Books

'Sunny Chernobyl': Beauty In A Haze Of Pollution

In some of the dirtiest places on Earth, author and environmentalist Andrew Blackwell found some beauty. His book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, tours the deforestation of the Amazon, the oil sand mines in Canada and the world's most polluted city, located in China.

Blackwell says his ode to polluted locales is a bid for re-engagement with places people have shrunk away from in disgust.

Full piece on NPR

Couple Has Saucy Spat Over 50 Shades of Gray

Daily Mail UK reports on a not quite lethal assault with HP Brown Sauce.

A man has appeared in court after taking revenge on his girlfriend who refused to stop reading the erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey - by squirting sauce all over her face.

Raymond Hodgson, 31, was charged with common assault after being appalled to discover that his partner of five years, Emma McCormick, had been reading the racy book.

Carlisle Magistrates’ Court heard how their tiff over the book escalated to the point where Hodgson, from Carlisle, Cumbria, decided take to his own saucy revenge.

LeBron James, open book: Star credits reading for making him calmer during playoffs

"Turns out there's nothing whatsoever feigned about LeBron's one-man book club. Nobody's paying him to read (although it's OK for folks to be paid to lose weight on TV). He's not doing product-placement favors for any author buddies. Simply, LeBron James decided before the playoffs he would be best served if he stopped watching hour after hour of sports on television, and got off the Internet, and stopped tweeting, and stopped reading Twitter."

Read more at ESPN.com.

46 Pages

Book: 46 Pages - Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the turning point to Independence

Thomas Paine, a native of Thetford, England, arrived in America's colonies with little in the way of money, reputation, or prospects, though he did have a letter of recommendation in his pocket from Benjamin Franklin. Paine also had a passion for liberty in all its forms, and an abiding hatred of tyranny. His forceful, direct expression of those principles found voice in a pamphlet he wrote entitled Common Sense, which proved to be the most influential political work of the time. Ultimately, Paine's treatise provided inspiration to the second Continental Congress for the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. 46 Pages is a dramatic look at a pivotal moment in our country's formation, a scholar's meticulous recreation of the turbulent years leading up to the Revolutionary War, retold with excitement and new insight.

46 Pages

To Lure ‘Twilight’ Teenagers, Classic Books Get Bold Looks

Publishers are dressing classic novels like “Emma” and “Jane Eyre” in sexy new covers, hoping to appeal to the young-adult readers who made “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” so popular.


Full article

Dawn Powell’s Diaries for Sale on the Internet

If it weren’t for Tim Page, the diaries of Dawn Powell wouldn’t be worth much. Mr. Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former music critic at The Washington Post (and before that a frequent contributor to The New York Times), has pretty much single-handedly engineered a revival of interest in Powell, a New York novelist greatly admired by critics like Gore Vidal and Edmund Wilson, but whose career, even during her lifetime, was always in need of a jump start. When she died in 1965, most of her 15 novels were out of print. She was buried in a potter’s field.

Starting in 1991, Mr. Page, who had discovered Powell by accident while reading a review in a collection of Wilson’s criticism, set about rekindling interest in her writing.

Full article

Reader responses: Books you want banned

Salon asked which books you think kids should never have to read in school.

Piece at Salon.com

Trouble in paradise: UCLA book enumerates challenges faced by middle-class L.A. families

It's the place to look for the plumber's phone number, the date of the next doctor's appointment, that photo from your summer vacation and the spelling test your kid aced last week.

Yet even for all these telling glimpses into the minutiae of daily life, your refrigerator door reveals much more about your middle-class family.

The sheer volume of objects clinging to it may indicate how much clutter can be found throughout your home. Furthermore, that clutter provides a strong clue to how much stress Mom feels when she walks through the door at the end of a day at work.

This is one of the juicy tidbits from "Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors," the first book by researchers affiliated with UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families

Full article

Googler proposes '451' error code to signal Internet censorship, in honor of Ray Bradbury

A 451 Internet error code? Digital Trends has the details:

"Government-imposed online censorship has become increasingly prevalent over the past few years...When censorship does happen, we need a sign that clearly tells us that that’s the reason for a site’s inaccessibility.

Enter Tim Bray, a software developer at Google who has proposed a solution: a “451? error code that displays anytime you visit a site blocked by the government. The number 451 is in honor of late author Ray Bradbury, whose science fiction classic Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1950, warned of a dystopian world defined by government-imposed censorship (in the form of burning any house that contains books)."

LoC's "Books That Shaped America"

It's summer, it's a Friday, why not get way over-invested in arguing over a list?

The Library of Congress, the world’s largest repository of knowledge and information, began a multiyear “Celebration of the Book” with an exhibition on “Books That Shaped America.” The initial books in the exhibition are displayed below.

“This list is a starting point,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “It is not a register of the ‘best’ American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.”

My initial reactions:

  • Why only one book after 1987?
  • Where is Dr. Atkins's diet book? Think of the influence that one diet book, originally published in the 1970s, had and still has about how America eats.

 

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