Atlantic

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

Atlantic

By SIMON WINCHESTER

Reviewed by Eric Banks

Bernard Bailyn, the Harvard professor who presided over the birth of "Atlantic History" as a spry little subdiscipline in the 1980s, once confessed that he knew of no one who was "poetically enraptured by the Atlantic world." It's safe to say that Bailyn had never met Simon Winchester. In his new Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, Winchester's vigorous "biography" of the body of water known at different times as the Ethiopian Ocean, the Mare Glaciale, and (oddly enough) the Ocean Sea, is virtually Byronic in its length and devotion. Mention the names of a string of middling coastal towns—Esbjerg or Vigo, Takoradi, Walvis Bay, or Puerto Madryn, Wilmington or Halifax—and where most would hear the very definition of back-water obscurity, for Winchester they're the very stuff of oceanic poetry.

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10. Books of The Times: A New York Tale of Art, Money and Ambition

FROM : The Hindu

Photo : www.hindu.com

A rare personality

RANDOR GUY

IDHU RAJAPAATAI ALLA: by Sivakumar in Tamil; Translated by Malathi Rangarajan; Alliance Publishers, Old No 244 (New No 64), Ramakrishna Mutt Road, Mylapore, Chennai-600004. Rs. 600.

Sivakumar, one of the most successful star-actors of Tamil cinema, is a very rare personality in the field. Handsome and still looking young, he is fondly referred to as ‘Markandeyan' (one who ever remains ‘sweet 16'). Although he has given a large number of successful and critically acclaimed films, he remains the same old rural lad who came to Madras (now Chennai) years ago full of dreams. Professional success has not gone to his head. For one who wanted to be a painter, movies and stardom — public adulation and all that go with it — were perhaps not on the boy's mental horizon when he landed in the city.

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The challenge to German liberalism

From : Prospect
Photo : www.prospectmagazine.co.uk

Thilo Sarrazin: are Muslims really lowering the intelligence of German society?

---

Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany Abolishes Itself: How we are putting our country at risk]
By Thilo Sarrazin (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, €22.99)

The challenge to German liberalism

The first British review of the publishing sensation that trashes the pieties of the 1968 generation. Despite its needless racial provocations, it narrows the gap between the public and politicians, says David Goodhart—who appeared on Radio 3's Nightwaves last night to discuss the book
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Apollo's Angels

From : Slate
Photo : www.slate.com

Is Ballet Really Dying?

Don't believe the diagnosis in a new history of the classical tradition.

Ballet is dying. Maybe already dead. Impossible, you say, I've got tickets to a show! Alas, dear reader, I've just learned the grim diagnosis in Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, Jennifer Homans' account of the classical tradition. Pack up your toe shoes, ballerinas. Shutter the theaters, artistic directors. "The occasional glimmer of a good performance or a fine dancer is not a ray of future hope but the last glow of a dying ember," Homans declares in her epilogue. "Apollo and his angels are understood and appreciated by a shrinking circle of old believers in a closed corner of culture."


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From : The Telegraph
Photo : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Books of the Year for Christmas

Franzen’s Freedom and Larkin’s Letters, Tony Blair’s inner ‘animal’ and 100 objects that told the history of the world – in this special issue we survey the literary highlights of 2010. But first, leading names select their personal favourites… and the presents they’ll be giving this Christmas.

Hilary Mantel

Annabel Lyon won prizes in her native Canada for her note-perfect historical novel The Golden Mean (Atlantic, £14.99), but here it has not had the attention it deserves. It tells the story of Aristotle and the young Alexander; her interpretation of their relationship and their world is luminous and deeply intelligent. Richard Cohen’s Chasing the Sun: the Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life (Simon & Schuster, £30) is a warming book for short winter days, blending myth with history and science, and guaranteed to please and fascinate almost any reader.

Orlando Figes

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Tongues Twisted

From : The Book
Photo : www.tnr.com

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel

by Nicholas Ostler

Walker & Co., 352 pp., $28

While English is the most widely-spoken lingua franca in history, so-called common or working languages can be much less pervasive. Elamite, for example, was the submerged administrative language of the Persian Empire in the sixth century B.C.E. All official documents were written down in Elamite, but they were both composed and read out in Persian, the language of the illiterate ruling class. Then there is Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhism. No longer used in everyday conversation, Pali is written in different scripts in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Burma, and sounds different when read aloud by Thai and Burmese speakers. The identity of the language is almost obscured by its profusion of forms.

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Passport Not Required

From : The Wall Strueet Journal
Photo : http://online.wsj.com
Sheena Taylor Collection

Never Mind Neutrality, Our Friends Are in Trouble

Between the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939 and Hitler's declaration of war against the U.S. in December 1941, 22 American citizens ignored the country's Neutrality Act and joined the Royal Navy to fight for Great Britain. They flouted the law despite the draconian sanctions threatened by the act, including imprisonment, heavy fines and the loss of citizenship. These motives of these volunteers varied—some were gung-ho Anglophiles, others wanted to battle Nazi tyranny and still others joined up simply for the adventure.


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Romain Gary

From : The Telegraph
Photo : www.telegraph.co.uk

Romain Gary: au revoir et merci

Romain Gary was the most glamorous of literary conmen. He wrote novels under many names, won major prizes and married an iconic actress. But in the end, writes David Bellos, his fictions destroyed him.

In November 1945, France’s national philosopher, a bespectacled gnome named Jean-Paul Sartre, took Simone de Beauvoir to a café on Boulevard Saint-Germain to meet a young man whose first novel had just won a literary prize. He told her he wanted to find out who had written such a moving, metaphorical defence of the Resistance.


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Party

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

Party

By Richard McGregor

Hardback

China's secret rulers are the elephant in the room. They are the largest political organisation in the world. They control every aspect of Chinese life. And no one discusses them. Until now. Who are they? And how do they operate? This title presents the true story of the Chinese Communist Party.


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BUILDING A WORLD CLASS CIVIL SERVICE FOR 21ST CENTURY INDIA

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Civil service reform

K.C. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

The book for the most part concerns itself with the Indian Administrative Service

BUILDING A WORLD CLASS CIVIL SERVICE FOR 21ST CENTURY INDIA: S. K. Das; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 675.

Civil service reform has been a much-discussed subject since India's Independence. As S.K. Das, author of this book mentions, there have been at least 600 Commissions, Committees and Task Forces that have gone into the question. He has tried to give his own perspective, drawing upon examples from other countries

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Mark Twain

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

A century later, Mark Twain stripped bare

Before modernists invented stream of consciousness; before John Dos Passos came up with the idea of making a novel out of four narrative modes – including “newsreel” montages of press clippings and “camera eye” sequences of autobiographical free association; before postmodernists eschewed linear narrative progression in favour of experimentation, chance, irony, collage and self-reflexivity; before bloggers filled the blogosphere with of-the-moment short personal timely takes on the news; before Jon Stewart broadcast sharp satirical riffs on the day’s events, there was Mark Twain, doing all of the above and more in a book meant to be published only after he had been dead 100 years.



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Cathedrals of Science

From : Books and Culture
Photo : www.booksandculture.com





Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry
Patrick Coffey
Oxford University Press, USA, 2008
400 pp., $29.9

The Model Scientist?

Kirk, not Spock.

I once loved Star Trek, but I am about to shoot a posthumous photon torpedo at Gene Roddenberry. Why would a 50-something Baby Boomer (I was 13 when the first episode aired), who by all accounts should be nostalgic for the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, now scorn one of the icons of the Sixties? The answer is Spock. Like so many ill-educated people of my generation, I knew no scientists personally and assumed they were all like Spock. I mean, who wants to grow up to be Spock? Men don't follow him, women ignore him, and, according to Vulcan custom, he only has a wife/girlfriend for one weekend every decade or so—not the role model a skinny kid in the middle of hormone poisoning is looking for.

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Decision Points

From : The Telegraph
Photo : Ron Edmonds/AP

Decision Points: For all his honesty, George W Bush still baffles us

George W Bush never really explains why he wanted to be president, how he got elected, or what he meant to do when he got there, writes Charles Moore.

George Bush and Tony Blair were close allies in war. Each admires the other. Both have published memoirs this year. So one inevitably compares the two.

Mr Blair's volume is very good at telling the reader how he operated politically. He explains how he fooled X and charmed Y. The book is much more useful to the student of politics than most leaders' memoirs because it tells you, through the eyes of a practitioner, the tricks of his trade.

Mr Bush's book, by contrast, presents a puzzle. He writes clearly. In simple form, he sets out his ethical, religious and political beliefs. He says whom he likes and dislikes. Nothing seems hidden. And yet he never really explains why he wanted to be president, how he got elected, or what he meant to do when
he got there. For that same student of politics who should study Mr Blair, the Bush book is baffling.

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Stirring the Waters

From : The New York Review of Books
Photo : www.nybooks.com



The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
by James Baldwin, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan
Pantheon, 304 pp., $26.95

Life never bribed him to look at anything but the soul, Henry James said of Emerson, and one could say the same of James Baldwin, with a similar suggestion that the price for his purity was blindness about some other things in life. Baldwin possessed to an extraordinary degree what James called Emerson’s “special capacity for moral experience.” He, too, is persuasive in his antimaterialism. Baldwin, like Emerson, renounced the pulpit—he had been a fiery boy preacher in Harlem—and readers have found in the writings of each the atmosphere of church.

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Charles de Gaulle

From : Literary Review
Photo : www.literaryreview.co.uk




THE MELANCHOLIC PROPHET
The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved
By Jonathan Fenby (Simon & Schuster 707pp £30)


Charles de Gaulle is France's favourite national hero, embodying the country's highest collective ideals: devotion to public service, patriotism, military valour, and personal integrity (he paid his own electricity bills when he was president). He is also a literary giant: ever since their publication in the 1950s, his War Memoirs have become one of the monuments of modern French prose. Indeed, de Gaulle is so iconic today that more French streets and public squares bear his name than any other historical figure. This is a tribute to his founding of the Fifth Republic, which has produced a stable presidential democracy, as well as his pivotal role as the symbol of the French Resistance during the Second World War.

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I Am a Japanese Writer

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

We are all Haitian-Canadian writers

There was a time, in the eighties and nineties, when every few years, another Dany Laferrière novel would appear in one of David Homel’s sturdy translations, and English-Canadian readers would get a good dose of this wry, protean, mischievous author. But the translation well seemed to dry up after 1997, and it has been 13 years since he’s appeared in our solitude.

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Emerging geo-political and security challenges

From : The Hindu
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SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA - Responding to Changing Geo-political and Security Challenges: Edited by K.V. Kesavan, Daljit Singh; KW Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 4676/21, I Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 440.

This compendium of 10 essays, presented at an interaction in 2009 among scholars of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, covers a wide range of subjects related to the political and security trends in South Asia and Southeast Asia.. They include: the role of extra-regional powers and their growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean; the evolving Asian regionalism; India's ‘Look East' policy; the political situation in Myanmar; and the non-traditional security challenges to Asian security.

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ATLANTIC

From : Boston.com
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Unfathomable depths

A wide-ranging — and sometimes exhausting — treatise on the life and times of the Atlantic Ocean explores its influence on the history of civilization

Veteran journalist Simon Winchester has, in recent years, taken to writing what might be called geological blockbusters. His method is to focus on a relatively contained event — the eruption of Krakatoa, say, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 — and envelop it in several layers of context, social, scientific, historical, political. Winchester’s technique gives him license to pursue tangents hither and yon, which are annoying and charming in equal measure.

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Love, Sex, Death and Words

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


Love, sex, death, boredom, ecstasy, existential angst, political upheava.
















A fabulous compendium of stories from literary history for every day of the year, lavishly presented, making it an ideal gift for a bibliophile. Find out why 16th June 1904 mattered so much to Joyce, and which great literary love affair was brought to a tragic end on 11th February 1963.

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'Cleopatra'

From : Los Angeles Times
Photo : www.latimes.com

Book review: 'Cleopatra' by Stacy Schiff

The biography portrays the Egyptian ruler as a shrewd political strategist who used her affairs to further her own power, as well as one of the most famous celebrities of her day.

Little, Brown: 370 pp., $29.99

You think 21st century culture is celebrity-obsessed? Try Mediterranean society at the dawn of the first millennium, when politics were entirely personal, and rulers' romantic entanglements could be as important as the battles they won. Who needed movie stars, when the gargantuan appetites of the rich and famous shaped empires, not Hollywood budgets, and their out-of-wedlock offspring were displayed in triumphal parades, not tabloid magazine photos?


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Claude Lévi-Strauss

From : New Statesman
Photo : www.newstatesman.com

High priest of anthropology

Between his own publication of Tristes tro­piques in 1955 and Jacques Derrida's publication of De la grammatologie in 1967, Claude Lévi-Strauss bestrode western humanities and social sciences as no one has before or since. Unlike philosophy or literary criticism, his discipline, anthropology, was not divided between "Anglo-Saxon" and "Continental" approaches, and the promise of a method that would analyse the fundamental processes of the human mind was initially plausible.

From the beginning, Lévi-Strauss argued two theses, logically separate but inseparably linked in his own writing. His great idea - the fruit of a close friendship with Roman Jakobson forged in wartime exile in New York - was that both myth and kinship were to be analysed by a functional relationship not to social and physical reality, but to the most elementary processes of human thought. The establishment of difference - the distinction between animals with or without cloven hooves, say - was dictated by the need to structure the world into pairs of binary oppositions. This insight built on the greatest discovery of 20th-century linguistics: rather than analyse the positive features of sound across an infinite continuum, the Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy and his successors had focused simply on the differences (between "b" and "p", for example) that produced meaning.

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From : Tablet
Photo : www.tabletmag.com

Last Exit

In Gal Beckerman's telling, the story of the Soviet Jewry movement becomes one of modern Jewish history's great dramas

One way of thinking about 20th-century Jewish history is as the steady depopulation of Eastern Europe, the heartland of Ashkenazi Jewry since the Middle Ages. In 1880, the Jewish population of the region was close to 7 million, representing more than 80 percent of the world’s Jews; today, Russia is home to just 200,000 Jews, and Ukraine another 80,000. This dramatic decline did not take place steadily or easily, but in three historical convulsions. The first was the huge wave of emigration that lasted until World War I, turning America into the world’s largest Jewish community and planting the seeds of Jewish settlement in Palestine. The second, of course, was the Holocaust, which killed 6 million European Jews, most of them from Eastern European countries under German occupation—Russia, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States,


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Churchill at war with India

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Churchill at war with India

ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

He hated Indians and was bitterly determined to hold on to India

CHURCHILL'S SECRET WAR - The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II: Madhusree Mukerjee; Tranquebar Press, Venkat Towers, 165 Poonamallee High Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai-600095. Rs. 495.

Winston Churchill was often said to be permanently mid-Victorian, although being born in 1874 made him a late Victorian. He was bitterly determined to hold on to India; he hated Indians, and intended that they remain subjects for all time. With sources ranging from official documents to first-hand accounts of the Bengal famine, Madhusree Mukerjee brings out the consequences for India, and thereby for hundreds of millions of people. Major policies were designed to exploit the divisions in Indian society — whatever that meant

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The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900

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

An Age of Creative Destruction

'Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you." Thus Cornelius Vanderbilt writing to business partners who had exploited his absence to gain control of one of his companies. He was as good as his word.

The nature of both ruin and success is the subject of "American Colossus," H.W. Brands's account of, as the subtitle has it, "The Triumph of Capitalism" during the period 1865-1900. Mr. Brands paints a vivid portrait of both this understudied age and those industrialists still introduced by high-school teachers as "robber barons"—Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Together these men of the 19th century laid the foundations that would allow the use of innovations that we think of as modern, such as trains and automobiles, on a massive scale in the 20th century.

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Higher Expectations

From : American Prospect
Photo : www.prospect.org







What are colleges for? Research, economic advancement, or making students more interesting

The Great American University: Its Rise to Prominence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected, by Jonathan R. Cole, PublicAffairs, 616 pages, $35

Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Henry Holt and Company, 288 pages, $26

More than nine Americans in 10 say that universities are among the nation's "most valuable resources," but they hold different and sometimes conflicting ideas about what universities are valuable for. Universities are expected to generate ideas and generate jobs, to prepare the next generation of leaders and open their doors to the great mass of high school graduates, to speak truth to power and serve as resources for those in power.

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From : The Times
Photo : http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

English houses and their inheritance

Public and private histories all have their part to play in the life of the English home

e grand passion of Vita Sackville-West’s life was Knole, the house – or “conglomeration of buildings half as big as Cambridge”, in Virginia Woolf’s words – where she grew up but which she could not inherit because she was not a boy. Thomas Sackville took possession of Knole in 1604 and turned it into a “calendar” house designed to awe: 365 rooms and fifty-two staircases, some with little purpose, and seven courtyards spread over four acres. Sackville’s will, directing that Knole be passed from “heir male to heir male”, meant that it was never split among family or sold off in parts. But with only one instance of a father-son succession in the past 200 years, the story of Knole is about disappointment and disinheritance as much as inheritance. The voices of aggrieved women ring down the ages. Lady Anne Clifford, who married Richard Sackville in 1609, felt doubly disinherited: she was also fighting for her father’s estates in Cumberland. She kept a diary detailing her unhappiness and listing dates and conversations in the inheritance contest. Within days of arriving at Knole in 1889, Vita’s mother Victoria sat down and read Lady Anne’s diary with its record of “perpetual domestic quarrels”, and Vita herself later published an edition. Vita celebrated Anne Clifford in Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) and she imagined herself as Anne’s ghost, prowling about the gardens at night. Banished upon her father’s death, Vita went on writing about Knole in novels such as The Edwardians; while in Orlando, Virginia Woolf worked the magic that ensured Vita’s name would be linked to Knole beyond all the brothers, nephews and uncles in the melancholy story of inheritance.

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An Unlikely Prince:

From : Popen letters monthly
Photo : www.openlettersmonthly.com

An Unlikely Prince: the Life and Times of Machiavelli

By Niccolo Capponi

It falls to the Duchess, in Anthony Trollope’s great novel The Prime Minister, to be always “making up the party, — meaning the coalition, — doing something to strengthen the buttresses, writing little letters to little people, who, little as they were, might become big by amalgamation.” Her husband, the Duke of Omnium, the Prime Minister of the book’s title, is mulishly introverted, and the Duchess fears for the longevity of his coalition government if she is not constantly shoring it up with lavish entertainments and constant backstage finessing. And when her efforts begin to tire even her, she exclaims, “I’m not a god, or a Pitt, or an Italian with a long name beginning with M., that I should be able to do these things without ever making a mistake.”

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Higher Expectations

From : The Amrican Pospect
Photo : http://m-eyf.org

The Great American University: Its Rise to Prominence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected, by Jonathan R. Cole, PublicAffairs, 616 pages, $35

Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Henry Holt and Company, 288 pages, $26

More than nine Americans in 10 say that universities are among the nation's "most valuable resources," but they hold different and sometimes conflicting ideas about what universities are valuable for. Universities are expected to generate ideas and generate jobs, to prepare the next generation of leaders and open their doors to the great mass of high school graduates, to speak truth to power and serve as resources for those in power.

Needless to say, higher education hasn't figured out how to do all these things at once, and its failings have been grist for a cottage industry of sharp-eyed critics. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus' Higher Education is the latest addition to this bookshelf of broadsides, the question mark in the title signaling its viewpoint. In sharp contrast, Jonathan Cole's The Great American University is a 616-page paean to elite research universities. Each book offers something of value but goes too far: American universities are neither the frauds that Higher Education asserts nor as impressive as The Great American University imagines.

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The Top 100 Canadian Singles

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

American music, stay away from me. American music, mama let me be. Bob Mersereau has written another list-based book, following up his previous debate-stirrer, 2007’s The Top 100 Canadian Albums, with an equally commendable coffee-table companion.

Not for nothing was American Woman (with its unsweetened B-side, No Sugar Tonight) voted by a cast of hundreds of musicians, disc jockeys, music fans and journalists as the very best Canadian single. It’s a vote for a great rock song, undoubtedly. But it’s also a chest-out statement – a big, red maple leaf in a sea of stars and stripes.

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