Better served cool

From : The New Criterion

Photo : http://www.newcriterion.com/

A review of Macaulay:

The Tragedy of Power

Robert E. Sullivan

By the time he died in 1859, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Victorian historian and parliamentarian, had meticulously plotted his posthumous fame. A founding trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, he sat for no fewer than twenty-one portraits now found in its collection. He served on the committee to decorate the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, the corridors of which were duly adorned with paintings based upon his histories. His Cambridge College, Trinity, immortalized him in marble. In 1876 his nephew George Otto Trevelyan published the stately Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, a virtually authorized biography that remained standard for generations. He was entombed at Westminster Abbey, one of the few historians to lie in Poet’s Corner.

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Jesus, Jesus, Jesus

From : Slate


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In the late 1950s, three men who identified as the Son of God were forced to live together in a mental hospital. What happened?

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected, barely concealing his anger.


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The ‘American gospel' that failed

From : The Hindu


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







Stiglitz says the freefall is basically due to “market fundamentalism” dominating the financial sector .

FREEFALL - Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy: Joseph E. Stiglitz; Allen Lane. Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 499.
Joseph Stiglitz, formerly Chief Economist at the World Bank, Nobel Laureate (2001), and the author of such widely read books as Globalization and Its Discontent and Making Globalization Work is recognised as one of the world's leading economic thinkers. This book gives a cogent and lucid account of the contemporary global financial and economic crisis, “Made in America” and almost instantly exported to the rest of the world. It traces the origin of the crisis, its rapid acceleration, the sudden collapse, and the continuing recession. Though it is a “Tract for the Times” meant for Americans, I strongly recommend it to all, especially those in the finance and banking sectors, and teachers and students of economics. The ups and downs in the American economy over the past two decades, the housing boom of the early part of the present century, the encouragement that the banks and the government gave to housing loans, sub-prime lending, America's “new financial architecture,” derivatives, securitisation, investment banking, and much more are explained in simple language situating each in its real life context.




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Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

From : Powell's Books

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

This is an admittedly biased statement .

The first book Open Letter published was Ugresic's Nobody's Home, and I was responsible for Dalkey's publishing Thank You for Not Reading a few years back), but I honestly believe that Dubravka Ugresic is one of the most interesting writers working today. Her books are consistently good, even across genres. The two aforementioned essay collections are spot-on, and her fiction -- from The Museum of Unconditional Surrender to Lend Me Your Character to The Ministry of Pain -- is always enjoyable, surprising, captivating, and envelope-pushing.

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Absence of Mind

Form : The Guardian


Photo : http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/

An ambitious book reflecting on some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought: science.








Covers the topics in the history of human thought - science, religion, and consciousness. This title challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. It explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization.


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'Blue Bloods'

From : The Telegraph

Photo : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Peter Ingham on the latest batch of sci-fi novels, including Black and White by Jackie Kessler and Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead .

Take a bunch of adolescent Manhattan socialites, add vampirism to the mix, and the appeal is obvious. The youngsters at a private school learn they are part of the old-money lineage of vampires that rule New York society. But just as they become aware of this, another, more powerful creature is hunting them and rendering the undead dead. For all its 300 pages, Blue Bloods is merely the exposition for further novels to be published and ends on an unsatisfactory cliffhanger.

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The faces of evil

From : F T


Photo : http://www.ft.com/


A scene from the 1922 German horror film ‘Nosferatu’, based on Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’










On Evil, by Terry Eagleton, Yale University Press RRP£18.99, 192 pages



A Philosophy of Evil, by Lars Svendsen, Dalkey Archive Press RRP£11.99, 312 pages



Memory as a Remedy for Evil, by Tzvetan Todorov, Seagull Books RRP£10.50, 92 pages



Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick, Palgrave Macmillan RRP£19.99, 416 pages



The idea of evil, remarks Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, has in recent decades been seen as “a holdover from a mythical, Christian worldview whose time had already passed”. But the fact that Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Evil is being published within weeks of literary critic Terry Eagleton’s On Evil and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s Memory as a Remedy for Evil suggests that the secular world is not quite ready to dispense with the concept of evil just yet. At the same time, a new reissue of theologian John Hick’s 1966 classic Evil and the God of Love shows there’s still life in the Christian perspective too.





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The Enlightened Economy

From : The BOOK

Photo :

The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850
by Joel Mokyr
Yale University Press, 564 pp., $45

The Industrial Revolution is the inflection point of economic history. During all the millennia before that revolution, incomes were static and humans were poor—often hungry, inadequately clothed, ill-housed. But somehow, in the two-and-a-half centuries since humanity learned to mass produce, a large number of ordinary people have acquired more material comfort than even the wealthiest magnates of the pre-industrial era. A modern Wal-Mart would have been a place of incalculable riches to Charlemagne.

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The Bookmakers Daughter

From : Barnes & Noble


Photo : http://search.barnesandnoble.com/

The heartfelt memoir of a daughter who summons up the ghost of her father .




This deeply felt memoir is a journey through family history, feminist insight, and southern mythology. In it a daughter reflects on the complicated and volatile love she and her father shared. Shirley Jean Abbott grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1940s and 50s and was the beloved daughter of Alfred Bemont Abbott, affectionately known as "Hat." Hat wasn't a bookmaker in the literary sense, even though he allowed Shirley's mother to believe as much while they were dating. Rather, his craft was gambling, and his business was horse racing.
Despite the corruption, which put food on the table and rabbit coats in the closet, Abbott remembers the kind and attentive father who spent nights reading to her. He alone is responsible for opening the door to a world of language and literature for her. And she ran with it. Against her father's wishes, after graduation she headed for New York City. In the end, the girl he had nurtured into an independent and intelligent young woman had outgrown the small town where she grew up. The Bookmaker's Daughter was originally published by Ticknor and Fields in 1992 and was a Book of the Month Club selection.





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The Rational Optimist

From : The Telegraph


Photo : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/






How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley: review
Robert Colvile is frustrated with The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, a former executive of Northern Rock .

Over the past few decades, the world has seen the greatest explosion in prosperity in human history. Unimaginable advances have been achieved in terms of increased life expectancy, reduced disease and access to lifestyles undreamed of by any tsar or pharaoh. So why, asks Matt Ridley, in this challenging and ambitious book, do we assume that this must end, that mankind’s pillaging of the world’s resources will bring the gravy train to an abrupt halt.

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From : Barnes and Noble
Photo : http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com

My friend Manan Ahmed, a professor at Freie Universität in Berlin, is giving a lecture called "Situating a Universal:

Liminal Sindh in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia." I am in the back, but my brain is in 1920s Paris, with Manan's maps of the 11th-century Middle East layered in the background. I have been gorging on the letters of Sylvia Beach and the memoirs of Margaret Anderson so when Manan pauses and asks, "What does it mean to situate yourself in the frontier?," instead of port cities and conquerors on horseback, I think of these two women, joined by a mad love for James Joyce's Ulysses, exploring the world of modernism and bringing its treasure to the empire's doorstep.

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From : Barnes & Noble


Photo : http://search.barnesandnoble.com/








Hailed as one of the year's top five novels by Time, and selected as one of the best books of the year by nearly all major newspapers, national bestseller Peace Like a River captured the hearts of a nation in need of comfort. "

A rich mixture of adventure, tragedy, and healing," Peace Like a River is "a collage of legends from sources sacred and profane — from the Old Testament to the Old West, from the Gospels to police dramas" (Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor). In "lyrical, openhearted prose" (Michael Glitz, The New York Post), Enger tells the story of eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy who has reason to believe in miracles. Along with his sister and father, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother who has been controversially charged with murder. Their journey is touched by serendipity and the kindness of strangers, and its remarkable conclusion shows how family, love, and faith can stand up to the most terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates. Leif Enger's "miraculous" (Valerie Ryan, The Seattle Times) novel is a "perfect book for an anxious time ... of great literary merit that nonetheless restores readers' faith in the kindness of stories" (Marta Salij, Detroit Free Press).


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A chronicle of Dharavi

Form : The Hindu


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

Documenting Informalities: Edited by Jonathan Habib Engqvist; Academic Foundation, 4772-73/23, Bharat Ram Road (23 Ansari Road), Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 1200.

“Another book on Dharavi?” — you wonder as you start browsing this rather large volume. And the editor puts you at ease, when he says it is not a scientific study, nor is it fiction. “To a large extent,” says the introduction, “it contains images of urban poverty, of slums and of colourful people. Yet it does not claim to be either coffee-table fashion or hard hitting journalism.”


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Flight from Monticello

From : Powell' Books

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Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson

at Warby Michael Kranish

Man on the Run

For many of Thomas Jefferson's contemporaries, the greatest scandal of his life had nothing to do with Sally Hemings. It was his sudden and hasty -- his enemies said cowardly -- flight on horseback from Monticello on the morning of June 4, 1781, just as a squadron of invading British cavalrymen began to gallop up the little mountain toward his house.

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Gilead

From : The Guardian


Photo : http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/






From the author of Housekeeping.





In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames' life, he begins a letter to his young son, a kind of last testament to his remarkable forebears. When his son returns to Gilead, he and Ames attempt haltingly to reconcile, and as they do, secrets that carry fatal consequences come to light.


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Winter on the Nile

From : The Telegraph


Photo : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/







Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt by Anthony Sattin.

On November 25 1849, 70 passengers boarded a boat in Alexandria, beneath a “gloomy autumn sky”, bound for Cairo and the ancient sites of Upper Egypt. The barge-like vessel was designed to carry only 25; fleas abounded on the crowded lower decks. Egypt had no museums, and some travellers brought chisels to chip souvenirs from the temples and pyramids. Among the Europeans fighting their way on board were a 29-year-old Florence Nightingale and, by coincidence, a slightly younger Gustave Flaubert.


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The Most Powerful Idea in the World

From : F T

Photo : http://www.ft.com/

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention, by William Rosen, Jonathan Cape RRP£20, 400 pages.

It was a collection of essays by the economic historian Arnold Toynbee, published posthumously in 1884, that first popularised “industrial revolution” as the name for the transformation that swept across Britain in the previous century.
There may be some problems with the term: the country hardly adopted the steam engine – which William Rosen rightly calls the period’s “signature gadget” – like a crowd storming into an Ikea sale. Thomas Newcomen may have put the first practical steam engine to work in 1712 to pump water from coal mines – but 90 years later water mills still produced more than three times as much power in Britain as steam.
Nonetheless, nobody

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From Philosophy to Neuroscience

From : Review

Photo : Science April 23. 2010

Is there such a thing as wisdom -- a thing, stuff, an abstract entity -- or are there only wise individuals and wise actions and attitudes, these latter not exclusively the possession of the individuals in question given that even fools can sometimes be wise?

This question is a significant one, because it bears on the enterprise of "wisdom studies," a parallel endeavour to the "happiness studies" now big in the neuropsychologically-informed social sciences. (And there too the question has to be: is there such a thing as happiness, or only happy individuals and happy times and experiences, the latter not the exclusive property of the individuals in question, given that even the gloomiest of us can occasionally be happy?) If you aim to study wisdom, or happiness, presumably in the hope of finding out how we can all be wiser and happier, you had better be clear about the object of study; and, as Stephen S. Hall's Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience shows, that is hard to do.

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Top From the Guardian :

Paperback

Punishment of Gaza
Gideon Levy

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

Boy Who Climbed into the Moon
David Almond

Daughter
Pavlos Matesis

Revolt of the Pendulum
Clive James

DEATHRIDE

From : Boston

Photo : http://www.boston.com/

We think we understand the great German-Russian conflict of the Eastern Front of World War II. We think it was the great grudge match of the tyrants, Stalin and Hitler. We think Stalin panicked in June 1941 when his Nazi ally turned on him. We think Hitler was beaten by the same Russian winter that defeated Napoleon a century earlier. We think Stalin was steadfast in refusing to consider surrender. We think the Soviets prevailed in the greatest tank battle ever, at Kursk.

Maybe not. At least that is what the historian John Mosier, who in an earlier volume shattered the myths surrounding Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, is telling us in “Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin — The Eastern Front, 1941-1945.’’ It is a dramatic departure from the conventional wisdom and is itself a dramatic chronicle of the most brutal theater in the most brutal war in one of history’s most brutal centuries. But the real theme is even bigger than the Eastern Front, which itself stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

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Hardback

Helen
Maria Edgeworth

Absence of Mind
Marilynne Robinson

Number Mysteries
Marcus Du Sautoy

Listening to Van Morrison
Greil Marcus

Hare with Amber Eyes
Edmund de Waal

A Hatred That Resists Exorcism

From : The New York Times

Photo : http://www.nytimes.com/

Is there anything left to be said about anti-Semitism? By now surely the outline is clear: how hatred of Jews grew out of early Christianity’s attempts to supplant Judaism; how the demonization of Jews in the Middle Ages turned violent; how the hatred was given its name by a 19th-century German journalist; and how it reached cataclysmic fulfillment in the Holocaust.


There are other landmarks: the expulsion of the Jews from England, Spain and Portugal; intermittent massacres in Muslim lands; the construction of European ghettos; the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe; the Dreyfus Affair; the Nazification of Europe; Stalin’s purges and show trials.

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Aboriginal sin?

From : The New Criterion

Photo : sadredearth.com

June 2010
Aboriginal sin?
by Roger Sandall
On The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008, by Keith Windschuttle.

One fine morning Australians woke up to find the credit rating of their country—the moral credit rating, that is—plummeting out of control. A damaging tale about “stolen children” had been invented. It was said that between 1880 and 1970, about 100,000 Aboriginal youngsters had been cruelly torn from their mothers and families and institutionalized, and that Australia had been guilty of genocide. Scholarly studies even compared this thriving liberal democracy to Hitler’s Germany.

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THE POLICE IN WAR

From : The Hindu

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THE POLICE IN WAR - Fighting Insurgency, Terrorism, and Violent Crime: David H. Bayley and Robert M. Perito; Pub. by Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1800, 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301. Price not stated.

Following the Dantewada and other Maoist attacks in India, there has been an animated debate whether the State police and the Central forces, such as the CRPF, have been adequately trained to handle insurgency of the Maoist variety. There is the inescapable impression that the training methods are outdated, suitable only for humdrum policing during normal times, and that there is a good case for their imaginative revamping. Inspiration from domestic experts is no doubt welcome. Drawing from the experience of police agencies in conflict-ridden areas elsewhere is also not a bad idea.

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Back When Men Shared Secrets

From : The New York Times

Photo : http://www.nytimes.com/

Back When Men Shared Secrets
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 1, 2010

No one’s been better than Ann Beattie at dropping a couple of brand names, book and movie titles or references to food and fashion to conjure a particular time and place and circumstance. The smart young denizens of the ’70s and ’80s who populate her best-known fiction tend to be clever, artsy types who, if they haven’t attended a notable university or law school, are taking night-school courses in poetry. They smoke joints, drink wine spritzers, eat ramen noodles, underline Russian novels and quote Wallace Stevens. They wear jackets from L. L. Bean, listen to Lou Reed, make mixtapes and know things like how to identify a Limoges plate without looking at the back.

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MOST POPULAR - BOOKS
Connections: A Hatred That Resists Exorcism
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Empire of Desire
Humanity’s Database
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China’s Daughter
Essay: Ben Franklin Is a Big Fat Idiot
Beryl Bainbridge, Mordant Novelist, Is Dead at 77
The Rebbe of Graceland
Land of Sugar Cane and Shortstops

History, loud and clear

From : The Globe And Mail

Photo : http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Review: Fiction
History, loud and clear

David Mitchell’s masterful new novel is the author working at full volume.

Half the size of a football field, its curved shape resembling a fan, the man-made island of Dejima once nestled in Nagasaki Harbour. From the 17th century through to the middle of the 19th, Dejima housed the only Westerners permitted inside cloistered, shogun-era Japan. Fifteen or so Dutchmen resided there at any moment, and they were not even allowed to cross a footbridge into the city. Nor were more than a handful of Japanese translators, medical students and courtesans let onto this “foreign” isle.

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The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet�s Nest
Stieg Larsson Viking Canada

Secret Daughter Shilpi Somaya Gowda William Morrow

Family Ties Danielle Steel Delacorte

The Passage Justin Cronin Doubleday Canada

Heart Of The Matter Emily Giffin St. Martin's

The Help Kathryn Stockett Putnam

Savor The Moment Nora Roberts Berkley

Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Objective

Eric Van Lustbader Grand Central Island Beneath the Sea Isabel Allende
-
The Lion Nelson DeMille Grand Central

Imperial Bedrooms

From : The Guardian

Ph0to : http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. It was labelled fiction but most of it – the snuff movie, the gang rape – was true. The only bits that hurt were those that chronicled my relationship with Blair as the writer was in love with her himself, though too immersed in the passivity of writing and too pleased with his own style to bother with many commas to admit it so he wrote me into the story as the man who was too frightened to love. Make of that what you will though the real message I want you to take is that I'm a smartass seller of banal meta-fictions.

I went to the premiere in 1987 with Blair, Rip, Julian and all the other empty narcissists who had somehow dazzled the literary establishment. The movie had been a pile of shit. Bret had hated the movie too and what follows is I guess his revenge. Shame he involved you in it because the real Julian didn't die in the movie he died on the page more than 20 years later.

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Top sale for the Guardian :

Hardback

Hare with Amber Eyes
Edmund de Waal

Helen
Maria Edgeworth

Riches Beneath Our Feet
Geoff Coyle

Absence of Mind

Marilynne Robinson

Charlotte Moore

Losing our minds to the web

From : Prospect

Photo : http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/

An influential new American book claims that the internet is damaging teenagers’ brains and our ability to think. But the web’s real dangers lurk elsewhere .

In 1889 the Spectator published an article, “The Intellectual Effects of Electricity,” intended to provoke its Victorian readers. Robert Cecil, the prime minister, had recently given a speech to the Institution of Electrical Engineers in which “he admitted that only the future could prove whether the effect of the discovery of electricity… would tell for good or evil.” The authors attacked him for being soft on electricity. Its material effects were welcome—“imagine the hundred million of ploughing oxen now toiling in Asia, with their labour superseded by electric accumulators!”—but its intellectual effects were not.

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Essay: Ben Franklin Is a Big Fat Idiot
Empire of Desire
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Singing the Poet Electric
Land of Sugar Cane and Shortstops
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To Save the Union
‘Mambo’ Author Returns to His Muse
Books of The Times: An Abduction and Its Chilling Aftermath

wWrong

From : The Wall Street Journal


Photo :http://online.wsj.com

The Openness Elixir
In the marketplace of ideas, progress depends on freedom—and the expectation of error.








The word "slick" did not come to mind as Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive of BP, foundered in a sea of congressional questioning this week. Never in the face of righteous political indignation did expertise look so unconvincing and so unworthy of its status. But in many respects Mr. Hayward and BP were simply unlucky: They were caught out by an event they didn't think would happen and then compounded the problem by sounding clueless when asked to explain what went wrong or how they would fix it.
Excerpt From 'Wrong'


As David H. Freedman notes in "Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them," such cluelessness is all too common in our expert-mediated world. Look at all those economists who failed to predict the great crash of 2008 or the rating agencies whose metrics melted into mere wishful thinking. Realtors, who are supposed to know more than you or I about the housing market, predicted housing prices would trend up for 2008. Experts, schmexperts.





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Why Not Socialism?

From : The Oxonian Review


Photo : www.oxonianreview.org/.../








On a Socialist Camping Trip

As a teenager, Jerry Cohen was a counsellor in the Montreal Jewish socialist summer camp Kinderland, where, in the words of one of his young charges, “the sons and daughters of 1950s leftists spent July and August waging class struggle against mosquitoes and boredom”. These summer expeditions left a lasting impression: decades later, Cohen fondly recalled campfire songs from Kinderland at his inauguration as Chichele Professor in All Souls college chapel; and a camping trip serves as the prime illustration of the virtues of socialism in his latest and last work, a lively discussion of political morality.





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For the new football fans

From : The Hindu


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

The book serves as a decent entry point for its primary target audience, the new fans of the game .







Around the time of the 1998 World Cup in France, an Indian bubble gum company began giving away football cards free with its gum, causing an entire generation of pre-teens, some of whom had never watched football, to debate endlessly the relative merits of Gabriel Batistuta and Alessandro Del Piero.
The cards, with action pictures in front and a short biography at the back, served as an initiation into an unfamiliar sport, helping newbies separate the Italians from the Germans and the forwards from the midfielders.





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An industry in re-covery

From : The Globe and Mail

Photo : http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

There’s a line that goes around in the publishing industry: “You can’t tell a book by its cover, but you can sure sell it.”

In the book world, nobody takes cover art lightly. Publishers pile time, money and talent into cover art. They recruit top artists, run market tests and hold focus groups. And they count on covers to make old books new again, and attract attention in bookstores where half the purchases are made on the whimsy of browsing.

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Is English Special Because It's "Globish

From : New Republic


Photo : http://www.tnr.com/





Most of the mainline reviews of Robert McCrum’s Globish

Of which there have been so many so fast that I am in awe of his publicity people -- are missing what is fundamentally wrong with the book. Herewith one linguist’s take on this peculiar book, within which all evaluators seem to perceive a certain fuzziness, but few are catching that it is based on an outright error of reasoning and analysis – as well as an infelicitous volume of downright flubs.

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