Monday, September 15, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Two Indian authors shortlisted for Booker
Tuesday,9 September 2008 20:30 hrs IST
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London: Two Indian authors - Aravind Adiga for his novel ''The White Tiger'' and Amitav Ghosh for his book ''Sea of Poppies''- were short-listed for the £50,000 Man Booker Prize 2008. First-time novelist Adiga is the youngest in the running at 34. But surprisingly, Salman Rushdie's ''The Enchantress of Florence'' failed to make it to the elite six. This was rather unexpected especially after he won for the second time the Booker of Booker Prize earlier this year.
However, after being shortlisted in the list of 13 in July this year, Rushdie's novel was installed as the 4-1 favourite by Bookmakers Ladbrokes.
Following the announcement of the long list, his novel enjoyed sales increase along with others. It saw an overall increase of 56.5 per cent sales in the first week of the announcement.
The short list of six was announced by the judges, which apart from the two Indian authors, included Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture), Linda Grant (The Clothes On Their Backs), Steve Toltz (A Fraction Of the Whole) and Philip Hensher (The Northern Clemency).
Bookmakers William Hills feel that Barry is the favourite to win and has given him 2 to 1 odds. Linda Grant and Toltz have 3 to 1 odds, Ghosh, 6 to 1, Adiga and Hensher 8 to 1.
Michael Portillo, the Booker chair of judges, called the six final works ''intensely readable'', adding they are ''extraordinary examples of imagination and narrative.'' ''These books are, in every case, both ambitious and approachable,'' he added. The winner will be announced on October 14 at the awards ceremony at Guildhall, London.
Source MM
-
London: Two Indian authors - Aravind Adiga for his novel ''The White Tiger'' and Amitav Ghosh for his book ''Sea of Poppies''- were short-listed for the £50,000 Man Booker Prize 2008. First-time novelist Adiga is the youngest in the running at 34. But surprisingly, Salman Rushdie's ''The Enchantress of Florence'' failed to make it to the elite six. This was rather unexpected especially after he won for the second time the Booker of Booker Prize earlier this year.
However, after being shortlisted in the list of 13 in July this year, Rushdie's novel was installed as the 4-1 favourite by Bookmakers Ladbrokes.
Following the announcement of the long list, his novel enjoyed sales increase along with others. It saw an overall increase of 56.5 per cent sales in the first week of the announcement.
The short list of six was announced by the judges, which apart from the two Indian authors, included Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture), Linda Grant (The Clothes On Their Backs), Steve Toltz (A Fraction Of the Whole) and Philip Hensher (The Northern Clemency).
Bookmakers William Hills feel that Barry is the favourite to win and has given him 2 to 1 odds. Linda Grant and Toltz have 3 to 1 odds, Ghosh, 6 to 1, Adiga and Hensher 8 to 1.
Michael Portillo, the Booker chair of judges, called the six final works ''intensely readable'', adding they are ''extraordinary examples of imagination and narrative.'' ''These books are, in every case, both ambitious and approachable,'' he added. The winner will be announced on October 14 at the awards ceremony at Guildhall, London.
Source MM
Sunday, September 7, 2008
The Omnivorous English:Henry Hitchings's 'Secret Life of Words' By CALEB CRAIN
The words lolcat and wiki are among the newest in the English language, so new that lolcat doesn't appear in "The Secret Life of Words" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 440 pages, $27), Henry Hitchings's account of the growth of English vocabulary over the centuries, though wiki does. According to Mr. Hitchings, there were 50,000 words in the English language a millennium ago, and there are at least 700,000 today. Half of English words are borrowed, some from the jargon of subcultures such as the Internet, but more often from other languages.
"Borrowings have a 'psychological climate,'" Mr. Hitchings writes, himself borrowing a phrase from a scholar of loanwords. Therefore, Hitchings continues, "we can use details of language to open up a historical vista." For example, in the 1842 coining of dinosaur, which was composed by joining the ancient Greek words for "scary" and "lizard," one can see the pride in the ability to read Homer in the original that was typical of 19th-century intellectuals, even those who dug up bones for a living. And in the emergence of the word teenager in the 1940s and 1950s, one can sense the optimism, informal style, and sociological self-regard of America just after World War II.
Read it all
"Borrowings have a 'psychological climate,'" Mr. Hitchings writes, himself borrowing a phrase from a scholar of loanwords. Therefore, Hitchings continues, "we can use details of language to open up a historical vista." For example, in the 1842 coining of dinosaur, which was composed by joining the ancient Greek words for "scary" and "lizard," one can see the pride in the ability to read Homer in the original that was typical of 19th-century intellectuals, even those who dug up bones for a living. And in the emergence of the word teenager in the 1940s and 1950s, one can sense the optimism, informal style, and sociological self-regard of America just after World War II.
Read it all
Jewel of Medina -- 'child bride of Muhammad' :Gibson Square to publish Sherry Jones's controversial novel
Controversial 'child bride of Muhammad' novel finds UK publisher
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday September 03 2008 17:54 BST
British independent publisher Gibson Square has bought Sherry Jones's controversial novel about the child bride of Muhammad, which was dropped by Random House US following warnings that it could incite acts of violence from radical Muslims. Jones's The Jewel of Medina was also pulled from bookshops in Serbia last month after pressure from an Islamic group.
Gibson Square, which has previously published provocative works including Alexander Litvinenko's Blowing up Russia and House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, paid what it described as a "compelling" advance to acquire The Jewel of Medina. It will publish it in October in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
"In an open society there has to be open access to literary works, regardless of fear," said Gibson Square publisher Martin Rynja. "As an independent publishing company, we feel strongly that we should not be afraid of the consequences of debate. If a novel of quality and skill that casts light on a beautiful subject we know too little of in the West, but have a genuine interest in, cannot be published here, it would truly mean that the clock has been turned back to the dark ages. The Jewel of Medina has become an important barometer of our time."
Random House was told by security experts and academics that the novel, for which it paid a $100,000 advance, was potentially more incendiary than both Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and the Danish newspaper cartoons of Muhammad. Random House said at the time that it decided not to publish the title "for the safety of the author, employees of Random House Inc, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the book". The publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 saw attempts made on the lives of Rushdie's Italian and Norwegian publishers, while the Japanese translator of the book was killed.
Read it all
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday September 03 2008 17:54 BST
British independent publisher Gibson Square has bought Sherry Jones's controversial novel about the child bride of Muhammad, which was dropped by Random House US following warnings that it could incite acts of violence from radical Muslims. Jones's The Jewel of Medina was also pulled from bookshops in Serbia last month after pressure from an Islamic group.
Gibson Square, which has previously published provocative works including Alexander Litvinenko's Blowing up Russia and House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, paid what it described as a "compelling" advance to acquire The Jewel of Medina. It will publish it in October in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
"In an open society there has to be open access to literary works, regardless of fear," said Gibson Square publisher Martin Rynja. "As an independent publishing company, we feel strongly that we should not be afraid of the consequences of debate. If a novel of quality and skill that casts light on a beautiful subject we know too little of in the West, but have a genuine interest in, cannot be published here, it would truly mean that the clock has been turned back to the dark ages. The Jewel of Medina has become an important barometer of our time."
Random House was told by security experts and academics that the novel, for which it paid a $100,000 advance, was potentially more incendiary than both Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and the Danish newspaper cartoons of Muhammad. Random House said at the time that it decided not to publish the title "for the safety of the author, employees of Random House Inc, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the book". The publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 saw attempts made on the lives of Rushdie's Italian and Norwegian publishers, while the Japanese translator of the book was killed.
Read it all
The story of Obama Book Review by C.T. KURIEN
Volume 25 - Issue 18 :: Aug. 30-Sep. 12, 2008
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU • Contents
BOOKS
The story of Obama
C.T. KURIEN
This young black man, a relatively unknown person in his own country, was in search of his identity.
WHETHER Barack Obama will become the President of the United States of America will be known only later this year. But by becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, he is only one step – the most crucial one, though – away from that powerful position. Hence, it will be worthwhile to get to know something of the background of this hitherto not widely known person especially as he is the first Afro-American to reach this stage in a presidential ele ction.
The book under review, originally published in 1995 when Obama was only 34 years old, is autobiographical, concentrating on his early life and training, his higher education in Columbia University and Harvard University from where he took his degree in Law. It also deals with his work as a community organiser in Chicago among the youth, particularly the blacks. The concluding part is an account of his first visit to Kenya, the land of his father and his meeting with many of his relatives, including the half siblings.
One of the notable things about Obama is that he is a first generation Afro-American, his father a native and citizen of Kenya and mother (white) American and of American parentage. Obama’s international credentials are even more impressive. While he was still a young child, his parents ended their marriage. His mother re-married a man from Indonesia and Obama spent some years of his early childhood in that country. He has also an Indonesian-American half sister who is now married to a Chinese-Canadian. Obama’s wife Michelle is a native Afro-American.
It is not surprising that with such diverse ethnic and national elements surrounding him, Obama found frequently asking himself: “Who am I?” The book is a record of that quest – “a story of race and inheritance” indeed. Obama’s maternal grandparents were both involved in the Second World War, and soon after the War moved from mainland America to Hawaii, already very much of a racial and nationality “melting pot” or “salad bowl”. It is there that Obama’s mother grew up and went to the university. Obama’s paternal grandfather was a recognised leader of the Luo tribe in Kenya who had established different kinds of contact with the British during the War and had travelled widely in other parts of Africa, West Asia and as far as Burma (Myanmar). Obama’s father was in Kenya as a child and school boy, attending also to the family’s land and sheep. He had come in contact with a couple of American women in Nairobi, and through them succeeded in getting into the university in Hawaii. It was there that the young man met Ann, the young American student.
Obama confesses that it is not clear how Ann’s parents reacted to her desire to marry a man from Kenya. They were known to be broadminded people who always wanted to “treat people decently”. But that probably did not go as far as having a foreigner, a black too, as son-in-law. Obama records: “In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky…. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride…. Just a small civil ceremony.” And in due course “the baby arrived, eight pound two ounces with ten toes and ten fingers and hungry for food”. But the father soon left Hawaii and went over to Harvard University (where he finally took a doctorate) and from there back to Kenya. Obama’s mother was not willing to go to Kenya and lead a life there. So the marriage broke down. Sometime later she married another student she met at the university, an Indonesian named Lolo.
Obama’s mother took him to Indonesia to join Lolo who had left earlier. Obama spent a couple of years there. His half-sister, Maya, arrived during this period. Accepting her failure to adjust herself to life in a foreign country, Ann, along with her two children returned to Hawaii where Obama started his formal schooling.
LIFE IN BLACK & WHITE
In school and society in Hawaii the growing lad became conscious of the black-white divide. “I had begun to see a new map of the world” records Obama, “one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications”. And a friend told him: “We are always playing in the white man’s court … by the white man’s rules…. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motive and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning…. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.” The awareness, “this nightmare vision” that he was a black and that the essence of being black was the rage that reflected utter powerlessness dawned on Obama and that became a continuing reflection on his life and role in the world that surrounded him.
In 1979, after completing high school, Obama moved to the mainland, to Occidental College (‘Oxy’), Los Angeles. There he was to learn that the society around him was not simply black and white. Some of his college mates vehemently asserted that they were neither black nor white, but multiracial. If so what about Barack Obama? Obama would soon discover that while those who claimed to be multiracial would not and could not class themselves as whites, most of them definitely did not want to be classified as blacks, a track he was not willing to take. And then there were those who denied race and colour altogether to be just “individuals”. He did not find that acceptable either. New doubts. New questions.
Still searching for where he belonged, Obama moved to the east coast to join the Columbia University in New York City where he knew he would have more interactions with blacks. There, perceiving the penury of the blacks, he would soon grasp “the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars”. By the time he graduated, Obama had decided that what he wanted to do, immediately at least, was to become a community organiser. What did that mean? “I couldn’t answer directly. I would pronounce the need for change. Change in the White House, where Ronald Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, maniac and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilised grass roots.” Versions of this creed formulated when Obama was in his early twenties would resonate frequently a quarter of a century later during campaign to capture the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidential race.
ALEX BRANDON/AP
Barack Obama with daughter Malia (right) and wife Michelle (left) during a tour of the USS Arizona Memorial with family and friends in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on August 14.
Chicago was the city Obama chose for his experiments in community organisation. It was to be both a philosophy and a strategy. “Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men. In the sits-ins, the marches, jailhouses, songs [of the civil rights movements] I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place you’d be born or the house where you’d be raised. Through organising, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned – because the community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger community, black, white and brown, could somehow redefine itself – I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life. That was my idea of organising. It was a promise of redemption.” That was the philosophy.
The strategy was to be evolved too, but not easy to know how – whether to set up a new establishment or work through those that already existed; whether there were to be separate ones for youth or include all age groups; whether to be directly involved in politics or to concentrate on relief and empowerment programmes… These would not be fully resolved. But it was a life lived with the neglected, the oppressed, the aimless, the frustrated. There were many failures and a lot of anger too. “Anger at the leadership for being short-sighted. Anger at myself for believing that I could have ever bridged the gap between them.” But there was a great sharing of life with the people he was working with, which “helped me to bind my world together, that gave me the sense of place and purpose I’d been looking for”.
After a few years and building a team to continue the work, Obama began to feel that he should leave and take up a study of law. The decision was not easy. Nagging self-doubts emerged. In law school he would surely learn about government and legal processes, about corporates and business practices, about markets and money power, and these would certainly help to bring about real change. But was he rationalising, running away? Would further academic studies divide him? Obama decided to send in applications to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and so on. When a positive response came from Harvard, the decision was made, and off he went to the Harvard Law School.
VISIT TO KENYA
There is little in the book about life in Harvard, but the Introduction mentions that the opportunity to write the book came after his election as the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review and the burst of publicity that followed that election. But more important to Obama, at the time of writing, was his visit to Kenya, his father’s country, and the discovery of its land and people, including the many members of the family. Almost immediately after he landed in Kenya, Obama was struck by the close affinity of the people there, the pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth, in sharp contrast to the growing isolation of American life. But soon the divisions in the Kenyan society began to appear too, among the country’s 40 black tribes and between the natives and the Asian settlers, for instance. Obama learned a great deal about his own ancestors, his father in particular – who had been killed in a car accident – which led him to ponder over “the mysteries of my own life”.
There is also a moving account of the visit to the graves of the grandfather and the father. “When my tears were fully spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago – all of it was connected with this plot of earth an ocean away, connected more than the accident of a name or the colour of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my father’s questions. Their struggle, my birthright.”
Dreams from My Father is a vivid portrayal of a young man’s search for his identity because of the sharply differing backgrounds he had inherited and the contrasting clusters he had come to belong.
It is an intensely personal groping for meaning through involvement and action, and the striving to evolve a personal and social philosophy of liberation and reconciliation. It is also the remarkable story of a young black man who, at the time of writing, was a relatively unknown person in his
Link
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU • Contents
BOOKS
The story of Obama
C.T. KURIEN
This young black man, a relatively unknown person in his own country, was in search of his identity.
WHETHER Barack Obama will become the President of the United States of America will be known only later this year. But by becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, he is only one step – the most crucial one, though – away from that powerful position. Hence, it will be worthwhile to get to know something of the background of this hitherto not widely known person especially as he is the first Afro-American to reach this stage in a presidential ele ction.
The book under review, originally published in 1995 when Obama was only 34 years old, is autobiographical, concentrating on his early life and training, his higher education in Columbia University and Harvard University from where he took his degree in Law. It also deals with his work as a community organiser in Chicago among the youth, particularly the blacks. The concluding part is an account of his first visit to Kenya, the land of his father and his meeting with many of his relatives, including the half siblings.
One of the notable things about Obama is that he is a first generation Afro-American, his father a native and citizen of Kenya and mother (white) American and of American parentage. Obama’s international credentials are even more impressive. While he was still a young child, his parents ended their marriage. His mother re-married a man from Indonesia and Obama spent some years of his early childhood in that country. He has also an Indonesian-American half sister who is now married to a Chinese-Canadian. Obama’s wife Michelle is a native Afro-American.
It is not surprising that with such diverse ethnic and national elements surrounding him, Obama found frequently asking himself: “Who am I?” The book is a record of that quest – “a story of race and inheritance” indeed. Obama’s maternal grandparents were both involved in the Second World War, and soon after the War moved from mainland America to Hawaii, already very much of a racial and nationality “melting pot” or “salad bowl”. It is there that Obama’s mother grew up and went to the university. Obama’s paternal grandfather was a recognised leader of the Luo tribe in Kenya who had established different kinds of contact with the British during the War and had travelled widely in other parts of Africa, West Asia and as far as Burma (Myanmar). Obama’s father was in Kenya as a child and school boy, attending also to the family’s land and sheep. He had come in contact with a couple of American women in Nairobi, and through them succeeded in getting into the university in Hawaii. It was there that the young man met Ann, the young American student.
Obama confesses that it is not clear how Ann’s parents reacted to her desire to marry a man from Kenya. They were known to be broadminded people who always wanted to “treat people decently”. But that probably did not go as far as having a foreigner, a black too, as son-in-law. Obama records: “In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky…. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride…. Just a small civil ceremony.” And in due course “the baby arrived, eight pound two ounces with ten toes and ten fingers and hungry for food”. But the father soon left Hawaii and went over to Harvard University (where he finally took a doctorate) and from there back to Kenya. Obama’s mother was not willing to go to Kenya and lead a life there. So the marriage broke down. Sometime later she married another student she met at the university, an Indonesian named Lolo.
Obama’s mother took him to Indonesia to join Lolo who had left earlier. Obama spent a couple of years there. His half-sister, Maya, arrived during this period. Accepting her failure to adjust herself to life in a foreign country, Ann, along with her two children returned to Hawaii where Obama started his formal schooling.
LIFE IN BLACK & WHITE
In school and society in Hawaii the growing lad became conscious of the black-white divide. “I had begun to see a new map of the world” records Obama, “one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications”. And a friend told him: “We are always playing in the white man’s court … by the white man’s rules…. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motive and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning…. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.” The awareness, “this nightmare vision” that he was a black and that the essence of being black was the rage that reflected utter powerlessness dawned on Obama and that became a continuing reflection on his life and role in the world that surrounded him.
In 1979, after completing high school, Obama moved to the mainland, to Occidental College (‘Oxy’), Los Angeles. There he was to learn that the society around him was not simply black and white. Some of his college mates vehemently asserted that they were neither black nor white, but multiracial. If so what about Barack Obama? Obama would soon discover that while those who claimed to be multiracial would not and could not class themselves as whites, most of them definitely did not want to be classified as blacks, a track he was not willing to take. And then there were those who denied race and colour altogether to be just “individuals”. He did not find that acceptable either. New doubts. New questions.
Still searching for where he belonged, Obama moved to the east coast to join the Columbia University in New York City where he knew he would have more interactions with blacks. There, perceiving the penury of the blacks, he would soon grasp “the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars”. By the time he graduated, Obama had decided that what he wanted to do, immediately at least, was to become a community organiser. What did that mean? “I couldn’t answer directly. I would pronounce the need for change. Change in the White House, where Ronald Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, maniac and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilised grass roots.” Versions of this creed formulated when Obama was in his early twenties would resonate frequently a quarter of a century later during campaign to capture the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidential race.
ALEX BRANDON/AP
Barack Obama with daughter Malia (right) and wife Michelle (left) during a tour of the USS Arizona Memorial with family and friends in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on August 14.
Chicago was the city Obama chose for his experiments in community organisation. It was to be both a philosophy and a strategy. “Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men. In the sits-ins, the marches, jailhouses, songs [of the civil rights movements] I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place you’d be born or the house where you’d be raised. Through organising, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned – because the community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger community, black, white and brown, could somehow redefine itself – I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life. That was my idea of organising. It was a promise of redemption.” That was the philosophy.
The strategy was to be evolved too, but not easy to know how – whether to set up a new establishment or work through those that already existed; whether there were to be separate ones for youth or include all age groups; whether to be directly involved in politics or to concentrate on relief and empowerment programmes… These would not be fully resolved. But it was a life lived with the neglected, the oppressed, the aimless, the frustrated. There were many failures and a lot of anger too. “Anger at the leadership for being short-sighted. Anger at myself for believing that I could have ever bridged the gap between them.” But there was a great sharing of life with the people he was working with, which “helped me to bind my world together, that gave me the sense of place and purpose I’d been looking for”.
After a few years and building a team to continue the work, Obama began to feel that he should leave and take up a study of law. The decision was not easy. Nagging self-doubts emerged. In law school he would surely learn about government and legal processes, about corporates and business practices, about markets and money power, and these would certainly help to bring about real change. But was he rationalising, running away? Would further academic studies divide him? Obama decided to send in applications to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and so on. When a positive response came from Harvard, the decision was made, and off he went to the Harvard Law School.
VISIT TO KENYA
There is little in the book about life in Harvard, but the Introduction mentions that the opportunity to write the book came after his election as the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review and the burst of publicity that followed that election. But more important to Obama, at the time of writing, was his visit to Kenya, his father’s country, and the discovery of its land and people, including the many members of the family. Almost immediately after he landed in Kenya, Obama was struck by the close affinity of the people there, the pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth, in sharp contrast to the growing isolation of American life. But soon the divisions in the Kenyan society began to appear too, among the country’s 40 black tribes and between the natives and the Asian settlers, for instance. Obama learned a great deal about his own ancestors, his father in particular – who had been killed in a car accident – which led him to ponder over “the mysteries of my own life”.
There is also a moving account of the visit to the graves of the grandfather and the father. “When my tears were fully spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago – all of it was connected with this plot of earth an ocean away, connected more than the accident of a name or the colour of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my father’s questions. Their struggle, my birthright.”
Dreams from My Father is a vivid portrayal of a young man’s search for his identity because of the sharply differing backgrounds he had inherited and the contrasting clusters he had come to belong.
It is an intensely personal groping for meaning through involvement and action, and the striving to evolve a personal and social philosophy of liberation and reconciliation. It is also the remarkable story of a young black man who, at the time of writing, was a relatively unknown person in his
Link
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
Oddest book title of the past 30 years: Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers.
The people have spoken and the oddest book title of the past 30 years has been selected: Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers. The impenetrable-sounding book, a comprehensive record of Greece's postal routes, is published by the Greek Hellenic
The people have spoken and the oddest book title of the past 30 years has been selected: Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers. The impenetrable-sounding book, a comprehensive record of Greece's postal routes, is published by the Greek Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain, which "exists to encourage the collection of Greek stamps and to promote their study".
The Diagram prize is The Bookseller magazine's award for oddly named publications, and this 72-page book has won the Diagram of Diagrams, for the weirdest title in the past three decades. It nipped in ahead of People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It, and How to Avoid Huge Ships. Philatelic Society of Great Britain, which "exists to encourage the collection of Greek stamps and to promote their study".
The Diagram prize is The Bookseller magazine's award for oddly named publications, and this 72-page book has won the Diagram of Diagrams, for the weirdest title in the past three decades. It nipped in ahead of People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It, and How to Avoid Huge Ships. Read more
Friday, August 29, 2008
Another Book Controversy: Grandma refuses to return Sex education book
The Book Titled 'It's Perfectly Normal' Is Frequently Protested
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Dictionary to have wardrobe malfunction now - Yahoo! India News
Dictionary to have wardrobe malfunction now - Yahoo! India News
Dictionary to have wardrobe malfunction now
Thu, Aug 14 11:25 AM
London, Aug 14 (IANS) Pop star Janet Jackson's explanation for exposing her breast at 2004 SuperBowl, that it was a 'wardrobe malfunction', has entered an English dictionary.
Contactmusic.com reports that Jackson, who was performing during the SuperBowl's half-time show, was embarrassed when her stage partner Justin Timberlake ripped open her bodice, revealing a breast. It was seen by more than 90 million people and the term 'wardrobe malfunction' was coined.
The phrase will now feature in the latest Chambers English Dictionary.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
"The Shack" Reveiwed by Tim Challies
I am certain that there is no other book I’ve been asked to review more times than William P. Young’s The Shack, a book that is currently well within the top-100 best-selling titles at Amazon. The book, it seems, is becoming a hit and especially so among students and among those who are part of the Emergent Church....A search of blogs and websites turns up near-unanimous enthusiastic (and almost unbridled) praise for the book. “This book is a life-changer, a transformer.” “[The Shack] has become a favorite book OF ALL TIME.” “I am changed. I pray indelibly. My oh my!” This book, which was released in May but which has already gone into its fourth printing, is making a major impact. It has obviously struck a chord with Christians.
There are two things I would like to note about this type of book—theological fiction. First, because of the limitations of the genre, it is sometimes difficult to really know what an author means by what he says. There is often some question as to what comes from the author and what comes from the characters. The author cannot always adequately explain himself; nor can he provide footnotes or references to Scripture. It can be challenging, then, to turn to the Bible to ensure that what he teaches is true. This makes the task of discernment doubly difficult, for one must first interpret the fiction to understand what is being said and then seek to compare that to the Bible. We will do well to keep this in mind as we proceed.
Second, we must also realize that, because of the emotional impact of reading good fiction, it can be easy to allow it to become manipulative and to allow the emotion of a moment to bypass our ability to discern what is true and what is not. This is another thing the reader must keep in mind. We cannot trust our laughter or our tears but must allow our powers of discernment to be trained to distinguish good from evil (see Hebrews 5:14). Discernment is primarily a Spirit-empowered discipline of the mind rather than an emotional response.
First, a word about the book as it is written. William Young shows himself to be a capable writer, though I would not have believed it through the first couple of chapters. The book began with far too many awkward sentences and awkward sentence constructs (e.g. “One can almost hear a unified sigh rise from the nearby city and surrounding countryside where Nature has intervened to give respite to the weary humans slogging it out within her purview”). But as it went on and as the story took over the book became easier to read. The story itself is interesting enough, though certainly it lacks originality. The last chapter should have been left on the editing room floor and the final paragraph (before the “After Words”) was a ridiculously terse attempt to provide closure to remaining plot lines. But on the whole the book is readable and enjoyable. Never does it become boring, even after long pages of nothing but dialog.
But Young did not write this book for the story. This book is all about the content and about the teaching it contains. The book’s reviews focus not on the quality of the story but on its spiritual or emotional impact. Eugene Peterson grasps this, saying in his glowing endorsement, “When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of “The Shack.” This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” did for his. It’s that good!” Could it really be that good? Is it good enough to warrant positive comparison to the English-language book that has been read more widely than any other save the Bible? Let’s turn to the book’s content and find out.
Read it all here
There are two things I would like to note about this type of book—theological fiction. First, because of the limitations of the genre, it is sometimes difficult to really know what an author means by what he says. There is often some question as to what comes from the author and what comes from the characters. The author cannot always adequately explain himself; nor can he provide footnotes or references to Scripture. It can be challenging, then, to turn to the Bible to ensure that what he teaches is true. This makes the task of discernment doubly difficult, for one must first interpret the fiction to understand what is being said and then seek to compare that to the Bible. We will do well to keep this in mind as we proceed.
Second, we must also realize that, because of the emotional impact of reading good fiction, it can be easy to allow it to become manipulative and to allow the emotion of a moment to bypass our ability to discern what is true and what is not. This is another thing the reader must keep in mind. We cannot trust our laughter or our tears but must allow our powers of discernment to be trained to distinguish good from evil (see Hebrews 5:14). Discernment is primarily a Spirit-empowered discipline of the mind rather than an emotional response.
First, a word about the book as it is written. William Young shows himself to be a capable writer, though I would not have believed it through the first couple of chapters. The book began with far too many awkward sentences and awkward sentence constructs (e.g. “One can almost hear a unified sigh rise from the nearby city and surrounding countryside where Nature has intervened to give respite to the weary humans slogging it out within her purview”). But as it went on and as the story took over the book became easier to read. The story itself is interesting enough, though certainly it lacks originality. The last chapter should have been left on the editing room floor and the final paragraph (before the “After Words”) was a ridiculously terse attempt to provide closure to remaining plot lines. But on the whole the book is readable and enjoyable. Never does it become boring, even after long pages of nothing but dialog.
But Young did not write this book for the story. This book is all about the content and about the teaching it contains. The book’s reviews focus not on the quality of the story but on its spiritual or emotional impact. Eugene Peterson grasps this, saying in his glowing endorsement, “When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of “The Shack.” This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” did for his. It’s that good!” Could it really be that good? Is it good enough to warrant positive comparison to the English-language book that has been read more widely than any other save the Bible? Let’s turn to the book’s content and find out.
Read it all here
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Gmail - "To Collect Is to Write a Life" - Books & Culture Corner - jacobthanni@gmail.com
Gmail - "To Collect Is to Write a Life" - Books & Culture Corner - jacobthanni@gmail.com
"To Collect Is to Write a Life" - Books & Culture Corner
booksandculture-html@lists.christianitytoday.com
http://lists.christianitytoday.com/t/12521594/7181730/153830/0/Read the online version here.
ChristianityToday.com
Books & Culture Christianity Today International
A Weekly Bulletin from the Editors of Books & Culture Magazine
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Afew days ago in Pasadena, reading the Letters section of the Los Angeles Times, I learned (via a letter from four former editors of the Book Review) that Sam Zell and his people—who took over the Tribune Co. a while back—have decided to kill the section. The timing is interesting, since the Books section of the Chicago Tribune has for several weeks featured a little box asking "What are you looking for in a books section?" Under longtime literary editor Elizabeth Taylor, the Tribune has had an excellent Books section, one that is clearly rooted in Chicago and the Midwest more generally while never seeming parochial. Alas, in a cost-cutting move, the Tribune's bosses have already been weakening the section by reprinting reviews from other Tribune Co. properties as well as from assorted miscellaneous sources, so that what's original to the Trib's own section keeps shrinking. Somehow I don't think it's going to get better in September, when the paper unveils its new, slimmed-down look.
Here at Books & Culture we still think books are important (whether you are reading them in traditional form or via Kindle or absorbing them through your skin). And speaking of Chicagoland, our Book of the Week—Collections of Nothing, a memoir by William Davies King—comes from the University of Chicago Press, one of the glories of American publishing, long may they prosper. In this wonderfully odd and lapidary little book, reviewer Linda McCullough Moore finds intimations that our deepest hopes are not in vain.
In articles from the July/August issue of Books & Culture, Alvin Plantinga explains why evolution and naturalism, far from being mutually supportive, are more like oil and water, while Douglas Groothuis reports on the latest skirmishes in the great debate between atheists and believers.
Thanks for reading.
John Wilson
To reply to this newsletter: booksandculture@christianitytoday.com
"To Collect Is to Write a Life" - Books & Culture Corner
booksandculture-html@lists.christianitytoday.com
http://lists.christianitytoday.com/t/12521594/7181730/153830/0/Read the online version here.
ChristianityToday.com
Books & Culture Christianity Today International
A Weekly Bulletin from the Editors of Books & Culture Magazine
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Afew days ago in Pasadena, reading the Letters section of the Los Angeles Times, I learned (via a letter from four former editors of the Book Review) that Sam Zell and his people—who took over the Tribune Co. a while back—have decided to kill the section. The timing is interesting, since the Books section of the Chicago Tribune has for several weeks featured a little box asking "What are you looking for in a books section?" Under longtime literary editor Elizabeth Taylor, the Tribune has had an excellent Books section, one that is clearly rooted in Chicago and the Midwest more generally while never seeming parochial. Alas, in a cost-cutting move, the Tribune's bosses have already been weakening the section by reprinting reviews from other Tribune Co. properties as well as from assorted miscellaneous sources, so that what's original to the Trib's own section keeps shrinking. Somehow I don't think it's going to get better in September, when the paper unveils its new, slimmed-down look.
Here at Books & Culture we still think books are important (whether you are reading them in traditional form or via Kindle or absorbing them through your skin). And speaking of Chicagoland, our Book of the Week—Collections of Nothing, a memoir by William Davies King—comes from the University of Chicago Press, one of the glories of American publishing, long may they prosper. In this wonderfully odd and lapidary little book, reviewer Linda McCullough Moore finds intimations that our deepest hopes are not in vain.
In articles from the July/August issue of Books & Culture, Alvin Plantinga explains why evolution and naturalism, far from being mutually supportive, are more like oil and water, while Douglas Groothuis reports on the latest skirmishes in the great debate between atheists and believers.
Thanks for reading.
John Wilson
To reply to this newsletter: booksandculture@christianitytoday.com
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Upinder Singh’s A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India
Bibliofile : outlookindia.com
This is one five-star launch nobody wants to miss. The Prime Minister will be there, so will his wife, Gurcharan Kaur. And it’s not one of those titles where the hype about the advance or author is bigger than the book itself. It’ll also probably be the first time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attends a book event without doing the honours. Instead, he’ll be sitting in the front row as a proud father. To no one’s surprise, the launch of historian Upinder Singh’s A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India early next month won’t be held at 7, Race Course Road. Instead, her publisher, Pearson, has wisely decided to go in for a five-star book party to cash in on their power list of invitees and the controversy the book is generating.
This is one five-star launch nobody wants to miss. The Prime Minister will be there, so will his wife, Gurcharan Kaur. And it’s not one of those titles where the hype about the advance or author is bigger than the book itself. It’ll also probably be the first time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attends a book event without doing the honours. Instead, he’ll be sitting in the front row as a proud father. To no one’s surprise, the launch of historian Upinder Singh’s A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India early next month won’t be held at 7, Race Course Road. Instead, her publisher, Pearson, has wisely decided to go in for a five-star book party to cash in on their power list of invitees and the controversy the book is generating.
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