I’m a great admirer of James Hansen, though not in agreement with all his prescriptions for the planet. His call to arms - Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (what is it with never-ending titles these days?) – came out last December, so why [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
Last August I avidly read The Lives of Ants by Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon. No doubt I assumed that would do me for ant books for another half decade. Not so – check out this sampler in The New York Review of Books of six stunning photos from Mark Moffet’s forthcoming book Adventures among Ants: [...]
This intriguing review by Charles Bock in the New York Times, of John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, sent me straight to my reading list. The core subject of the book is Yucca Mountain, of great interest to me. But is this work (I’m writing a book on nuclear power) or pleasure? Bock’s review suggests D’Agata’s [...]
Last week’s reading: Parrot and Olivier in America is Peter Carey at his most exuberant, wild almost. Recounting the fictional tale of the trip to the new, troubling democratic nation of the United States of America by French nobleman Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur and an artistic servant thrust upon him, John ‘Parrot’ Larrit. Carey succeeds marvellously in [...]
Last week’s reading: ‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?’: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country is an intriguing single-topic book by Kevin Mattson, an Ohio historian. He tells the story of the critical speech given by Carter on July 15, 1979, covering the energy crisis [...]
Last week’s reading: Robert Harris’s Lustrum is the second of two novels recounting the life of Roman philosopher/orator/lawyer/politician Cicero. Harris can write smoothly and entertainingly about any subject, modern or ancient, Lustrum being a good example. It’s an enjoyable and intriguing read, although the five-year period covered by this book is telescoped at the end, [...]
I’m a geek who is fascinated by geeks, their ascending (I believe, though many would dispute this) role in the modern world, and whether geeks are ‘better’ moral beings than non geeks (call them jocks, if you like). The topic of geeks is not one easy to pursue tangentially, so not much thinking has occurred [...]
2009 was a humdinger of a reading year. Publishers often seem to load up the end of the year with the best stuff, or at least the books that suit my tastes, and this year illustrated that trend strongly. I had to scramble to read enough of those end-of-year books to make sense of the [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
What the heck is The Bat Segundo Show? I must have registered, for I receive a semi-regular email telling me about it. Until now, I’ve binned the emails as products of another of my misguided online expressions of interest, but I read the latest one, and it’s got some potentially fascinating interviews: filmmaker Michael Haneke, [...]
Melbourne author Jeff Sparrow’s latest book takes him a long way from his previous ‘radical’ histories. After becoming fascinated by the mummified head of a Turkish solder in World War I, discovered in a country town recently, Sparrow embarks on a quest to find out how hard it is for humans to kill. Being fascinated, [...]
Also posted in Genocide |