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Other People’s Mail

2009-11-30T01:48:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-30T01:03:00.000-05:00

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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Top sale

Drug Addicts Blamed for Crime Wave - The Daily Mirror 11/30/2009, 4:00 a.m.
Michael Hiltzik: How to finance a Great Park - Money & Company 11/30/2009, 3:00 a.m.
Joe Biden update: N.Y. paper proclaims he's (maybe) second most powerful VP ever after you-know-who - Top of the Ticket 11/30/2009, 2:22 a.m.
New Symphony Uses Car Horn - The Daily Mirror 11/30/2009, 2:00 a.m.
Lakers 106, New Jersey 87: Who are they to stand in the way of history? - Lakers Blog 11/30/2009, 12:05 a.m.

Shallow Graves

2009-11-29T01:24:00.000-05:00

From : The New Yorker

Photo : http://www.newyorker.com/

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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The Good Parents by Joan London

2009-11-28T08:56:00.000-05:00

From : The Guardian

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

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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The Persians

2009-11-27T11:30:00.000-05:00

From : The Guardian

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

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

2009-11-27T09:35:00.000-05:00

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.

FOOD SECURITY

2009-11-27T00:08:00.000-05:00

From : The Hindu

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

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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Hospitality Department

2009-11-26T09:15:00.000-05:00

From : The Wall Street Journal

Photo : http://online.wsj.com/

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,

2009-11-26T00:02:00.001-05:00

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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36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

2009-11-25T11:39:00.003-05:00

From : The edge

Photo : http://www.edge.org/

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

2009-11-25T07:53:00.000-05:00

From : The Wall Street Journal

Photo : http://online.wsj.com/

By ALEXANDRA MULLEN

"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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You Say Potato, I’ll Say Potato

2009-11-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

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?

2009-11-24T01:20:00.000-05:00

From : Christian revieuw

Photo : http://www.christianitytoday.com/

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

2009-11-23T08:52:00.002-05:00

From : The Guardian

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

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'

2009-11-23T00:10:00.000-05:00

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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Nine Dragons

2009-11-22T01:59:00.000-05:00

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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Grim facts are still just facts

2009-11-21T07:40:00.000-05:00

From : The Globe and Mail

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

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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The men who knew too little

2009-11-20T12:26:00.000-05:00

From : The Globe and Mail

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

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

2009-11-20T00:32:00.000-05:00

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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An enigma called Jinnah

2009-11-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

From : The Hindu

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

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

2009-11-19T07:26:00.000-05:00

From : The Christian Science Monitor

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

'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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The Evolution of the God Gene

2009-11-18T13:25:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-18T01:16:00.000-05:00

From : World hum

Photo

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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The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker

2009-11-17T13:10:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-17T01:03:00.000-05:00

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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