have given John Maynard Keynes a new lease of life. Events have demonstrated the limits of the theory that economies can be relied on to be stable if they are lightly regulated and otherwise left to themselves. There is now much talk of the paradox of thrift, whereby the rational choices of individuals can prove collectively ruinous, and of the need for government to counteract the inherently anarchic tendencies of markets. Keynes has been revived because he understood that markets are very often irrational. Unfortunately, few of those who urge that we go back to him seem to have understood why he believed this.


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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD


From : The edge


Now things had happened — fundamental and fundamentalist things.


Religion as a phenomenon is on everybody's mind. And among all the changes that religion's new towering profile has wrought in the world, which are mostly alarming if not downright terrifying, is the transformation in the life of one Cass Seltzer.
First had come the book, which he had entitled The Varieties of Religious Illusion, a nod to both William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and to Sigmund Freud's The Future of An Illusion. The book had brought Cass an indecent amount of attention. Time Magazine, in a cover story on the so-called new atheists, had ended by dubbing him "the atheist with a soul." When the magazine came out, Cass's literary agent, Sy Auerbach, called to congratulate him. "Now that you're famous, even I might have to take you seriously. ...





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NOVEMBER 21, 2009 Discovering the Keys to a Musical Past



From : The Wall Street Journal






"Mr. Langshaw's Square Piano" By Madeline Goold BlueBridge, 280 pages, $24.95.



Madeline Goold is a British sculptor who trained as a lawyer. She has also played the piano since childhood—and it was this avocation that sparked her interest, a few years ago, to look into buying a historical instrument. In her search, she heard about "square pianos," early-19th-century instruments that were produced during the transition from harpsichords to modern pianos. She had wondered about this musical curiosity but had never seen one. Then, idly surveying the listings for an antique auction one day, she saw this entry: "Two Square Pianos."



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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

You Say Potato, I’ll Say Potato


From : The City Journal

Photo : astore.amazon.com


How social networks influence our behavior and outlook

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (Little, Brown, 352 pp., $25.99)


Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list.
Yet the history of humanity is a history of social networking all the same, according to Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. “Our connections affect every aspect of our daily lives,” they write. “How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us.” And the burgeoning field of network research is revealing that “our connections do not end with the people we know.” Social networks take on lives of their own, transmitting information, germs, and habits between people who are nearly as tangentially linked as actors in the old parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. “Friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us,” the authors argue, “like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.”


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Was Nietzsche Pious?



From : Christian revieuw




Nietzsche again?



Nietzsche again?" Nietzsche professionally studied chorus in Greek tragedy, but never heard a wail quite like this. If the question does not sound forth in choral harmony, it is certainly uttered by a multitude of voices. The phenomenon of "Nietzsche again" gives rise to bewilderment, consternation, and exasperation on the part of the many who see his name everywhere and do not know why. In (dulcet or otherwise) antiphonal response, we may warble that the justification for attending to Nietzsche lies in his sheer influence, regardless of our judgment on the quality of his thought or on various particulars of Nietzsche interpretation. If we do not find him intellectually momentous, at least we might call him a momentous event in intellectual culture.




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Monday, November 23, 2009

To Sea and Back: The Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon by Richard Shelton


From : The Guardian



Giles Foden is carried along by a holistic view of the salmon's lifecycle.


When Richard Shelton's first book The Longshoreman: A Life at the Water's Edge was published in 2004 it was acclaimed by Telegraph and Guardian readers alike. The main reason for its cross-cultural appeal was the engaging prose style in which Shelton described life as a waterfowler, fisherman and biologist; but there was something more to it. Here was a man who had lived a tweedy country life and was a keen angler and hunter, but who also had ecological knowledge and scientific credentials (he was director of the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory in Pitlochry from 1982 to 2001) that are perhaps more usually associated with left-leaning environmentalists.


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'The Sixties'



From : The Los Angeles Times


Photo :www.renaud-bray.coM
'The Sixties' .

"The past," Jenny Diski writes at the start of her memoir-cum-social-history, "The Sixties" (Picador: 148 pp., $14 paper), "is always an idea which people have about it after the event." This is true in regard to no period of recent history so much as the 1960s. More than 40 years on, we have built up so many myths, so many ideas (as Diski would put it), that it's nigh impossible to see the decade as it really was.

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Sunday, November 22, 2009

Nine Dragons



From : The Globe and Mail


Photo : www.theglobeandmail.com




Nine Dragons, by Michael Connelly, Little, Brown, 374 pages, $34.99.


Also, Bosch has a soft spot for the victim, a Chinese immigrant named John Li, who had done him a small kindness many years before. So when he promises Li's family he'll catch the killer, there's good reason to believe him.
Bosch's usual partner, Ignacio Ferras, is hampered, more mentally than physically, by a wound incurred months before while on duty, and is further distracted by a young family and a demanding wife. And since Bosch finds himself out of his depth linguistically and culturally in the Li case, he requests assistance from the Asian Gang Unit, bringing multilingual Detective David Chu onto the scene.


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Saturday, November 21, 2009

Grim facts are still just facts


From : The Globe and Mail



David Finkel's new book is a catalogue of the horrors of the war in Iraq, but at this point the soldiers killed there deserve more than that.



The Americans have won the war in Iraq. It may be a dubious victory achieved mainly by scaling back expectations (rather than actually democratizing Iraq, which was the goal of George W. Bush, Americans have settled for the creation of a precarious and besieged government), but nevertheless the gunfire and explosions have decreased in Baghdad and other cities, and American troops are leaving the country.




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Friday, November 20, 2009

The men who knew too little



From : The Globe and Mail





Fabrice de Pierrebourg and Michel Juneau-Katsuya's attack on Canada's anti-spy measures is off-base, filled with errors and quick to embrace dubious conspiracy theories. Tretiak was a spy?!

Hidden somewhere in this messy nest of a book is a bold polemical pamphlet, or maybe, better yet, a PowerPoint briefing, just waiting to be born. The authors, one of whom is a professional journalist (de Pierrebourg), the other a security consultant and former CSIS officer (Juneau-Katsuya), have a legitimate message: There are spies (mostly of the economic variety) under our beds, and we are not very good at worrying about them, or doing anything to mitigate their pesky presence. States such as Russia and China have emerged as major players in the field of post-Cold War economic espionage, quite apart from the private-sector bottom-feeders who are out there in droves.





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Satanic Panic




From : Powell's Books



Photo : http://www.powells.com/







In the 1980s, America was gripped by a phenomenon so frightening and shameful that it has all too quickly been brushed under history's rug.


The fusion of journalism and entertainment -- personified by leading figure Geraldo Rivera -- led to "the Satanic Panic," wherein viewers fell for the unfounded (and fantastic) claims conveyed by Rivera during several primetime specials devoted to devil-worshipping cults, demonic conspiracies, ritual child abuse, and even the occasional act of cannibalism. "Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera proclaimed to a watching nation. "The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their Satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography, and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town."

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Thursday, November 19, 2009

An enigma called Jinnah


From : The Hindu






JINNAH – India, Partition, Independence: Jaswant Singh;
Rupa & Co., 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 695.



The political career of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who along with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, occupied the centre stage of the anti-colonial movement, has several versions, both academic and popular. While some celebrate his triumph in creating a sovereign state against many odds, others focus on his tragedy of unrealised ambition, as the Pakistan which came into being bore very little resemblance to the one he dreamt of.




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Raven Summer


From : The Christian Science Monitor






'Raven Summer’ leads two teens to both adventure and danger in this evocative young adult novel.

When boys dream of woodland adventures, hiding out where adults will never find them, they no doubt imagine exactly the kind of place where Liam Lynch and his friend Max found the Death Dealer. Although just an old, tarnished pruning knife uncovered as the two were “messing about, digging for treasure,” in Raven Summer, David Almond’s skillfully crafted young adult novel, it becomes a symbol of both the adventure and the danger that boyhood summer held.



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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Evolution of the God Gene




From : The New York Time




Photo : frmarkdwhite.wordpress.com














IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.



During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.


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The Death of the Idyll



From : World hum








Travel Books: Frank Bures on "The Wisdom of Tuscany" and the last, dying gasp of a travel book genre .




For many years now, the northern edge of the Mediterranean has been besieged by Anglophones searching for the good life. First Peter Mayle settled in Provence. Then Tim Parks met his neighbors in Verona. Frances Mayes looked up in the sky near Florence. And Chris Stewart ran over some fruit in Spain. The list goes on. As Matthew Kneale recently pointed out in the Financial Times, the tradition of what he calls “idyll memoirs” may go back even further.



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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker



From : The Guardian


Photo : market.climate-zone.com

Considerable effort has gone into Christopher Booker's definitive manual for sceptics. Shame he's talking bunk, says Philip Ball.


Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph columnist and bete noir of climate campaigners, has here produced the definitive climate sceptics' manual. That's to say, he has rounded up just about every criticism ever made of the majority scientific view that global warming, most probably caused by human activity, is under way, and presented them unchallenged. If you share his convictions, you'll love it, and will dismiss the rest of this review as part of the cover-up.

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Sarah Palin’s ‘Going Rogue’ book cover unveiled



From : Msnbc.com


Photo : votingfemale.wordpress.com

Memoir features a beaming, patriotic image of former Alaska governor.


You know the title, now see the cover of Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue."
The former Alaska governor's memoir, a top-seller online weeks before publication, will feature an outdoor shot of Palin, wearing an American flag pin on her red fleece top, eyes turned slightly from the camera as she smiles confidently into the horizon, a patchwork of Alaska blue sky and clouds behind her.
The image was released Thursday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.

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Monday, November 16, 2009

Under the Dome by Stephen King



From : The Guardian


Photo :nextread.co.uk








Stephen King's new novel is predicated on, and takes its epigram from, the song "Small Town", one of country-singer James McMurtry's savagely compressed and contemptuous indictments of American life.








It's a small town, son," McMurtry sings, "and we all support the team," inflecting the words with a bland, overbearing oppressiveness. Not content with this quiet pressure cooker, and determined to write what he describes as "a book that would keep the pedal consistently to the metal", King drops a dome over his small town – Chester's Mill, not far from the infamous Castle Rock – and clamps it there so we can watch what happens






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The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War


From : The Guardian

Photo : Matt Cardy


Harry Patch launching the 2007 Royal British Legion Poppy appeal, 2007.


On 9 November 1920 Britain's Unknown Warrior, having been duly saluted in Boulogne by Maréchal Foch, supreme commander of allied forces on the western front, set sail on a Royal Navy destroyer for Dover. Three months earlier David Railton, a frontline padre, had sent his idea for what Peter Parker calls "this representative of all the dead" to the Dean of Westminster, who had put it to George V. The king didn't like it, but the prime minister, Lloyd George, did, and having claimed the scheme as his own, got it through Cabinet that October. On 7 November, four unidentified bodies were exhumed from battlefield cemeteries and one randomly selected for a state funeral, at Westminster Abbey, on 11 November, 1920. Thus was a caravan set in motion that rolls to this day.

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Sunday, November 15, 2009

China's Mystery Lady


From : The Wall Street Journal

Photo : Simon & Schuster


There was a time in the history of modern China when one of Mao Zedong's favorite proverbs, "women hold up half the sky," could have been amended to the singular: "A woman holds up half the sky." That woman, Soong May-ling, was the wife of Mao's bitter rival and better known by her married name, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. To virtually everyone in her orbit, she was simply "Madame."


In 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek's influence as the leader of China's Nationalist government was at its peak, Life magazine called Madame the "most powerful woman in the world." Liberty magazine described her as "the real brains and boss of the Chinese government." Clare Boothe Luce compared her, without a hint of hyperbole, to Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale. Ernest Hemingway, who had lunch with Madame in 1941 in the wartime capital Chongqing, called her the "empress" of China. That's the appellation that Hannah Pakula has appropriated for the title of her entertaining, though overlong, biography, "The Last Empress.



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Saturday, November 14, 2009

The School of Athens



From : The Wall Stree Journal


Photo : Viking






The difficulty of drawing lessons from an ancient war—of distinguishing facts from what one would like to be facts.







Without Thucydides the war (or wars) fought between the Greek states of Athens and Sparta late in the fifth century B.C. would have been no more significant than many another long war (or wars) whose start dates, end dates, causes and characters might (or might not) have been discussed by future historians. Only because of Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War"—with his radical claims of exercising a new rationality and, most grandiloquently, of writing a "thing for all time"—did a typically messy military contest based on money, influence, bloody-mindedness and happenstance become interpreted and reinterpreted as though it were a religious revelation. Communists and anticommunists, leftists and neocons, anti-imperialists and empire builders have all fought to recruit the great Athenian as their ally.
Donald Kagan, a veteran Yale professor of classics and ancient history.








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Friday, November 13, 2009

Universities Reject Kindle Over Inaccessibility For The Blind

Photo: Kindle DX. (Credit: Amazon)

From The CNET:

The National Federation of the Blind is applauding the decisions of Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison not to Amazon.com's Kindle DX as a textbook replacement.

The universities cited the Kindle's inaccessibility to the blind as the problem.

The federation said Wednesday that while it appreciates the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, the "menus of the device are not accessible to the blind...making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon's Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX."

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Year That Changed the World



From : The Guardian Book Shop







Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Publication Date : 03/09/2009
Hardback.


"The Untold Story Behind The Fall Of The Berlin Wall". On the 20th anniversary, an account of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a riveting account of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

An institution builder



From : The Hindu







A prolific writer, M. N. Srinivas was an inspiring teacher nurturing generations of sociologists .

THE OXFORD INDIA SRINIVAS: Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 995.
M. N. Srinivas (1916–1999) was undoubtedly India’s most distinguished and accomplished sociologist. His long and active intellectual life that started during the period immediately preceding Indian Independence extended up to the end of the millennium. As an intellectual of the Nehruvian generation, his interest in the study of social transformation in India was not merely academic. It is symbolic perhaps that his first stint of fieldwork in what later became & #8220;the remembered village” of Rampura was interrupted by the assassination of Gandhiji.






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Canadian Maverick:



From : The Globe and Mail


Photo : www.theglobeandmail.com




The Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand, by William Kaplan, Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History/University of Toronto Press, 491 pages, $55.

Ivan Rand is a quintessential Canadian personality. And William Kaplan has delivered an equally representative biography. As such, A Canadian Maverick is a splendid Canadian biography of a definitive Canadian figure; there is no hint of hagiography on view here. Nor any intent or interest in doing a hatchet-job. Kaplan takes a characteristically Canadian approach to a characteristically Canadian personality.


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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

West of the West



From : The Guardian


Photo : www.perseusbooksgroup.com


Mark Arax : Public Affairs

By turns lucid, harrowing, and comical, this collection of dispatches paints a darkly impressionistic portrait of modern California. A journalist and native son, Arax puts paid to vestigial West Coast clichés and replaces them with ominous realities and discontents encountered during four years of intrastate travel. Migrants, exiles, dreamers, schemers, murderers, hippies, fundamentalists, conspiracists, environmentalists—all share space in these pages and in that vast Golden State. The possibility of crazy-quilt discursion looms high, but Arax calmly sews the diverse stories and dramatic studies into coherence and poignancy. The effortless mix here—memoir and reportage, psychography and geography—coolly achieves the author’s aim: “to find the truth and the lie of the California myth.”

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The Peril of Palatability



From : The Reason.com


Photo : hrsbstaff.ednet.ns.ca




A former FDA chief sounds the alarm about dangerously delicious food.






by David A. Kessler, Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Books, 320 pages, $25.95
According to The Washington Post, David Kessler’s research for The End of Overeating included late-night forays into the trash bins behind Chili’s restaurants across California. From the chain’s garbage he retrieved ingredient boxes with nutritional labels that revealed the secret of dishes such as Southwestern Eggrolls and Boneless Shanghai Wings. It turned out they “were bathed in salt, fat and sugars.”




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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

21 Poets for the 21st Century


From : The Guardian



Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century edited by James Byrne and Clare Pollard
A new collection showcases young poets whose work soars above the tired editorial clichés.


In 1962, Penguin published an anthology edited by Al Alvarez, bombastically entitled The New Poetry. Alvarez introduced his selection with a now-famous essay in which he expressed his belief that the postwar English literary scene had become insular and moribund, its poetry calcifying into the "academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgable, efficient" typified by the Movement poets of the 1950s. His anthology, conceived to counter this process, championed younger poets whom he believed capable of "open[ing] poetry up to new areas of experience"; almost half a century on, his lineup, which included Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and (in the 1966 reprint) Sylvia Plath, has stood the test of time


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Firing Bullets of Data at Cozy Anti-Science



From : The New York Times




I always say that electricity is a fantastic invention,” the British economist Michael Lipton once told Michael Specter, whose bristling new book, “

Denialism,” explores the dangerous ways in which scientific progress can be misunderstood.


But if the first two products had been the electric chair and the cattle prod,” Mr. Lipton continued, “I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point.”
Here is what they would have done instead, if Mr. Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, correctly captures the motifs that shape the stubbornly anti-scientific thinking for which his book is named: they would have denounced electricity as a force for evil, blamed its prevalence on venal utility companies, universalized the relatively rare horrific experiences of people who have been injured by electrical currents and called for a ban on electricity use.




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Monday, November 09, 2009

Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia


From : Bostonreview

Photo : Wikipedia


Edit This PageIs it the end of Wikipedia?


Can you trust Wikipedia? Most of us have stopped asking and simply bookmarked it. That makes sense when you consider the alternatives: you can explore the first dozen or so Google search results, or you can go straight to the occasionally erroneous Wikipedia entry, typically culled from the very same search results. If you are looking for fast, up-to-date information, it is Wikipedia or Google (not Wikipedia or Britannica), and Wikipedia wins on speed.



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Sunday, November 08, 2009

Border Crossings


From : The Atlantic



In our age of globalization, when immigration and the Internet and multinational conglomerates have made cultural transmission across borders easier than ever, does the idea of a national literature still have meaning?


Where, in a civilization divided between cultural nativism and cosmopolitan mélange, does such a literature belong? The Atlantic, in conjunction with the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity, asked four novelists with international followings to consider these questions.




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Saturday, November 07, 2009

Book of revelations





Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves. By Andrew Ross Sorkin. Viking; 624 pages; $32.95. Allen Lane; £14.99.


LAST year, as Lehman Brothers tottered, there was briefly hope that Barclays Bank would ride in with an 11th-hour bid. But the British government, fearful of contracting the American cancer, took fright and blocked it, helping to seal the investment bank’s fate. As American officials absorbed the news, an exhausted and exasperated Hank Paulson, the then treasury secretary, muttered that the British had “grin-fucked us.”


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Friday, November 06, 2009

An artist making art









An amazing self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, in words and pictures.




Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. Thames and Hudson; 2,500 pages; $600 and £325. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THE story of Vincent van Gogh’s life is more heartbreaking, and heart-lifting, than the romantic myth that has enshrouded him for decades. It is told, in his own words and works, in the six-volume “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters”. His 819 surviving letters (and the 83 addressed to him) form the core. The first letter was written when Vincent, aged 19, was a trainee at The Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, a firm of international art dealers. Like most of the letters, it was sent to his brother, Theo, then 15. The two remained close. Theo became an art dealer and Vincent’s main source of financial and emotional support.




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Uranium Wars



From : The Globe and Mail


Photo : Palgrave Macmillan




The Scientific Rivalry That Created the Nuclear Age, by Amir D. Aczel, Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $34.50

Shortly after lunch on Dec. 2, 1942, a group of scientists working in a subterranean squash court beneath the University of Chicago's football field completed one of the world's most important experiments. The team, led by the charismatic and brilliant Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, had created a primitive nuclear reactor in which they launched a self-sustaining uranium chain reaction.


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Thursday, November 05, 2009

A perspective on Chomsky



From : The Hindu




Chomsky has inspired millions with his incisive analyses of the abuse of power by the powerful .


THE CHOMSKY EFFECT — A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower: Robert F Barsky; Orient BlackSwan, 3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad-500029.
Rs. 495.


Noam Chomsky has been called the world’s most important public intellectual, and Robert Barsky has written a very accessible book about him, a remarkable thinker and person. Chomsky has inspired millions around the world with his impassioned and incisive, yet meticulously sourced, analyses of the abuse of power by the powerful, generally — but not exclusively — those who act for and on behalf of the United States. There has been a price to pay. He has bee n all but obliterated from the corporate mainstream media in the U.S., but he has never wavered, even in the face of death threats. He draws huge audiences and is always accurate and civil in responding to often gross vilification.



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Is This Literary History?





Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Wald assess Harvard's new anthology.

Harvard University Press's major new tome, A New Literary History of America, is getting significant publicity—both praise and controversy. Edited by the Harvard scholars Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, with its own Web site and a kickoff party in Cambridge featuring symposia on aspects of the book, it's a 1,122-page collection of essays that unpack cultural topics broadly defined—not just literature, high and low, but the Salem witch trials, W.E.B. Du Bois and his relation to Booker T. Washington, J.F.K.'s inaugural, Linda Lovelace's Ordeal, the screenplay as genre, Alcoholics Anonymous. It is history, literature, art criticism, and more, all rolled into one. The Chronicle Review asked Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Wald to discuss the project via e-mail. Sollors then comments on the dialogue.

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Wednesday, November 04, 2009

No Way to Run an Economy




From : The Guardian



Photo : GRAHAM TURNER







Subtitled, "Why The System Failed & How To Put It Right". An analysis of the policy mistakes made by governments in an attempt to ease the crisis, including Obama's doomed market-led response and the obsession of central banks with inflation.







Dissects the policy mistakes, including Obama's doomed market-led response to the crisis and the obsession of central banks with the red herring of inflation. This title warns that the collapse of Eastern European economies can lead to political crisis in the ex-Soviet states that embraced neoliberalism and massive debt levels so fully.





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'The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps'



From : The Los Angeles Times


Photo : ebookstore.sony.com



Unpublished stories and fragments from the late author show false starts and digressions as he developed his signature style.


The business -- and I use the word advisedly -- of posthumous publication is a troubling one. We honor our dear dead. Yet there are certain kinds of attention it seems wiser not to pay; those who profit from the legacy of the prose of Ernest Hemingway have been ill-advised, I think, to produce so many volumes of what he left unfinished or rejected while alive. The bank account enlarges, but the reputation shrinks. Soon the son of Vladimir Nabokov -- that most fastidious of authors -- is scheduled to produce a text his father had enjoined.




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Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Ayn Rand’s Revenge



From : The New York Times


Photo : Lester Kraus




A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged.

An inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”



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Empire Falls: The Revolutions of 1989





Article : The Nation




Photo : Hansi Krauss




The end of the story was gruesome.

A spray of bullets and a splattering of blood on a wall in central Romania. On Christmas Day 1989, after a hastily arranged trial before a kangaroo court, the deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad. The assembled soldiers, eager to eliminate the despised dictator, were ordered not to aim higher than his chest. The faces of the condemned had to be recognizable after the fact. The country had to see that the communist era was over.



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Bookyards Editor: For more staartegic studies , Bookyards section is here.


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Monday, November 02, 2009

Electric Dreams

On the small screen Amazon's Kindle is one of 40 electronic readers using E-Ink technology. (Photograph by Tim Llewellyn)

From Boston.com:

One Cambridge company has built its success on Kindle. But can it stave off competitors and make good on its vision of revolutionizing everything from credit cards to clothing?

The hottest technology company in the Boston area sits in a low-slung 100-year-old converted factory in the West Cambridge Industrial Park, not far from the Concord Avenue rotary. Inside its modest lobby hangs a 2-by-4-foot display. Messages scroll across it: “Welcome to E-Ink . . . the time is now 2:58 p.m. ’’ It’s 30 minutes slow.

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