LibWorm.com provides a librarian RSS filtering service. Over 1500 RSS librarian sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest headlines from journals and sites in the Biographies interest group. http://www.libworm.com/rss/librarianqueries.php Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:54:28 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://wplbookclub.blogspot.com/2016/04/louis-riel-comic-strip-biography-by.html In 1869, the Red River Settlement area, home to the French-speaking Metis, is sold to the Canadian government. Louis Riel, the de facto leader of the Red River Settlement, demands that they be granted the right to govern themselves. Not suprisingly, the government refuses this. This story relates Riel's resistance to the Canadian government's mistreatment of the Metis community.Louis Riel - Wikipediahttps://owa.fibrehost.net/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_RielLouis Riel - rethinking Riel (CBC Archives)Louis Riel - Trivial Pursuit (CBC Archives) Place a hold on a WPL copy of the book here. (Source: WPLBOOKCLUB) Wed, 20 Apr 2016 04:00:00 +0100 377637 http://hhsmedia.blogspot.com/2010/02/celebrate-black-history-month.html February is Black History Month. Test your knowledge of Civil Rights heroes by taking this interactive quiz.To learn more about the contributions of African Americans in history, try these great websites:African VoicesThis Smithsonian online exhibit celebrates Africa's diversity and long history.African American WorldSponsored by PBS, this website features a large collection of classroom resources for teachers and students.Black HistoryHere you can find an interactive timeline, biographies, and a collection of video clips. (Source: Huntingtown High School Library Media Center) Mon, 14 Feb 2011 05:00:00 +0100 819509 http://hhsmedia.blogspot.com/2010/02/celebrate-black-history-month.html February is Black History Month. Test your knowledge of Civil Rights heroes by taking this interactive quiz.To learn more about the contributions of African Americans in history, try these great websites:African VoicesThis Smithsonian online exhibit celebrates Africa's diversity and long history.African American WorldSponsored by PBS, this website features a large collection of classroom resources for teachers and students.Black HistoryHere you can find an interactive timeline, biographies, and a collection of video clips. (Source: Huntingtown High School Library Media Center) Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:00:00 +0100 815254 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/quiz/2010/sep/02/political-memoirs-quiz Tony Blair's biography is flying off the shelves, but how have his political friends and rivals fared in the literary bear pit? Test your knowledge of political memoirs, from Margaret Thatcher to Mo Mowlam (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:41:53 +0100 868550 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/02/tony-blair-prime-minister-memoirs Churchill got a Nobel prize for his - but other efforts by former PM's have succumbed to score-settling and defensivenessWinston Churchill had the right idea about memoirs. "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it," he revealed during the second world war. Most former prime ministers set out with a similar ambition, though few prove as successful in setting the terms of debate as Churchill's heroic six-volume account of the war largely did for many years. It won him a Nobel prize for literature.Tony Blair is only the latest former occupant of Number 10 to try his luck. He has one advantage shared by Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: a lucrative market in the United States, a place where he, like them, is more admired than at home.Sales are only one test, and the awkward truth is that the memoirs of lesser politicians (minor figures with a good writing style and a ringside seat, such as Alan Clark or Chris Mullin) often prove more enduring. So do those of the also-rans of politics, less calculating characters such as Denis Healey, Rab Butler or Norman Tebbit.After enduring attack from all sides, former premiers are too keen to explain and justify; they tend toward caution, defensiveness, and an unwillingness to exhibit vulnerability. Blair has clearly made an effort to avoid such pitfalls. He even admits liking a drink.Rare indeed are the killer facts in such books, score-settling is more the norm.Sir Anthony Eden's three-volume Full Circle passed up the chance to tell the truth of the Suez deception. Harold Wilson's dull thousand-page The Labour Government 1964-1970 makes no mention of his domineering political secretary, Marcia Williams.Jim Callaghan's Time and Chance was modest and decent, like the man himself. So was John Major's The Autobiography, an unexpected bestseller for HarperCollins. ... Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:00:11 +0100 868428 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BabyBoomerLibrarian/~3/d-4nZnJgkRU/professional-military-reading-list.html The Professional Military Reading List The U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List The Army List is compiled for leaders. The Chief of Staff of the Army (CSA) views it as a pillar for his leadership development efforts. Titles are included that will provoke critical thinking about Professional soldiering and the unique role of land power; analysis and reflection on the past and the future; and a deep understanding of the Army and the future of the profession of arms in the 21 st Century. U.S. Navy Professional Reading ListA list of books from Chief of Naval Operations Reading List that includes history, fiction, inspirational and patriotic titles, biographies and the classics on military strategy and theory. The list provides an understanding and analysis of sea power, naval history, naval aviation, and the role of the U.S. Navy in past, present and future conflicts. U.S. Marine Corps Reading List The Marine Corps Reading list is developed to enrich a reader's knowledge and understanding of war. To quote directly from the reading program's purpose, "How do we translate written words into sound military decision? Obviously, the first step is to read. Then we must relate what we have read to what we actually do in training, field exercises, war games, leadership,and the like. We must read and discuss our readings with each other." Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF) Reading List The CSAF Reading list is compiled to inform, analyze, inspire and educate. Titles are selected to inform readers about the history of the Air Force, analyze on-going conflicts and their relevancy to the future, inspire readers with success stories and provide lessons learned from conflicts. Coast Guard Commandant's Reading List This reading list is designed to offer Coast Guard people recommended books related to leadership. This list is not all-inclusive; the goal is to provide a starting point or expand existing knowledge and skills. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:42:00 +0100 868358 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/01/tony-blair-gordon-brown-reaction Battle that dominated decade of Labour government reopened as former PM's draft of history becomes instant bestsellerTony Blair repeatedly assured Gordon Brown that he would not contest the Labour leadership, then resolved within minutes of hearing of John Smith's death to stand, telling Peter Mandelson "it's mine", the former prime minister admits for the first time in his autobiography.Blair reveals that even before Smith's death he was "straining at the leash", straying out of his policy brief and becoming more convinced that "something was missing" in Brown's ability to lead. He admits that he toyed with the idea of leadership before Smith's death in 1994, but told Brown he had his backing in order to avoid a battle.Blair's book, A Journey, gives fresh details of the depths of the struggle between the two most powerful men in the Labour government and reopens the wounds of the Blair-Brown era on the day the ballots were sent out in the Labour leadership election.He describes Brown as "maddening", lacking political instinct and having "zero" emotional intelligence.A spokesman for Brown said the former prime minister would not comment on the book. Some in the Brown "crew", as Blair describes them, sought to highlight the positive aspects of the two men's relationship.Ed Balls, a key Brown ally and leadership contender, said: "For all the tensions, difficulties and arguments which undoubtedly happened, [Blair and Brown] achieved great things together. I wish these memoirs could be a time for celebrating those achievements, not recrimination."Blair also used an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr to try to highlight the achievements the two men had made. "Gordon is somebody of enormous talent, ability, commitment. And in the end, his contribution was enormous. I mean he was a huge, solid figure for the government," he said. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:10:20 +0100 868195 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/01/a-journey-waterstones-fastest-seller Waterstone's says autobiography has enjoyed 'unprecedented' sales for its genre on first day of publicationA Journey is already Waterstone's fastest seller ever in the autobiography and biography category. The chain said the book had "unprecedented" sales on its release this morning."We've never seen anything like this for a political book. It is rewriting what we expect this sort of book to achieve," said Andrew Lake, Waterstone's politics buyer. By 3pm yesterday, A Journey had sold more copies than Peter Mandelson's book, The Third Man, in its first three days. And the chain predicted that by the end of the day Tony Blair's book would outsell The Third Man's entire first three weeks."Mandelson's book was, at the time, the fastest selling political book Waterstone's had ever seen, but has now been eclipsed by Blair," said Lake."You cannot fault Mandelson's book for timing, marketing and content – it was brilliantly done – but Tony Blair has returned to show who really is the boss when it comes to New Labour. Mandelson may remain the prince, but Blair has reclaimed his title as king."The chain has the book on sale at half price, £12.50, while it was also available on Amazon yesterday at anything from £12.50 to its full price – and up to an astounding £99.99.Tony BlairLabourBiographyWaterstone'sBooksellersRetail industryAmelia Hillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:50:18 +0100 868196 http://theipl.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/september-2010/ Welcome to the Link. Each month the ipl2 brings you some of the best information sites on the Internet. If you have an Internet connection, you can connect with us! The September edition of the Link is filled with birthdays and celebrations throughout the world. So join the party and explore the world through these colorful and informative websites! Suggest a site for the ipl2. Know of a great site, but you cannot find it in the ipl2? Use the form located at http://www.ipl.org/div/contact/ to let us know about good resources to add to our collections. September 1 – Independence Day Uzbekistan Uzbekistan: A Country Study “An historical overview and information on the geography, economy, government, transportation and telecommunications, foreign relations, national security, languages, religions, and people and society of Uzbekistan. Includes a glossary, a bibliography, and statistical tables. Searchable. “Completed [in] March 1996.” A part of the Web site Country Studies, from the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress.” Country Profile: Uzbekistan “Profile of this former Soviet country that is “positioned on the ancient Great Silk Road between Europe and Asia.” Includes demographic facts, historical overview, timeline of key events, and information about leaders and media. Site also includes links to related news stories, and audio of the national anthem. From the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).” September 2 – National Day Vietnam Country Profile: Vietnam “Profile of Vietnam, which “became a unified country in 1976.” Includes demographic facts, historical overview, timeline of key events, and brief listings of leaders and media outlets. Site also includes links to related news stories, audio of the national anthem, and video clips. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:22:29 +0100 868404 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/gallery/2010/sep/01/tony-blair-book-release The former prime minister is back in the media spotlight as A Journey hits shop shelves (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:05:11 +0100 868200 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/01/tony-blair-a-journey-booksellers Retailers predict high sales for former PM's political memoirAnd so the journey – well, A Journey – begins. Tony Blair's heavily embargoed, highly anticipated political memoir hits the shelves this morning, amid feverish predictions from booksellers.The book, running to over 600 pages, leapfrogged into top position in Amazon.co.uk's bestseller chart this morning from 11th place last night, overtaking bestselling books by Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer and Terry Pratchett. The online bookseller says it is on target to become its biggest-selling political memoir ever.Amazon.co.uk said that Blair's A Journey had generated 36% more pre-orders than Peter Mandelson's The Third Man at the same stage. It added that the book "is on target to overtake that title to become the most successful political memoir of all time on Amazon.co.uk" – news that will be welcomed by the Royal British Legion, to which Blair is donating all proceeds from the memoir, including his estimated £4.6m advance."Both books have performed very well and, perhaps unsurprisingly in a year when there has been a general election, we are encountering a strong appetite for books from the world of politics," said Amy Worth, Amazon's head of bookbuying.At Waterstone's – where Blair will sign copes of his autobiography on 8 September amid heavy security – A Journey was hovering in eighth place in its online bestseller chart this morning, while Foyles was predicting that the book would be the independent chain's bestseller of the week."Most bookshops have revised their expectations for A Journey, after such impressive sales for Peter Mandelson's book. Initial sales will be very high indeed and we expect it to be our bestseller this week, even on just four days' sales," said Jonathan Ruppin at the independent bookseller. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:12:35 +0100 868202 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/sep/01/sitting-lying-reading-position AbeBooks wonder if it's weird to read lying on your stomach. The answer is yes: everyone knows the side is best. Don't they?I don't mean to boast, but I think I have quite strong hands. Strong because they are forced, every night in bed, to hold up whatever hefty tome I'm currently reading (they generally seem to be long, the books I choose). It's an essential end to my day: I find I can't actually go to sleep unless I've read for at least five minutes, and I'll even do it when I'm somewhat intoxicated, words blurring and all – although in the morning I'll never remember what happened during the bit I read.Anyway, I've been moved to consider how I do it – not something I ever really thought about before – by the nice folk over at AbeBooks, who've been wondering if it's weird to read lying on your stomach, propped on your elbows (and yes, I reckon it sounds painful)."I unspokenly assumed other people read like this, too, until I mentioned to my coworker Julie that I had sore elbows because the book I was reading (Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden) was so good that I'd been reading a lot more per night than usual," writes one employee on the company's Reading Copy book blog. "She made a confused face, and when we got into it she informed me that when she reads in bed she reads on her side, propping her face/head on one hand."Other techniques mentioned at AbeBooks include sitting up against the headboard with some pillows, "scooching slowly down as I get sleepier and sleepier", and the bizarre pillow-under-the stomach approach, with the book propped against the wall.My technique is also lying on my side, but I prop myself up on a few pillows and hold the book in both hands. If it's a particularly large book I'll balance one edge of it on the bed. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:13:20 +0100 868207 http://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2010/09/remembering-how-media-helped-get-us-in.html October 30, 2008CHARLIE ROSE: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is. TOM BROKAW: No, I don't, either. CHARLIE ROSE: I don't know how he really sees where China is. TOM BROKAW: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy. CHARLIE ROSE: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him? TOM BROKAW: Yeah, it's an interesting question. CHARLIE ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very inspirational (sic) speeches. TOM BROKAW: Two of them! I don't know what books he's read.CHARLIE ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama? TOM BROKAW: There's a lot about him we don't know. (Source: Collecting my Thoughts) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0100 868230 http://csbsjulibrary.blogspot.com/2010/09/36-of-online-americans-consult.html More than one-third of American adult Internet users consult the citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on a typical day, 8 percent of online Americans consult Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one place to start when understanding your research topic but another place would be Credo Reference. It is a huge collection of great reference books: encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographies, measurement conversions and much more!We also subscribe to Oxford Reference Online and Gale Reference Online, both contain great collections of reference books! You can find these under "Articles & More" then "Encyclopedias & Dictionaries" on the library's homepage.-sg (Source: CSBSJU Library Blog) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0100 868208 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/aug/31/tony-blair-journey The memoirs of the former prime minister go before an apparently eager public tomorrow. Rather than shelling out for them, why not just guess what he'll say?Let's get one thing clear: we're not comparing Tony Blair to Lord Voldemort. No, really we're not. But it struck the books desk today that a competition we ran at the time of the release of JK Rowling's final Potter tome, asking readers for their predicted (or funniest) first line of the novel might work rather well for Blair's eagerly-awaited (by some) political memoir, A Journey, which hits the shelves tomorrow. Just to refresh your memory and alert you to the full potential for "it was a dark and stormy night" horrors, here are a few of the gems that have emerged about the book over the last few weeks in the run-up to publication.The book was originally to be called "The Journey" but a last minute article tweak saw it become "A Journey". The BBC suggest that the change "... was aimed at making it sound less pompous or even messianic, although publisher Random House has described it as a 'minor editorial decision'."It was assumed by many that the book's £4.5m advance would go towards paying the mortgage on Blair's £3.5m home near Hyde Park but, in a typically tactically astute move, Blair announced last week that he would be handing over all that he makes from the book – the full advance and any royalties – to the Royal British Legion."It also means people who disagree with his actions can buy the book and read it without feeling they are paying him money," shrugged Benedicte Page, associate editor of the Bookseller – and, sure enough, the book shot up the Amazon pre-order sales chart immediately after the deal was announced.However, those customers need not bother taking their books to the Big Blair Signing at Waterstone's in Piccadilly next week. ... Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:57:43 +0100 867835 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/08/30/whats-in-a-name/ Two young men with the same name were featured in the Baltimore Sun in December 2000.  One was named a Rhodes Scholar and the other was wanted for allegedly killing a police offi­cer in an armed rob­bery.  These two young men started out on very similar paths - how did their lives turn out so differently? The full story of what happened is told by Wes Moore, the Rhodes Scholar, veteran, White House Fellow and successful businessman in The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. This book should be required reading for all middle school students.  That’s around the age things really started to fall apart for the other Wes Moore. Both boys grew up with loving mothers who wanted their sons to succeed and tried their very best to protect them from a tough environment.  Both boys had other family members looking out for them.  Both boys were bright but had issues with school.  Both boys rebelled at about the same age.  One got sent to military school and the other started dealing drugs.  By the time they were teenagers, their futures were set.  One was on his way to becoming an officer in the military and the other had been arrested multiple times and was headed toward life in prison. Man, is this a sobering book.  I can’t say that I enjoyed it, but I’m so glad that I read it.  Even though the subject matter is heavy, it’s very readable.  Author Wes Moore is even-handed with details and was able to obtain in-depth background information from the other Wes Moore and his family, as well as family photos.  I imagine this title will also be popular with book groups.  There’s much to discuss. (Source: MADreads) Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:04:30 +0100 867556 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/gi1vzv4P6O0/  Resource of the Week: BBC British Novelists Archive Collection By Adrian Janes, DocuTicker UK Contributing Editor The BBC is increasingly finding ways to exploit and make more freely available its vast collection of visual and aural content. The latest example of this is its British Novelists Archive Collection. This is a complement to a BBC TV series, In Their Own Words: British Novelists. But whereas the series of necessity relies on short clips of interviews with leading authors as it charts the history of the 20th century British novel, this website is an archive of complete interviews and talks. These vary in length from five minutes up to an hour, and in year of broadcast from 1937 (Virginia Woolf) to 2009 (Zadie Smith). Care has been taken to present a mixture of writers, which implicitly charts the gradual shift during the century from a literary field dominated by white males to one in which women and minorities are clearly visible and audible, through examples like Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. Each programme is accompanied by a synopsis and a few astutely chosen links which complement the archive and might well merit separate bookmarking. These include: Modern radio interviews from the programmes Book Club and Open Book, the latter being strikingly international in scope, with authors from the Americas, Africa and Asia as well as the UK An extensive database of contemporary UK writers provided by the British Council, which includes a biography, bibliography and short critical essay A database of UK reading groups The history and current news of the Man Booker prize, the most prestigious literary award in Britain. (The BBC archive collection also includes a percipient interview from 1995 with the 2009 winner Hilary Mantel, which calls her “the novelist of her generation who will last. ... Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:53:15 +0100 867552 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/08/30/resource-of-the-week-bbc-british-novelists-archive-collection/ Resource of the Week: BBC British Novelists Archive Collection By Adrian Janes, DocuTicker UK Contributing Editor The BBC is increasingly finding ways to exploit and make more freely available its vast collection of visual and aural content. The latest example of this is its British Novelists Archive Collection. This is a complement to a BBC TV series, In Their Own Words: British Novelists. But whereas the series of necessity relies on short clips of interviews with leading authors as it charts the history of the 20th century British novel, this website is an archive of complete interviews and talks. These vary in length from five minutes up to an hour, and in year of broadcast from 1937 (Virginia Woolf) to 2009 (Zadie Smith). Care has been taken to present a mixture of writers, which implicitly charts the gradual shift during the century from a literary field dominated by white males to one in which women and minorities are clearly visible and audible, through examples like Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. Each programme is accompanied by a synopsis and a few astutely chosen links which complement the archive and might well merit separate bookmarking. These include: Modern radio interviews from the programmes Book Club and Open Book, the latter being strikingly international in scope, with authors from the Americas, Africa and Asia as well as the UK An extensive database of contemporary UK writers provided by the British Council, which includes a biography, bibliography and short critical essay A database of UK reading groups The history and current news of the Man Booker prize, the most prestigious literary award in Britain. (The BBC archive collection also includes a percipient interview from 1995 with the 2009 winner Hilary Mantel, which calls her “the novelist of her generation who will last. ... Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:43:55 +0100 867563 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/29/jane-miller-on-old-age In a perceptive, amusing book about growing old, Jane Miller argues that there's more to ageing than frailty and lonelinessSince everyone now knows that there are more old people around than ever before, it's not surprising that there's been a spate of books about age. Crazy Age by Jane Miller (born in 1932) is the latest and definitely one of the best. It is a highly literate and amusing exploration of the glooms and possibilities of the condition, how it feels, what it offers or really lacks – as opposed to what younger people might think it does.A teacher herself, Jane Miller has written extensively about women and education and the relation between the two, but there's no trace here of a stolid academic style: her writing is so fluid and amusing that you mostly forget that old age is supposed to be such a gloom. Not that she funks the downside of it – there's a long account of a close friend descending, not too miserably, into Alzheimer's disease; but many more accounts of those facing old age with considerable zest.What makes it so readable is not just that she writes tellingly about the experiences of herself and those she knows, but that she draws on characters in books – by Muriel Spark or Edith Wharton, Turgenev or Pushkin (she's a Russian translator, among other things); we're as likely to read about Ivan Illich or Updike's Rabbit as of her own two new knees or her father's death. She has her critique of Simone de Beauvoir, "who has written a book about it 700 pages long saying we shouldn't think about it too much", and cites Philip Roth's distaste for the view that "a healthy old age is somehow morally superior, as if frailty is always your own fault". ... Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:21:52 +0100 867162 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/29/new-york-stories-elizabeth-hardwick Over a range of troubling themes – the uncertainty of belonging, the inscrutibility of men – Elizabeth Hardwick's fiction shines with wisdom and craft, writes Tim AdamsThere is a gap of 20 years in this selection of Elizabeth Hardwick's short stories, between the late 1950s when she and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, moved from New York to Boston, and 1980, when, after their divorce and Lowell's death (in a taxi on the way to her apartment), she seemed to discover her fictional voice once more. Hardwick was not idle in between times. She helped to found the New York Review of Books in 1963 and illuminated its pages with her essays until her death in 2007, each sentence weighted with sifted wisdom and delicious humanity – Derek Walcott called her the "best prose writer in America". And throughout the 1960s she devoted herself with legendary dignity to the almost overwhelming work of shoring up her famous, and famously manic, husband, as he migrated between his study, the outpatient ward or various mental institutions, and the bedrooms of women younger than herself.A southerner, from Kentucky, Hardwick had set out, though, when she came to New York in 1939, to write fiction, from a somewhat liberated woman's view (her first act on getting off the Greyhound bus in Times Square was to buy a new-minted American edition of Finnegans Wake). She was quickly cornered and hemmed in in this enterprise by the dazzle and success of her friend Mary McCarthy, and sometimes lost heart. ... Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:05:48 +0100 866784 http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2010/08/28/reference-question-of-the-week-82210 This was sort of a frustrating question, but in the end was fun - mainly because I get to tag this post “gonzo reference.” A patron came rushing up to the desk (literally) and said he quickly needed to know John Philip Sousa’s religion. Since time was important, I gave the patron Encyclopedia Britannica and showed him how to find the John Philip Sousa article, while I searched Wikipedia. Neither identified his religion, so the next step was to grab the one Sousa biography we had on the shelf, and the patron looked through the index under “faith,” “religion,” etc., while I kept searching our databases and the internet. Again, neither of us located anything quickly, except for a quote online attributed to Sousa: My religion lies in my composition. That didn’t exactly answer the patron’s question, but he felt Sousa must have meant that, regardless of what religion he was officially, he wasn’t himself a very religious person, and that was good enough for the patron. He thanked me and rushed out. But I was still surprised that such an simple fact wouldn’t have been more readily available. I decided to keep searching until I found it, and then add the fact to Wikipedia - mainly because I can. I was already in the library’s catalog, so I requested a Sousa biography from another library (John Philip Sousa: American Phenomenon) that seemed likely to have the information. When it arrived, I started flipping through it, then wondered if this had been scanned into Google Books - turns out, it had. I searched the content of the book for “religion” and found the answer I was looking for at the bottom of page 102. I then composed a little paragraph and added it to Wikipedia: Although Freemasonry is an organization influenced by religious beliefs, John Philip Sousa himself was not. ... Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:39:57 +0100 866694 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/08/27/more-treasure-for-jazz-aficionados-from-the-library-of-congress-another-set-of-images-from-the-gottlieb-jazz-photos-collection-now-available-via-flickr/ At the beginning of August the first set of images (219 to be precise) from the William P. Gottlieb Jazz Photos collection at the Library of Congress were made available on Flickr. Since then another set of 200+ images were uploaded. We posted a link to the Flickr set along with some biographical info about William Gottlieb in this post. We should also mention again that the entire Gottlieb Collection entered the public domain in February, 2010. However, “…rights of privacy and publicity may apply. Privacy and publicity rights protect the interests of the person(s) who may be the subject(s) of the work or intellectual creation. Users of photographs in the Gottlieb collection are responsible for clearing any privacy or publicity rights associated with the use of the images.” Today, more images from the collection were added to the LC’s Flickr stream and blogged about here. From LC’s “In the Muse” Blog: This week’s set is particularly varied, with classic portraits of Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Tommy Dorsey, Doris Day, Nat “King” Cole, and Perry Como. In addition to these portraits are photos taken at one of the jazz sessions Atlantic Records producer Ahmet Ertegun arranged at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C. The blog post continues with brief tributes to tenor sax player Lester “Prez” Young (he was born on August 27, 1909) and the legendary Charlie “The Bird” Parker. This Sunday is The Charlie Parker Festival in NYC. Finally, we learn that every other Friday for the time being new images from the Gottlieb Collection will be uploaded until the entire collection of approx. 1600 images are available on Flickr. Access the COMPLETE searchable database (numerous ways to search), background info, articles written by Walter Gottlieb, and much more visit this page on the LC web site. ... Sat, 28 Aug 2010 03:57:55 +0100 866652 http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/aug/28/will-self-bigness-and-littleness As a child, Will Self collected doll's house furniture, trolls and miniature dictionaries. In later life, he has come to have a special admiration for artists whose work addresses size and scale – and transcends the Lilliputian character of the modern ageSome time in the summer of 1992 I sat down in a four-square and fusty house that my then wife and I were renting in the Oxfordshire countryside and typed these words: "Some people lose their sense of proportion, I've lost my sense of scale." Over the succeeding five days I wrote a section a day of a piece called simply "Scale". Its ostensible subject was the mental disintegration of an opiate-addicted scholar living in a bungalow next to the Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield – and this had obvious autobiographical resonances; but the organising principle of the material was the very perceptual conundrum implied by the opening line. Indeed, while like most writers I mistrust any romantic talk of "inspiration", even at the time I felt that "Scale" was coming to me with a peculiarly deductive fluidity, that each successive sentence seemed logically to derive from that initial and perplexing proposition.Eighteen years later I find myself on the brink of publishing a second work owing its genesis to my abiding preoccupation with the very big and the very little. The first part of a trilogy of fictionalised memoirs collectively called Walking to Hollywood, this piece, in fact, has the title "Very Little", and while seemingly a flight of – admittedly miserable – fantasy, detailing my destructive relationship with a monumental sculptor who happens to be a person of restricted height, it is in reality as close to a true piece of autobiography as anything I've written.Why should physical scale so preoccupy me? The most obvious explanation is that I myself am on the large side, as are most of the men from my family. ... Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:05:35 +0100 866292 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/28/philip-de-laszlo-life-art Jan Marsh on the many reinventions of a hugely successful society artistPhilip de Who? Sadly for someone who saw himself in an illustrious line of foreign-born artists including Holbein, Van Dyck, Lely and Kneller, and who specialised in portraying British royals and nobles, De László's name has slipped well below the horizon since his death in 1937. Style recognition, however, remains high in his society portraits, with their bravura brushwork: sweetly glamorised, chiffon-draped images of Princess Marina and the late Queen Mother when Duchess of York; European kings, dukes and generals in full regalia, vestiges of vanished hierarchies. And thousands of them, for De László perfected the art of instant painting alla prima on to canvas, to capture the likeness in a single sitting, like a flattering cartoonist with gestural panache.His male portraits put an acceptable face on plutocracy. Where Sargent, his real role model, lamented that each work cost him a friend, De László gained friends on all sides. "The portrait of my wife has a ray of heaven illuminating in her face the charming qualities of her soul," the Duke of Portland wrote. He made his sitters "look exactly as they would like themselves to look", observed the magazine Apollo. No wonder he was popular.Who was he? A man of several incarnations, born Fülöp Laub in Budapest in 1869, the son of a poor tailor. He claimed to have left school at nine to work successively for theatrical scene-painters, an architectural sculptor and a porcelain-painter before colouring up prints in a society photographer's studio – a portent of the future, perhaps. Evening study led to fine art training, then Munich and Paris. His scenes of peasant life were comparable to those being produced in Brittany and Newlyn and, following the national trend, he hungarianised his name to László at about the same time as he swapped his Jewish faith for Catholicism. ... Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:05:27 +0100 866298 http://www.powells.com/partner/18/review/2010_08_27.html?utm_source=overview&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_overview&utm_content=Muriel%20Spark%3A%20The%20Biography Muriel Spark: The Biography by Martin Stannard, a review from Harper's Magazine by Benjamin Taylor. (Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day) Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:00:07 +0100 866042 http://aidlibrary.blogspot.com/2010/08/library-news-08272010.html Hurrah for cooler weather, everyone seemed in a better mood.  We continue to get more and more new stuff, DVDs, databases etc.  DatabasesYou can use both of these off campus if you have the log-in and password brochure available in the library when you show your valid student ID.   It is amazing to me how many students get home and decide they need to use the databases and call the library to ask for them.  WE WILL NOT GIVE THE PASSWORDS OVER THE PHONE OR IN EMAIL!!  We really, really mean it!Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition provides the Encyclopaedia Britannica, plus statistics, magazine articles, biographies, evaluated web sites, timelines, country information, educational videos and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus, quotes, an atlas and news feeds from The New York Times.   Wikipedia wants to be Britannica when it grows up.  CQ Researcher is noted for its in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. Each issue has an introductory overview; background and chronology on the topic; an assessment of the current situation; tables and maps; pro/con statements from representatives of opposing positions; and bibliographies of key sources. Updated online 44 times a year. MediaFirstcom is a production music and sound effects service with 140,000 tracks and 6,000+ new track releases every year. Searching is by keyword, styles, eras, tempos, instruments, moods, countries and dances. Sign in using the log-in and password available in the library when you show your valid AiDallas ID for on and off-campus access.   Please set up your own folder for your projects. Turn off your pop-up blocker. This site will not function properly with your pop-up blocker on.VideosBusiness90 minutes to killer presentation skills. ... Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 866720 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/aug/26/christopher-hitchens-hitch-22 Christopher Hitchens's conversion to the Bush administration's cause is still mystifying, but anyone who checks out his autobiography won't deny his lifelong bravery as a journalistChristopher Hitchens opens his memoir Hitch-22 with a story about a false rumour of his own mortality. A catalogue for an exhibition of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery mistakenly described the legendary journalist as "the late" Christopher Hitchens: making his amused protests, he then went on to write this book about his life. But as he toured to promote it – weathering some unsympathetic media coverage, inevitably given his controversial politics – he was diagnosed with cancer. Now, to judge by reports, he really is in mortal peril.Hitchens's support for the wars of the Bush administration – indeed, as he reveals in detail in this book, his active part in encouraging them, at the highest levels of Washington insiderdom – has ensured him an army of enemies. But what do critics of the book feel now? Do they wish they had tried harder to understand where he's coming from?The interpretation of his political shift rightward that some readers of his memoir have proposed is that he has been haunted all his life by the manly dignity of his father, a navy officer with serious wartime experience. When 9/11 changed the world, Hitchens saw his moment to join the Few, to refight the Battle of Britain and live up to their heroic fathers' generation.Yet the most affecting incident in Hitch-22 is actually the death of his mother in a suicide pact in a hotel in Athens, when he was just starting out on his writing life. Perhaps I am soppy, but isn't the suicide of a parent quite a significant event?It would seem arguable that his lifelong courage as a journalist derives at least in part from a desire to do justice to his mother, to live with a daring denied her. ... Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:54:47 +0100 865461 http://engagedpatrons.org/Blogs.cfm?SiteID=4725&BlogID=41&BlogPostID=7467 This book is the American translated version by Arnold J. Pomerans.  It is a unique edition regarding Anne Frank, her family and the times in which they lived.  Direct quotes are from Anne's diary.  Supplemental information puts the reader in the situation of this family's plight. As you read this account of Anne Frank's life, you almost have a sense of being in an Anne Frank museum.  Difficult as it is to read with the dreaded outcome we all know, the book is a worthy biography and well written with many actual photographs from Otto Frank's collection of his family.  Just when we thought another book could not be written about this girl, a fresh approach to the topic with family photos makes a statement regarding the importance of young and old to remember these events.  This book is most suitable for readers in grades 5-12. (Source: Teen Scene from Wright Memorial Public Library) Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:20:01 +0100 864910 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LibraryCloud/~3/u_oJHkg-C_o/following-blog-stats.html I have successfully weaned myself from looking at our blog statistics (StatCounter, Feedburner, and Hot Stuff 2.0) on a daily basis; because I am interested in how readers find us, where readers are located, and what interests them, I do still review them weekly if for no other reasons than to reset blocking cookies so my personal posts do not add to the count and satisfy my curiosity. This evening I noticed several returning links from Cairo, Egypt that appeared to originate from my personal author page on a web site I am unfamiliar with, uFollow. With curiosity engaged, I followed the link."uFollow is a free service that helps you keep track of your favorite bloggers and columnists. Once you create an account you can add authors, sources, and channels to the stream of articles that you receive. uFollow currently tracks more than 10,000 bloggers and columnists from over 1,000 of the world’s leading blogs, magazines, and newspapers." -- About uFollowIt was odd to see a personal author page complete with a vaguely familiar biography. A quick review of the 2010 Computers in Libraries site revealed the biographical information was from my speaker page (and not a reference citation in sight, tsk). Also on the about page was a blurb stating uFollow is a division of Hindawi Publishing; "Hindawi Publishing Corporation is a commercial publisher of peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines" and in 2007 entered into a partnership with Sage Publications (Hindawi, about us). They also have offices in New York city and Cairo, Egypt.After spending time this afternoon discussing proliferation of online personal information and importance of knowing what's "out there" as it applies to individuals, it was wonderfully ironic this information came to my attention today. I signed up for an account, which may be the desired response, and added myself to my author shelf. ... Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:26:00 +0100 866421 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/oC9jrwEMTx8/ From the Report Summary: Bowker released its much-anticipated 2009 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Report today, providing the U.S. book industry with the most complete consumer-based research on who buys books and why. The 2009 Annual Report is culled from more 44,000 total respondents, responsible for the purchase of 118,000 books in 2009. [Clip] This year’s report provides data not available in any other source with a scope that captures the changing nature of retail channels, including the growing presence of such mass merchandisers as Wal-Mart. Further, the report captures the explosion of new electronic formats. Selected Stats from the Summary + More than 40% of Americans over the age of 13 purchased a book in 2009 and the average age of the American book buyer is 42. + Women lead men in overall purchases, contributing 64% of sales. Even among detective and thriller genres, women top 60% of the sales. Where do men catch up? Fantasy titles are purchased evenly by men and women. + Baby Boomers spend. The boomer generation is the largest purchasing generation, making up 30% of sales. Their elders – Matures – contribute 16%. + More income doesn’t mean more book purchases. 32% of the books purchased in 2009 were from households earning less than $35,000 annual and 20% of those sales were for children’s books. + Americans like people. The biggest selling non-fiction genre is biography – auto and otherwise. Access the Complete Announcement Source: Bowker Via Resource Shelf Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:02:04 +0100 864763 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/08/25/new-report-from-bowker-highlights-from-consumer-focused-research-report-for-book-industry/ From the Report Summary: Bowker released its much-anticipated 2009 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Report today, providing the U.S. book industry with the most complete consumer-based research on who buys books and why. The 2009 Annual Report is culled from more 44,000 total respondents, responsible for the purchase of 118,000 books in 2009. [Clip] This year’s report provides data not available in any other source with a scope that captures the changing nature of retail channels, including the growing presence of such mass merchandisers as Wal-Mart. Further, the report captures the explosion of new electronic formats. Selected Stats from the Summary + More than 40% of Americans over the age of 13 purchased a book in 2009 and the average age of the American book buyer is 42. + Women lead men in overall purchases, contributing 64% of sales. Even among detective and thriller genres, women top 60% of the sales. Where do men catch up? Fantasy titles are purchased evenly by men and women. + Baby Boomers spend. The boomer generation is the largest purchasing generation, making up 30% of sales. Their elders – Matures – contribute 16%. + More income doesn’t mean more book purchases. 32% of the books purchased in 2009 were from households earning less than $35,000 annual and 20% of those sales were for children’s books. + Americans like people. The biggest selling non-fiction genre is biography – auto and otherwise. Access the Complete Announcement Source: Bowker See Also: On August 5th, We Posted Selected Stats from “Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading” (Bowker/BISG). Access via: Kat Meyer, Sue Polanka, and Paul Biba/TeleRead (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:56:24 +0100 864854 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/25/obama-and-franzen-freedom-novel I've read the eagerly awaited new Jonathan Franzen novel, but so has Obama – and that worries meSeeing as my holiday books this year included Danniella Westbrook's autobiography, The Other Side of Nowhere, and Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley (it's amazing the authorities allowed me to leave the country once the x-ray scanners saw the perverted literary contents of my bag), I am clearly no literary snob. But I have to say, I am concerned about President Obama's holiday reading. As has been widely and, in the case of the publishers, ecstatically reported, Obama has wangled an early copy of Jonathan Franzen's not-yet-published but already hyperbolically reviewed book Freedom. As chance would have it, I too procured a copy of this book, and while Obama and I may have obtained the book through different channels (he got it because he is the president, I got it because I begged), it is pleasing to think of Obama and me, united across the ocean, both reading about the trials of the Berglund family.So yes, I've read the new Franzen. In literary circles this is the equivalent of getting hold of the new YSL coat two months before it arrives in stores, or snaffling the new Radiohead album before they give it away for free. It has been touted as "a masterpiece", "a work of total genius" and got Franzen on the cover of Time. This apparently is a very big deal, even though I have never seen anyone read a copy of that magazine that they didn't get for free in an airport. But because a living author hasn't been on the cover of Time in 10 years, the word "landmark" has been bandied around. I don't think my desk has ever been as popular as it was this week. Truly, having some contraband Franzen in the Guardian office is like bringing pure cocaine powder into a record label company. But I digress.In some ways, it is a very clever choice for this determinedly non-partisan president. ... Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:00:08 +0100 865475 http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/08/pearl-buck-in-china-journey-to-good.html As a student in the sixties and early seventies, I am certain that I read bits of Pearl Buck's writings from literature textbooks. She was a living author and not as forgotten then as she is now. I think we discussed her in Mr. Wallace's sophomore English class in high school. I've long had a vague sense that she was an interesting woman. I finally read and mostly enjoyed The Good Earth several years ago (though it was a bit long). So I welcomed getting Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth by Hilary Spurling.Being the daughter of impassioned Christian missionaries who were set on converting China, you wouldn't think that Pearl would end up being so sympathetic to common Chinese people and their traditions. The rural peasants and village merchants to whom her father tried to preach mostly ignored him, except at times of political rebellion when they sough to kill him and his family. Someone always saved the Bucks, hiding them or helping them flee. They seemed to lose their meager possessions and need to be bailed out by the missionary society frequently. Why would Pearl identify so with these people? Spurling explains that as a girl, Pearl's busy mother often left her in the care of her Chinese housekeeper. Pearl played with Chinese children, and her mother got her a local scholar as a tutor. Pearl was already eight when she discovered that she was not Chinese.Pearl's upbringing did not really prepare her for life in the West. While she excelled at college and was awarded prizes, she never fit into campus life. When she first married, she was not really interested managing a house with furniture and lots of possessions. She was always awkward socially. Her best times were reading and writing alone.Spurling's biography of Pearl Buck focuses mostly on the novelist's life in China, her subsequent longing to get back to her adopted land when she was exiled, and the way that she recreated her China in her novels and memoirs. ... Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 865189 http://marklindner.info/blog/2010/08/24/12-books-12-months-challenge/ A friend who was unhappy with her previous attempts at book clubs, in-person and virtual, decided a book club where we each read whatever it is we want to read might work better. Thus, 12 Books, 12 Months was born. Here are the rules for the 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge: Pick 12 titles from your To Read Pile.  These should be titles you currently own in whatever format you prefer. Acquisition of other formats or translations is permitted.  So, if you have a paperback but want to read on your Kindle, you can get a Kindle copy.  If you have a library copy but want to buy your own, that’s kosher.  Heck, if you own a copy and want to check another out from the library, I’m not gonna stop you. Post your list in your public space of choice by September 1, 2010.  If you prefer not to post, you can just leave a comment with your list. Read all 12 titles between now and September 5, 2011.  Might as well tack on an extra long weekend at the end for cramming. When you finish a title on your list, post about it in your public space of choice.  If you prefer not to post, you can just leave a comment with your review. Once a month, I’ll post a round-up of the reviews posted from that month so that we all know what everyone else has read. My list: Ronald Gross, Peak Learning I am trying to find some kind of structure (best word I can think of at the moment) to help me get a grip on my own pursuit of lifelong learning and am hoping this might have some ideas that I can (and will) implement. I know goodreads says that I am currently reading this but that was months ago and I will need to start over. I hadn’t got very far anyway. Catherine C. Marshall, Reading and Writing the Electronic Book I am interested in e-books for a variety of reasons and while I love print books I also think e-books can one day provide immense value over and above the mostly “convenience factor” that they now provide. ... Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:02:30 +0100 866006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/24/gunter-grass-last-autobiography German Nobel laureate says new book, a paean to the Brothers Grimm, will 'mark the end of my autobiographical writings'Günter Grass, the Nobel prize-winning author of acclaimed memoirs Peeling the Onion and The Box, has revealed that his new book will be his last venture into autobiography.Grass, 82, has just published a new book in Germany. Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung (Grimms' Words: A Declaration of Love) is a paean to the Brothers Grimm and the dictionary of German language they began to write in the early 19th century, also delving into Grass's own political past. It follows 2008's Die Box (The Box), about his life from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, and 2006's controversial Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), in which the Nobel laureate revealed he had joined the Waffen-SS at the age of 17."Grimms' Words will certainly mark the end of my autobiographical writings. At my age, one is surprised if one experiences the next spring, and I know how long it can take to complete a book with an epic concept," Grass told German magazine Der Spiegel.But the author said he did not fear the end of his life. "I've realised that, on the one hand, one is ready for it. I also realise that I've retained a certain amount of curiosity. What will happen to my grandchildren? What will the weekend football results look like? Of course, there are also some banalities I still want to experience. Jacob Grimm wrote a wonderful piece on aging, and I also found the following sentence in another one of his works: 'The last harvest is on the stalk.' It touched me, and of course it immediately prompted me to reflect," said Grass.Growing up with the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, Grass said the pair went on to influence his own creative work: Tom Thumb "lives on" in Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum, and the brothers themselves play a role in many of his manuscripts. ... Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:25:42 +0100 865457 http://wheelockcollegelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/08/wheelock-college-coat-of-arms.html Did you know that Wheelock College has an official coat of arms?When the Classroom Building at Wheelock College was built and dedicated in 1941, a stone coat of arms was fixed above the main entrance on Pilgrim Road. In a letter included in the March 1942 alumnae newsletter, Lucy Wheelock described the significance of the newly adopted symbol of the institution she’d founded in 1888: Over the doorway of our building at 25 Pilgrim Road is the Wheelock coat of arms. It shows three wheels encircled by a wreath of oak leaves and acorns. The three wheels mean progress in the right training of childhood. They show the purpose of Wheelock College to follow the guiding ideal of the Kindergarten, – the training of the head, the heart, and the hand. We wish our children not only to know, but to do, and to feel the joy of service to humanity. And in her unpublished autobiography, My Life Story, Miss Wheelock describes the symbol’s relationship to her own educational hero, Friedrich Fröbel (or Froebel), the innovative German educator who first introduced the “kindergarten” in 1840: The wheels mean progress, progress toward Froebel’s ideal of child training of the head, the heart, and the hand. The oak leaves and acorns mean growth – “Great oaks from little acorns grow.” On June 3, 1960, Wheelock’s Board of Trustees voted to incorporate the coat of arms into the official seal for the college – a crest we continue to use to this day. You can still see the Wheelock College coat of arms above the entrance to the Classroom Building at 25 Pilgrim Road.Learn more about the Wheelock College Archives online or schedule a time to meet with the Archivist about our collections documenting the history of our institution, the histories of our alumni, and the history of efforts by those at Wheelock and around the world to improve the lives of children and families.-Andrew Elder, Archivist (Source: Wheelock College Library) Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 867241 http://www.lisnews.org/keith_richardsplease_visit_my_library As we learned last April, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has always had a secret ambition...to be a librarian. And today, as reported in Penn Live, Librarian Sheila Redcay — and at least 480 others on Facebook — would like to have Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards visit Matthews Public Library in Fredericksburg, PA. Redcay, a lifelong Rolling Stones fan, decided to invite Richards to her library after reading a preview of his autobiography, "Life," coming out in October, in which he says he considered becoming a librarian. “Having him come to a public library, wherever it may be — why not here — will just simply bring awareness to the many struggles many libraries are having just to keep their doors open." Her goal is to get 1,000 people as members of the Facebook page she created, Keith Richards, Please Have Sympathy for America’s Public Libraries, after which she will approach his manager again with an invite. Richards’ manager said it sounded like “a very good idea,” but his publicist has said he is adamant that he will do only one book signing, in New York City. C'mon Keith... There's a little contest on the Facebook page...join up and check out your knowledge of the Stones. (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Sat, 21 Aug 2010 01:51:01 +0100 865595 http://lisnews.org/keith_richardsplease_visit_my_library As we learned last April, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has always had a secret ambition...to be a librarian. And today, as reported in Penn Live, Librarian Sheila Redcay — and at least 480 others on Facebook — would like to have Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards visit Matthews Public Library in Fredericksburg, PA. Redcay, a lifelong Rolling Stones fan, decided to invite Richards to her library after reading a preview of his autobiography, "Life," coming out in October, in which he says he considered becoming a librarian. “Having him come to a public library, wherever it may be — why not here — will just simply bring awareness to the many struggles many libraries are having just to keep their doors open." Her goal is to get 1,000 people as members of the Facebook page she created, Keith Richards, Please Have Sympathy for America’s Public Libraries, after which she will approach his manager again with an invite. Richards’ manager said it sounded like “a very good idea,” but his publicist has said he is adamant that he will do only one book signing, in New York City. C'mon Keith... There's a little contest on the Facebook page...join up and check out your knowledge of the Stones. (Source: LISNews.org) Sat, 21 Aug 2010 01:51:01 +0100 865312 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/08/18/sage-advice-from-a-celebrity-mom/ Fans of Kathy Griffin know her 90-year-old mother Maggie as a sensible, mid-western voice of reason in the wacky world of Hollywood stars and lifestyles of the rich and famous.  She enjoys celebrity spotting at her local West Hollywood Pavilions grocery store, loves her family, knows the value of a dollar, and appreciates a nice glass of wine. In the ever expanding genre of celebrity memoirs, Tip It: The World According to Maggie by Maggie Griffin is a charming, light addition for fans of both Griffins and for those looking for a refreshing perspective on Hollywood.  Tip It is a sweet, funny book that is a combination of memoir, advice and family anecdotes. Margaret Corbally was one of sixteen children born to Irish immigrants who ran a local grocery in Chicago.  She and her husband raised a large family of their own in Oak Park and worked hard to send the kids to Catholic school and then put them through college.  Marge, or Maggie as she is known now, moved to California with her husband and daughter Kathy after retirement.  Kathy worked her butt off to establish a career “in the biz” with much support and encouragement from her parents.  Her parents worked hard to track down stars by crashing celebrity golf events and awards shows.  Apparently, Hollywood security was looser in the 1980s and two darling retirees could wander into red carpet events if they happened to be traveling by foot on Santa Monica Blvd.  Crafty! In between the memoir chapters, Maggie provides sensible Depression-era advice on topics like how to recycle rubber bands and paper towels, which golf courses and bars and restaurants to frequent when in L.A. (gay bar Rage has the best happy hour) and an open letter to the “bastard who stole our sword” - you’ll have to read it to believe it.  Kathy makes comments in parentheses throughout.  I found this annoying at first, but it quickly grew on me. ... Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:49:29 +0100 864816 http://www.slaw.ca/2010/08/17/court-web-site-design-principles/ Back in January, I announced the formation of a working group under the auspices of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology (CCCT). The objective of this working group was to draft guidelines facilitating the modernization of Canadian court web sites. Since that time, we have made progress and expect to have finished a first draft of the Court Web Site guidelines before the upcoming Canadian Forum on Court Technology. One of the five parts of the guidelines is titled “Principles – Cutting Through Context and Issues: What Principles Should Guide the Design of Court Web Sites?” In this post I’d like to expose the principles we selected. Your comments and feedback are welcome: Principle #1: The Right Information for Specific Audiences Principle #2: Empowerment Principle #3: Timeliness Principle #4: Notification Principle #5: Content Organization & Search Principle #6: Security Principle #7: Bilinguism Principle #8: Accessibility Principle #9: Interactivity Principle #10: Viability Principle #11: Simplicity The first three principles are explained, below. The other principles will be explained in upcoming posts. Principle #1: The Right Information for Specific Audiences Users that come to a court web site generally fall under the following categories: Members of the Public Journalists Self-represented Litigants Practitioners: Lawyers, Paralegals, Stenographers, Translators, etc. Researchers: Law Professors, Law Librarians, Law Students Commercial Law Publishers Government (Public Servants) Staff (employees and judges of the court) Each audience has its own information needs and expectations. Being able to find the right information means that courts should make a effort, under the current guidelines, to specifically cater to each audience according to a “cost / benefit” analysis. This analysis is necessary, because it is impossible to meet the entire range of all information needs by all audiences. ... Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:18:13 +0100 867086 http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/08/nelson-mandela-life-in-photographs.html How do we consider Nelson Mandela from America? I think our general opinion of him is positive, but I would bet that most of us really know very little about him other than there was a long campaign to get him freed from South African prisons during the decades of Apartheid and that he became the president of his country after reform of voting laws. Most of us know little of his background and why he was imprisoned. Few of us could quote from his speeches. Instead, he is a well-liked personality to rank with George Washington or Martin Luther King - beloved but not really understood. He deserves more of our attention.As a famous person, he is the subject of several photobiographies, including Nelson Mandela: A Life in Photographs from 2009. Most of this book is filled with large photographs of the subject at many stages in his life. Understandably, more than half were taken after his release in 1990, as he has been in the public eye constantly since then. The photos tend to be just Mandela at his best, ever smiling and greeting others with warmth. Only so much can be learned from them. Luckily for readers, the editors also included six of Mandela's most famous speeches. In these, especially "No Easy Walk to Freedom" from September 21, 1953 (page 11) and "An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die" from April 20, 1964 (page 55), we get to read what the subject has to say about himself and his country. Without them, this book is a bit shallow. With them, it serves as a good introduction to a long life.The editors obviously just considered this a coffee-table book to be purchased by the modestly affluent. They did little to help its reference value, as there is not even a table of contents to help readers find the speeches, much less an index to find Mandela at court, in prison, abroad, or as president. It will help students looking for pictures, but it could have been much more. ... Mon, 16 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 865193 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/08/12/nice-librarian-likes-snarky-books/ Yes, that’s me, lover of all things snarky.  Chelsea, Kathy and Daniel are some of my favorite comedians because of their witty, often snotty and always irreverant commentary.  Things that come out of their mouth are remarks that I could only dream of saying out loud.  I had forgotten all about another fun snarky writer, Jen Lancaster, until her new book “My Fair Lazy (way too long subtitle)” showed up on my holds shelf.  Former sorority girl Lancaster first came on the writing scene in her lacoste polo and pearls in a tell-all unemployment rant Bitter is the New Black and she’s made a career out of sharing the details of her life in essays.  Her latest book recounts an attempt to become more cultured after a radio interview with Candace Bushnell (one of her heroes) makes her question her addiction to reality television programming.  One of my favorite chapters in the book examines her love affair with the MTV show Real World, I could totally relate to this unhealthy fascination. What other topics does she cover?  Her short chapters punctuated with lots of footnotes** cover everything from moving from a cramped Chicago apartment to a spacious suburb-like neighborhood house, adopting THREE feral cats, attending off the beaten path theatre with her ex-stage director friend and accomplishing an “eat my way around the world” cuisine challenge.  Her attempt to become more cultured culminates in a literary fundraiser in the Hamptons hosted by left wing political figure where she manages to hold her wine-loving Republican views to herself and make small talk with people she has nothing in common with besides a love of books. This book is so opposite of Eat, Pray, Love.  Nothing spiritual, just trash talking funny writing that will make you crack a smile or two. ... Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:54:16 +0100 864819 http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=2334 Ralph Shaw was an academic librarian, an educator, and in 1950, the founder of Scarecrow press. He was known as an outspoken guy who forged his career more on the basis of saying what he thought than making friends. I first read about him in Ken Kister’s biography of Eric Moon, which is a great book for learning about the library scene of the mid-20th century. Ralph Shaw’s efforts have inspired me as I have been building up Library Juice Press and Litwin Books along some of the same lines. The barriers to publishing were higher then, and came down most significantly around 1990, when the cost of printing dramatically dropped and many small presses such as mind sprouted up. The way he did it at that time though, as an academic librarian jumping into the scholarly book market, was a method that still applies in my case: operating on extremely low overhead and hustling to find good books that major publisher either miss or don’t want to risk their less-efficient money on. (Don’t read into that that Library Juice Press has lower standards than other publishers in the field. On the contrary, we have directed several projects to better-known publishers over quality concerns, who have taken them on.) All of this is to introduce a link to an old article that is now freely available on the web: “To Remember Ralph Shaw,” from Current Contents #23, June 5, 1978. I am not sure why the library at U Penn has posted the article, but I’m glad that they did. The article is from Eugene Garfield’s regular column, titled, “Essays of an Information Scientist.” (Eugene Garfield founded ISI.) var button = document.getElementById('facebook_share_link_2334') || document.getElementById('facebook_share_icon_2334') || document.getElementById('facebook_share_both_2334') || document.getElementById('facebook_share_button_2334'); if (button) { button. ... Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:43:44 +0100 867508 http://community.livejournal.com/libraries/962203.html HelloFirstly, I thought I would share some photos of a library in Grimsby with plant wall's by Biotecture! Does anyone work in any particularly beautiful or interesting libraries? I write a blog about libraries, (usually unusual, historic, or beautiful ones), so would be good to get some inspiration from all of you.Also I just finished a job as the learning resources assistant and librarian in a primary school in East London. In a few weeks I start a new job, near my house in South London. It is pretty much the same job, but I will be going part-time from the end of September. It is in a new school and we are moving into a brand new building on the 25th of August, designed by the amazing Zaha Hadid. I get to set up the library from scratch. I need to get lots of incentives for teenagers to read. I was thinking of ordering lots of the kinds of books my friends at 14/15 used to read, so musicians' biographies, books on street fashion and graffiti. What do you think?ALSO if anyone reads the Times on Sunday there was an article about my new school, and some of the reading schemes they already have in place.On the 27th of September I start my postgrad diploma in book and paper conservation at Camberwell. I need to apply in the new few months for my MA/Msc in Library Sciences, (or whatever course I choose. There are so many similar ones with different names??). Have any of you studied in London or near? I am thinking of going to UCL or City College London? Do you have good experiences or bad experiences?Also you can find my Library Blog here:http://lennylikeslibraries.blogspot.com/I will miss the primary school books a lot. (Source: Library Lovers' LiveJournal) Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:16:59 +0100 865215 http://zydecofish.blogspot.com/2010/08/reads-pseudo-reviews-of-some-of-books-i.html ReadsPseudo-reviews of some of the books I have read recently...The Zero by Jess Walter - This is the second Walter book I have read (the other being Citizen Vince).  IMHO, The Zero is better.  This book also happens to be the third 9/11 book I have read.  I'd rank Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country higher than The Zero, but I'd place The Zero ahead of DeLillo's Falling Man, a novel I did not really like, though I admit it has moments of genius.  The Zero is a kind of thriller, I suppose, and a sort of dark comedy with some noir thrown in.  It'sa good summer read.The Grifters by Jim Thomspon - Essential Jim Thompson.The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq - I loved Platform very much. This book?: not so much.  Despite the graphic sex that should appeal to me, the book reads like a too-long essay on the social history of France told by way of biographies of two half brothers.  The trouble is that the novel is unbelievably boring. A Partisan's Daughter by Louis De Bernieres - I am a huge fan of this writer, but I hated this book.  Choke by Chuck Palahniuk - I really wanted to like this book, but I didn't.  I mean, it's OK, and it's certainly not terrible.  If you removed the sex parts, though, you would be left with an unreadable book.  I'd really hate to use the word stupid to describe this book, but I might have to.The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall - I imagine that if the publisher packaged this book as a mass market paperback and placed it at the checkout at supermarkets, it would sell quite a few copies.  I fail to understand why this book is being referred to as literary.  I just don't see that.  It's a quirky sort of book that is not challenging to read.  Literary it is not.  It might pass for good.  It's not brilliant.Ratner's Star by Don DeLillo - I'm a big fan of DeLillo. ... Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 865894 http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2010/08/information-literacy-context-community.html There are already the abstracts of this conference and the posters from the first workshop session on the conference blog for Information Literacy: Context, Community, Culture, held 8-9 August in Gothenburg, Sweden, organised by the IFLA Information Literacy Section (I was conference chair).- There is a pdf with informative abstracts and biographies of speakers, plus the programme and guidelines for the unconference: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/satellite-brochure.pdf- There is the briefing for the Sunday workshop sessions: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/briefing-sunday.pdf- There are the posters that were produced on the Sunday: Group A, Group B, Group C, Group D, Group E, Group FPhoto by Sheila Webber (photoshopped): at the conference (Source: Information Literacy Weblog) Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 864989 http://yourlibrarycsu.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-ebooks_09.html Below is a selection of new eBooks added to the collection this week:De Swiet's medical disorders in obstetric practice - Assists in navigating the many challenges pregnancy presents for both the patient and physician. Check AvailabilityGetting it wrong : ten of the greatest misreported stories in American journalism - Addresses and dismantles prominent media-driven myths. Check AvailabilityMaking schools different : alternative approaches to educating young people - Offers a forward-looking overview of where we are now, and where we might want to go in the future. Check AvailabilityMemory and the moving image : French film in the digital era - A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age. Check Availability Our toxic world : a guide to hazardous substances in our everyday lives - Is an effort to shine a keen light on the hazardous substances in our everyday lives, and suggest alternatives that will allow readers to improve the physical quality of their lives and of their environment.Check Availability Postmortem : how medical examiners explain suspicious deaths - Goes deep inside the world of medical examiners to uncover the intricate web of pathological, social, legal, and moral issues in which they operate. Check AvailabilityTiger Woods : a biography - Updates the 2005 edition to examine the life and career of this phenomenal athlete through the 2009 PGA Championship. Check AvailabilityYouth leadership in sport and physical education - Useful for teachers, coaches, and youth agency program leaders, this work compiles ideas suitable for children in fourth grade through high school. Check AvailabilityThe science of grapevines : anatomy and physiology - The only book to comprehensively explore the physiology of the grapevine as it occurs around the world. Check AvailabilityClick on Check Availability to access these titles.The full list of new eBooks can be accessessed here and more information on eBooks is here. ... Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 866451 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BabyBoomerLibrarian/~3/ycwbvWgzE6I/idsconf10-if-you-got-everything-under.html August 4, 2010 -- Wednesday Keynote (9:00 am - 9:50 am) If You've Got Everything Under Control, You're Doing Something Wrong. Lessons in Innovation from Better World Books. Better World Books, launched in 2002, is one of the fastest growing companies in the USA. A triple-bottom-line social enterprise, Better World Books finds new homes for old books and funds literacy in the process. To date, over $7 Million has been raised for libraries and literacy. It has partnered with thousands of libraries with its Discards & Donations program, and is launching a next-generation ILL service (symbol: QUICK) in partnership with OCLC. In its short life, Better World Books has reinvented itself three times, and is on the verge of its greatest reinvention yet. This talk will discuss the challenges of reinvention & innovation in an organization, as well as a look forward at libraries' role in society. F. Xavier Helgesen's Biography F. Xavier Helgesen is the co-founder of Better World Books and an unabashed champion of innovation and creativity in the workplace. He founded two million-dollar companies before age 30, and will be spending 2011 as a Skoll Scholar in social entrepreneurship at Oxford University. ... Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:46:00 +0100 864885 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BabyBoomerLibrarian/~3/SB2DctXMT-w/idsconf10-oclc-web-services-for.html August 3,2010 -- Tuesday Session #4 (4:10 pm - 5:00 pm) • OCLC Web Services for Developers: WorldCat API, et al. Have you wondered just what a web services is, and what it would mean to use one? Are you thinking of investing effort into building new systems that rely on web services, or enhancing an existing service with API-provided data? OCLC offers a variety of web services such as xISSN, WorldCat Search API, WorldCat Identities, and the WorldCat Registry provide a variety of data which can be used to enhance and improve current library interfaces. This session will provide an overview of the web services offered by OCLC and demonstrate several simple real world applications which use the data from these services in libraries. Examples such a Javascript and PHP code to add journal of table of contents information, peer-reviewed journal designation, links to other libraries in the area with a book, also available ..., and info about this author will be discussed. Karen A. Coombs' Biography Karen A. Coombs is a librarian and geek coder with an interest in mashups, web services, and library web sites and interfaces. Currently she is the Product Manager for the OCLC Developer Network, a community of developers collaborating in a “sandbox” environment in order to propose, discuss and test OCLC Web Services. Prior to joining OCLC, she worked part time as a Web Application Specialist for LISHost and as a library web technology consultant. From 2005 - 2010, Karen served as the Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries. ... Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:37:00 +0100 864886 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/aug/04/justin-bieber-biography The teen sensation is set to publish his first memoir and be the subject of a biopic. Is it really the right time?As if Justin Bieber's supernova status were not already bewildering enough for anyone past the age of majority, the baby-faced Canadian singer, who looks even younger than his 16 years, has just announced his first memoir, First Step 2 Forever: My Story, via HarperCollins. He may not be the youngest celebrity to write an autobiography – Drew Barrymore and Charlotte Church were both 15 when they published, respectively, 1990's Little Girl Lost and 2001's Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far) – but he is the only one who can also boast a forthcoming 3D biopic (apparently helmed by the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, no less) about his prodigious rise.Explaining this explosion in Bieberology, the singer gave potential readers some idea of the kind of pulse-pounding prose they can expect: "My fans have played such a large part in all of this and they help me live my dreams every day . . . This is just another way to say thank you to my fans."He has a lot to thank them for. A long, long time ago, in early 2007, Bieber's mother posted on YouTube a clip of her 12-year-old son performing Ne-Yo's So Sick at a singing contest in Stratford, Ontario. The clip's phenomenal popularity won him a deal with Island Records and his 2009 album My World gave rise to commercial superlatives, making him the youngest solo male US chart-topper since Stevie Wonder in 1963, the first artist ever to score seven hit singles from a debut, and the star of the most-viewed YouTube clip to date (Baby stands at over 270 million views).Bieber is a distinctly modern celebrity, discovered and nurtured by fans on the internet. He was a Twitter trending topic for months until Twitter changed the rules in May to reflect spiking popularity rather than consistent mentions. ... Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:59:14 +0100 864505 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/04/celebrity-biography-jonathan-margolis Angelina Jolie is reportedly upset about a new unauthorised book about her, and Jonathan Margolis, author of several celeb biographies, is beginning to see whyThere can't be many people who feel a pang of empathy for Angelina Jolie, who, along with her PR team, is reportedly upset about an unauthorised biography of her by Andrew Morton.The assiduous Morton's book, apparently pieced together from interviews with unnamed sources – oh, and Jolie's childhood nanny – is a veritable juice-a-thon. In it, so it's being said in the States, we learn that Jolie once had a fling with Leonardo DiCaprio, that she was raised for two years by nannies in a Los Angeles serviced apartment, and that she has a tattoo on her bottom in honour of her former husband, Billy Bob Thornton, written in the helvetica font.Well, as a red-blooded hack of over 30 years' standing (some of this standing outside the firmly closed doors of celebrities), I have something a little bizarre to say. Owing to an odd recent turn of events, I think I'm slightly on Angelina Jolie's side on this.In the 90s, when I was green in judgement, red in bank account, I wrote a series of unauthorised biographies of figures in comedy whom I admired. The first was John Cleese, then Billy Connolly, Michael Palin, and last – my contractual-obligation album requested by the publishers because they thought it would sell – Lenny Henry. The books were pretty good and actually did sell OK, Lenny Henry apart (wherein lies a tale I'll mention in a bit).But my subjects suffered a lot of grief from their unauthorised biographies. Cleese wrote to everyone he knew asking them not to speak to me. Plenty did anyway, but Cleese later commented dismissively that he found 200 mistakes in the first chapter alone. Connolly was furious and I believe remains so. Palin, because I suspect he just can't help being nice, agreed to read the manuscript when I bumped into him at a reception. ... Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:27:36 +0100 864316 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/08/03/mmmmmmm-spaghetti/ What’s better than pasta?  Possibly reading a dating memoir by an Italian American that includes pasta recipes? Well, that was my hope when I grabbed I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti by Giulia Melucci.  Living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan in publishing (Spy, Harper’s), Melucci chronicles her love life a la Sex and the City, substituting cooking for shopping.  She feels “a new boyfriend is a tantalizing opportunity to show off the thing I’m most confident about: my cooking.”  For each troubled relationship, she cooks up a storm.  Her cooking improves, but it’s hard to believe she learned anything in the man-selection department. Kit is the first guy in her book.  An acquaintance from her past, Kit sends her a note on the same day that she moves into her first apartment.  The timing was so perfect.  They hit it off immediately; they both worked in the publishing world, met interesting people and were invited to parties all over New York, which was perfect for Kit’s drinking problem.  Not even her Spaghetti Carbonara (pg. 22) wins him over as gradually his drinking becomes more important than being with Giulia. Number two is Ethan.  They were perfect for each other.  They loved each other’s company, had plenty in common, and he looked exactly like the man she was looking for.  But it took “nine months and about twenty-seven meals to win him,” if finally sleeping together is winning.  They stayed together for 3 years, but despite the Seder she cooked for him, the trips to Rome and to Venice, and the Risotto with Intricately Layered Hearts (pg. 78), Ethan would not commit.  Bye bye #2. Mitch is next.  An older man, 20 years her senior, Mitch had a crush on Giulia since first seeing her.  Despite their age difference there was an intense physical attraction, but his insecurities showed up and soon after the Frugal Frittata (pg. ... Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:38:13 +0100 864404 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/08/02/lists-rankings-the-top-five-new-items-added-to-worldcat-in-july-2010/ Laura Endress on the WorldCat Blog posts a list of the Top 5 new items added to WorldCat in July 2010. We’ve also added overall holding numbers for each title. In July 2010, 15,208 WorldCat libraries added new items (via Worldcat holdings). The Top Five Items That WorldCat Libraries Added in July are: 1) Night, a biography by Elie Wiesel, was added by 2517 WorldCat libraries. Overall: 122 editions published between 1956 and 2007 in 13 languages and held by 4,689 libraries worldwide 2) The Butter Man, by Elizabeth Alalou and Ali Alalou, was added by 999 WorldCat libraries – A Junior Library Guild selection; Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, 2009. Overall: 1 edition published in 2008 in English and held by 2,794 libraries worldwide 3) Trading Places, an elementary and junior high fiction by Claudia Mills, was added by 959 WorldCat libraries. Overall: 2 editions published in 2006 in English and held by 3,131 libraries worldwide 4) Suite Francaise a novel by Irene Nemirorvsky, was added by 859 WorldCat libraries. Overall: 59 editions published between 2004 and 2008 in 11 languages and held by 2,710 libraries worldwide. 5) The 100-Year Old Secret, an elementary and junior high fiction by Tracy Barrett, was added by 840 WorldCat libraries. Overall: 3 editions published in 2008 in English and held by 2,462 libraries worldwide Source: WorldCat Blog (Source: ResourceShelf) Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:28:44 +0100 864130 http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/08/nine-lives-in-search-of-sacred-in.html India is a mysterious land. While economic development has transformed its cities and suburbs into modern centers of commerce that resemble urban areas around the world, its villages and countryside seem fundamentally untouched by the secular electronic age. In rural places, some people live much as their ancestors did 100, 500, or even 1000 years ago. In his travels across the Indian subcontinent, author William Dalrymple has identified nine people living timelessly. In his new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, Dalrymple profiles each within the context of Indian culture.I started reading Nine Lives wondering whether it would qualify as a collective biography. While each of the nine chapters contains a story of an individual living a life that reflects the past in the present, the author spends much of his effort setting the stage and philosophizing on the meaning of lives. While immersed in reading about the landscapes and traditions, I sometimes forgot who we were following. This is fitting, as Dalrymple's book is not really about individuals. His subjects have all surrendered themselves to lives in service to their beliefs.Dalrymple's subjects include a Jain nun, a ritual dancer, a temple prostitute, and a blind minstrel. All align with Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist faiths in some way, but they are not all particularly pious. Some are seeking purity and peace, while others are just doing the jobs that they born to do. Some still travel by walking, begging for food along the way and sheltering in holy places. All are somewhat revered for serving their societal functions by communities who see no conflict keeping the old ways while living in the 21st century.The author includes a ten-page glossary in the back to define many unfamiliar concepts and identify many of Hindu's gods and goddesses. Because he defines pretty well throughout the text, I did not need the glossary often, but it was still good to have. ... Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 864003 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/07/31/scholarly-publishing-seminal-social-sciences-archive-goes-online-and-opens-to-the-public/ From a Penn St. University Libraries Announcement: Few, if any, archival resources can claim as complete and wide-ranging a documentary record for American academic publishing in the social sciences over the past half century than the Irving Louis Horowitz-Transaction Publishers Archives, 1939-2009. According to William L. Joyce, Penn State’s Dorothy Foehr Huck chair and head of special collections, “This archive of well over 100 cubic feet of materials documents the expansion of social science research and publication from the 1960s into the first decade of the 21st century as it also illustrates the widening focus of the social sciences on important public policy issues.” The archive is newly opened for public research use at Penn State’s Historical Collections and Labor Archives (HCLA) of The Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries. Researchers worldwide can obtain more information and access digitized copies of the majority of the archive through the Libraries’ website at online. [Snip] “I am delighted that the Penn State University Libraries can make the Transaction Archive and its associated collections available online to scholars worldwide,” said Nancy L. Eaton, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications. “This archive will be very important to the study of the social sciences as a discipline and provides correspondence and papers of many notable scholars of the era.” “The files contain correspondence of distinguished social scientists, including Daniel Bell, Alvin Gouldner, and David Riesman, and academics, such as Peter Drucker, and represent the maturation of social science research as it was reflected through the impressive publication record of Transaction Publishers,” Joyce added. ... Sun, 01 Aug 2010 04:21:52 +0100 863908 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/01/kate-kellaway-poetry-book-of-the-month Jo Shapcott's enigmatic poems fight shy of referring directly to her battle with cancerOf Mutability is, as its title suggests, a protean collection: the poems keep shifting ground, subtly transforming themselves – you need to watch Jo Shapcott like a hawk. Or, perhaps, like a barn owl. In her audaciously successful "Night Flight from Muncaster", she wastes no time in asking for audience participation:"Reader, you're an owl/ for this moment, your flower-face a white scrawl/ in the dark, a feather frill."And, as an owl, furnished in feathers and by her imagination, we fly exhilaratingly and unexpectedly towards the sea. But most of the poems do not have the freedom to be fly-by-nights: this collection, her first in 12 years, was written after a breast cancer diagnosis and there is a sense, throughout, of what it might mean to have your wings clipped.Cancer is not mentioned – never dignified with a name. It is characteristic of Shapcott to avoid the banality of straight autobiography. Instead, her illness exists as an anarchic rabble of cells in the body of her texts: "Too many of the best cells in my body/are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw/in this spring chill…" Of Mutability is also a homage to the artist Helen Chadwick (the title borrowed from her 1986 exhibition). Like Chadwick, Shapcott is interested in where the body begins and ends, the extent to which we overspill boundaries and become more than figures in a landscape – a permeable part of what we see. In "Viral Landscape", the body and a baking summer field are strangely fused: "I went outside and found the landscape/which had eaten my heart."Shapcott is interested in non-verbal perception. She reminds us that language is the greatest agent of change. As we seize on one word rather than another, we transform our experience and discard alternative accounts. There is a small coppice of poems about trees. ... Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:02:52 +0100 863687 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/01/my-life-in-pieces-simon-callow-review The actor's collection of his journalism and other writing displays a lust for life both infectious and exhaustingSimon Callow is as noisy on the page as he is on the stage, not necessarily a bad thing. Reading through this skilfully arranged collection of his journalism, speeches and tributes – linked with autobiographical notes – I felt a sense of being engulfed by a tidal wave.Like Orsino in Twelfth Night, Callow is in love with love, his appetite as all-consuming as the sea. Simon Gray doesn't just write good plays; he writes masterpieces. Paul Scofield isn't just a remarkable actor with an inner secret; he guards his God-given talent like a tiger and provides an enduring example of visionary power to rival "any great artist in any sphere".Even when you agree with Callow, there's an air of special pleading and hyperbole that is sometimes offputting. But he's so persuasive, and so enthusiastic, you overcome these caveats and submit to the impassioned fury of his arguments and descriptions.His detailed and perceptive portraits of figures as various and extraordinary as Charlie Chaplin, Charles Laughton, Peter Brook, Rudolf Nureyev, Peter Ustinov, Tommy Cooper and John Gielgud are utterly irresistible.And when it comes to people he admires, whom he's befriended through working with them – Alan Bennett, Peter Shaffer, David Hare, Michael Gambon – you realise he also possesses something his hero Kenneth Tynan had in the post-war era: a gift for transforming personal experience into blazingly intelligent, objective, critical appreciation."If acting is not about prizes, and not about glory, what then is it about?" he asks, pondering the majesty of Laurence Olivier. Callow's whole career, in fact, is a heroic act of will, whose purpose is as much about completing his marvellous biography of Orson Welles (two volumes down, one to go) as it is about playing Mozart, Dickens and, currently, Shakespeare on tour. ... Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:01:53 +0100 863688 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/31/shades-greene-jeremy-lewis-review Graham is famous, but what about the other Greenes? Ian Thomson investigatesGraham Greene's darkest entertainment, The Third Man, ends with a shoot-out in the sewers of Vienna and the death of the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. A convert to Catholicism, Greene had found a suitable image for man's fallen state in the city's reeking underworld. And Lime, with his opportunist loyalties, is a familiar Greene character, whose surname suggests the quicklime in which murderers were said to be buried. One could see him as a fictional counterpart of the British double-agent Kim Philby, who had betrayed fellow spies to the Soviet Union. Philby had earlier helped communists to escape through the Vienna sewers in 1934; newspapers later dubbed him "the Third Man" (a soubriquet that has lost none of its resonance in the era of Peter Mandelson).Written in 1948 as a film treatment, The Third Man made much of east-west border tensions and, as such, reflected a personal anxiety of Greene's. Frontiers have a dynamism of their own in his fiction, and typically set off a reflex of unease. The novelist's father, Charles Greene, had been the pious Anglican headmaster of a public school in Berkhamsted near London, and each day Greene experienced divided loyalties as he left the family quarters to go to class. His literary gift, later, was to locate the moment of crisis when a character transgresses a border of some sort, whether geographical, religious or political, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder.Greene came from a family that guarded its secrets. His five brothers and sisters were all, in their different ways, involved in acts of subterfuge. The eldest brother Herbert was, in the words of Jeremy Lewis, a "shabby fantasist" who consorted with remittance men and confidence-tricksters. ... Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:06:06 +0100 863511 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/31/atlee-life-politics-roy-hattersley Roy Hattersley on an old-fashioned but principled prime ministerAccording to Sir Alan Lascelles – principal private secretary to King George VI – Clement Attlee arrived at Buckingham Palace on 26 July 1945 "in a state of some bewilderment. The poor little man had only heard a couple of hours before that he was to be called upon immediately to fill Winston's place." In Attlee, A Life in Politics, Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds adds to that patronising picture with the bland announcement that the victorious leader of the Labour party had agreed to form a government on "Ernest Bevin's instruction". Clearly Thomas-Symonds believes that, at least until he became prime minister, Attlee was, in Churchill's words, "a modest man with plenty to be modest about" and that it was luck rather than talent that carried him into Downing Street.There is no doubt that circumstance rather that the admiration of his colleagues made Attlee the Labour leader, and even after he led the party to victory, powerful voices still called for Herbert Morrison to replace him. George Strauss – a minister in the postwar government who had served under Morrison on the London County Council – told me: "If the parliamentary party had been allowed to vote, Clem would have been out." Then he added: "And we would have made a terrible mistake." That is not Thomas-Symonds's view. He believes that dumping the man, described by Hugh Dalton as "a little mouse", would have improved Labour's chances of becoming "the natural party of government". In consequence, although A Life in Politics scores high marks for meticulous accuracy, it is flawed by a failure of judgment.Thomas-Symonds can argue in his own defence that Attlee himself endorsed – at least in public – a highly limited view of his Downing Street role. ... Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:06:03 +0100 863515 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/31/letters-sylvia-beach-james-joyce Kathryn Hughes delights in a stream of missives from the 'midwife of literary modernism'Sylvia Beach, sometimes called "the midwife of literary modernism", wrote the kind of letters that any of us might produce if we were running an under-capitalised cottage industry while simultaneously trying to be nice to James Joyce. In other words, the stream-of-paper communication which issued forth most days from the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris during the interwar years is chock-full of worries about recalcitrant radiators, searing headaches and whether or not it might be possible to smuggle banned copies of Ulysses into the US by way of the Canadian border. Beach's letters, a selection of which are published here for the first time, do not tell a tale of obvious heroism, even though the events which shadow them – insolvency, internment by the Nazis, dinner with Gertrude Stein – might tax most of us. Instead, their story is one of getting by – of just about managing to pay the bills and conserve health while doing your dogged best to ensure that western literature will never be the same again.From her letters Beach does not sound like the sort of person who would go out of her way to peddle obscenity, which is technically what she did in 1922 when Shakespeare & Company brought out the first edition of Ulysses, a book that had been banned in all right-thinking territories. Clearly Beach understood exactly why the swollen river of Joyce's priapic prose mattered, but that doesn't mean that any of its chaotic lawlessness seeped into her own way of being. Rather her letters are full of the kind of polite chirpiness you might expect from a Presbyterian minister's daughter from Princeton. Even the most moderate slang – jazzed up, my stars, corking – is placed between metaphorical quotation marks. ... Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:06:02 +0100 863516 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jul/30/bike-blog-summer-reading We asked our bike bloggers and Twitter followers to suggest cycle-themed books to read on your holidays. Here's the best of the bunchWhether your summer break is an epic two-wheeled trek on a rugged tourer kitted out with fully loaded panniers, or a relaxing week lying on the beach, you may be pondering your holiday reading. We've asked regular Guardian bike bloggers plus @james_randerson and @guardianeco's combined Twitter followers for their favourite books on cycling. Here are the results:It's All About The Bike, by Robert PennWarning: do not even casually flick through this book if you have promised your significant other that you will not be cluttering up the garage/shed/landing/bedroom with any more bloody bikes. Reading how Penn, a lawyer-turned-journalist, travels the world to build his dream bike, will make it also seem your destiny to own a completely customised machine. I only started this the other day after watching the BBC4 tie-in, and already my two off-the-peg bikes have lost their lustre. The book's concept might seem a bit of a gimmick, but Penn uses his own personal mission as a peg on which to hang a fascinating history of two-wheeled travel.(Recommended by Helen Pidd, author of Bicycle - the complete guide to everyday cycling, published by Penguin).The Yellow Jersey, by Ralph HurneProbably the best novel about the Tour de France, a racy (if somewhat politically incorrect, as suggested by one particular paperback cover) account of an ageing pro who saddles up for one last go at the Tour. Out of print but to be found on used book sites.(Recommended by William Fotheringham, the Guardian's cycling columnist - author of Roule Britannia: A History of Britons in the Tour de France)Lance Armstrong: Tour de Force, by Dan CoyleInsiders account of a year with Lance Armstrong, with the amusing twist that Coyle proves immune to the Armstrong-as-modern-day-saint hype. ... Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:37:13 +0100 863347 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/30/penguin-books-turns-75-anniversary Colour-coded paperbacks launched in 1935 as cheap, disposable fiction have now become collectible itemsWhen the first Penguin paperbacks appeared they cost just sixpence – the price of a packet of cigarettes – and were hardly intended to be enduring items.But as the publisher celebrates its 75th birthday, Penguin titles are not only among the most recognisable in literature but also a magnet for collectors.Penguin was launched on 30 July 1935 after publisher Allen Lane, travelling home from a weekend visiting Agatha Christie in Devon, was appalled by the lack of cheap but good quality contemporary fiction available at Exeter station. He came up with the concept of the Penguin paperback, bringing out a host of the colour-coded titles that summer (orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime), with works by Ernest Hemingway, André Maurois and Christie herself part of the launch list."Allen Lane didn't get much wrong [but] he thought Penguins would be ephemeral, disposable objects," said Steve Hare, owner of about 15,000 Penguins – he believes he has the largest collection in private hands in the world – and a trustee of the Penguin Collectors Society, which numbers 500 members today.Hare owns the first 2,000 Penguins published, and is "most of the way through the third thousand, but there are some which are very difficult to obtain", particularly some titles published during the war."The great thing about them was that the economics of them meant that it only worked with huge numbers at cheap prices, so most of them are still around," said Hare. "But there are some great rarities, and it is not unknown for particularly rare copies to fetch around £500. ... Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:46:32 +0100 863351 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jul/29/penguin-john-makinson-ebooks John Makinson says that if people want to read using new technology, that's what publishers must give themPenguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron's delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson's diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.Innovation"It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us," he says. ... Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:59:00 +0100 863198 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/29/verily-anderson-obituary Late-flowering writer of biographies and children's booksVerily Anderson, who has died aged 95, published more than 30 books – memoirs, biographies, children's stories and work ranging from personal reminiscences to Shakespeare scholarship and 10 Brownie books. She was a late starter: her breakthrough as a writer came in 1956, at the age of 41, when she published Spam Tomorrow, a deft and frequently uproarious account of her wartime experiences on the home front. Critics hailed it as a new kind of memoir, one of the first to explore the lives of women in wartime.Before the success of Spam Tomorrow, she led a life that was colourful but frequently impecunious. Born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, the fourth of five children of the Rev Rosslyn Bruce and his wife Rachel (nee Gurney), Verily was always certain that she wanted to be a writer. As children, she and her brothers edited and wrote a nursery magazine which they called the News of the World. Verily's haphazard schooling ranged from a few years at Edgbaston high school for girls to being taught at home by her mother, to a brief and unsuccessful stint at the Royal College of Music in London. She said she worked at "100 different jobs" (including writing advertising copy, illustrating sweet papers and working as a chauffeur) before the outbreak of the second world war, when she enlisted with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, on the grounds that if there were going to be a war, it would be "less frightening to be in the middle of things".During the war she met Donald Anderson, a writer who specialised in military history. They married in 1940 and had five children. With his encouragement, she made a precarious living as a freelance writer, while papering her lavatory walls with rejection slips received from publishers for her book projects. ... Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:17:29 +0100 863200 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jul/29/nostalgia-narrative-diaspora-literature The American literary genre of you can't go home again – that fertile ground farmed by Faulkner, Twain and Kerouac – has in the last half-century found a new voice abroadAt six foot, six inches tall, Thomas Wolfe had trouble entering most rooms. But he also had a problem with going back through them, especially if they led to the past. He had told too many truths – and too many lies – about where he came from in North Carolina.In his posthumous 1940 novel, You Can't Go Home Again, he gave Americans a literary catchphrase for the pain so many of us who wind up far from where we grew up feel acutely.After all, in the case of many Americans, if you leave the provinces only to return home, you are marked as a failure. At the very least, you run the risk of finding that flight has spoiled any fond memories you managed to smuggle out.Think of the successful ad-man hero of John Updike's The Farm, who returns to his family's crumbling Pennsylvania farm for an emotionally fraught visit, or Quentin Compson of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, shivering in his dorm room at Harvard, who begins his defence of the American south with the ringing endorsement, "I don't hate it ... I don't hate it."This thread of conflicted nostalgia is strongest in America's most autobiographical novelists, especially the ones who had to leave to write but continuously dial back the past in their work: writers such as Jack Kerouac, who frantically travelled America, but wrote most of his later books about Lowell, while living with his mother in Queens and Florida.Then there's Mark Twain, whose autobiography appears in the new issue of Granta, who rose out of Missouri and saw the world, but settled in Hartford, Connecticut in a white mansion that everyone around him could see looked exactly like a river steamboat.But like so many things America feels it has invented, from democracy to baseball, the you-can-never-go-home again narrative is hardly unique to it. ... Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:16:07 +0100 863070 http://drakelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/07/zack-greinke-jacqueline-cochran.html Quick, Zack Grienke, who plays with the Kansas City Royals this year, and Jacqueline Cochran, an "aviatrix" in 1940, what do they have in common? Well, they both are subjects of a biographical entry in Current Biography, a set we have in print which runs from 1940 to the present. Each issue features short biographies of a number of people of current interest, sports stars, politicians, literary figures etc. It's a great starting point if you're researching someone and want to be straight on the basics - their dates, where they grew up, education etc. (Pictured here is Jacqueline Cochran - you can find a picture of Zack Grienke in the July issue of Current Biography.) (Source: Drake Memorial Library) Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:00:00 +0100 863555 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/28/books-expert-view-park-honan Perhaps Josipovici's condemnation is not of the novels, but of us and the electronic age, writes Park HonanGabriel Josipovici is one of our best critics and he's quite right: let's have a debate. But this is a difficult time for the modern English novel. Martin Amis and other novelists are searching for a medium to express the superficial electronic lives we all lead.They are looking at language itself for a way to accommodate the immense changes the world is going through. The novel is trying to accommodate itself to new views of history and biography, and to make some headway beyond modernism. It is very easy to write in a simple and direct style and to tell a story, but that doesn't achieve real depth.But the electronic age has changed everything, the way we think and the way we live – with instant knowledge, a world where you can find out about anything in two minutes. Novelists are anxious about the medium, the form and its language.Perhaps this condemnation is not of the novels, but of us and the electronic age.We are becoming superficial. I think Amis is trying very hard to find a language which will somehow suit this speed we live under.The time hasn't come yet for a deep Brothers Karamazov.Park Honan is emeritus professor of English and American literature, Leeds University Martin AmisSalman RushdieJulian Barnesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:59:10 +0100 862920 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/28/cuba-fidel-castro-memoirs Ex-comandante publishes The Strategic Victory – but readers hoping for revelations and score-settling will be disappointedThe title, like the man, brooks no argument: The Strategic Victory. When it comes to memoirs some leaders tend to favour metaphor or vagueness, but Fidel Castro likes to get to the point.Cuba's former president is about to publish the first volume of his memoirs, the style and content of which seemingly owe more to Julius Caesar than Tony Blair or George Bush. The 83-year-old's opening volume, due next week, focuses on his guerrilla campaign against Fulgencio Batista's army in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains in 1958.Over 25 chapters Castro recounts, using maps, photographs and diagrams, how his outnumbered rebels routed the dictator and paved the way for their triumphant march into Havana on 1 January 1959. "The defeat of the enemy offensive after 74 days of incessant combat marked a strategic turning point in the war," according to excerpts from an article Castro published on a state website this week.As well as the casualties, he details the type and number of guns, mortars and tanks captured and destroyed: "With these events the guerrilla liberation opened a new phase."One of the titles Castro discarded, because it would have sounded "like science fiction", was How 300 Defeated 10,000. The memoir's dry detail, military focus and victorious arc evokes Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul, but critics must await the full volume before deciding if it matches the Roman's literary merit.By contrast Bush's memoir, Decision Points, due in November, will focus on the former president's battle with alcohol, the 2000 presidential election, and 9/11. Tony Blair's imminent tome, The Journey, is expected to settle some scores with Labour rivals.Castro, presumably spared pressure from any publisher to spice up the text, is not thought to have delved into tensions between his brother Raúl, Che Guevara, and other commanders. ... Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:55:54 +0100 862923 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/28/nikolaus-pevsner-biography-stephen-games My sources are legitimate. I've interviewed those who knew him and accessed his archiveRosemary Hill must have good judgment as a historian: she has won a prize for her book on Stonehenge and enjoyed praise for her study of Augustus Pugin. But she doesn't give that impression in her review of my new book Pevsner – The Early Life: Germany and Art (The adopted Englishman, Review, 10 July).She is aware, for example, that in writing this first volume of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's first-ever biography, I haven't had access to his diaries. She therefore says, vaguely but insidiously, that I "make grave insinuations knowing that much of the evidence is missing". In doing so she makes three "grave insinuations" of her own: that what I've written is suspect; that without the diaries I've been handicapped; and that my knowledge of that handicap should have held me back.Of course I'd love to have had the diaries, but it's wrong that nothing else matters or that, in Hill's words, only "in the diaries [Pevsner] kept at the time" is there "the evidence that would confirm or refute" conclusions sourced from elsewhere.It's entirely possible to know about Pevsner from other sources. Mine include the 70 shelf-feet of papers in the Pevsner archive in Los Angeles, the archives of the many bodies he was associated with, a mass of official documents, his own privately circulated family history, and the memories of the people I've talked to who knew him in Germany, including his wife's sister, two first cousins, surviving former students in Göttingen, and contemporaries from his schooldays in Leipzig.These sources aren't illegitimate or inadequate, as Hill implies. In fact, they often provide an independent means of testing what Pevsner said about himself. ... Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:05:18 +0100 862636 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/27/booker-prize-longlist Booker prize longlist of 13 ignores Amis, McEwan and Rushdie for novels characterised by humour and storytellingMartin Amis may be getting heartily sick of people mentioning he's never won the Man Booker. But the wait goes on, after his novel The Pregnant Widow – along with books from Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan – today became the most surprising omission from this year's longlist.Amis, McEwan's Solar and Rushdie's not yet published Luka and the Fire of Life all failed to make it onto a 13-strong list comprising eight men and five women. This year's judging panel is chaired by the former poet laureate Andrew Motion.The only former winner listed is Australian Peter Carey, one of two novelists to have won the prize twice, who was immediately installed as 3-1 favourite by Ladbrokes to win for his novel Parrot and Olivier in America. If he emerges victorious, Carey will make history by becoming the first three-time winner.Motion said the discussions had been "amiable and clever", and that the judges had tried to put aside literary reputations and judge the novels on their individual merits. Motion is aware that eyebrows might be raised at the omissions, though. "It's slightly invidious to talk about the books that aren't there," he said.After reading 138 books, Motion said he had been struck at how few novelists had written about sex. "It's as if they were paranoid about being nominated for the Bad Sex award. There were a lot of people writing about taking drugs, though, as if that was a substitute for sex."There were no real wild cards in this longlist – unlike last year, when Me Cheeta, a spoof biography of Tarzan's chimpanzee, was listed. Perhaps the most controversial novel is Emma Donoghue's Room, inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl who kept his daughter prisoner for 24 years. ... Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:06:26 +0100 862639 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jul/27/carola-hicks-obituary Art historian and biographer, her work infused large, iconic subjects with new lifeCarola Hicks, who has died of cancer aged 68, was a glamorous academic and a serious populariser of art. She created something new in the world of contemporary biography, writing the life stories and afterlives of iconic works of art such as the Bayeux tapestry and the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. She swept the dust off old masterpieces, explained their cultural contexts and infused them with life for a new public.Her first book to reach a wide general audience was the acclaimed Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk (2001), a gripping account of an 18th-century aristocrat, an earlier Lady Diana Spencer. This Lady Di defied convention: she abandoned her husband, the second Viscount Bolingbroke, for a secret liaison with Topham Beauclerk, concealed her illegitimate child, divorced, remarried and earned her living by becoming an accomplished painter. Carola's biography illuminated 18th-century artistic life and exposed the consequences of transgressive behaviour by women.Her next book, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (2006), was the first of her innovative biographies of works of art. Carola brought fresh insights to this medieval strip cartoon and instrument of political propaganda. Most groundbreaking was her investigation of the afterlife of the Bayeux tapestry: its rediscovery by 18th-century antiquarians, its survival though the French revolution, its reinvention by the pre-Raphaelites, its skewed interpretation by over-reachers from Napoleon to Heinrich Himmler.She followed this success with The King's Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art (2007), which Radio 4 serialised as its Christmas book of the week. As Henry VIII's queens disappeared, they were erased from the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel. ... Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:33:42 +0100 862640 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/27/dickens-robert-seymour-pickwick-grave London museum unveils gravestone of Robert Seymour, the artist who killed himself after 'being dropped' by Charles DickensThe scene on 20 April 1836 was horrific: the artist lay in a welter of gore on the floor of the summerhouse at his London home, his coat and waistcoat burning from the ferocity of the shotgun blast which had killed him.Now, a century after Robert Seymour's memorial disappeared, the stone commemorating him is to be unveiled at a ceremony in the back garden of 48 Doughty Street, the museum in Charles Dickens' only surviving London home.Seymour had taken his own life within 24 hours of a last meeting with the author Dickens, after completing the final illustration – named Death of a Clown – for the writer's first novel, the Pickwick Papers. Almost certainly Dickens had told Seymour he was being dropped as the artist for the serial, which when bound together would become his first runaway best seller and launch his career.The gravestone, which had been missing for more than a century, was tracked down by Stephen Jarvis, a scholar, and rescued from the damp crypt of a London church. Its re-dedication will be some reparation for a grave injustice which some blame on Dickens.A number of admirers of Seymour certainly believe that morally Dickens was responsible for his death. The wretched artist is thought to have believed his genius had been stolen and that the book would make another man rich and famous.Seymour died literally heartbroken: the inquest found that the blast from the fowling weapon, an early type of sporting gun, which he turned on himself, disintegrated his heart.David Parker, a former curator of the Dickens House Museum, in north London, and an expert on the Pickwick Papers, said: "I don't think Dickens can be blamed for Seymour's suicide. ... Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:44:13 +0100 862643 http://hplbookhunt.blogspot.com/2010/07/reader-reviews_27.html The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nestby Steig LarssonBook 3 of the trilogy pulled it all together. Brings up a moral question regarding committing illegal acts for "good" reasons. Good discussion questions regarding whether 2 wrongs make a right and what kind of message is being presented by the "heroine". I enjoyed the series.- Elizabeth P.I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan WellsJohn Wayne Cleaver is not your ordinary 15-year-old protagonist in Dan Wells' debut novel. John has several issues: his mother and aunt run the local funeral home; he believes that he is named after John Wayne Gacy and a murder weapon (Cleaver); and not to mention he believes he could potentially be a serial killer. Fascinated by serial killers, John no doubt finds morbid interest in the local killing spree occuring in his small town; however, will his strict rules to prevent him from become a serial killer be threatened? Read this fast-paced thriller to find out.- Stephanie S. The Thirteenth Taleby Diane SetterfieldGood mystery and well written tale of a biography of a famous dying author named Vida Winter. Miss Winter chooses a young writer to begin her story and the life story that unfolds is intriguing and beguiling. It involves murder, an unusual connection between twins, abandoned children, and an ending that was not terrific but satisfactory.- Julia E. A Fine Balance by Rohinton MistryIt chronicles the intertwining lives of several generations of Hindus and Brahmins in the decades leading up to partition of the Indian sub-Continent in 1947, culminating in Indira Gandhi’s election as Premier and her assassination. This novel explores the full range of human experience from love, loyalty and tenderness to rage, hatred and despair against a background of caste-based inequality and cruelty. It is a powerful story and an eye-opener for the Western reader.- Mike E. ... Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:00:00 +0100 862601 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/26/digested-tell-all-chuck-palahniuk Cape, £12.99Act 1 opens with two Jewish homosexual babies clamped to Lillian Hellman's tits while Nazi bullets spit past her. Samuel Beckett and Pablo Picasso sit passively at the dinner table breathing in the scent of Chanel No 5 as Miss Hellman manipulates the world to her bidding. Oink, bark, cluck . . . Katherine Kenton catches my eye as Miss Hellman grabs Adolf Hitler by the throat.Allow me to part the fourth wall. My name is Hazie Coogan. My vocation is not that of a professional housekeeper – though I am proud to scrub her pots and pans – to the glorious film actress Katherine Kenton; nor do I enjoy what Walter Winchell call a "fingers deep" relationship with her. Nor too am I the sorceress; rather I am the source. I am the lens through which she exists, I am the axe of the bluntest Hollywood satire.Back to the action. If you can call it that. See how every name is in bold. Sarah Bernhardt, Wallis Simpson. See how irritated you get by it! See how little it adds. See how few original ideas Hollywood and Chuck really have. Hollywood sucks you in and spits you out. What Walter Winchell would call a dream factory. What John Crace would call a statement of the bleeding obvious.Los Angeles, city of myth where the truth is what I say it is. Moo, miaow, yawn. Katherine Kenton watches her life flicker past in black and white, old reels of her as Queen Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great, as she reads a Lillian Hellman script where Lillian carries an atom bomb to Iwo Jima and sucks on her Nembutal and Seconal, medication you definitely won't be needing if you carry on reading. Cut to the crypt where Katherine Kenton is mourning her dog, Loveboy, and placing his remains alongside several of her ex-husbands – or wasbands, as Walter Winchell would say. The only flowers are from Webster Carlton Westward III. Where are Errol Flynn, Gloria Swanson and the other invited guests?Act 2. ... Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:30:13 +0100 862502 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/jul/26/rupert-murdoch-hugh-trevor-roper "Rupert Murdoch is a megalomaniac twister, surrounded by yes-men and hatchet-men". That sharp description by Hugh Trevor-Roper was contained in a February 1982 letter to his confidant, the historian Blair Worden.It is just one of the critical references to the News Corporation chief that are revealed for the first time in a just-published biography of Trevor-Roper*.Trevor-Roper was appointed as a national director of Times Newspapers in 1974, seven years before Murdoch lobbied to acquire The Times and Sunday Times.By the time, in 1981, when Murdoch emerged as the favoured bidder Trevor-Roper had acquired a life peerage, becoming Lord Dacre of Glanton. He was one of the four directors who extracted promises from Murdoch designed to protect the editors of the titles.But Murdoch's first act was to add two of his own nominees to the board of directors, weakening its independence. Dacre's first clash came when he "expressed reservations" about the switching of the Sunday Times editor Harry Evans to the editorship of The Times.Dacre came to distrust Murdoch's taste and his motives, as he revealed in a Daily Telegraph interview published just after his death in 2003, and a passage is reproduced in the book:I felt that whatever he [Murdoch] touched went down-market, though it also moved from loss into profit. For the sake of sales, he aims to moronise and Americanise the population. He also wants to destroy our institutions, to rot them with a daily corrosive acid... He certainly has a hatred of what he considers the stuffiness of the British establishment. He tends to put peers on his board, and they're not useless peers either, but I think he's saying, 'All these people are buyable, they're digging their own graves for me".Dacre's second clash with Murdoch followed the transfer of the ownership of the newspaper titles from a separate company into News International. It was that which prompted Dacre's "megalomaniac" remark. ... Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:05:07 +0100 862214 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/wYfTVkpjxTk/ The public domain is a great thing for literary appreciation. Any title older than 1923—which includes most of the great literary novels, the works of 19th-century poets, and so on—is immediately available to anyone who can download an e-book. But what happens when a lost work turns up—and then promptly vanishes into a private collection? This is the question posed by Michael Rosen on the Guardian’s Books blog. Rosen reminds us that the four year anniversary recently passed of the discovery of a lost poem by Percy Bysse Shelley, entitled “Poetical Essay”. The poem, self-published by Shelley in support of a friend imprisoned for libel, was known to scholars but considered lost, until a copy of the pamphlet containing it turned up in a British antiquarian bookshop. The reappearance of the poem caused a bit of a stir in the press, with at least one article by a literature professor about it, but then the owner sold it to a private collector and it disappeared entirely from view. Rosen writes: First of all, I would like the poem to be available to read by anyone who is interested. I believe that should have happened the moment it was rediscovered. Secondly, I want to know why Professor Woudhuysen was given the right to look at the poem, but no one else was. Thirdly, I want to know why this situation doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the great republic of letters, least of all that guardian of literary precision and exactitude, the TLS [Times Literary Supplement]. Isn’t it an outrage, that a long dead, great writer’s work can be hidden away in its owner’s drawer? When I covered Mark Twain’s unpublished autobiography, I wondered who owned the copyright on the work and whether it should technically be in the public domain as soon as it was newly published. ... Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:36:07 +0100 862178 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/25/rusty-gun-noel-razor-smith An ex-violent offender has written a provocative – often funny – account of prison group therapySay what you like about the shortcomings of prison, but it has produced some wonderful writing. Indeed the combination of extreme experience, a hidden world and enforced isolation might almost be described as the perfect conditions for exceptional prose. Not surprisingly, then, the prison memoir is a genre with an illustrious lineage that includes among its authors Jacobo Timmerman, Primo Levi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.These men, of course, were all writers or intellectuals in the first instance whose accounts of political imprisonment (and torture) remain vital testaments against state tyranny. There is another tradition, though – that of the criminal prisoner who discovers writing in jail. Noel "Razor" Smith falls into this category.Smith is – or was – an armed robber and career criminal. In his first memoir, A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, Smith displayed literary talent, describing his life spent largely behind bars in a fashion that was vivid and powerful and yet alive to larger questions about confinement and brutality. A Rusty Gun continues the story, detailing the five years Smith spent at HMP Grendon, the only prison facility specifically dedicated to the therapeutic rehabilitation of "long-term violent recidivists". Smith himself certainly fit that bill. By the time he reached Grendon in 2003, he was four years into a life sentence on various counts of bank robbery.A big man with a big reputation, he decided, after the suicide of his teenage son, that he needed to change his life. And to do that, he realised, he needed to change himself. His success over the next five years in turning his back on violence he attributes in no small part to the sympathetic environment of Grendon. Smith points to the absence of a punishment block at the prison, and the fact that it has the lowest reconviction rate of any category B prison. ... Sat, 24 Jul 2010 23:29:45 +0100 862012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/25/michael-munn-biographer-interview-tim-adams Michael Munn claims to have had astoundingly eventful friendships with Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Steve McQueen and a host of other stars. Those who doubt him include their families – and his ownSitting with Michael Munn, biographer to the stars, in a somewhat bleak pub near his home in Sudbury, Suffolk, I can't get out of my head that classic Pete 'n' Dud sketch in which the flat-capped Peter Cook reveals to Dudley Moore the problems he is having being harassed by the likes of "bloody Greta Garbo". Munn, an affable man of 57, has long been a stalwart of Sudbury amateur dramatics; he still harbours ambitions of moving to Colchester, "just for the buzz". As he sips at a lunchtime half of lager, and tucks into his chicken salad, he is telling me of the time that Ava Gardner wouldn't take no for an answer."Ava was a brief but very intense relationship," he suggests, matter-of-factly. "After the first time, we'd meet in the afternoons at hotels in Knightsbridge or wherever." I try to picture the scene. Gardner would have been 45 and Munn 17. He'd not long left school in London, was living with his parents, and had recently been working for British Railways as a trainee in their health and safety department. Ava had moved to London to star opposite James Mason as the Empress of Austria in the film Mayerling. The unlikely pair had met, Munn explains, when he had delivered a package to her – he was by that time apparently working as a messenger boy for a film company – and asked to use her lavatory. "One thing led to another," he explains, with a shrug.The connection was such that before long Ava had, Munn claims, chosen him as the person to whom she would confide all she knew about her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra, and his vendetta against mafia boss Sam Giancana, which in turn became the inside story of the Kennedys' involvement in the murder of Marilyn Monroe. ... Sat, 24 Jul 2010 23:05:59 +0100 862017 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/25/duchess-of-death-richard-hack A life of Agatha Christie is character assassination most foul…There is a literary critic in America, Dale Peck, whose reviews are so eminently brutal and precise that his surname has become synonymous with a savaging. After reading Duchess of Death, Richard Hack's biography of Agatha Christie, I can't help but wonder whether his name might also become a byword for a particular kind of book: an unauthorised, speculative muddle of fact and fantasy spiced with a pinch of salacious misrepresentation. A hack job, say. It might catch on.This is a tremendously bad book. It manages to be both dull and unpleasant; to describe in exhaustive detail almost everything Agatha Christie ever did without coming close to revealing her as a person or a writer. Part of the problem is that though Hack dutifully lists every one of her 95 books, often describing their cover, cast list, sales figures, reviews and contractual wrangles, he never stops to describe one in any detail. A typical analysis concerns Crooked House, which apparently has "an involved plot with an unexpected denouement." Who'd have thought it?The most outwardly exciting thing that ever happened in Agatha's long life was that she once staged her own disappearance. Her husband Archie, a former fighter pilot, had announced he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce; in response Agatha ran away to Harrogate and pretended to be a South African holidaymaker called Teresa Neele – the name of her rival. This is a fairly intriguing scenario and it's canny of Hack to use it as his opening chapter. But his workmanlike account of the police search and media fuss is undermined by the grotesquely intrusive way he animates Agatha's behaviour. "Agatha squinted her eyes in real pain, or perhaps to prevent the flow of tears"; "Agatha was engulfed by her suffering, stalled like a storm front, shuffling silently through her task on slippered feet. ... Sat, 24 Jul 2010 23:05:48 +0100 862021 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/25/tv-book-clubs-richard-judy-amanda Richard and Judy's approval could make a book an instant bestseller. Could the heady days of the TV book club return? Viv Groskop reviews the genreYou can almost feel the smarm in Richard Madeley's voice. "We're thrilled that the Richard and Judy name is once again associated with books." WH Smith announced last month that it is joining forces with daytime TV veterans Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan to create a new version of their TV book club. It will launch this autumn in 1,055 stores. Six books will be promoted, selected by Richard and Judy and WH Smith's buying team. Although there's no tie-in television show this time, a spokesperson said TV advertising was likely.So is this the return of one of the greatest bookselling wheezes known to publishing? Or a watered-down TV-free version that will have little effect? The online reactions – many of them from disgruntled independent booksellers – are sceptical. "Next month, Waterstone's starts a new book club with a collection of titles chosen by the Chuckle Brothers," sniggered one. Others are more enthusiastic. "If people buy books because they are aware of the Richard and Judy 'brand', how can that be a bad thing?"In its heyday the Richard and Judy Book Club, launched in 2004, made million-plus-sellers out of Joseph O'Connor, Victoria Hislop and Kate Mosse. Featuring 10 (mostly fiction) picks a year, the Book Club was a 15-minute weekly discussion comprising an interview with the chosen author and then a reviewers' chat with two guests. The titles were eclectic: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, Feel: Robbie Williams by Chris Heath, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Arthur & George by Julian Barnes. When viewers voted David Mitchell's famously demanding Booker-shortlisted Cloud Atlas their favourite in 2005, the accusations of dumbing-down diminished to a barely audible murmur. ... Sat, 24 Jul 2010 23:01:46 +0100 862030 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/jo-shapcott-poet-interview The president of the Poetry Society talks to Sarah CrownJo Shapcott has an ear for a title. From the jaunty clank of Electroplating the Baby via Phrase Book's knowing wink to the pointed throat-clearing of 2000's Her Book, she's one of poetry's great encapsulators, able to set the tone of a collection with a choice word or two. "I like titles," she says with a grin, over coffees in a rackety West End café. "With other people's collections, I enjoy reading the title page as if it were a poem itself. For me, I love the process of inventing them: a lot of thought goes in, but they're serendipitous, too. When they come, it's a real thrill. The title is the first sense you get that maybe you've got a book in your hands."Which is why, when Shapcott unveiled her latest collection, fans knew that something was up. Of Mutability, which was shortlisted this week for the Forward prize, is her first book in almost a decade, and while the title is no less plangent than those that preceded it, an audible tonal shift has occurred; the preposition "of" creates a gap between poet and poem, introducing a new note of reticence. It's lower-pitched than before: less pert, more pensive.This is a shift of which Shapcott herself is acutely aware – and she's in no doubt about its origins. In May 2003, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent the "full gamut" of treatment (her oncology team are named in Of Mutability's acknowledgments). The process took almost a year, and was deemed, in the cautious terms of cancer medicine, to have been a success. But the remedy left its own scars. During the course of her treatment, Shapcott found herself facing "not only physical changes, which were quite profound, but mental and emotional ones". It was, she says, "like being reborn as someone slightly different. ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:06:04 +0100 861759 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/west-landscapes-jim-perrin-review Andrew Motion finds complexity and pathos in a memoir of griefWest remembers a double tragedy. A few years back, Jim Perrin's son Will – the child of a woman from whom Perrin had long since separated – committed suicide; he was in his 20s. A fortnight after his death, Perrin's partner Jacquetta was diagnosed with cancer, and died two years later. Perrin, whose reputation as a writer about the countryside stands very high, not surprisingly turned to landscape and words as sources of possible healing. The result is – inevitably - a very moving memoir of lives shared and lost. It is also nearly embarrassing – in ways which are initially squirm-making, but gradually work to deepen the pathos of the story.This embarrassment has nothing to do with Perrin's expectations of landscape. His invocations of his native Wales in general, and of his familiar haunts in particular, are made to carry a familiar burden – in times of sickness and grief, beloved places are discovered to have a healing power, because their memories, as well as their intrinsic beauties, are a kind of benediction. It's a Romantic premise, on which every subsequent "nature writer" has built their own monument – Richard Mabey, in Nature Cure, being a notable recent example.Perrin's writing is another matter. For one thing, the structure of West, while seeking to capture the circlings of a sorrowing mind, and to match these with the need (even in so personal a story) to create suspense for the reader, occasionally ties itself in knots. There is too much repetition (of facts as well as responses) and too much over-elaboration of themes in the pursuit of an appropriate subtlety. At one point Perrin acknowledges this, and makes an attempt at self-validation which is more convincing as argument than fact. "Grief is a strange and wandering journey," he says, "continually returning to the same points in its maze of memory and loss. ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:06:03 +0100 861760 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/caravaggio-life-sacred-profane-review A life of Caravaggio is lost between the personal and the scholarly, says Neil BartlettOne of the primary weapons in 16th-century Catholicism's war against sin was the practice of visualisation, in which the faithful were exhorted to imagine themselves as literal, here-and-now witnesses to the sufferings of Christ. The more flesh-and-blood the imaginings, the better. At the start of his new biography of Caravaggio, the most skilfully carnal artist of the Counter-Reformation, Andrew Graham-Dixon carefully shows how the lurid elaborations of this theory in the plague-stricken Milan of the late 1500s sowed the visual and psychological seeds of a career spent making the dramatis personae of Catholicism seem real – gloriously, horribly, movingly real.What he doesn't mention are the curious parallels between this particular brand of salvation-through-imagination and his own work as a popular art historian. If you can't make it to Rome, Naples, Valletta or Messina to see the incomparable originals in situ – runs the unspoken subtext — then this book is here to help you visualise them. Just as on television, your friendly expert will not only tell you what the paintings mean, but his impassioned commentary will also make you feel as though you are there, in the presence of the original.Done well, this is no mean feat. The problem is that in print, Graham-Dixon clearly feels the need to foreground his expertise. He reassesses (and often reprints verbatim) much of the key source material relating to Caravaggio's notoriously turbulent life, and this necessarily makes for a hefty read. Sometimes it feels like he gets it right – the doggedly back-to-sources account of the painter's early death is impressively unsentimental – but just as often, the history seems under-edited, or even just plain unconvincing. ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:05:48 +0100 861775 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/24/bronte-sisters-haworth-yorkshire Ian Sansom on three literary sisters and their 'hopeless' brotherFor the Brontës of Haworth, west Yorkshire, 1847 was a big year. In October, Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre was published. "We can cordially recommend Jane Eyre to our readers," ran one enthusiastic review. "It is sure to be in demand." The reviewer was right. Two months later, both younger Brontë sisters also published novels: Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Wuthering Heights was an instant bestseller. The Brontës – under their male pseudonyms, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – had achieved what they had always sought. Fame.Everyone now has heard of the Brontë sisters, of course – the "three weird sisters", Ted Hughes called them. They have been memorialised in films and biographies, and their work is drummed into students at school and university. There are academic conferences, Penguin classics, box sets and leather-bound collectors' editions. Isabelle Huppert plays Anne in André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë. Olivia de Havilland played Charlotte in the 1946 biopic Devotion. A 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights starred Juliette Binoche. Brontëana available at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth includes jewellery, mugs and cross-stitch kits. But what of the fourth Brontë sibling, the only brother, Branwell? He was the fourth of the six Brontë children – two older sisters died young. As he was the only son, expectations were high.The Brontës' father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, had come a long way from a two-room cottage in Drumballyroney in County Down to study theology at St John's College, Cambridge, and then be appointed to a perpetual curacy in Haworth. Branwell was not expected to fail. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, claimed that Branwell was "a boy of remarkable promise, and, in some ways, of extraordinary precocity of talent". ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:05:47 +0100 861776 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/american-caesars-nigel-hamilton A collection of waspish mini-biographies of the most recent US leaders enthrals Peter PrestonThis is a delight of a summer book: history for the beach, politics for the deckchair, and waspish entertainment come rain or shine. Nigel Hamilton takes Suetonius's set formula for mini-biographies in The Twelve Caesars – where they came from, what they did in power, who shared their beds – and uses it to work over every US president from FDR to George W Bush. Scope for jokes, gossip and something much more: a space to set a dozen leaders everyone knows in a context where secrets fall out of the cupboard and comparisons come naturally.Who emerges well? Roosevelt, of course, with Eisenhower, Truman and Reagan not far behind. And badly? Bush Jr, inevitably; the warped, sometimes demented Nixon; but John F Kennedy, hopelessly in thrall to a world of lust, isn't pavilioned in praise either. And, because he is essentially telling a sequential story as well as sketching his portraits, Hamilton also charts the rise, and perhaps the fall, of the American empire in human terms.We don't think of Hoover or Coolidge as any kind of Caesar. After Woodrow Wilson, indeed, the US turned in on itself, sinking first into hedonism then into crunching depression, until the ravenously ambitious Roosevelt won the White House and delivered a message that resounds to this day in coalition land. "The country needs, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."That's the wonder of history. The past isn't dead; it offers constant resonances. ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:04:43 +0100 861777 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jul/24/alan-moore-gorillaz-unearthing He may no longer be writing an opera with Gorillaz, but for his next trick, the magician, psychedelic adventurer and occasional comics creator has a different musical project up his sleeveIt's not exactly on a par with his previous triumphs, but Astounding Weird Penises is as close to a new Alan Moore comic as you're likely to get these days. It's drawn by Moore himself and you've got to admit that's a snappy title; but from the shaggy-maned magus who redefined the medium with influential masterworks such as Watchmen (1), V For Vendetta (2), and From Hell, you kind of expect a little more than eight pages of puerile pornographic sci-fi involving a phallus in a space helmet (3). Oh, and you'll only get hold of it by buying issue two of Dodgem Logic, his new underground magazine, in which it's a free insert. There's no point wondering if Moore has lost his mind; here is a man who scrambles minds for a living. But has Moore lost his love of comics?"That has continued," he says in his unmistakable Northampton twang. He's still writing his Victorian pulp fiction mash-up The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (4) and a few other bits and pieces, but that's about it. "There's so many other things that seem to be springing up like mushrooms everywhere. Effectively retiring, at least from mainstream comics, has just given me more time to do things I'd always wanted to do before."Dodgem Logic (5) is one of those things: a proper underground mag in the tradition of 1960s counterculture titles Oz (6) and The International Times. It's a trove of esoteric instruction: anarchy, activism, feminism, urban guerrilla gardening, 1970s-style comic strips and all things alt. Recently, though, the mag attracted wider attention, not because of what was in it but what wasn't. Last year, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz asked Moore to write the libretto for a new opera they were working on, along the lines of their Monkey: Journey To The West. ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:03:42 +0100 861778 http://library.blog.wku.edu/2010/07/23/emanie-nahm-sachs-arling-philips-collection-available/ Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927); Emanie Philips (1893-1981) After establishing herself in New York during the 1920s as an author of novels, short stories and reviews, Bowling Green native Emanie (Nahm) Sachs longed to write the biography of a “wild woman.”  In 1927, fate handed Emanie her subject with the death of the notorious nineteenth-century feminist, free love advocate, spiritualist, suffragist and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull.  The result was The Terrible Siren, published in 1928.  A feast of gossip and hearsay that made its publisher’s attorneys nervous about libel suits, the book nevertheless remained the standard work on Woodhull for decades. The  Emanie (Nahm) Sachs Arling Philips Collection at the Kentucky Library & Museum preserves much of her fascinating research into Woodhull’s life.  Emanie and her assistants combed through libraries and newspaper archives and contacted individuals who had personally known Woodhull and her colorful family.  While some informants had scandalous stories to tell, others defended Woodhull as a clever and charming woman who was far ahead of her time. After her success with Woodhull’s biography, Emanie went to work on a history of Kentucky.  She became particularly fascinated with the state’s early years, gathering primary and secondary resources on pioneers, Indians and politicians.  Although the work was never published, her manuscript and much of her research is also part of the collection. A finding aid for the Emanie (Nahm) Sachs Arling Philips Collection can be downloaded here. (Source: Western Kentucky University Libraries Blog) Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:35:40 +0100 861833 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/07/23/are-there-worse-things/ One of the worst things I can ever envision is to be imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit.  Imagining someone having to go through the indignities, loss of freedom and choice, and the endless monotony of being in prison when they’re innocent horrifies me.  How do you get through that?  Knowing you’re innocent and spending time in a system that is set up for the guilty?  Very tough to imagine.  But what about going to prison for a crime you did commit?  Is that less scary?  Going to federal prison for a criminal choice you made ten years ago?  That’s what Piper Kerman experiences in her memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Woman’s Prison. Fresh out of Smith College Piper is at loose ends.  When a friend tells her about being involved in drug smuggling with a West African kingpin, Piper thinks it sounds exciting.  She agrees to help by transporting cash illegally and has no real thought about her actions or the possible consequences.  Though the life seems exciting Piper soon gives it up and moves to San Francisco where she starts fresh and eventually finds love.  Flash forward a number of years and Piper is now in New York with her boyfriend (soon to be fiancée) Larry.  She’s got a job she likes and lots of friends.  A seemingly perfect life.  Until the knock on her door and the news that she’s been indicted on federal conspiracy charges.  After learning that she could face up to fifteen years in prison Piper takes a plea deal and agrees to serve fifteen months.  And then she waits.  For six years Piper waits to start her prison time as the government pursues a case against the kingpin.  When that falls through Piper’s time begins.  She surrenders herself to the Federal Correction Institution in Danbury, CT to start her one year sentence. The world she enters is scary and foreign.  Rules, big and small, must be learned quickly. ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:43:36 +0100 861823 http://michaelgolrick.blogspot.com/2010/07/read-and-listened-to-january-june-2010.html OK, I am lazy this time. The list is in reverse chronological order. And it is first books, then audiobooks.....Books read, January - June 2010In the Sanctuary of the Outcasts by Neil White for the East Baton Rouge One Book/One Community The world that made New Orleans : from Spanish silver to Congo Square by Ned SubletteHungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans: The City Where Food Is Almost Everything by Tom FitzmorrisThelonious Monk: the life and times of an American original by Robin D. G. KelleyJulie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie PowellNadirs = (Niederungen) by Herta Müllertranslated and with an afterword by Sieglinde LugCorporate Diversity: Swiss Graphic Design and Advertising by Geigy, 1940 - 1970 by Andres Janser, Barbara Junod, Karin Gimmi, R. Roger Remington, Yvonne ZimmermanI did not actually read the whole book, merely browsed and sampled. There are some great, classic graphic designs featured.The passport by Herta Müller translated by Martin ChalmersFabulous New Orleans by Lyle Saxon[A 1988 reprint by Pelican Press of the 1950 reprint of the 1928 original. Christmas gift.]Letter to My Daughter: A Novel by George BishopAdvance Reader's EditionListened to:There's a (slight) chance I might be going to Hell: [a novel of sewer pipes, pageant queens, and big trouble] by Laurie Notaro, read by Susan DenakerThe Traveler: [a novel] by John Twelve Hawks, read by Scott BrickThe Associate by John Grisham, read by Erik SingerNo way to treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley, read by Grover GardnerSearching for paradise in Parker, PA by Kris Radish, read by Barbara McCullohInside Drucker's brain byJeffrey A. ... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:00:00 +0100 862320 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/22/edna-healey-obituary Author, film-maker and, for 64 years, wife of Denis HealeyWhen Edna Healey, wife of the Labour politician Denis Healey, wrote her book Wives of Fame (1986), about three women married to men of genius, her preferred original title was I Didn't Know He Had a Wife. It is to her extraordinary credit and talent that, although she did not embark on her career as an author until middle life, her success ensured that this was not a phrase that anyone could have subsequently applied to her.Edna, who has died of heart failure aged 92, worked as a teacher as a young woman and later lectured, often on Charles Dickens, for the Workers' Educational Association and the English-Speaking Union. It was Dickens's friendship with Angela Burdett-Coutts, the great Victorian philanthropist who had inherited the Coutts banking fortune, that partly inspired Edna's first biography, Lady Unknown, the Life of Angela Burdett-Coutts. That, and the fact that the Healey family had twice lived in houses in the Holly Lodge estate in Highgate, north London, in the beautiful grounds of her wealthy subject's former home.It took her friend Pearl Binder (wife of the Labour lord chancellor Lord Elwyn-Jones) to make her promise as they sat together in the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster that she would take a synopsis of her idea for the biography to her first publisher. The book, published in 1978, was a bestseller. Her achievement was a matter of great delight and some astonishment on the part of her better-known husband. "I wondered if he would ever have known what I was if I had not written that book," Edna observed drily in a later book of memoirs, Part of the Pattern (2006). "He is always a more attentive reader than listener."It was a truly affectionate observation. ... Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:13:48 +0100 861476 http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/jul/22/private-life-of-pigs The Private Life of Pigs | Tim Marlow Meets | Undercover Boss | Southland | Arena: According to Beryl | SkinsThe Private Life Of Pigs8pm, BBC2Everything you think you know about the ordinary pig is proved wrong in the final episode of the BBC's wonderful and weird three-part series, The Private Life Of . . . Not only do some pigs have straight tails and stripy fur coats, Jimmy Doherty proves their intelligence in a series of challenges before introducing you to the wild boar, "the SAS of the pig world". Worth watching purely to see Jimmy learn how to converse in pig, this show is probably the only time you will ever see a pig and its "corkscrew todger" work its way towards "what must be the world's longest ejaculation". Hilariously gross viewing. MLYTim Marlow Meets8.30pm, Sky Arts 1Jung Chang's Wild Swans, the story of three generations of her family in China, was a publishing phenomenon. It has sold over 10m copies and been translated into 30 languages, making Chang a literary superstar. The book is still banned in her home country, though, and Chang has been very critical of communist China, which she describes as a "prison". Her biography of Mao, co-written with her husband Jon Halliday, was also a success, though controversial in some quarters. Chang meets Marlow at the V&A where she discusses her life and work through a selection of the museum's artefacts. MSUndercover Boss9pm, Channel 4This Undercover Boss has the emotional impact of a three-act Hollywood drama. The big bad boss spends a few humbling days at the grassroots of his business and realises how wonderful his staff are and at the end he gives them special jobs. Not that Tower Hamlets council chief exec Kevan Collins is one of the bad guys. He's having to make £50m worth of cuts, but by spending time with the meals on wheels service and in the homeless office, he appreciates the value of his frontline staff. ... Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:00:37 +0100 861354 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/21/penguins-next-march At 75, the venerable old bird now faces the kind of challenge that it once posed to publishing itselfThe publishing industry is said to have been rocked back on its heels at news that ebooks have outsold US hardback books on Amazon. But the ghost of Allen Lane, publishing impresario and founder of Penguin, might raise an eyebrow at the notion that usurping hardback books via a new technology is really news at all. Seventy-five years ago he launched his paperback imprint and, as birthdays are one thing that Penguin does better than any other bird or beast in the publishing jungle, we're going to hear all about it.As early as 1956 it produced a "Penguin Comes of Age" special written by Lane himself to mark its 21st. For the 60th anniversary of Penguin Classics, in 2006, it was commissioning artists – including shoe designer Manolo Blahnik and photographer Sam Taylor-Wood – to design covers for dinky limited editions of classic texts, each in its own Perspex box. For Penguin's 70th, it treated itself to 70 short books, in all colours of the rainbow, with texts excerpted from the work of its most illustrious authors.By next week, when it arrives at the 75th anniversary of the very first book to roll off its presses it will be seven months into a celebration which began in January with a Waterstone's jamboree involving 50 writers recommending 50 titles, and frolicked into spring with the reissue of 20 novels "that helped shape modern Britain".The self-image, then, remains strong. But what exactly does that image represent? And how well will the venerable old seabird be able to swim in the age of the ebook? One senses that Lane would be relaxed. He revolutionised the industry with the commercially brilliant idea in the depressed Britain of the 1930s of producing paperbacks for the people at sixpence a copy, available at Woolworths or from vending machines. ... Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:59:36 +0100 861356 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/21/glen-baxter-top-10-memento-mori From St Augustine to Nietzche, the author chooses the fearless autobiographical writers who taught him how to write his own, A Preparation for DeathGreg Baxter was born in Texas in 1974, and has lived in Dublin for the past 10 years where he works as a journalist, and runs the Some Blind Alleys creative writing courses. His memoir A Preparation for Death is an unflinchingly honest account of his self-destructive personal decay in his early 30s, and his redemption throug writing.Buy A Preparation for Death at the Guardian bookshop"My interest in autobiography began quite late, relative to my interest in books. I had always assumed heavy lifting in literature could only be accomplished by novels, and I very much wanted to be a heavy lifter. Also, I felt and still feel a natural revulsion toward memoir. Nothing that had ever happened in my life was worth, in itself, a page of published text. But I was sick of my own fiction, and sick of the tired and relentless procession of award-winning novels that all looked the same, and became, through their success, the primary influences of a new generation of fiction writers. The bitterness I felt at not being recognised as a figure in literature almost destroyed me as a writer: I only wrote to be praised, or to avenge, or to insult."It was through an intense study of autobiography – beginning with The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate – that I learned how to write without ambition, and for myself. Every great autobiographical work is a private preparation for death: an author hunts down his weaknesses, his delusions, his inherited values, his everyday enslavements, and murders them in plain sight. Below are some of the works – books and essays – that inspired this sort of ruthlessness in me."Death of Death: "Asthma" by SenecaAll the best autobiographical writers – those who teach us how to live well and how to die well – are to varying degrees stoics. ... Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:15:26 +0100 861215 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/oLGC3iABuoE/sachin-tendulkars-blood-used-to-prepare.html "Worship of cricket's "little master", Sachin Tendulkar, is set to cross a new boundary, as a luxury book publisher brings out a special edition of his autobiography made with the batsman's blood. Only for the most dedicated of fans, the "blood edition" of the Tendulkar Opus, which also includes unpublished family pictures and Tendulkar's thoughts about his career, weighs 37kg, measures half a metre square and stretches to 852 pages edged in gold leaf, costing $75,000 (GBP49,000). Out next February, only 10 copies are being printed and they have all already been pre-ordered" - Guardian (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:39:04 +0100 861258 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/21/mandelson-memoirs-hit-with-bookbuyers Despite frosty reception from critics and fellow politicians, The Third Man is an immediate success at the tillsReviews have been lukewarm and his fellow politicians have hardly been complimentary, but Peter Mandelson's autobiography The Third Man has nonetheless become one of the fastest selling political memoirs ever.According to official figures, released yesterday by book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, the book sold 14,960 copies in just three days last week, putting it at the top of this week's hardback non-fiction chart – well ahead of second-placed Bill Bryson, whose At Home sold 3,745 copies, and third-placed Peter Andre, whose My World – subtitled "In Pictures and Words" – sold 3,208. Amazon.co.uk said The Third Man had topped its overall online bestseller chart since it was released last Thursday, selling more copies than both Stieg Larsson and Stephenie Meyer."The Third Man has undoubtedly been the most successful book from the world of politics this year. As the first significant book release following the general election, we expected considerable demand for this title and the number of pre-orders we received meant that it was challenging for the bestseller top spot before it had even been released," said the internet retailer's head of books buying Amy Worth. "How long The Third Man will hold the number one spot remains to be seen but its success to date illustrates the strong appetite for political memoirs."The Bookseller pointed out that although Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years sold 23,956 in its first six days on sale in the UK, and Bill Clinton's My Life 21,690 copies in its first five days on sale, The Third Man's per-day average, at 4,987, is higher than both Campbell (3,993) and Clinton (4,338). ... Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:28:08 +0100 861216 http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/07/johnny-cash-i-see-darkness-by-reinhard.html Johnny Cash's story has been told before in books, movies, and documentaries. Now it is the subject of a gritty graphic novel, Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness by Reinhard Kleist, which focuses on the singer's life up to his direction changing 1968 concert in Folsom Prison. Through black and white panels, the author/illustrator recounts the death of Cash's brother Roy, his military service, unhappy marriage, and early time at Sun Records, leading up to his addiction to drugs and arrest for smuggling. He also inserts panels on the life of Glen Sherley, an Folsom inmate who wrote a song that Cash sang at the daring concert. Kleist makes no apologies for Cash, who abandoned his family, broke the law, and disappointed many concert goers with bad performances. Feeling that his songs spoke to and for them, however, many of his fans stuck with him. This frank but sympathetic graphic novel is 223 pages and may take several hours to read.For a deeper look at Cash's life as a whole, try Johnny Cash: The Biography by Michael Streissguth, who has also written Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece.Kleist, Reinhard. Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness. Abrams ComicArts, c2009. ISBN 9780810984639. (Source: ricklibrarian) Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:00:00 +0100 861343 http://www.powells.com/partner/18/review/2010_07_20.html?utm_source=overview&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_overview&utm_content=Muriel%20Spark%3A%20The%20Biography Muriel Spark: The Biography by Martin Stannard, a review from The Wilson Quarterly by Michael Anderson. (Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day) Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:00:07 +0100 860942 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/jul/20/comic-superhero-echo-stereotypes-deaf Unlike most of the one-dimensional deaf characters in literature, Echo (aka Maya Lopez) has a complex emotional back storyDeaf characters are often marginalised in literature. Echo the deaf superhero is coming to the rescue as the creators of comics strive for realism in their portrayal of deaf characters."With any form of portrayal including the deaf in comics, we tend to see things very much from a hearing person's point of view," said Paul Dakin, a GP trainer from North London who studies deaf characters in literature, at a recent conference on comics and medicine. "Most of the people who write or who are artists are hearing, and as a result, traditionally there have been other reasons to portray deaf people. So, for example, they are plot devices; they are catalysts; they are means of reflecting particular aspects or features of a hearing character; they move the plot along, but they're not developed in their own right."In Hergé's Tintin, for example, Professor Calculus is hard of hearing. His disability is used as a comic device to introduce trivial and amusing misunderstandings into the story, rather than explored in its own right. Similarly, Hope Hibbert, a deaf girl who first appeared in The Sensational Spider-Man, issue 18, uses her ability to read lips from security camera footage to give Spider-Man the information he needs to save the day."However, over the last 20 years an increasing number of deaf characters have started to emerge within mainstream comics," said Dakin. "That's given rise to the emergence of Echo. She is a major deaf character in the Marvel canon."Echo (aka Maya Lopez) is a superhero like no other. First appearing in Daredevil issue 9 in 1999, she is a rare deaf character with a complex emotional back story. Born deaf to a Cheyenne father and a Hispanic mother, she has the power to perfectly imitate anything she sees, including a rival's fighting style. ... Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:17:12 +0100 860933 http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2010/07/20/notes-on-reading-resumes First of all, let me apologize right up front, because I know I’m going to come off sounding like a jackass in this post. I really don’t intend to, and I honestly am sensitive to what I’m saying. Remember last week when I posted about our opening for a Head of Circulation? We’ve received close to 50 resumes so far, and I (and my coworkers) have spent a lot of time reading resumes in the past few days. I am certainly not a human resources professional, but I do have input on who will get interviewed and ultimately hired, so I thought I’d share some observations and trends I’ve been noticing. But applicants, take what I say with a grain of salt. I realize I am probably not a typical resume-reader, and that every application process and situation is different. These are just my feelings concerning filling this position. Applying for a job isn’t about you - it’s about the interviewers visualizing you filling the open position and how that will help the library. Do everything you can to make that easy for them. No one writes a good objective, but resumes without them seem lacking. It seems weird to start off a cover letter thanking us for giving you the opportunity to apply, yet I saw this at least five times. Just say what you’re applying for, where you saw the ad, and then move on. There is a definite difference between applicants who want this job and applicants who want a job. I truly sympathize with the large number of people who are out of work. That just sucks. But this job does have requirements, and I was surprised at how many resumes just didn’t meet them. Please, if you are not qualified, do not apply. This position is important to us, and we don’t view it as someone’s stepping stone or life preserver. Read the job posting very closely, and address those points in your cover letter. ... Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:03:43 +0100 861062 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/3hhSt_0ftHc/ A reader named Will posted a link in the Screens page to a handful of DX-friendly screensavers hosted over at Picasa. If you’ve read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, played Portal, or watched Futurama, you will likely be interested. If not, carry on. Kindle Screensavers by William [Picasa Web Albums] Via Chris Walters’ Kindlerama Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:11:58 +0100 860823