 ASU Browsing
The Sweet Potato Queens' first big-ass novel : stuff we didn't actually do, but could have, and may yet / Jill Conner Browne with Karin Gillespie
Browne, Jill Conner
The Lazarus project / Aleksandar Hemon ; with photographs by Velibor Božović and from the Chicago Historical Society
Hemon, Aleksandar, 1964-  New Titles in UNCA Popular Reading New Titles in WCU Leisure Reading New DVDs at ASU Library New Titles in UNCA DVD New Titles in WCU CMC Video DVD  NYT > Sunday Book Review
Livin’ La Vida Local
In this multilayered first novel set in 1950s Cuba, American expatriates try to bury their dark pasts, even as the Castro brothers gather revolutionaries in the hills.
The Things He Saw
In Ethan Canin’s novel, a boy from humble roots becomes entangled with a powerful New York family — and its secrets — in the early 1970s.
Second Acts
After publishing two memoirs that proved insufficiently factual, James Frey has brought forth a novel whose greatest problem is that it’s insufficiently fictional.
The Dysfunctional Jameses
A collective biography of the James family highlights their problems with alcohol, mental instability and conflicted sexuality.
An American in China
Michael Meyer, a resident of Beijing, records the demolition of the city’s ancient neighborhoods.
Home Screening
In this memoir, a father helps his son through adolescence with the help of a pile of DVDs.
Out of the Midday Sun
Peter Clarke shows how the end of the British empire was hastened by the same Anglo-American alliance that was so successful in vanquishing fascism.
What Safety Net?
Peter Gosselin reports that setbacks like a serious illness or losing a job are now more likely to mean an economic disaster.
Ancestral Journeys
In tracing his family’s history in Lebanon and beyond, Amin Maalouf also traces the changing nature of Arab identity.
Landscape Artist
Robert Macfarlane hikes, climbs and swims through the British Isles in search of parts unspoiled.
The New York Review of Books
Iran: The Threat
By Thomas Powers At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether the United States should or will attack Iran if it continues to reject American demands to give up uranium enrichment. Ignore for the moment whether the United States has any legal or moral justification for attacking Iran. Set aside the question whether Iran, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed in a speech at West Point, 'is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons.' Focus instead on purely practical questions. By any standards Iran is a tough nut to crack: it is nearly three times the size of Texas, with a population of 70 million and a big income from oil which the world cannot afford to lose. Iran is believed to have the ability to block the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf through which much of the world's oil must pass on its way to market.
F. Kafka, Everyman
By Zadie Smith The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:
Obama & the Black Church
By Darryl Pinckney My parents, old NAACP activists, live in front of CNN, and back in April I happened to be with them in Indianapolis the week before the Indiana primary, when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy returned to embarrass Senator Barack Obama's campaign. To my mother, passionately pro-Obama, nothing justified what she saw as Wright's weekend of self-promotion: his speech to the Detroit NAACP and his performance at the National Press Club. 'He's clowning for the white folks,' she said.
From 'Wolf Hall'
By Hilary Mantel Thomas Cromwell was born in Putney, outside London, around 1485. Little is known of his family, but his father, a brewer and blacksmith, had court convictions for drunkenness and assault. Wolf Hall, my new novel from which this excerpt is taken, imagines for Cromwell a hungry, anxious, and desolate childhood. Aged seven, he takes himself to the Lambeth household of Cardinal Morton, where his uncle is a cook, and begs work in the kitchens. Aged nine, he witnesses the burning of a woman of eighty, the heretic Joan Boughton. Aged fifteen, he runs away after a beating from his father. His life for the next ten years is obscure. He seems to have joined the French armies as a mercenary and fought in Italy. Working his way up from a servant's post in a Florentine household, he became a banker and cloth trader; he was sighted in Rome, Venice, and Antwerp.
In the Night Kitchen
By Stephen Greenblatt Macbeth a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Rupert Goold Macbeth an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Adrian Noble In the company of Banquo, King Duncan arrives in great good spirits at the castle of his principal thane Macbeth to whose dauntless military prowess he owes the survival of his reign. Dunca n knows nothing of the 'weird sisters' who have prophesied that Macbeth will be king and Banquo the begetter of kings; and he has no intimation either of the disturbing thoughts that have been stirring in Macbeth's mind or the still more disturbing thoughts that have been welling up in the mind of Macbeth's ambitious wife. Scotland at last seems to be at peace, and its ruler is in the mood to enjoy himself, almost as if he were a tourist: 'This castle hath a pleasant seat,' he remarks to Banquo. Echoing the king's pleasure, Banquo calls attention to the little birds--swallows or house-martins --that are nesting everywhere:
Isn't It Funny?
By Mary Beard Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes by Jim Holt Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC???AD 250 by John R. Clarke Just over halfway up the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome is a memorable, and unsettling, scene. Although practically invisible from ground level, and almost crowded out by the images of violent conflict between Roman legions and German tribes which spiral up the shaft, it has often caught the attention of archaeologists. For it shows a young child being torn from the arms of his German mother by a Roman soldier--and still reaching out to her, as he is roughly hauled away.
Embedded in Iraq
By Michael Massing '0900: Link up with 2-4 IN patrol at Cross Sabers in IZ,' read the message from the press center of the Multi-National Force-Iraq. That meant that at nine the next morning I should show up at the crossed-sabers monument-- the giant pair of arched swords erected by Saddam Hussein on his military parade ground--in the International Zone (aka the Green Zone) to meet a convoy from the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division. The convoy was to take me to a neighborhood in southern Baghdad, where I was to spend the day embedded with the US military.
Blood Relations
By Claire Messud The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich Only in the years following my French Catholic grandmother's death was it revealed to me that there is no such thing as 'magical realism.' There are, instead, culturally specific experiences of the real which, when rendered in fiction, produce different results. Raised in an essentially Protestant setting, I had in youth absorbed, unawares, an essentially Protestant understanding of the world: one that strives for a rational grasp of events, one that espouses clarity, directness, and mastery. In fiction, this leads to largely linear narrative, in which the lines between cause and effect can be clearly traced, and in which, in spite of welcome complexity, there remains an underlying certainty of limits, boundaries, and order.
Please Release the Chinese Writers in Prison! (letter)
By Larry McMurtry
TechBookReport
Practical Reporting With Ruby and Rails reviewed at TechBookReport
TechBookReport reviews Practical Reporting With Ruby and Rails by David Berube
The Unofficial Lego Mindstorms NXT Inventor's Guide reviewed at TechBookReport
TechBookReport reviews The Unofficial Lego Mindstorms NXT Inventor's Guide by David J. Perdue
VBA and Macros for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 reviewed at TechBookReport
TechBookReport reviews VBA and Macros for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 by Bill Jelen and Tracy Syrstad
Pro NetBeans IDE 6 reviewed at TechBookReport
TechBookReport reviews Pro NetBeans IDE 6 by Adam Myatt, with Brian Leonard and Geertjan Wielenga  Quotes of the Day
Evan Esar
"Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose."
Arnold Lobel
"Books to the ceiling,/ Books to the sky,/ My pile of books is a mile high./ How I love them! How I need them!/ I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."
George Santayana
"Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together."
Robin Williams
"Cocaine is God's way of saying that you're making too much money."
E. H. Gombrich
"Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there."
Sir Winston Churchill
"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning."
Unknown
"An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible."
Gerald R. Ford
"Things are more like they are now than they have ever been."
Bertrand Russell
"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." |
