Bookyards

Privacy Policy

2011-11-30T23:59:00.001-05:00

With the traffic that this blog has been receiving in the past year, I am now obliged to publish a Privacy Policy. I just want to inform everyone that we have no interest in tracking and/or keeping any information on the readers of War News Updates. We take your privacy seriously, and we will not permit tracking and/or marketing programs to monitor our readers. If you should find a post has such a tool, please inform us immediately and we will delete this offending post ASAP.

For Ebook Fans, Reading Is Becoming A Whole New Experience

2011-07-03T21:15:00.002-04:00

For Ebook Devotees, Reading Is A Whole New Experience -- USA Today

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — David J. Loehr, a playwright who lives in southern Indiana, was taking his car to the dealership when a story on the radio caught his attention. A short science piece about "an obscure subject" gave him an idea for a new play.

Ordinarily, Loehr would have had to make do with jotting down some notes or trying to remember his inspiration. But since he had his iPad with him, he bought a few books on the subject and downloaded them as soon as he got to the dealership. He started his research for the play right there, while his car was being serviced.

"I can have all that research on a single tablet instead of carrying around 40 books," Loehr said.

Welcome to the future of books, where your entire library is as portable as a cellphone.

Read more ....

Is This The Tipping Point For E-Books & Libraries?

2011-06-29T16:15:00.001-04:00

From Tinyread:

The American Library Association (ALA) has just released its 2011 Public Library Funding and Technology Access Survey, and among its findings, 67% of public libraries in the U.S. now offer free access to e-books for their patrons. That's up 30% since 2007. Of course, access to e-books ranges greatly from state-to-state: 100% of Maryland and Utah libraries offer e-books, while only 25% of ilbraries in Mississippi do so, for example.

But even in the states where e-book access is commonplace, when it comes to making digital literature available to their patrons, libraries face a number of challenges. We've covered many of these issues here. Most well-known among these obstacles was the controversial announcement earlier this year by publisher Harper Collins to have library e-books "self-destruct" after 26 checkouts, forcing libraries to re-purchase titles in order to secure more checkouts. This among other factors (including, of course, budget issues) has made the future of e-books in libraries unclear.

Another Sign The Ebook Readers Make Business Sense

2011-05-21T00:18:00.000-04:00

Nook Hook: Liberty Media Eyes E-Books With $1 Billion Bid for Barnes & Noble -- Epicenter

Economist Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction” — the process by which technological innovation disrupts, and in many cases destroys, old business models, paving the way for new ones to emerge. It was little more than a decade ago that bibliophiles were bemoaning the loss of traditional neighborhood bookstores, crushed by big-box behemoths like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

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My Comment: This is a billion dollar gamble, but it is a good match if Liberty Media can make both the e-book and brick and motor business work together.

Kindle E-Book Outsells Print Versions For First Time Ever

2011-05-20T09:43:00.003-04:00

Bestseller: The e-book is outselling text versions for the first time ever

Is It The End For The Paperback? Kindle E-Book Outsells Print Versions For First Time Ever -- the Daily Mail

Sales of digital e-books have outstripped real books for the first time, according to Amazon.

Four years after the launch of electronic novels, the firm announced it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books over the past six weeks.

While e-book sales have previously outsold hardback books, never before have they exceeded sales of all books, in both hardback and paperback forms.

Read more ....

My Comment: We predicted this years ago .... but it is still a surprise to now know that this point has been reached.

E-Book Sales Now Surpass Printed Books At Amazom

2011-05-19T17:25:00.002-04:00

Amazon Says E-Book Sales Surpass Printed Books -- New York Post/AP

Amazon.com says it’s selling more electronic books than printed books, less than four years after it started selling e-books.

Since April 1, Amazon.com Inc. says it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books, including printed books for which there is no electronic edition. The comparison excludes free e-books.

Printed books include both hardcover and paperback books. Amazon said in July that e-book sales had outstripped hardcover sales.

Read more ....

My Comment: My prediction .... within 10 years print will only be about 10 - 25% of sales.

The Right Questions To Ask About Literature

2011-04-14T13:53:00.000-04:00

FROM : SLATE
PHOTO : http://www.slate.com

The Right Questions To Ask About Literature

Harvard's Marjorie Garber gets them all wrong.

Marjorie Garber's new book brought me back to my days as an English professor; I thought I was reading a freshman essay. My marginal comments might as well have been written in red: "What is the point of this paragraph?" "Where are we in the argument—and what exactly is the argument?" "Sloppy thinking." "You need to unpack this." "Again, is there a point here, or just a mass of notes?" "You have to develop your thesis, not just keep reiterating it

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Last 24 hours

Thinking the Impossible

2011-04-13T13:49:00.002-04:00

FROM : THE GUARDIAN
PHOTO : http://www.guardian.co.uk

Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 by Gary Gutting – review

The theories of Derrida and Foucault are revisited in this fair-minded history of French deconstructionism, and guess what? It wasn't all bunkum…

Are the theory wars over? Twenty-five years ago you couldn't cocoa your cappuccino without someone accusing you of floating a signifier, much less close down the, ahem, discourse with a simple "I prefer my coffee that way". Who is this mythic "I", the theorists wanted to know, and how could he presume to know what he prefers? Has he forgotten he's as fictional as Oliver Twist or Mrs Dalloway? Doesn't he know that his likes and dislikes are as ideologically determined as the medium-term financial strategy?

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1	20.00
2	Eagle of The Ninth Rosemary Sutcliff
3	Moonwalking with Einstein Joshua Foer
4	Faber Poetry Collection
5	Zero Degrees of Empathy Simon BaronCohen
6	Crazy Like Us Ethan Watters
7	Haud Yer Wheesht! Allan Morrison
8	Making of the British Landscape Francis Pryor
9	Essays of Elia Charles Lamb
10	Ten Poems About Tea Sophie Dahl

Among the Hagiographers

2011-04-12T13:45:00.002-04:00

FROM : THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
PHOTO : http://online.wsj.com

Early on Gandhi was dubbed a 'mortal demi-god'—and he has been regarded that way ever since

Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.

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Hardcover fiction

1. The Troubled Man
By Henning Mankell. Knopf.

2. The Land of Painted Caves
By Jean M. Auel. Crown.

3. The Tiger's Wife.
By Tea Obreht. Random House.

4. Drawing Conclusions
By Donna Leon. Atlantic Monthly.

5. A Lesson in Secrets.
By Jacqueline Winspear. Harper.

6. The Pale King
By David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown.

7. Live Wire.
By Harlan Coben. Dutton Adult.

8. Lover Unleashed
By J.R. Ward. NAL.

9. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules
By Jeff Kinney. Amulet.

10. Sweet Valley Confidential
By Francine Pascal. St. Martin’s.

Group Think

2011-04-05T01:07:00.000-04:00

From : NEW YORK
PHOTO : Illustration by Dienstelle 75

(Photo: Danny Kim/New York Magazine)

Group Think

Tina Rosenberg joins a popular club for nonfiction writers.

By Kathryn Schulz
Published Mar 20, 2011

If I had the money, I would send Tina Rosenberg on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cairo. Here’s why: Back in 1987, the MacArthur Foundation, which does have the money, awarded her a “genius” grant. Rosenberg used it to research and write an excellent book, Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America. Afterward, she turned her attention to Eastern Europe and to the moral, political, and ethical difficulties of apportioning guilt and innocence in post-Communist nations. The resulting book, The Haunted Land, possesses a rare combination of nuance and force. It also possesses a rare combination of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

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13, Rue Thérèse

2011-04-04T01:30:00.002-04:00

FROM : FT.COM
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE

13, Rue Thérèse

Review by Simon Schama

Published: March 25 2011 22:00 | Last updated: March 25 2011 22:00

13, Rue Thérèse, by Elena Mauli Shapiro, Headline, RRP£12.99, 288 pagesYou take a quick shufti at this debut novel and you clock its cuteness right away: the title for a start – treize, rue Thérèse; yeah got it; then all those old photos, facsimile letters, the chequered covers of a mysterious box embedded in the text and your bricolage alert is ringing like billy-o.

So you have a browse and you see right away that Elena Mauli Shapiro is having a bit of a lark, scrambling time, setting us up for the Unreliable Narrator who is made to happen upon that box full of stuff – an opening to a bigger mystery.

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Is Pakistan a ‘jelly state'?

2011-04-03T01:27:00.001-04:00

FROM : THE HINDU
PHOTO : www.hindu.com

Is Pakistan a ‘jelly state'?

SHAIKH MUJIBUR REHMAN

The book seeks to build a body of knowledge that falls under the rubric of Pakistan scholarship

TINDERBOX - The Past and Future of Pakistan: M.J. Akbar, HarperCollins, A-53, Sector 57, Noida-201301. Rs. 499.

The publication of this book has brought some dignity to the claim that India has some serious academic expertise on Pakistan. Although more than a score of diplomats and journalists are projected by the Indian media as Pakistan experts, hardly any Indian author figures in the list of top 20 books written on Pakistan over the past two decades. This could also be said of Indian scholarship on Middle East, Latin America, and many other regions. But it becomes a bit too embarrassing in respect of Pakistan because it happens to be our most important and, at the same time, highly sensitive neighbour.

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The future of the English language

2011-04-02T01:24:00.002-04:00

FROM : THE TIME
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE

The future of the English language

Will English survive as a lingua franca, or will translation technology make it unnecessary? In the British film Code 46 of 2003, the director Michael Winterbottom creates a visually and verbally hybrid world for a dystopian love story. Cityscapes are an architectural collage of Shanghai, Dubai and London’s Jubilee Line, simultaneously recognizable and alien, and are populated by speakers of a world language that mixes English with Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Persian. The linguistic hybridization signals that in the world of Code 46 the balance of economic and political power has shifted away from English-speaking nations and hence English is no longer quite the global force to which we have become accustomed.

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The Use and Abuse of Literature

2011-04-01T01:07:00.002-04:00

FROM : SF GATE
PHOTO : www.sfgate.com

The Use and Abuse of Literature

By Marjorie Garber

(Pantheon; 320 pages; $28.95)

Why read? You'd think that with the e-book and the Internet, with Google searching and channel surfing, the experience of curling up with a good book is as archaic as a buggy ride. You'd think, too, that with graphic novels and celebrity memoirs, and with Wikipedia offering their entries in "simple English," the very idea of literature itself had disappeared and, along with it, the language of craft and cadence that made memorable all writers from Shakespeare to Shaw.

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The Quick-Change Artist

2011-03-31T01:52:00.002-04:00

FROM : BOOKFORUM
PHOTO : www.bookforum.com

A writer who actively resists categorization these days might seem to be deliberately flouting common sense. Writing is a lame-duck art form at best, since readers go for data, preferably without having to chop their way through encroaching idiosyncrasies such as style. For all we know, the pursuit of data will soon enough be free of the encumbrance and ambiguity of words. In the meantime, the writer should be building a brand identity and hitching it to a neatly delimited subject area. If you've written a successful memoir about fishing, Manitoba, and suicidal ideation you would do well not to stray too far from those ingredients in your subsequent works. You want to turn your lemonade stand into a chain.

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This week's bestsellers

1. Ten Poems About Tea
by Sophie Dahl
2. Hundred Doors
by Michael Longley
3. Troubled Man
by Henning Mankell
4. Zero Degrees of Empathy
by Simon BaronCohen
5. Hanging Shed
by Gordon Ferris

Can neuroscience explain art?

2011-03-30T01:46:00.001-04:00

FROM : THE SMART SET
PHOTO :GOOGLE IMAGE

Idle Chatter
This Is Your Brain on Art
Can neuroscience explain art?

By Morgan Meis

Twenty percent of art can now be explained by neuroscience. That, at least, is what V.S. Ramachandran thinks. Ramachandran is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, and Distinguished Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego. He is, in short, one of the top neuroscientists around at the moment. He is also a clear and engaging writer. His 1999 book, Phantoms in the Brain, brought him much popular attention and his most recent book, The Tell-Tale Brain, is doing more of the same.

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The Oxford Book of Parodies

2011-03-29T01:39:00.004-04:00

FROM : COMMENTARY MAGAZINE
PHOTO :

Mickey or Bugs?

The Oxford Book of Parodies
Edited by John Gross
Oxford, 416 pages

For decades, comedy writers have puzzled over a mystery: Why is Mickey Mouse more famous than Bugs Bunny? Mickey isn’t funny or interesting. He cannot produce an anvil or a Carmen Miranda hat out of the air. All in all, his “good mouse” act is a toothless, nice-guy bore.

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Hardcover fiction

1. The Tiger's Wife
By Téa Obreht. Random House.

2. Sing You Home
By Jodi Picoult. Atria.

3. The Wise Man's Fear
By Patrick Rothfuss. DAW.

4. The Paris Wife
By Paula McLain. Ballantine.

5. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

6. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Amy Einhorn.Putnam.

7. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (tie)
By Jasper Fforde. Viking.

7. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
By Jeff Kinney. Amulet.

8. Swamplandia! (tie)
By Karen Russell. Knopf.

8. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth
By Jeff Kinney. Amulet.

REPORT ON THE STATE OF FOOD INSECURITY IN URBAN INDIA

2011-03-28T01:41:00.000-04:00

FROM : THE HINDU
PHOTO : www.hindu.com

Poverty norm or calorie norm?

SWARNA S. VEPA

Kerala and Tamil Nadu with the lowest calorie consumption seem to show better health outcome indicators

REPORT ON THE STATE OF FOOD INSECURITY IN URBAN INDIA: MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Third Cross Street, Taramani Institutional Area, Chennai-600113.

This report, a joint initiative by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation — an institution with a remarkable long term commitment to issues related to food security — and the United Nations World Food Programme, should serve as an excellent hand book on urban food insecurity. Aside from providing all the relevant information in a consolidated fashion — something that is hard to come by in these days of information overload — it highlights the issues that are of critical importance. If its recommendations are meant for policymakers and those charged with the responsibility of formulating action-oriented programmes, the publication is no less useful for researchers in the field.

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Superficial & Sublime?

2011-03-27T01:38:00.000-04:00

FROM : THE NEW YORK REVIEW
PHOTO : www.nybooks.com

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly
Free Press, 254 pp., $26.00

Hamburger Kunsthalle/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource

Helen of Troy; painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1863

This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers. It is written by well-regarded professors (one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it. The authors set about to solve the problems of a modern secular culture.

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In Defense of Tenure

2011-03-26T01:34:00.000-04:00

FROM : DEMOCRACY
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE

In Defense of Tenure

It might be under attack, but academic tenure is essential to preserving academic freedom.

Kevin Mattson

The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University By Ellen Schrecker • The New Press • 2010 • 304 pages • $27.95

I inhabit two worlds. The first is where I work most of the time—the American academy or, more specifically, a state-funded university. What do I see here? A full-time faculty dwindling in numbers and whose salaries are flatlining; rising ranks of “contingent” and contract-based teachers who have little job security; and stressed students who face rising tuitions and ballooning class sizes.

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That’s Offensive!

2011-03-24T01:26:00.000-04:00

FROM : THE BOOK
PHOTO : www.tnr.com

That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect

by Stefan Collini

Seagull Books, 82 pp., $18.25

AMERICANS TRAVELING ABROAD often hear this country discussed with great passion and intensity. These discussions, it will not surprise even homebodies to learn, are often critical. Nor is it surprising that the criticisms range from the uninformed to the witheringly acute; they fall on the same spectrum as American self-criticism. Foreigners can be imprecise or simply misinformed about this country—I remember being asked at a small bookstore in New Delhi why Americans would never elect a president with a postgraduate degree—but a unique (at least to us) perspective can also yield real insight. Different news sources or cultural reference points will produce distinct analyses. No criticism is invalid simply because of the critic; what matters are the opinions themselves.

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TOP :

1	Ten Poems About Tea Sophie Dahl 3.96
2	Khirbet Khizeh S Yizhar
3	4-Percent Universe Richard Panek
4	1001 Children's Books
5	766 and All That Paul Johnson
6	Favourite of the Gods Sybille Bedford
7	Hundred Doors Michael Longley
8	When the Children Came Home Julie Summers
9	Afgantsy Rodric Braithwaite
10	Ghost of White Hart Lane

Adam Smith

2011-03-23T01:21:00.000-04:00

FROM : NICHOLAS PHILLIPSON
PHOTO : www.amazon.com

In the “Overture” to his grandly symphonic The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay describes the “international type” of the philosophe as a “facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular man of letters.” On this definition, was Adam Smith a philosophe?

Yes and no. Unlike his French counterparts and even his bosom friend David Hume, he led a retired life, much of it in the small Scottish town where he was born, and he lived with his mother until she died at a very advanced age. He was shy, destroyed most of his letters, and did not seem to relish giving brilliant performances, either in print or in conversation. He never fell afoul of civil or religious authority, had no mistresses, and engaged in no public quarrels.

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"A Discovery of Witches," by Deborah E. Harkness, remains in the lead on the hardcover fiction list this week.

David Brooks' "The Social Animal" tops hardcover nonfiction.

"The Imperfectionists," by Tom Rachman, takes the number one spot in paperback fiction.

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," by Rebecca Skloot, takes the lead in paperback nonfiction.

THE CRISIS THIS TIME

2011-03-21T01:35:00.000-04:00

FROM : THE HINDU
PHOTO : www.hindu.com

Profitable, yet risky trade

C. T. KURIEN

Derivatives: those at the top become wealthier; those at the other end go into debt

THE CRISIS THIS TIME - Socialist Register 2011: Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, Vivek Chibber; LeftWord Books, 12, Rajendra Prasad Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 350.

During the past four decades and more, a group of committed analysts, admittedly with Left leanings, have been bringing out an annual publication, Socialist Register, to make available their interpretation of pressing contemporary problems. The latest in the series deals with the global economic crisis that surfaced in 2008-09 and is still running its course in the United States, Europe, and many other parts of the world.

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Secret Songs of Birds

2011-03-20T01:32:00.000-04:00

FROM : THE GUARDIAN
PHOTO : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk

Secret Songs of Birds

By

Audio (other formats)

RRP £9.95

Our price: £7.96

Many songbirds, such as the Skylark, Icterine Warbler and Grey Fantail produce songs that astound us with their complexity and speed of delivery. This title helps to discover the hidden beauty of birdsong.

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THE TELL - TALE BRAIN

2011-03-19T01:28:00.002-04:00

FROM : NORTON
PHOTO : www.nybooks.com

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human
by V.S. Ramachandran
Norton, 357 pp., $26.95

Rosemania/Creative Commons

Dancing stone nymph, Uttar Pradesh, India, early twelfth century. In The Tell-Tale Brain V.S. Ramachandran asks about this sculpture, ‘Does it stimulate mirror neurons?’

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them.

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Justice for Hedgehogs

2011-03-18T01:25:00.000-04:00

FROM :Harvard Universtiy Pres.
PHOTO : http://newhumanist.org.uk

Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin

Conor Gearty takes a tour round Ronald Dworkin's remarkable mind

Conor Gearty

Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin (Harvard Universtiy Press, £24.95))

The first thing to strike you about this remarkable book is its ambition. Academic scholarship these days is more like staying in a hotel than a home: full of rooms offering the prospect of a well-furnished stay but with never a suggestion that you should talk to the guests next door. There is no meeting of minds even in the grander reception spaces, given over as these invariably now are to fundraising and graduate recruitment drives (or pretences at welcoming poorer students). Whenever the likes of philosophy, politics and law meet in the lift in such a place they gaze at the floor indicator in embarrassed silence before rushing off to talk incomprehensibly to their own kind.

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Hardcover nonfiction

1. Unbroken
By Laura Hillenbrand. Random House.

2. Townie
By Andre Dubus III. W.W. Norton.

3. Blood, Bones, and Butter
By Gabrielle Hamilton. Random House.

4. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (tie)
By Amy Chua. Penguin.

4. The Emperor of All Maladies
By Siddhartha Mukherjee. Scribner.

5. The Information (tie)
By James Gleick. Pantheon.

Torrid Life

2011-03-17T01:21:00.002-04:00

FROM : SLATE
PHOTO : www.slate.com

Torrid Life, Transcendent Art

It's awfully hard to revise the romantic myth of Modigliani.

By Christopher Benfey

The romantic myth of the artist dies hard. Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin in Tahiti, Caravaggio boozing and brawling in the mean streets of Rome! Wouldn't we much rather hear about the impulsive escapades of the bad boys of art than follow the incremental progress of a bourgeois toiler like Monet, turning out one more view of haystacks with the light striking them just so, or Cézanne, shifting the apples around on his table?

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Hardcover fiction

1. A Discovery of Witches
By Deborah E. Harkness. Viking.

2. Sing You Home
By Jodi Picoult. Atria.

3. The Wise Man's Fear
By Patrick Rothfuss. DAW.

4. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

5. Swamplandia!
By Karen Russell. Knopf.

6. The Paris Wife
By Paula McLain. Ballantine.

7. Minding Frankie
By Maeve Binchy. Knopf.

8. Mockingjay
By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic.

9. Room
By Emma Donoghue. Little, Brown.

10. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

The Fugitive in Flight

2011-03-15T01:40:00.000-04:00

FROM : LONDON REVIEUW
PHOTO : www.lrb.co.uk

Save it for HBO

Jenny Diski

The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism and Law in a Classic TV Show by Stanley Fish
Pennsylvania, 152 pp, £16.50, November 2010, ISBN 978 0 8122 4277 Academics: beware of loving what you write about. Fandom can tempt intellectuals to take uncharacteristic risks with their primary sources. Even Stanley Fish, who as the author of Is There a Text In This Class? knows better than anyone how important the division of insider and outsider is for keeping amateurs at bay. In 1993, Fish-the-fan, enamoured of the American television series The Fugitive, joined the faithful at a convention in Hollywood to rerun, adore and discuss the episodes, to listen to actors and directors of the programme talk about their experience.

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Muslim women in America

2011-03-14T13:42:00.002-04:00

FROM : CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
PHOTO : www.csmonitor.com

Muslim women in America speak out

'I Speak for Myself' is an essay anthology that gives Muslim women a voice and American audiences a much-needed glimpse of an oft-misunderstood group.

“Taliban prohibits Afghan girls from attending school.”

“Indonesian Sharia police ban tight pants for women.”

The media have plenty to say about Muslim women. But what makes the headlines isn’t the experience of the vast majority of Muslim women. And what rarely emerge are the voices of Muslim women themselves.

Two women have sought to change that by urging American Muslim women across the US to speak for themselves.

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2011-03-13T01:39:00.001-05:00

FROM : THE HINDU

PHOTO : www.hindu.com

Progress in infrastructure

V. K. NATRAJ

The book provides a good introduction to the problems faced in infrastructure development

BUILDING FROM THE BOTTOM - Infrastructure and Poverty Alleviation: Edited by Sameer Kochhar, M. Ramachandran; Academic Foundation, 4772-73/23, Bharat Ram Road (23, Ansari Road) Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 995.

This collection of papers discusses the contribution of infrastructure to economic growth and development under four broad heads: policy, infrastructure, governance and service delivery, and poverty alleviation. In addition, there are 11 case studies on different aspects of infrastructure development.

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The Raft on Our Backs

2011-03-12T01:35:00.002-05:00

FROM : CARAVAN
PHOTO :http://caravanmagazine.in

IS THERE AN INDIAN WAY OF THINKING? The poet and sconsidered the question at length in a celebrated essay on the subject. The answer, he decided, would depend on which word of the question one chose to stress. The same is true of the following variation on Ramanujan’s question: Is there an Indian way of thinking about politics?

There are several things we might mean by this. For example, we might mean to ask: Is there an Indian way of thinking about politics at all? Or we might mean: Is there an indigenously Indian, rather than derivative, way of thinking about politics? Or perhaps: Is there an Indian way of thinking, systematically, about politics? When this question is asked by a historian, it becomes another way of asking about India’s tradition of political thought. Does such a thing exist? What sort of thing is it?

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King James Bible

2011-03-11T01:20:00.002-05:00

FROM : THE TIMES
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE

400 years of the King James Bible

Mysteries and mistranslations in the making of the King James Bible, still the most influential version four centuries after its birth.

The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world” and “the most enduring embodiment of Scripture in the English language”. To Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett it is simply the Bible translation that defines Bible translations: “All other versions still exist, as it were, in its shadow. It has shaped, formed and moulded the language with which the others must speak”.

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Premarital Sex in America

2011-03-10T01:30:00.002-05:00

FROM : THE BOOK
PHOTO : www.tnr.com

Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying

by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker

Oxford University Press, 312 pp., $24.95

IN A COLLEGE CAMPUS STUDY in 1989, physically attractive people approached opposite-sex students and asked, “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Not a single woman said yes, but seventy-five percent of men accepted the invitation. This gender disparity forms the basis of the theory of “sexual economics,” which starts from the familiar premise that most guys want sex to be as easy as possible.

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Hardcover fiction

1. A Discovery of Witches
By Deborah E. Harkness. Viking.

2. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

3. Swamplandia!
By Karen Russell. Knopf.

4. Room
By Emma Donoghue. Little, Brown.

5. Treachery in Death (tie)
By J.D. Robb. Putnam.

5. I Am Number Four
By Pittacus Lore. HarperCollins.

5. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

6. Angel
By James Patterson. Little, Brown.

7. A Heartbeat Away (tie)
By Michael Palmer. St. Martin's.

7. The Oracle of Stamboul
By Michael David Lukas. Harper.

The Death of Eli Gold

2011-03-09T01:25:00.002-05:00

FROM : THE GUARDIAN
PHOTO : www.guardian.co.uk

The Death of Eli Gold by David Baddiel – review

Steven Poole finds no cruel brilliance of style to justify David Baddiel's caricatures

This novel may have been written by someone best known as a comedian, but it is a proper novel because it deals with big themes such as literature, love and illness. What's more, it is narrated from the point of view of several characters, one of whom is a child. Some bits of it are supposed to be funny; but others, I'm pretty sure, aren't.

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1	David Leigh & Luke Harding 6.99
2	Eyewitness Decade Roger Tooth
3	South Riding Winifred Holtby
4	Ragged Trousered Philanthropists Robert Tressell
5	Dangerous Journey Tove Jansson
6	33 Revolutions Per Minute Dorian Lynskey
7	Siege Helen Dunmore
8	To a Mountain in Tibet Colin Thubron
9	Guardian Quick Crossword Collection x4
10	How to Change the World Eric Hobsbawm

How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think

2011-03-08T01:22:00.000-05:00

FROM : LONDON REVIEW
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember by Nicholas Carr
Atlantic, 276 pp, £17.99, September 2010, ISBN 978 1 84887 225 7

‘I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a productive life without one. Are those of us with computers really better off?

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Last 24 hours

In search of a pink Viagra

2011-03-07T01:31:00.001-05:00

FROM : THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PHOTO : www.theglobeandmail.com

A few pages in, it’s hard not to feel déjà vu. Moynihan came out a few years ago with Selling Sickness, a book tackling the problem of medicalization, the tendency for typical life phases or human behaviour such as shyness to be medicalized – treated as disorders and diseases requiring medical treatment.

The economic motivation for medicalization is obvious. Once something is labelled a disease, it requires intervention, often in the form of a pharmaceutical cure. Profits expand, the sicker we are exhorted to feel.

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2011-03-06T01:25:00.000-05:00

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

For evergreen agriculture

S. MAHENDRA DEV

The author urges farmers to resist the temptation of turning the ‘green revolution' to a ‘greed revolution'

FROM GREEN TO EVERGREEN REVOLUTION - Indian Agriculture, Performance and Challenges: M.S. Swaminathan; Academic Foundation, 4772-73/23, Bharat Ram Road (23, Ansari Road), Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 1195.

This is a collection of 45 select articles written by M.S. Swaminathan over the past 20 years. Arranged in six sections, they cover ‘sustainable development in Indian agriculture', ‘technology and evergreen revolution', ‘sustainable food security', ‘agrarian crisis', ‘WTO and Indian farmers', and ‘shaping India's agricultural destiny'

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Exploring Barack Obama's Kenyan Roots

2011-03-05T01:27:00.000-05:00

FROM : THE ATLANTIC
PHOTO : www.theatlantic.com

Dreams From Africa: Exploring Barack Obama's Kenyan Roots

Crown

Whole shelves of books have explored Barack Obama's American journey. Son of an immigrant father, he overcame both humble beginnings and racial barriers to become president of the United States. Yet aside from Mr. Obama's own investigation of his most recent African forebears, Americans have known little about the President's African roots.

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A mind of one's own

2011-03-04T01:21:00.002-05:00

FROM : NEWSTATESMAN
PHOTO :

The metaphysical limitations of neuroscience.

Soul Dust: the Magic of Consciousness
Nicholas Humphrey
Quercus, 288pp, £25

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
Antonio Damasio
William Heinemann, 384pp, £25

The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness - from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self - is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between human life in the library or the operating theatre and animal life in the jungle or the savannah are more apparent than real: at the most, matters of degree rather than kind.

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The Next Wall Street Collapse

2011-03-03T01:18:00.002-05:00

FROM : BOSTON REVIEW
PHOTO : www.bostonreview.net

Business As Usual The Next Wall Street Collapse

Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. Vintage, $15.95 (paper).

Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression. Harvard University Press, $23.95 (cloth).

Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance. Penguin Press, $27.95 (cloth).

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy. W.W. Norton, $16.95 (paper).

The economy teetered on the brink but did not fall into the abyss. The bailouts, the stimulus, and adequate international political comity—each imperfect, even ugly—nevertheless prevented what was otherwise very likely: another Great Depression.

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The outsider’s insights on the American soul

2011-03-02T01:57:00.000-05:00

FROM : STANDARD

PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE

‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’ AND Character and Opinion in the United States

by George Santayana

edited by James Seaton

Yale, 240 pp., $16

The Highpriest of Pessimism

Zur Rezeption Schopenhauers in den USA

by Christa Buschendorf

Universitätsverlag Winter, 336 pp., 42 euros

A hundred years ago the philosopher and aesthete George Santayana traveled to Berkeley to recuperate “among her immense forces,” the mountains, forests, and Pacific surf, from the arid flatlands of Harvard’s intellectual conformism.

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Paperback nonfiction

1. The Big Short
By Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton.

2. Just Kids
By Patti Smith. Ecco.

3. Inside of a Dog
By Alexandra Horowitz. Scribner.

4. What the Dog Saw
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.

5. The Checklist Manifesto
By Atul Gawande. Picador.

6. The King's Speech
By Mark Logue and Peter Conradi. Sterling.

7. The Tipping Point
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.

8. Freakonomics
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Harper Perennial.

9. What Color is Your Parachute
By Richard N. Bolles. Ten Speed.

10. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report
By Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. PublicAffairs.

How to Change the World

2011-03-01T01:38:00.001-05:00

From : London review of Books
Photo : Google image

Indomitable

Terry Eagleton

: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 470 pp, £25.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 4087 0287

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

Top :

Hardcover fiction

1. A Discovery of Witches
By Deborah E. Harkness. Viking.

2. Freedom (tie)
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

2. Swamplandia!
By Karen Russell. Knopf.

3. Tick Tock
By James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. Little, Brown.

4.The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

5. Catching Fire
By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic.

6. Left Neglected
By Lisa Genova. Gallery.

7. The Lover's Dictionary (tie)
By David Levithan. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

7. You Know When the Men Are Gone
By Siobhan Fallon. Putnam.

8. Mockingjay
By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic.

2011-02-28T01:30:00.000-05:00

FROM : GUARDIAN
PHOTO : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa.

The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.

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2011-02-27T01:28:00.000-05:00

FROM : THE HINDU
PHOTO : www.hindu.com

A deadly scourge

N. GOPAL RAJ

A highly readable account of how ideas about cancer and ways to treat it evolved over time

THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES - A Biography of Cancer: Siddhartha Mukherjee; Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, A 53, Sector 57, Noida-201301. Rs. 499.

This book provides a panoramic view of humanity's fight against a deadly scourge. Cancer has plagued human beings down the ages. As people's lifespan lengthened and they became less likely to fall victim to infectious diseases, it emerged as a major killer in both rich and poor countries. One in eight deaths worldwide is now caused by cancer.

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The outsider’s insights on the American soul.

2011-02-26T01:24:00.000-05:00

FROM : STANDARD
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGES

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’ AND Character and Opinion in the United States

by George Santayana

edited by James Seaton

Yale, 240 pp., $16

The Highpriest of Pessimism

Zur Rezeption Schopenhauers in den USA

by Christa Buschendorf

Universitätsverlag Winter, 336 pp., 42 euros

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Scott Brown memoir

2011-02-21T01:41:00.003-05:00

FROM : CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
PHOTO : www.csmonitor.com

Scott Brown memoir details childhood abuse and a life of hardship

Scott Brown's new autobiography "Against All Odds" may add to his "political intrigue."

If you thought the Cosmo centerfold was edgy, hold on tight, Senator Scott Brown’s got more to share. Another political bombshell is set to hit a bookshelf near you.

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2011-02-20T01:39:00.001-05:00

FROM : THE HINDU

PHOTO :www.hindu.com

India's march to freedom

SURANJAN DAS

The year 1941 saw the hardening of the nationalist and imperialist standpoints in Indian politics

TOWARDS FREEDOM 1941 - Part-1: Edited by Amit K. Gupta and Arjun Dev; Oxford University Press, YMCA Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 3750.

This volume is another significant addition to the Towards Freedom series, an initiative for publishing documents on the freedom movement from an Indian perspective. In his perceptive introduction, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya underlines how 1941, although less eventful than the years preceding and succeeding it, saw the hardening of the nationalist and imperialist standpoints in Indian politics, which set the stage for the “tumultuous” 1942.

Amit Gupta and Arjun Dev have, diligently and adroitly, brought together a wide range of materials related to some constituents that gave 1941 an element of criticality in India's march to freedom.

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Use value

2011-02-19T01:35:00.002-05:00

FROM : The New Criterion
Photo : Google

Use value

by Barton Swaim

A review of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition (Oxford World's Classics) by H. W. Fowler

The third edition of the work of the brilliant and cantankerous Englishman H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, published in 1996, signaled the triumph of the descriptivist view of language—the view, that is, that the lexicographer’s duty is merely to describe the language as it’s used, not to make pronouncements about how it ought to be used. It also signaled the triumph of tedium over enjoyment, and of abstract truth over utility. Edited by the late R. W. Burchfield, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, as the third edition was titled, addressed all the significant questions about English grammar and usage and explained with sufficient clarity the ways in which those questions have been addressed in the past.

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Elegy for Raymond

2011-02-18T01:21:00.002-05:00

FROM : Bookforum
PHOTO :http://bookforum.com

Elegy for Raymond

A renowned author finds that art is poor consolation in a time of crippling grief

Ruth Franklin

In early 2008, Joyce Carol Oates gave a talk called "The Writer's (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration," about how writers go about transmuting painful life experiences into art. At the heart of her speech was a quote from Hemingway, which Oates found so profound that she cited it twice. "From things that have happened . . . and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality," he wrote. "That is why you write and for no other reason."

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Guardian recommends View all

To Kill A Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
RRP: £20.42
Offer Price: £16.33
You save: £4.09

Under Milk Wood
by
RRP: £13.00

Pleasures of the Garden
by Christina Hardyment
RRP: £16.99
Offer Price: £13.59
You save: £3.40

Bad Birdwatcher's Companion
by Simon Barnes
RRP: £16.99
Offer Price: £13.59
You save: £3.40

Lasting Man

2011-02-17T01:17:00.002-05:00

FROM : The NEW REPUBLIC
PHOTO : www.tnr.com

Saul Bellow: Letters
Edited by Benjamin Taylor
(Viking, 571 pp., $35)

How easy it is, and plausible, to regard a collection of letters spanning youth and old age as an approximation of autobiography: the procession of denizens who inhabit a life, the bit players with their entrances and exits, the faithful chronology of incidents—all turn up reliably in either form, whether dated and posted or backward-looking. Yet autobiography, even when ostensibly steeped in candor, tends toward reconsideration—if not revisionary paperings-over, then late perspectives, afterwords, and second thoughts. Whereas letters (but here let us specify a writer’s letters) are appetite and urgency, unmediated seizures of impulse and desire torn from the fraught and living moment

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Paperback nonfiction

1. The Big Short
By Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton.

2. Inside of a Dog
By Alexandra Horowitz. Scribner.

3. Just Kids
By Patti Smith. Ecco.

4. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report
By Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. PublicAffairs.

5. Zeitoun
By Dave Eggers. Vintage.

6. What the Dog Saw
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.

7. Blink (tie)
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.

7. Eat, Pray, Love
By Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin.

8. The Tipping Point
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.

9. Citizen Somerville
By Bobby Martini and Elayne Keratsis. Powderhouse.

For a Little Room Behind the Shop

2011-02-16T01:29:00.001-05:00

From : The AMERICAN INTEREST
Photo : Google Image

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
by Sarah Bakewell
Chatto & Windus, 2010, 387 pp., $26.88

Can a retired 16th-century French provincial magistrate teach us how to live today? Sarah Bakewell’s engaging and idiosyncratic biography of the great essayist Michel de Montaigne suggests that the answer, in some quite subtle and interesting ways, is that he can. To judge by the enthusiastic reviews and healthy sales for Bakewell’s book since it was published in Britain early last year and this past October in the United States, many critics and readers would seem to agree

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Mistresses through the ages

2011-02-15T01:24:00.002-05:00

From : The sunday Time
Photo : Google Images

Mistresses through the ages

Prostitute, concubine, mistress, wife: the boundaries are blurred in this study

What is a mistress? Elizabeth Abbott, who has also published A History of Celibacy and held the post of Dean of Women at Trinity College, University of Toronto, offers this definition: “a woman voluntarily or forcibly engaged in a relatively long-term sexual relationship with a man who is usually married to another woman”. Given the persistence of this model across time and cultures, Abbott maintains that “mistressdom”, like celibacy, is therefore an essential means by which to consider sexual relationships outside marriage – “in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage”. Considering the media’s current obsession with love-rat footballers and cheating celebs, “mistressdom” might also be considered a safe bet for a publisher’s list, and Abbott duly provides us with a generally cheerful tumble through adultery down the ages.

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Hardcover fiction

1. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

2. Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3. Catching Fire
By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic

4. Swamplandia! (tie)
By Karen Russell. Knopf.

4. Solo
By Rana Dasgupta. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

5. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth (tie)
By Jeff Kinney. Amulet.

5. Great House
By Nicole Krauss. W.W. Norton.

6. The Fates Will Find Their Way
By Hannah Pittard. Ecco.

7. The Death Instinct
By Jed Rubenfeld. Riverhead.

8. While Mortals Sleep
By Kurt Vonnegut. Delacorte.

David Ulin's favorite books of 2010

2011-02-14T01:55:00.003-05:00

From : Los Angeles Times

Photo : www.latimes.com

FAVORITE BOOKS

Here, in alphabetical order by title, are the 10 books that, over the last 12 months, most moved, inspired or beguiled me: my favorite books of 2010.

"About a Mountain" by John D'Agata (W.W. Norton: 236 pp., $23.95). Willfully blurring the line between reportage and essay, truth and construction, this beautiful book uses the saga of Yucca Mountain, nuclear waste and the history of Las Vegas to frame a searing meditation on uncertainty and time.

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Politics of ethnonationalism

2011-02-13T01:52:00.001-05:00

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Politics of ethnonationalism

K. N. PANIKKAR

This work, a collection of essays, focusses on major sites of ethnonational politics

ETHNONATIONALISM IN INDIA - A Reader: Edited by Sanjib Barua; Oxford University Press, YMCA Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 995.

John Stuart Mill in his celebrated essay, Considerations on Representative Government, had advanced the view that democracy is “next to impossible” in multiethnic societies and completely impossible in linguistically divided countries. By this yardstick, Indian democracy is a prime candidate for collapse. Nevertheless, it has survived, even if not ideally, as a puzzle for all those who expected the doom, particularly because ethnic discontent and violence have been endemic since the inception of the Republic. The essays brought together in this collection seek to solve this puzzle.

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Beyond the Crash

2011-02-12T01:36:00.000-05:00

From : The Gurardian¸
Photo : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk

Beyond the Crash

RRP £19.00

Our price: £15.20

The much-anticipated book from former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about the global economic crisis and the way forward

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Guardian recommends View all >>

Under Milk Wood
by
RRP: £13.00

To Kill A Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
RRP: £20.42
Offer Price: £16.33
You save: £4.09

Paddington Here and Now
by
RRP: £11.99
Offer Price: £9.59
Top :

An Anthology of African American Sermons

2011-02-11T01:32:00.002-05:00

From : Powell`s Books
Photo : www.powells.com

Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present

Black Christianity has always had an ambiguous relationship to American culture. If African slaves grew to embrace Christianity, they did so in their own way: hallowing Exodus and wondering, "If God delivered Daniel, why not every man?" Thus was born the amalgam "Afro-Christianity" -- a universalistic faith drenched in particularity. The "Africanness" was a matter of style, too, given in moan and shout, which often led whites to view black religion as exotically emotional. Even Martin Luther King Jr. was known to recoil at the sight of a preacher "jumping out" and "screaming with his tune."

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This week's bestsellers

Library cuts 'would make Britain more illiterate'

2011-02-10T01:25:00.003-05:00

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

Library cuts 'would make Britain more illiterate'

Leading children's author Julia Donaldson - whose books include The Gruffalo - spoke out in support of Saturday's Day Of Action to campaign against the closure of public libraries throughout Britain.

Donaldson, 62, who protested outside the Scottish parliament on Saturday, has warned that library closures would lead to a more "illiterate population".

TOP :

Paperback fiction

1. The Imperfectionists
By Tom Rachman. Dial.

2. Little Bee
By Chris Cleave. Simon & Schuster.

3. Cutting for Stone
By Abraham Verghese. Vintage.

4. Tinkers
By Paul Harding. Bellevue.

5. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
By Helen Simonson. Random House.

6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (tie)
By Stieg Larsson. Vintage.

6. The Girl Who Played with Fire
By Stieg Larsson. Vintage.

7. Water For Elephants (tie)
By Sara Gruen. Algonquin.

7. The Hunger Games
By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic.

8. True Grit
By Charles Portis. Overlook.

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Wherever Home May Be

2011-02-09T01:07:00.004-05:00

From : The Wall Street Journal
Photo : Google

Elizabeth Bishop was a restless, searching writer whose poems are rich in the wonder of being human

One hundred years after her birth in Worcester, Mass., in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop stands as the most highly regarded American poet of the second-half of the 20th century. She is admired in every critical camp—from feminists to formalists—who agree on little else. Her work also attracts a wide general readership. Taught and studied in high schools and universities, Bishop is, for the time being at least, the most popular woman poet in American literature after Emily Dickinson.

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Hardcover fiction

1. Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

2. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

3. Room
By Emma Donoghue. Little, Brown.

4. Tick Tock
By James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. Little, Brown.

5. To the End of the Land
By David Grossman. Knopf.

6. The Inner Circle (tie)
By Brad Meltzer. Grand Central.

6. Gryphon: New and Selected Stories
By Charles Baxter. Pantheon.

7. The Red Garden (tie)
By Alice Hoffman. Crown.

7. Under Current Conditions
By Kyle Darcy. PublishingWorks.

8. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth

John Gross

2011-02-07T01:23:00.002-05:00

From : THE TIMES
Photo :http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

John Gross, 1935–2011

The literary life of the editor who ended the practice of anonymous reviewing in the TLS

John Gross, who died this week, was Editor of the TLS from 1974 to 1981, and a contributor to the paper from 1960 (when he reviewed J. D. Salinger’s For Esmé – with Love and Squalor) until last year (when he reviewed Dancing in the Dark: A cultural history of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein). His books include The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English literary life since 1800 (1969), The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (1983), Shylock: Four hundred years in the life of a legend (1992), A Double Thread: A childhood in Mile End – and beyond (2001) and The Oxford Book of Parodies (published last year, and reviewed in the TLS by Seamus Perry).
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J.D. Salinger

2011-02-06T01:19:00.000-05:00

From : SLATE
PHOTO : www.slate.com

For Salinger, With Love

Kenneth Slawenski's biography offers a bowdlerized life.

Where were you when J.D. Salinger died on Jan. 27, 2010? I can never forget: I was on the campus of William & Mary, trying to get a little work done before teaching my class, but people kept calling and e-mailing to ask whether I'd write Salinger's biography now that he was finally dead. The possibility had occurred to me (having published a biography of John Cheever, another New Yorker chronicler of postwar middle-class malaise), but only if I could get the family's approval in the form of a legally binding agreement.

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THE TELL-TALE BRAIN

2011-02-05T01:33:00.000-05:00

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Ape and super ape

VIJAY NAGASWAMI

Ramachandran starts off with a description of the anatomy of the human brain with emphasis on cerebral cortices

THE TELL-TALE BRAIN - Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature: V.S. Ramachandran; Random House India, MindMill Corporate Tower, 2nd Floor, Plot No. 24A, Sector 16A, Noida-201301. Rs. 499.

An acclaimed neuroscientist, based in San Diego, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has been much feted and awarded for his original work on the brain and cognitive processes. A reading of the Tell-tale Brain gives one an idea why he is as well regarded as he is.

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The Scrapbook of American Slavery

2011-02-04T01:22:00.000-05:00

From : The ATLANTIC
Photo : www.theatlantic.com

The Scrap Applewoods Books book of American SlaveryIn 1862, the author Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the White House. When she was introduced to Abraham Lincoln, the six-foot-four president is supposed to have looked over his diminutive guest and asked, with a wry smile, "so this is the little lady who made this big war?"
In 1862, the author Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the White House. When she was introduced to Abraham Lincoln, the six-foot-four president is supposed to have looked over his diminutive guest and asked, with a wry smile, "so this is the little lady who made this big war?

In 1862, the author Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the White House. When she was introduced to Abraham Lincoln, the six-foot-four president is supposed to have looked over his diminutive guest and asked, with a wry smile, "so this is the little lady who made this big war?"

This remark, part of Stowe's family lore, may be apocryphal. What is unquestionably true is that her most famous work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, ignited a storm of controversy over its portrayal of slavery in the South when it was published in 1852. It strengthened the resolve of abolitionists, outraged Southerners who believed the novel depicted the "peculiar institution" in an unfair light, and introduced millions of Americans to the ugly particulars of a practice that they'd had little direct knowledge of. There are few novels in American history that have served as drivers of that history to the degree that has Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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Paperback nonfiction

1. Just Kids
By Patti Smith. Ecco.

2. What the Dog Saw
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.

3. Inside of a Dog
By Alexandra Horowitz. Scribner.

4. The Checklist Manifesto
By Atul Gawande. Picador.

5. The Cello Suites
By Eric Siblin. Grove.

6. Eat, Pray, Love (tie)
By Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin.

6. The Accidental Billionaires
By Ben Mezrich. Anchor.

7. Zeitoun
By Dave Eggers. Vintage.

8. Freakonomics
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Harper Perennial.

9. NurtureShock
By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Twelve.

Source: Boston-area bookstores

The Life and Legends

2011-02-03T01:06:00.002-05:00

From : Jewish Review
Photo : www.jewishreviewofbooks.com

Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends
by Tom Segev
Doubleday, 496 pp., $35

If there was anything in particular that prevented Simon Wiesenthal from becoming, after S.Y. Agnon, the second Jew from Buczacz to win a Nobel Prize, it was probably his relationship with Kurt Waldheim. Back in the 1960s, when he was Austria's foreign minister, Waldheim had helped Wiesenthal to defend himself against rumors spread by Communist bloc countries that he had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II.

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Last 24 hours

Philosophy as inspiration

2011-02-02T01:02:00.002-05:00

From : The Economist
Photo : www.economist.com/

Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche. By James Miller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 432 pages; $28.

Aristotle and the quest for understanding

THE unexamined life is not worth living, or so Socrates famously told the jury at his trial. He neglected to mention that the examined life is sometimes not all that wonderful either. In 11 biographical sketches of thinkers who tried to tread in Socrates’s footsteps, plus one on Socrates himself, James Miller explores what it means to follow the philosophical calling. Much trouble and uncertainty seems to be the answer, and some of the most famous philosophers turn out not to be all that admirable or convincing, he finds. So can philosophy inspire a way of life? That is one question raised by Mr Miller, who teaches politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York.

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AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY OF 1.2 BILLION PEOPLE

2011-02-01T01:57:00.005-05:00

From : Outlook
Photo : www.outlookindia.com

The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson would often say that “whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true”. For a long time India was seen as poor and spiritual in the West even as the IITS and IIMS disgorged thousands of aspiring tycoons into Europe and America. The worldwide corporate hunt for new sources of profit has now created another one-dimensional image: India, we are now told, is rich and materialistic, briskly flattening the world, in Thomas Friedman’s indelible phrase.

Never mind that more desperately poor people—421 million—live in India today than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. The new western accounts of India speak of the magnates of Mumbai and Bangalore; they hail an India rising, finally, to the consumer capitalism that is apparently the summit of human civilisation, if not the terminus of history. India becomes in this 2.0 version a vibrantly democratic country full of confident tycoons, adventurous entrepreneurs and friendly English-speakers, which might even counterbalance China while assisting the economic recovery of the West.

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Hardcover fiction

1. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
By David Sedaris. Little, Brown.

2. Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

4. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

5. Moonlight Mile
By Dennis Lehane. William Morrow.

The Voice

2011-01-31T01:51:00.002-05:00

FROM : The New York Review of Book
PHOTO : www.nybooks.com

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

February 10, 2011

Geoffrey O’Brien

Frank: The Voice
by James Kaplan
Doubleday, 786 pp., $35.00

James Kaplan’s Frank: The Voice is authentically a page-turner, a strident tabloid epic constructed out of facts—or more precisely out of the disparate and sometimes contradictory testimony of scores of participants in Frank Sinatra’s early life. There is certainly enough testimony to choose from; pieces of Sinatra, variously skewed and distorted, are scattered all over the latter part of the twentieth century. But they hardly converge into a unified portrait: confronted with the multitude of Sinatras that one must attempt to resolve into a single plausible person, there is a gathering sense of unsettling dissonance quite at odds with the perfected harmonies of his greatest recordings.

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CLASSES, CITIZENSHIP AND INEQUALITY

2011-01-30T09:54:00.001-05:00

FROM : THE HINDU
PHOTO : www.hindu.com

Emergence of a global working class

K. C. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

CLASSES, CITIZENSHIP AND INEQUALITY — Emerging Perspectives: Edited by T.K. Oommen; Pearson Education, 7th Floor, Knowledge Boulevard, A-8(A) Sector 62, Noida-201309. Rs. 595.

This is a collection of scholarly essays presented at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair, ably edited by one of India's leading sociologists. They are grouped under four heads: working class; peasantry; middle class; and citizenship.

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Cleopatra: A Life

2011-01-29T01:47:00.002-05:00

FROM : Guardian
PHOTO : www.guardian.co.uk

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Miranda Seymour enjoys a dramatic biography of the last and most dazzling of the Ptolemys

How, wondered Pascal, could he best sum up the causes and effects – the bliss and then, the bondage – of love? He found the answer in a single word – a woman's name: Cleopatr

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Diary of a Dean

2011-01-28T01:42:00.002-05:00

From : Standard
Photo : www.weeklystandard.com

The view from the front row of the academic follies.

Diary of a Dean

by Herbert I. London
Hamilton, 60 pp., $14.99

When I attended New York University during the late 1980s, reading about the school’s internal politics in the Washington Square News, Gallatin Division Dean Herbert London registered in my undergraduate imagination as a real “no”-it-all: He was against everything—at least, judging by the headlines. Whenever the WSN reported on a university senate vote, it trumpeted the tally as 77-1, with him the lone dissenter. In Diary of a Dean, an episodic collection of autobiographical essays, London tells how he became a voice crying in the wilderness of liberal academia. At the same time, he depicts the larger story of “the dramatic shift that has occurred in this society over the last four decades,” particularly how “political considerations have entered the Academy as an ideological tsunami

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Last 24 hours

Real Men Find Real Utopias

2011-01-27T01:45:00.002-05:00

From : Dissent
Photo : http://dissentmagazine.org

Real Men Find Real Utopias

By Russell Jacoby

Envisioning Real Utopias
by Erik Olin Wright
Verso, 2010, 394 pp.

A BOOK on utopias by a Marxist sociologist seems promising, perhaps even courageous. In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright seeks to counter widespread cynicism about radical social transformation. To do this he offers what he calls “real utopias,” which might appear a contradiction or oxymoron. For Wright, however, utopias are not fantasies, or not only fantasies. In the current period we need “hard-nosed proposals for pragmatically improving our lives” or utopian ideals grounded in reality. Wright not only provides examples of “real utopias,” but situates them within the broader framework of an “emancipatory social science,” a task that involves understanding how capitalism can be transformed.

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This week's bestsellers

1	How to Change the World Eric Hobsbawm 20.00
2	Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Rhoda Janzen
3	Alone in Berlin Hans Fallada
4	Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand
5	Treasure Islands Nicholas Shaxson
6	Women of the Revolution Kira Cochrane
7	Buy Guardian Style Guide & How To Write
8	Ultimate Guide to Mad Men Will Dean
9	Emperor of All Maladies Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Man Who Recorded the World

2011-01-26T01:39:00.000-05:00

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

The Catcher of Songs

Alan Lomax proved that the poorest places held some of the richest cultural treasures

As Washington geared up for war in late summer of 1940, Alan Lomax fired off a round of heated memos to his boss in the music division at the Library of Congress. As assistant in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song, the 25-year-old Lomax had ambitious plans for serving the cause, such as publishing songbooks for draftees at military camps and arranging antifascist war ballads for marching bands and pop singers, even recording conscripts with musical talent

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Hardcover fiction

1. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
By David Sedaris. Little, Brown.

2. Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

4. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

5. Moonlight Mile
By Dennis Lehane. William Morrow.

Private Patient

2011-01-25T01:14:00.004-05:00

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

When notorious investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn booked into an exclusive clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring facial scar, she had every prospect of a successful operation by a distinguished surgeon, followed by a week's peaceful convalescence in one of Dorset's most beautiful manor houses and the beginning of a new life.

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Why The West Rules

2011-01-24T01:02:00.000-05:00

From : Foreign Affairs
Photo : www.foreignaffairs.com

In the 1940s, Joseph Needham, a British academic, began cataloging China's achievements in science and technology in an effort to understand why they were inferior to the West's. In his 40 years of study, he found that even though .

China may have seemed behind in such achievements at the moment, it had led the world in science a millennium before. He concluded that Confucianism and Taoism made a Chinese scientific revolution less likely because they allowed for only slow, incremental innovation, rather than overnight breakthroughs. Still, he recognized that this was only a partial explanation. Religions are not fixed, and if China's loss of scientific leadership stemmed from its religious attitudes, then what could account for the emergence and persistence of those attitudes?

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Hardcover fiction

1. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
By David Sedaris. Little, Brown.

2. Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

4. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

5. Moonlight Mile
By Dennis Lehane. William Morrow.

What the Night Knows

2011-01-23T01:14:00.000-05:00

From : L.A. Time
Photo : www.latimes.com

Book review: 'What the Night Knows' by Dean Koontz

The author fails to explore the possibilities of a serial killer who may have returned from the grave.

Midway through Dean Koontz's new novel, "What the Night Knows," there's a scene that epitomizes everything the book could have been. Eight-year-old Minnie and her 11-year-old sister detect a recurrent shadow in the mirror mounted on their closet door. When they take down the mirror to examine it, Minnie grabs a handful of grapes and drops them one by one on the mirror's surface. And one by one they plunge straight through, leaving behind only a slow-expanding set of spectral rings on the mirror's glass. It's a quiet, chilling moment.

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Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

2011-01-22T01:03:00.003-05:00

FROM : The New Republic
Photo : www.tnr.com

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
By Eric Metaxas
(Thomas Nelson, 591 pp., $29.99)

Early in January 1939, the precocious German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age thirty-two, learned that all males in his age cohort had been ordered to register with the military. A dedicated opponent of the Nazi regime, he might have responded by declaring himself a conscientious objector, but there were two problems with such a course of action. The first was that Bonhoeffer, although pacifist by inclination, was not opposed to violence under all conditions; and he would later play an active role in the conspiracy led by German generals to assassinate Hitler. The second was that his fame in the Confessing Church (more on this below) might encourage other religious leaders critical of the regime to do the same, thereby bringing them under greater suspicion and undermining their efforts to prove that Nazi policies, and especially their rapidly intensifying Jew-hatred, were contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

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TOP :

1	How to Change the World Eric Hobsbawm 20.00
2	Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Rhoda Janzen
3	Alone in Berlin Hans Fallada
4	Treasure Islands Nicholas Shaxson
5	Ultimate Guide to Mad Men Will Dean
6	How to Live Sarah Bakewell
7	Eyewitness Decade Roger Tooth
8	Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand
9	Women of the Revolution Kira Cochrane

Enigma

2011-01-21T01:08:00.002-05:00

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

March 1943. The war hangs in the balance, and at Bletchley Park a brilliant young codebreaker is facing a double nightmare.

The Germans have changed their U-boat Enigma code, threatening a massive Allied defeat. And as suspicion grows that there may be a spy inside Bletchley, Jericho's girlfriend, the mysterious Claire Romilly suddenly disappears.

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1. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
By David Sedaris. Little, Brown.

2. Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

4. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

5. Moonlight Mile
By Dennis Lehane. William Morrow.

Voice of America

2011-01-20T01:04:00.002-05:00

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

Voice of America by EC Osondu – review

Helon Habila applauds a collection that examines the Nigerian immigrant experience in the US

In "Welcome to America" a family patriarch who has struck it big in Lagos builds a four-storey mansion and designates it the family house. Relatives from the village are to wake up one day, pack their bags and move to Lagos to stay in this house, where there will always be room for them. Most of them don't know each other even by sight, but they all eat from the same big bowl. This anecdote works very well as a metaphor for Caine prizewinner EC Osondu's first collection of short stories, Voice of America. There is room here for every style of storytelling, from folktale to crime tale to satire, to the very sombre and sad – and just when you think the writer has surely exhausted his bag of uproariously funny observations of street life in Lagos, or of immigrant experience in America, he unpacks more.

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West Meets East

2011-01-19T01:58:00.002-05:00

From : World Affairs
Photo : www.worldaffairsjournal.org

The Cambridge History of the Cold War
Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds. (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010)

Istoriia Rossii [The History of Russia], vol. 2, XX vek [The 20th Century]1939–2007
A. B. Zubov, ed. (Moscow: Astrel, 2009)

The Cold War—is it finally over? It shaped world history during the second half of the last century and its consequences are felt even now, especially in Europe and in U.S.-Russian relations, more then twenty years after it ended. For decades the causes of the Cold War have been discussed and disputed: how did it start, whose (to put it somewhat crudely) fault was it, could it have been prevented, were opportunities missed in the decades after Stalin’s death, and when and how and why did it end? As long as Soviet rule existed, Russian historians and commentators were not in doubt with regard to the answers to these questions. The fault was with the “cold warrior”—a Western (mostly American) hard-liner distrustful of Soviet peaceful intentions, probably with a vested interest in the maintenance of tensions and conflict, a hopelessly prejudiced individual, an obstacle to world peace, and quite likely a warmonger. In some Western circles there was agreement with this Soviet stereotype

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George Washington’s First War

2011-01-18T01:06:00.000-05:00

From : Christian Science Monitor
Photo : www.csmonitor.com

George Washington’s First War: His Early Military Adventures

The father of our country was once a scrappy boy colonel.

The nascent career of George Washington is nothing to wax sentimental about. The boy colonel of the Virginia militia learned his trade on the job, slogging through battles along the Colonial frontier against the French and Indian nations. His one minor victory was marred when an Indian ally murdered a wounded French officer who had surrendered and was under Washington’s protection – an incident that would escalate the undeclared war over who controlled the Ohio territory.

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‘War and Peace’ in 24 Hours

2011-01-17T01:03:00.002-05:00

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

Andy Richardson

THINK of it as an antidote to the electronic era. For 12 continuous hours last spring, 60 students and teachers at Hamilton College in upstate New York read aloud from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which spans a dozen volumes.

“Most of us became interested in reading because of being read to,” says Margaret Thickstun, a professor of English at Hamilton, who will orchestrate another “Milton Marathon” in February. She hopes to condense this one to 10 uninterrupted hours. “These readings revive the notion that poetry is not a private, silent thing you do in a room with a piece of paper,” she says, “but something you actually speak.”

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Blair has a story for Indians

2011-01-16T01:56:00.001-05:00

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Blair has a story for Indians

M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

It is by no means a confessional memoir but a brave attempt, with only patchy success, at self-justification

A JOURNEY: Tony Blair;Pub. by Hutchinson, 20, Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SWIV 2SA. œ 25

Among the many pleasures of reading an autobiography, three ought to be mentioned. It is a good way to learn history. A biography may help you rediscover someone you thought you knew well enough. Of course, it often satiates that infinite hunger within all of us for “dirt”. Tony Blair's A Journey is a mixed bag. The 700-page tome contains a lot of contemporary history. Blair ruled Britain at an extraordinary point when the Soviet Union was no more and the United States' decline was still invisible to the naked eye and the shift in the locus of power in world politics was yet to gain traction.

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Caught in the net

2011-01-15T01:59:00.002-05:00

From : The Economist
Photo : www.economist.com

Caught in the net

Why dictators are going digital

Politics and the internet

Jan 6th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov. PublicAffairs; 408 pages; $27.95. Published in Britain by Allen Lane as “The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World”; £14.99

WHEN thousands of young Iranians took to the streets in June 2009 to protest against the apparent rigging of the presidential election, much of the coverage in the Western media focused on the protesters’ use of Twitter, a microblogging service. “This would not happen without Twitter,” declared the Wall Street Journal. Andrew Sullivan, a prominent American-based blogger, also proclaimed Twitter to be “the critical tool for organising the resistance in Iran”. The New York Times said the demonstrations pitted “thugs firing bullets” against “protesters firing tweets”.

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No Thanks for the Memories

2011-01-14T01:51:00.004-05:00

From : New York Review of Book
Photo : www.nybooks.com

The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History
by Jill Lepore
Princeton University Press, 207 pp., $19.95

Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/Redux

Demonstrators at a rally against health care reform, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2010

America’s Founding Fathers have a special significance for the American public. People want to know what Thomas Jefferson would think of affirmative action, or how George Washington would regard the invasion of Iraq. No other major nation honors its historical characters in quite the way we do. The British don’t have to check in periodically with, say, either of the two William Pitts to find out what a historical figure of two centuries ago might think of David Cameron’s government in the way we seem to have to check in with Jefferson or Washington about our current policies and predicaments. Americans seem to have a special need for these authentic historical figures in the here and now.

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Nowhere Man

2011-01-13T01:45:00.001-05:00

From : Tablet
Photo : www.tabletmag.com

Nowhere Man

The poet Joseph Brodsky, kicked out of the USSR and never fully at ease writing in English, was a man of many residences and few homes, as a new biography shows

With most writers, the passage of time helps to consolidate their achievement and fix their reputation. Fifteen years after a poet’s death would seem like ample time for this posthumous process to be completed—especially in the case of a poet as famous as Joseph Brodsky, who became internationally known in his twenties and won the Nobel Prize in 1987. Certainly there is no mystery about the standing of poets like Seamus Heaney or Derek Walcott, Brodsky’s friends, contemporaries, and fellow-laureates. Whether you enjoy reading Heaney or not, the shape of his achievement is clear; his name stands for a certain kind of writing and thinking.

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'Begin Again

2011-01-12T01:40:00.002-05:00

From : L.A. Times
Photo : www.latimes.com

Book review: 'Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage' by Kenneth Silverman

The biography of the avant-garde composer fails to do justice to his complexities.

Alfred A. Knopf: 496 pp., $40

Type the name "John Cage" into YouTube, and you'll find several fascinating clips. First is a 1991 interview with the experimental composer, in which, above the squawks of a Manhattan street, he discusses silence and his appreciation of noise. "When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking," Cage tells the camera, "… but when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic … I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound." To catch a glimpse of this idea in action, look next at a January 1960 clip from the game show "I've Got a Secret," during which Cage performs "Water Walk," an oddly beautiful sound collage played on, among other objects, a water pitcher, an iron pipe, a sprinkling can, a bathtub and five radio.

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The first war on terror

2011-01-11T01:22:00.004-05:00

From : Pantheon Books
Photo : www.amazon.com

The First War on Terror

What the fight against anarchism tells us about the fight against radical Islam

The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents, by Alex Butterworth, Pantheon Books, 482 pages, $30

In the late 19th century, as today, a terrorist cabal detonated bombs in the heart of the Western world. Judged by the number of successful attacks on politicians and royalty, that force was more directly threatening to the inner circles of power than today’s radical Islam.

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BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENCE

2011-01-10T02:20:00.003-05:00

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

In tandem, the two books identify the complex policy continuum for the Indian strategic community

LIMITED WARS IN SOUTH ASIA: Maj. Gen GD Bakshi (Retd); Centre for Land Warfare Studies

BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENCE - Frontier of the 21st Century: Wg. Cdr Anand Sharma; Both the books are pub. by KW Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 4676/21, I Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 780 each.

The security and ethical dilemmas that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) pose became an intractable reality after the Hiroshima holocaust of August 1945. The apocalyptic nuclear age had dawned and the advent of the inter-continental ballistic missile during the early Cold War decades completed the global trapeze of ‘terror-induced coercion' as a tool of national policy. Security became MAD — or to clarify — the foundation of global security was based on ‘mutually assured destruction.' This, in turn, was predicated on the U.S.-Soviet 1972 ABM (anti-ballistic missile) treaty, which forbade the development of credible missile defence. Asia, site of the only two nuclear explosions (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), was WMD-ized in October 1964 when China became a nuclear weapon power. Over the uneasy, intervening decades, southern Asia — the Indian subcontinent in particular — became turbulent in the nuclear domain in an opaque manner, till the May 1998 nuclear explosions which saw India, and then Pakistan, becoming states with nuclear weapons.

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Forgotten Witness to the Gulag

2011-01-09T02:11:00.000-05:00

From : Forward
Photo : http://forward.com

Forgotten Witness to the Gulag

Yuli Margolin and His Russian Memoirs

If a writer’s message is unwelcome, it may not be heeded for many years. January 21 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin at age 70. Margolin — whose first name is also transliterated as Julius or Yuly, and was also known as Yehudah in Israel — should be as familiar a name as Solzhenitsyn for bearing witness to the Soviet gulag system. Yet the first-ever complete edition of Margolin’s almost 800-page-long gulag memoir in any language only appeared last November from the small Paris literary press Les éditions Le Bruit du temps.

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The Memory Chalet

2011-01-08T02:14:00.003-05:00

From : Washington Monthly
Photo : www.washingtonmonthly.com

The Memory Chalet
by Tony Judt
Penguin Press HC, 240 pp.

Tony Judt disliked the grand title “public intellectual,” even though he embodied it to the last day of his life. Judt (pronounced “Jutt”) was a professor of European history at New York University who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at age sixty-two in August 2010. Before his death he rose to great prominence on two fronts. First, he published in 2005 the magnificent, comprehensive Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a book encyclopedic in its learning yet engagingly written and argued. The pinnacle of his career, it quickly became one of the most celebrated works of history in recent years. Second, Judt contributed dozens of bracing, relentlessly clear, and frequently provocative essays to the New York Review of Books, his intellectual home. His audience was more receptive to some of his arguments than others. Judt’s harsh critiques of unrepentant communist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawn and Louis Althusser, and his championing of European-style social democracy, put Marxism firmly in its place while articulating a strong, practicable vision for the left. Yet his equally withering assessment of the Middle East crisi

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Man & Woman: An Inside Story

2011-01-07T01:09:00.003-05:00

From : The Economist
Photo : www.economist.com

How men and women are less different than you think

The making of the sexes

Man & Woman: An Inside Story. By Donald Pfaff. Oxford University Press USA; 232 pages; $27.95 and £15.99. Buy from

THE trouble with books about the differences between men and women is that the authors are all too often partisan, or perceived to be. Any writer brave enough to take on this subject needs to be meticulous and unflaggingly sceptical in his or her approach. Rebecca Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist at Barnard College, pulled this off last year with “Brain Storm” (Harvard), in which she showed up the flaws in research that attributes sex differences in behaviour to prenatal exposure to hormones. Out of the rubble of the edifice she destroyed, or at least left wobbling dangerously, Donald Pfaff has constructed a far more complex structure, that more closely resembles what scientists know about this subject.

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