A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names,

From : London Review of Books
Photo : www.lrb.co.uk

Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson

BuyA Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Vol. V.A

• Oxford, 496 pp, £125.00, March 2010, ISBN 978 0 19 956743 0

In the early 1800s, nearly 25 per cent of all females in the United Kingdom were called Mary. If you add to these many Marys the crushing numbers of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William.

Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names

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Freedom

From : The Republic
Photo : www.tnr.com

Freedom

By Jonathan Franzen

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 562 pp., $28)

A few years ago there appeared in The New York Times a profile of a Manhattan environmentalist who became known as No Impact Man. No Impact Man—his real name was Colin Beavan—had set himself the goal of radically reducing his family’s carbon footprint for a year: no paper products, no food that came from farther than a 250-mile radius of New York City, no fuel-consuming transportation. Rather than use the elevator, he climbed the steps to his Fifth Avenue apartment; and his wife bicycled to work, carrying her lunch in a Mason jar. No Impact Man made an exception, naturally, for the power required by his Internet service, for which he absolved himself by writing a blog chronicling the vicissitudes of his carbon-free year. Soon he had a book contract to show for his trouble, and a documentary film followed shortly thereafter—trees and the grid be damned.

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Catalog No. 439:

From : The smart set
Photo : www.thesmartset.com
Punk'd in the Great Depression
Catalog No. 439 gave American men everything they never knew they needed.

Trick Chairs

When historians compile lists of the stuff that helped make America America, they don’t even rank the DeMoulin’s Patent Lung Tester alongside even relatively minor inventions like the cotton gin, the telegraph, and the automobile, much less epic game-changers such as instant coffee and air conditioning. Surely this is an oversight.

• Catalog No. 439: Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes. Introduction by Charles Schneider; appreciation by David Copperfield. 240 pages. Fantagraphics Books. $22.99.

The DeMoulin Lung Tester was a plain, serious-looking box with a nickel-plated mouthpiece and a calibrated dial on its face. Its ostensible purpose was to measure a man’s lung capacity, the bulky antecedent to today’s spirometers. Its real purpose was to measure a man’s ability to maintain his composure after being made the butt of a joke. When an unsuspecting mark blew into it, a .32 caliber blank cartridge exploded and a blast of flour hit him squarely in the face.

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From : The Chronicle
Photo : Art Shay, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images

'The Lonely Crowd,' at 60, Is Still Timely

Art Shay, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images

David Riesman, 1953

For many Chronicle readers, the most relevant work of David Riesman may be the milestone book he wrote with Christopher Jencks, The Academic Revolution (Doubleday, 1968), on America's dual trends toward mass higher education and elitist meritocracy. But the book that put him on a Time cover was The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, published by Yale University Press in 1950, 60 years ago this October. (Riesman

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THE ANCIENT INDUS

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Study on Harappan world

SHEREEN RATNAGAR

It presents a history of discovery, environment, prehistoric background, religion, and the decline

THE ANCIENT INDUS - Urbanism, Economy, and Society: Rita P. Wright; Cambridge University Press, 4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 895.

This account of the Harappa civilisation presents, in 11 somewhat repetitive chapters, a history of discovery, environment, prehistoric background, the formative period, urbanism and states, subsistence and craft economies, trade, “landscape and memory” (the cemeteries mainly), religion, and the decline. The best parts are the ones on topics the author knows first-hand: patterns of settlement along the Beas and the Ravi; the development of village life at Mehrgarh; exquisite grey pottery with black-painted designs; and the sequence at Harappa. Rita Wright worked with the Harappa Archaeological Research Project, and we are reminded that a consolidated report is long overdue.

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Freedom: A Novel

From : Powell's Books
Photo : http://www.powells.com

Freedom: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

Synopses & Reviews Read the Powells.com Interview with Jonathan Franzen Customer Comments (1) ISBN13: 9780374158460 ISBN10: 0374158460 All Product Details

Staff Pick

In his new novel, Jonathan Franzen surpasses the achievements of his National Book Award-winner, The Corrections. Freedom examines every major theme in American life — politics, class, work, culture, and sex, to name a few — through the lens of one stubborn, fascinating, wholly believable family. The best novel yet this year.
Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com

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The Honor Code

From : Slate
Photo : www.slate.com

The Unappreciated Power of Honor

How it has driven moral progress in the past, and still can.

Vast moral revolutions do take place once in a while, but it is hard to figure out exactly what sets them into motion or brings them to success. A high-minded prophet in some part of the world denounces an old and dreadful social custom. A smattering of do-gooders plead for reform. The reform in question appears, at a glance, to be impractical, unpopular, and unlikely. And yet enormous masses of people somehow—but how?—end up suddenly embracing the revolutionary idea, and they bend to the task of digging a new foundation for the whole of society. The improbable reform, upon completion, turns out to be irreversible. And in retrospect, absolutely everyone, or nearly so, solemnly agrees that good has, in fact, been done, and moral progress on the grandest of scales is more than a figment of the wistful and naive imagination.

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Our Kind of Traitor

From : The Guardian
Photo : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk




John le Carre moves to Penguin with this, his 22nd novel.








Britain is in the depths of recession. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula and a diamond-encrusted gold watch.
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ECONOMIC GROWTH IN INDIA

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

The author favours a greater thrust to agriculture, and improved governance for achieving inclusive growth

ECONOMIC GROWTH IN INDIA — History & Prospect: Pulapre Balakrishnan; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 750.

India's growth performance since1991 has been characterised by some economists as “on the growth turnpike”, “India's turn,” and “India the emerging giant”. Pulapre Balakrishnan's book, apart from surveying the country's economic history since Independence, projects what can be expected in the near future. Balakrishnan views growth as an endogenous cumulative change and uses the ‘analytical growth narrative' methodology to study India's growth. He partitions the period since 1950 into three sub-periods — namely, 1950-64, 1965-91, and post-1991 — based partly on the policy regime in vogue and partly on the political configuration, since both evolved.

Moribund economy

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The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

From : Viking
Photo : www.nytimes.com

Charles Seife is steaming mad about all the ways that numbers are being twisted to erode our democracy. We’re used to being lied to with words (“I am not a crook”; “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”). But numbers? They’re supposed to be cold, hard and objective. Numbers don’t lie, and they brook no argument. They’re the best kind of facts we have.

Illustration by Leonardo Sonnoli

PROOFINESS

The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

By Charles Seife

295 pp. Viking. $25.95

And that’s precisely why they can be so powerfully, persuasively misleading, as Seife argues in his passionate new book, “Proofiness.” Seife, a veteran science writer who teaches journalism at New York University, examines the many ways that people fudge with numbers, sometimes just to sell more moisturizer but also to ruin our economy, rig our elections, convict the innocent and undercount the needy. Many of his stories would be darkly funny if they weren’t so infuriating.

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From : The Washington Post
Photo : www.washingtonpost.com

By Richard Overy

Viking. 159 pp. $25.95

This exceptionally lucid, concise and authoritative book (which publishes at the end of September) tells the story of "the extraordinary ten days of drama that separated the conclusion of the German-Soviet [non-aggression] pact early in the morning of 24 August [1939] and the late afternoon of 3 September when France joined Britain in declaring war on Germany." Richard Overy continues:

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KEEPING THE FAITH

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

As Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee introduced measures to improve the efficiency of Parliament functioning

Somnath Chatterjee served as a member of the Indian Parliament for most of the period from 1971 to 2009, having been elected on the Communist Party of India (Marxist) symbol every time. It was on the basis of an understanding between the CPI (M) and the United Progressive Alliance in 2004 that he was elected Speaker of the Lok Sabha. Five years later, he has, in his autobiography titled Keeping the Faith, vented his ire on the party that nurtured him and was instrumental in his holding the constitutional post that he so obviously relished. But that is not the real problem with his self-serving account. It is his tirade against Prakash Karat, the General Secretary of the CPI(M), that is in poor taste, subjective, and over the top.

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23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

From : Guardian
Photo : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk




Dispels the myths and prejudices that have come to dominate our understanding of how the world works.







An iconoclastic book that will turn every piece of received economic wisdom on its head, revealing the truth behind what 'they' tell you and how the system "really" works. A galvanizing, fact-packed book about money, equality, freedom and greed which proves that the free market isn't just bad for people, it's a bad way of running economies too.
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IN MEMORIAN

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

Hallam & Tennyson

On this day in 1833 Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly at the age of twenty-two, while on a trip to Vienna. Although a promising poet and essayist, Hallam is chiefly remembered as the one eulogized in Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. The two first met at Cambridge, where they became best friends, and members of the legendary intellectual club, the "Apostles." Hallam's death became an enduring inspiration for Tennyson—sixteen years of meditative poems, these connected as stages in an evolving grief, though Tennyson neither foresaw their unity nor expected to publish them. When gathered together and anonymously printed on June 1st, 1850, In Memoriam was overwhelmingly popular—60,000 copies sold in six months—and soon regarded as a monument not just to Hallam but to the Victorian Age.

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From : Powell's Books
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Hello, Beautiful: What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty.

A review by Arthur Krystal Beauty is a mess, a sinkhole, a trap. Approach it philosophically and you're immediately bogged down in questions of idealism, empiricism, subjectivity, and objectivity. Plato began the conversation, Kant tried to finish it, and Santayana, embracing Plato and Kant, tried to encapsulate it. Take a cultural run at it, and you're stumbling over issues of relativism, where nothing is either beautiful or ugly but time, class, nation, or ethnicity makes it so. There is also everything that artists, poets, and critics have said about beauty, with enough variance in emphasis to make your head spin. More recently, an entirely new field of study has emerged that considers beauty -- and attendant feelings of attraction and repulsion -- from an evolutionary standpoint. And, as if all this were not enough, there exists the impression that no matter what or how much is said about beauty, something is sure to remain unsaid.

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From : The Wall Street Journal
Photo : http://online.wsj.com

Monarch of the Movie Set

Reconsidering Cecil B. DeMille, the prototypical Hollywood director-as-autocrat

On a cool Southern California morning in September 1926, an impoverished, 21-year-old Russian with sketchy English who had just renamed herself Ayn Rand was dejectedly leaving the DeMille Studio after being told that the publicity department had no job openings. Near the exit gate, she spotted a beautiful open roadster parked by the curb; the man behind the wheel was unmistakably the boss himself. She couldn't help staring for a moment, then collected herself and turned toward the gate. Before she made it out, however, the car pulled up to her and the driver asked: "Why are you looking at me?"

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The Grand Design

From : The Economist
Photo : www.economist.com

The Grand Design. By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam; 198 pages; $28 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN 1988, Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist, ended his best-selling book, “A Brief History of Time”, on a cliff hanger. If we find a physical theory that explains everything, he wrote—suggesting that this happy day was not too far off—“then we would know the mind of God.” But the professor didn’t mean it literally. God played no part in the book, which was renowned for being bought by everyone and understood by few. Twenty-two years later, Professor Hawking tells a similar story, joined this time by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist and writer at the California Institute of Technology.

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Stephen Fry Autobiography Is ‘Publishing First’

The enhanced ebook version of Stephen Fry's autobiography, The Fry Chronicles, features additional videos and photos

From The Telegraph:

'The Fry Chronicles', Stephen Fry’s new autobiography, has been launched simultaneously as an ebook, hardback novel and iPhone app

Fry, who is well known for his love of technology, has embraced multiplatform publishing for his new book, The Fry Chronicles, which documents his life from his time at university to his first experiences of acting.

The autobiography is available in traditional hardback format for £20, while the ebook costs £12.99. An app, designed for Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad costs £7.99.

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Of dogs and boys

From : The Globe and Mail
Photo : www.theglobeandmail.com

I have always been interested in the relationship between human and other creatures. Where does the human end and the not-human begin?

How are we different from and complicit with other species? How many of the answers are tainted by justifications of ourselves to ourselves, or by our need to delineate ourselves as separate? How many answers are distorted by the simple fact of our consumption of beasts?

Before beginning Dog Boy I had written a number of stories that experimented with unsentimental guesswork about the consciousness of a cow, a dog, or a cockatoo, and with the limits of my own capacity to inhabit another point of view. In hindsight I think I was primed for a big story on the theme of animal and human being, and, as these things go, that story found me.

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COLLECTED PAPERS IN THEORETICAL ECONOMICS - 4

From : The HINDU
Photo : www.hindu.com

COLLECTED PAPERS IN THEORETICAL ECONOMICS - 4 Volumes: Kaushik Basu; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 2350.

In reviewing the collected papers of one of the most accomplished economists of his generation, there is a temptation to focus only on the examples of excellence. There is a great deal to be said about the significance of Kaushik Basu's contributions to the use of game theory in economic analysis and his other diverse interests reflected in this collection. But with endorsements from Amartya Sen, George Akerlof, Ariel Rubinstein, and Jagdish Bhagwati, among others, we can safely take this part of the story as read, allowing us to focus on a more subterranean theme. When seen in the context of Indian economic thought over the last four decades, his papers are also a subtle commentary on the challenges economics as a science faces in India.

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How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution

From : The Guardian
Photo : www.guardian.co.uk

The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution by Timothy Taylor

Peter Forbes is fascinated by a study of the role of early technology in human evolution.

There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire), sexual selection (Geoffrey Miller: The Mating Mind). Now, Timothy Taylor, reader in archaeology at the University of Bradford, makes a claim for technology in general and, in particular, the invention of the baby sling – not, as you may have thought, in the 1960s but more than 2m years ago.

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E-Books Are Still Waiting for Their Avant-Garde

From Gadget Lab/Wired Science:

E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural and comfortable as possible so that the device fades away and immerses you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal, but it also may be a profound mistake.

This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy … [w]e don’t have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.

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H. G. Wells, the futurity man

From : The Sunday Times
Photo : Google / H.G. W ells

A new biography records the extraordinary achievements of this hyperactive everyman and shows for the first time how completely Wells was a man of his time

"Self-made” simply isn’t a strong enough term for H. G. Wells, as Michael Sherborne’s authoritative new Life makes very clear. His father was an unsuccessful shopkeeper in Bromley, Kent; his mother a lady’s maid who had to return to service as the family got gradually poorer. Lack of money meant that Bertie’s formal education was delayed until a few months before his eighth birthday and ended soon after his thirteenth: the next year he was expected to teach other children, some bigger than him, at a National School in Wookey. Lessons consisted of “whatever occurred” to the teenager, punctuated by hand-to-hand combat, as Wells recalled in his autobiography: “I fought my class, hit them about viciously and had altogether a lot of trouble with them”.

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Bestsellers top 10

1. Crazy Age
2. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
3. Magnifier Flex Page
4. To the End of the Land
5. Journey
6. Brooklyn
7. Crazy Age
8. Human Chain
9. Childrens Thesaurus & Dict Special Offer
10. Perfect Nazi

World's Most Expensive Book Up For Grabs

(Image: Sotheby's)

From New Scientist:

If you like this picture of snowy owls and have a spare £4 to £6 million floating around, you might want make a bid for Audubon's book Birds of America when it goes to auction on 7 December at Sothebys, London.

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VIDA

From : The New York Times
Photo : www.nytimes.com

Books of The Times

How Colombia Meets America, but Not Quite

The stories in Patricia Engel’s striking debut collection are like snapshots from someone’s photo album: glimpses of relatives, friends, lovers and acquaintances, sometimes posing, sometimes caught by the camera unawares. There are portraits of Latinos in suburban “Gringolandia,” and portraits of young drifters in Miami, 16 of them sharing a single apartment, mattresses crammed together on the floor “like it was war times.” There’s a skinny 16-year-old boy who always wears faded jeans and “a white button-down shirt that looked like it only got washed in the sink,” a high school mean girl who develops a fatal case of anorexia, a womanizing pot dealer who becomes the narrator’s best friend and a Colombian beauty queen who comes to America and is forced into prostitution.

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The Oxford Book of Parodies

From : The Wall Street Journal
Photo : online.wsj.com

The Sincerest Form of Ridicule

Henry James, Raymond Chandler, J.K. Rowling—no writer is safe from the literary satirist

Literary parody is often described as verbal caricature. It's true that both parody and caricature rely on the exaggeration of quirks and idiosyncrasies for satiric purposes. But their differences go deeper. Caricature plays on the monstrous for comic pay-off; it turns earlobes into wind-flaps, lips into gaudy sausages. Parody can be just as crude, but usually it is slinkier, more insinuating; there's something snugly parasitic in its intimacy. The parodist must inhabit his victim's voice down to its least inflections—with close and lingering attention to those very flourishes an author is proudest of—only to turn the voice to ridiculous effect. The trick is to yoke the unmistakable manner to a grotesquely disproportionate subject.


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Mao's Great Famine

From : Literary Review
Phote : www.literaryreview.co.uk/mirsky_09_10.html

Jonathan Mirsky
'Livelihood Issues'
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
By Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury 420pp £25)

Mao strikes a pose

In 1936 Mao Tse-Tung, then a cave-dwelling revolutionary, told Edgar Snow his life story. Snow recorded Mao's self-serving autobiography in Red Star Over China, which for decades made the American's name as the leading reporter in China.

Back in China twenty-four years later, Snow was pestered by news agencies enquiring about mass starvation. The Snow of the 1930s had gone into the field to see for himself a prolonged drought in the north-west, where people were rumoured to be selling their children. But this time he relied on his access to top officials such as Premier Zhou Enlai, and foreigners who flacked for China such as the New Zealander Rewi Alley. In the book he wrote about that trip, The Other Side of the River, Snow stated, 'I saw no starving people in China ... Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No.' And most positively: 'Whatever he was eating, the average Chinese maintained himself in good health, as far as anyone could see.'

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Mustaine:

From : The Globe And Mail


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





Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, by Dave Mustaine with Joe Layden, It Books, 368 pages, $29.99

Dave Mustaine is the lead singer, songwriter and guitar player for the heavy metal band Megadeth. Prior to his creation of “the perfect beast … the perfect band,” Mustaine was a member of Metallica in the heavy-metal “thrash” scene in the 1980s. Kirk Hammet replaced Mustaine as a result of his battles with drugs and alcohol, and his personality conflicts with band members.
Megadeath stands out as a heavy-metal band with passion and a cause. The album Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying was “hailed as both a critical and commercial breakthrough.” Released in 1986, it eventually went platinum. Mustaine says, “It still holds up well even today; it feels raw, powerful.”


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PATHWAY TO INDIA'S PARTITION - 3 Volumes, Vol. 1

From : The Hindu


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

A useful publication as an introduction to national movement and Muslim separatist politics.







The partition of India leading to the formation of Pakistan in 1947 is undeniably the most decisive event of the 20th century, the memory of which continues to plague the politics of the subcontinent even now. The three key players involved in this traumatic event were: the Indian National Congress (INC), the Muslim League, and the British. The British were expected to play the role of an honest broker, facilitating the transfer of power of a country they had ruled for about 200 years. Many have argued that the failure of the British to discharge this responsibility rendered Partition inevitable.





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Under the Dome

From : The GUARDIAN

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

Stephen King's most riveting novel since THE STAND, in which every chapter ends on a cliffhanger -- a Maine town and its inhabitants are isolated from the world by an invisible, impenetrable dome

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W.S. Merwin is green as U.S. poet laureate

From : The Los Angeles Times


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The Pulitzer winner brings a strong environmental viewpoint to his new post.

Reporting from Maui





—We've been batting our way through W.S. Merwin's yard for a couple hours, swatting mosquitoes in the streambed under the dark wet canopy of towering, philodendron-draped mangoes and looking at some 700 species of palm trees, every one of which he has planted by hand. He stops to touch them, saying things like, "Oh, this is Carpoxylon macrocarpa; they were thought to be extinct on Madagascar, but here it is." Many of these trees are exceptionally rare. Then he pulls up in front of a short broad palm, rather unimpressive next to the other trees on his property on Maui's northern shore, but he smiles





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The End of Eternity

From : Thwe Threepenny Review


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The End of Eternityby Isaac Asimov.Tor/Tom Doherty Associates, 2010,$24.99 cloth.

The world we inhabit is one in which weekly newsmagazines, printed on paper in columns of type, are considered primitive and profoundly obsolescent; in which an entire bookshelf of bound volumes can be stored in a gadget the size of a fingertip; in which a mechanical device that is only about four inches long and a fraction of an inch thick can record whatever we like, play it back to us through a tiny earpiece, and rest comfortably in a pocket when not in use; in which space flight has been invented but is rarely used by humans, who have lost interest in it after the initial decades of excitement; in which hand-held or easily portable computers are a commonplace item; in which literature can hardly be distinguished from film in the public mind; and in which some members of society long fruitlessly for a past era when all such developments were unknown and almost inconceivable.We do, in fact, live in such a world, but I mean something else. The above description, detail by detail, exactly characterizes the world of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, a science-fiction novel set mainly in the 482nd, 575th, and 2456th centuries. What is remarkable is that Asimov’s book first appeared in print in 1955

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Oxford English Dictionary 'Will Not Be Printed Again'

The second OED was published in 1989 Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the world’s most definitive work on the language, will never be printed because of the impact of the internet on book sales.

Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.

A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED – known as OED3 – for the past 21 years.

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Biography of a Language

From : The Economist

Photo : http://www.economist.com/

The German language
Das Lied der Deutschen
A new history of German shows how it came to be, and how it could have been .

MOST people regard grammar books and dictionaries as a codified set of rules prescribing dos and don’ts. For professional scholars of language, though, they are more like history books. Languages are constantly in flux, but it takes a rather long view to show just what a contingent and transitory thing a language can be at any point in time. Ruth Sanders, a professor of German Studies at Miami University in Ohio, takes just such a view in her new book, telling the millennia-long story of German and how it got that way.

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