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L.A. Times - Books & Talks
'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
September 11: Terror and Boredom IT would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.
'The House of Widows' by Askold Melnyczuk
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Family secrets lie at the end of a dark and twisted path FROM its puzzling opening line ("The most common grammatical error is the lie"), there's an ominous vibe to Askold Melnyczuk's third novel, "The House of Widows," and the sense of unease lingers until the final sentence. It's a mysterious, masterfully taut story in which dread plays a prominent role.
'Marco Polo' by Laurence Bergreen
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0700
An account of the adventures of the celebrated 13th century world traveler. MARCO POLO was only 17 when he departed for China in 1271 with his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo. Those two merchants of Venice were known to the boy primarily as storytellers of their fabulous exploits, writes award-winning biographer and historian Laurence Bergreen, for they had been absent more than 16 years, Marco's entire childhood. The pair had followed trade routes east, encountered exotic countries and customs and survived many perils; they had even lived for a time at the court of Kublai Khan, the leader of the Mongol Empire. Eventually they agreed to accompany his emissary west to the pope, vowing to return to Cambulac (Beijing) with several items the Great Khan had requested.
NYT > Books
Books of The Times: Truth and Beauty? Only in Afterlife
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:45:07 -0000
Stanley Plumly’s book on John Keats is part biography, part study in the vicissitudes of poetic reputation.
Simon Gray, Playwright, Dies at 71; Aimed Wit at Intellectuals, and Himself
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:45:31 -0000
Mr. Gray wrote bitingly comic plays like “Butley” and “Otherwise Engaged” about the educated British middle class and manically confessional late-in-life memoirs.
Books of The Times: Coldblooded Commerce in Coldblooded Contraband
Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:27:58 -0000
In “The Lizard King,” Bryan Christy dissects the global trade in reptile trafficking.
Fiction & Poetry
Trouble
Matthew Dickman Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter hung in the Tahitian bedroom of her mother’s house, while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes you can look at the clouds or the trees and they look nothing like . . .
The Dinner Party
Joshua Ferris Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
On occasion, the two women went to lunch and she came home offended by some pettiness. And he would say, “Why do this to yourself?” He wanted to keep her from being hurt. He also wanted his wife and her friend to drift apart so that he never had to . . .
Attabled with the Spinning Years
John Ashbery Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
Does it mean one thing with work, one with age, and so on? Or are the two opposing doors irrevocably closed? The song that started in the middle, did that close down too? Just because it says here I like tomatoes, is that a reason to call off victory? Yet . . .
London Review of Books
Just Two Clicks · Jonathan Raban: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle
As Barack Obama never tires of saying, America is a country where 'ordinary people can do extraordinary things.' In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York, who had been living in the US for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian, with a long-barrelled Colt .22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law's gun collection. By the time the bodies were discovered in their house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, huddled together beneath a rumpled duvet in the brand-new four-poster bed bought by the couple just ten days before, Entwistle was home in England, living with his parents in Worksop, as if what had happened in America was a violent dream from which he'd woken to reality in his old back bedroom at 27 Coleridge Road.
A Man or a Girl's Blouse? · Jeremy Harding: Serbia after Karadzic
At the time of the parliamentary elections in Serbia earlier this summer, the possibility that Radovan Karadzic, once the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, might be handed over to stand trial at The Hague seemed remote. The acquittal of the former KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj in April had stunned opinion in Serbia and added to the sense that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was a Serb-grinding machine which spat out Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians and Croats intact. The idea of any more Serbs going on trial was not popular: even someone like Karadzic, born in Montenegro, long resident in Sarajevo and regarded by many as a ludicrous figure. His arrest late last month illustrates how rapidly things are changing in Serbia, and how keen the new pro-European leadership is to drive its policies forward. The process of EU accession has long been conditional on the delivery of the big three: Karadzic, Goran Hadzic, a Croatian Serb wanted for the massacre of Croats in Vukovar in 1991, and Ratko Mladic, the hands-on commander at Srebrenica. But the capture of Dr Karadzic - psychiatrist, poet, New Age healer, telegenic bigot and mass murderer - is the greater public relations coup.
Madame Matisse's Hat · T.J. Clark: On Matisse
Henri Matisse's portrait of his wife, Amélie Parayre, was first shown at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. The catalogue called it simply La Femme au chapeau. Journalists soon decided (or pretended) that Matisse's painting was scandalous, and the public turned up in droves to make fun of it. So far so predictable: the script was forty years old. But on 15 November something unusual happened. Two paragraphs of real and vehement criticism appeared in the Symbolist journal L'Hermitage, signed by the painter-critic Maurice Denis. Ever since, they have haunted our picture of 20th-century art: What one finds above all, particularly in Matisse, is artificiality; not literary artificiality, which follows from the search to give expression to ideas; nor decorative artificiality, as the makers of Turkish and Persian carpets conceived it; no, something more abstract still; painting beyond every contingency, painting in itself, the pure act of painting . . . What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic: you begin from the multiple and individual, and by definition, as the neo-Platonists would say, that is, by abstraction and generalisation, you arrive at ideas, at pure Forms of paintings [des noumènes de tableaux]. You are only happy when all the elements of your work are intelligible to you. Nothing must remain of the conditional and accidental in your universe: you strip it of everything that does not correspond to the possibilities of expression provided by reason . . . You should resign yourself to the fact that everything cannot be intelligible. Give up the idea of rebuilding a new art by means of reason alone. Put your trust in sensibility, in instinct.
guardian.co.uk Books
Novel on prophet's wife pulled for fear of backlash
Suzanne Goldenberg Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:15:28 -0000
The Jewel of the Medina was to have been released on August 12 by Ballantine Books
Voting opens in search for oddest book title
Alison Flood Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:43:45 -0000
Forget the Booker of Bookers. The quest to find the oddest book title of the past 30 years has begun today
Quiz: The Olympics in literature
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:04:24 -0000
Forget Beijing, the ultimate test of your readerly prowess is here
NPR Topics: Books
Orwell's Diaries Go Online
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:00:00 -0400
Previously unpublished George Orwell diaries are being released online as a daily blog. The first entry, from Aug. 9, 1938, will appear online Saturday, exactly 70 years after Orwell wrote it. The diaries shed light on European history and Orwell's life.
What Your Driving Habits Say About You
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:21:00 -0400
Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, talks about the psychology of driving and the engineering of roadways. He explains some contradictory traffic truths: why roundabouts are safer than intersections and how slower can actually be faster.
'Kiss My Math' Tries To Make Pre-Algebra Cool
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:03:00 -0400
Actress and mathematician Danica McKellar is on a mission to get middle-school girls to stop hating math. In her new book Kiss My Math, — a follow-up to Math Doesn't Suck — McKellar breaks math into easy-to-digest concepts so girls can "show pre-algebra who's boss."
Slashdot: Book Reviews
Subject to Change
samzenpus Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:00:00 -0000
prostoalex writes "Most companies would call themselves innovative and would claim they're delivering an above-average service to their customers. Yet, their customers opinions might differ. If you drill a company on their innovation practices, they would probably mention two approaches they employ: 1. Their research department meets with target groups, compiles presentations for the upper management, which then occasionally hands those reports over to the development department. 2. Their research or marketing department comes up with competitive matrix of the products available from competition. In a meeting then, executives see that their product is missing a feature, and hence the development department is assigned the task of adding 'an Internet-enabled installer' to the product, since everybody else offers them, thereby creating market expectations." Read on for the rest of Alex's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Ultimate CSS Reference
samzenpus Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:21:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "Cascading Style Sheets are now the dominant method used to format web pages. Even something as simple as modifying a WordPress blog can involve digging around a bit in CSS. A quick search at Amazon on CSS returns over 7 thousand books in the computer category alone. This book claims to be the ultimate, though, and that made me approach it with a bit of skepticism. Sure, it could be a decent reference, but is it truly the ultimate reference? I admit I was curious to see." Read on for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Virtual Honeypots
samzenpus Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:04:00 -0000
rsiles writes "Honeynet solutions were seen just as a research technology a couple of years ago. It is not the case anymore. Due to the inherent constraints and limitations of the current and widely deployed intrusion detection solutions, like IDS/IPS and antivirus, it is time to extended our detection arsenal and capabilities with new tools: virtual honeypots. Do not get confused about the book title, specially about the "virtual" term. The main reason to mention virtual honeypots, although the book covers all kind of honeynet/honeypot technologies, is because during the last few years virtualization has been a key element in the deployment of honeynets. It has offered us a significant cost reduction, more flexibility, reusability and multiple benefits. The main drawback of this solution is the detection of virtual environments by some malware specimens." Read below for the rest of Raul's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Books
Read what you like
mkehe Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:34:22 -0000
It’s hard not to be at least a little bit curious about a writer like Matthew Kneale. After all, he speaks 7 languages (sort of, at least), comes from a family of writers, and writes about subjects as diverse as arms dealers, Ethiopian mothers, Chinese wives and Middle England.
Outrage
picks Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:21:02 -0000
Outrage by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann is an excellent, informative book.
“When We Were Romans”
reviews Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:10:19 -0000
Nine-year-old Lawrence, it must be said, is a bit of a mama’s boy. But since his dad has been lurking around their London neighborhood and telling lies to the neighbors, Hannah needs somebody on which to lean.
Subscribe to Literature RSS feed 
'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
September 11: Terror and Boredom IT would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.
'The House of Widows' by Askold Melnyczuk
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Family secrets lie at the end of a dark and twisted path FROM its puzzling opening line ("The most common grammatical error is the lie"), there's an ominous vibe to Askold Melnyczuk's third novel, "The House of Widows," and the sense of unease lingers until the final sentence. It's a mysterious, masterfully taut story in which dread plays a prominent role.
'Marco Polo' by Laurence Bergreen
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0700
An account of the adventures of the celebrated 13th century world traveler. MARCO POLO was only 17 when he departed for China in 1271 with his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo. Those two merchants of Venice were known to the boy primarily as storytellers of their fabulous exploits, writes award-winning biographer and historian Laurence Bergreen, for they had been absent more than 16 years, Marco's entire childhood. The pair had followed trade routes east, encountered exotic countries and customs and survived many perils; they had even lived for a time at the court of Kublai Khan, the leader of the Mongol Empire. Eventually they agreed to accompany his emissary west to the pope, vowing to return to Cambulac (Beijing) with several items the Great Khan had requested.
NYT > Books
Books of The Times: Truth and Beauty? Only in Afterlife
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:45:07 -0000
Stanley Plumly’s book on John Keats is part biography, part study in the vicissitudes of poetic reputation.
Simon Gray, Playwright, Dies at 71; Aimed Wit at Intellectuals, and Himself
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:45:31 -0000
Mr. Gray wrote bitingly comic plays like “Butley” and “Otherwise Engaged” about the educated British middle class and manically confessional late-in-life memoirs.
Books of The Times: Coldblooded Commerce in Coldblooded Contraband
Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:27:58 -0000
In “The Lizard King,” Bryan Christy dissects the global trade in reptile trafficking.
Fiction & Poetry
Trouble
Matthew Dickman Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter hung in the Tahitian bedroom of her mother’s house, while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes you can look at the clouds or the trees and they look nothing like . . .
The Dinner Party
Joshua Ferris Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
On occasion, the two women went to lunch and she came home offended by some pettiness. And he would say, “Why do this to yourself?” He wanted to keep her from being hurt. He also wanted his wife and her friend to drift apart so that he never had to . . .
Attabled with the Spinning Years
John Ashbery Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
Does it mean one thing with work, one with age, and so on? Or are the two opposing doors irrevocably closed? The song that started in the middle, did that close down too? Just because it says here I like tomatoes, is that a reason to call off victory? Yet . . .
London Review of Books
Just Two Clicks · Jonathan Raban: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle
As Barack Obama never tires of saying, America is a country where 'ordinary people can do extraordinary things.' In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York, who had been living in the US for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian, with a long-barrelled Colt .22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law's gun collection. By the time the bodies were discovered in their house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, huddled together beneath a rumpled duvet in the brand-new four-poster bed bought by the couple just ten days before, Entwistle was home in England, living with his parents in Worksop, as if what had happened in America was a violent dream from which he'd woken to reality in his old back bedroom at 27 Coleridge Road.
A Man or a Girl's Blouse? · Jeremy Harding: Serbia after Karadzic
At the time of the parliamentary elections in Serbia earlier this summer, the possibility that Radovan Karadzic, once the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, might be handed over to stand trial at The Hague seemed remote. The acquittal of the former KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj in April had stunned opinion in Serbia and added to the sense that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was a Serb-grinding machine which spat out Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians and Croats intact. The idea of any more Serbs going on trial was not popular: even someone like Karadzic, born in Montenegro, long resident in Sarajevo and regarded by many as a ludicrous figure. His arrest late last month illustrates how rapidly things are changing in Serbia, and how keen the new pro-European leadership is to drive its policies forward. The process of EU accession has long been conditional on the delivery of the big three: Karadzic, Goran Hadzic, a Croatian Serb wanted for the massacre of Croats in Vukovar in 1991, and Ratko Mladic, the hands-on commander at Srebrenica. But the capture of Dr Karadzic - psychiatrist, poet, New Age healer, telegenic bigot and mass murderer - is the greater public relations coup.
Madame Matisse's Hat · T.J. Clark: On Matisse
Henri Matisse's portrait of his wife, Amélie Parayre, was first shown at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. The catalogue called it simply La Femme au chapeau. Journalists soon decided (or pretended) that Matisse's painting was scandalous, and the public turned up in droves to make fun of it. So far so predictable: the script was forty years old. But on 15 November something unusual happened. Two paragraphs of real and vehement criticism appeared in the Symbolist journal L'Hermitage, signed by the painter-critic Maurice Denis. Ever since, they have haunted our picture of 20th-century art: What one finds above all, particularly in Matisse, is artificiality; not literary artificiality, which follows from the search to give expression to ideas; nor decorative artificiality, as the makers of Turkish and Persian carpets conceived it; no, something more abstract still; painting beyond every contingency, painting in itself, the pure act of painting . . . What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic: you begin from the multiple and individual, and by definition, as the neo-Platonists would say, that is, by abstraction and generalisation, you arrive at ideas, at pure Forms of paintings [des noumènes de tableaux]. You are only happy when all the elements of your work are intelligible to you. Nothing must remain of the conditional and accidental in your universe: you strip it of everything that does not correspond to the possibilities of expression provided by reason . . . You should resign yourself to the fact that everything cannot be intelligible. Give up the idea of rebuilding a new art by means of reason alone. Put your trust in sensibility, in instinct.
guardian.co.uk Books
Novel on prophet's wife pulled for fear of backlash
Suzanne Goldenberg Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:15:28 -0000
The Jewel of the Medina was to have been released on August 12 by Ballantine Books
Voting opens in search for oddest book title
Alison Flood Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:43:45 -0000
Forget the Booker of Bookers. The quest to find the oddest book title of the past 30 years has begun today
Quiz: The Olympics in literature
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:04:24 -0000
Forget Beijing, the ultimate test of your readerly prowess is here
NPR Topics: Books
Orwell's Diaries Go Online
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:00:00 -0400
Previously unpublished George Orwell diaries are being released online as a daily blog. The first entry, from Aug. 9, 1938, will appear online Saturday, exactly 70 years after Orwell wrote it. The diaries shed light on European history and Orwell's life.
What Your Driving Habits Say About You
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:21:00 -0400
Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, talks about the psychology of driving and the engineering of roadways. He explains some contradictory traffic truths: why roundabouts are safer than intersections and how slower can actually be faster.
'Kiss My Math' Tries To Make Pre-Algebra Cool
Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:03:00 -0400
Actress and mathematician Danica McKellar is on a mission to get middle-school girls to stop hating math. In her new book Kiss My Math, — a follow-up to Math Doesn't Suck — McKellar breaks math into easy-to-digest concepts so girls can "show pre-algebra who's boss."
Slashdot: Book Reviews
Subject to Change
samzenpus Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:00:00 -0000
prostoalex writes "Most companies would call themselves innovative and would claim they're delivering an above-average service to their customers. Yet, their customers opinions might differ. If you drill a company on their innovation practices, they would probably mention two approaches they employ: 1. Their research department meets with target groups, compiles presentations for the upper management, which then occasionally hands those reports over to the development department. 2. Their research or marketing department comes up with competitive matrix of the products available from competition. In a meeting then, executives see that their product is missing a feature, and hence the development department is assigned the task of adding 'an Internet-enabled installer' to the product, since everybody else offers them, thereby creating market expectations." Read on for the rest of Alex's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Ultimate CSS Reference
samzenpus Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:21:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "Cascading Style Sheets are now the dominant method used to format web pages. Even something as simple as modifying a WordPress blog can involve digging around a bit in CSS. A quick search at Amazon on CSS returns over 7 thousand books in the computer category alone. This book claims to be the ultimate, though, and that made me approach it with a bit of skepticism. Sure, it could be a decent reference, but is it truly the ultimate reference? I admit I was curious to see." Read on for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Virtual Honeypots
samzenpus Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:04:00 -0000
rsiles writes "Honeynet solutions were seen just as a research technology a couple of years ago. It is not the case anymore. Due to the inherent constraints and limitations of the current and widely deployed intrusion detection solutions, like IDS/IPS and antivirus, it is time to extended our detection arsenal and capabilities with new tools: virtual honeypots. Do not get confused about the book title, specially about the "virtual" term. The main reason to mention virtual honeypots, although the book covers all kind of honeynet/honeypot technologies, is because during the last few years virtualization has been a key element in the deployment of honeynets. It has offered us a significant cost reduction, more flexibility, reusability and multiple benefits. The main drawback of this solution is the detection of virtual environments by some malware specimens." Read below for the rest of Raul's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Books
Read what you like
mkehe Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:34:22 -0000
It’s hard not to be at least a little bit curious about a writer like Matthew Kneale. After all, he speaks 7 languages (sort of, at least), comes from a family of writers, and writes about subjects as diverse as arms dealers, Ethiopian mothers, Chinese wives and Middle England.
Outrage
picks Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:21:02 -0000
Outrage by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann is an excellent, informative book.
“When We Were Romans”
reviews Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:10:19 -0000
Nine-year-old Lawrence, it must be said, is a bit of a mama’s boy. But since his dad has been lurking around their London neighborhood and telling lies to the neighbors, Hannah needs somebody on which to lean.
Introducing Miss Mai - A short biography.
Meta Description: [ Introducing Miss Mai By Safynaz Kazem ]
The Mirror of Mai - A review by Youssef Rakha.
Meta Description: [ Next week, the Supreme Council for Culture will hold an international symposium to mark the passing of a century since the publication of Qasim Amin's The Liberation of Women. Here, Al-Ahram Weekly remembers Mai Ziyada, one of the most remarkable advocates of women's liberation in the Arab world ]
