tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37071732012-01-11T22:59:29.484-08:00BOOKS IN HEATBooks as a passionCaptain Futurenoreply@blogger.comBlogger335125This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site, subject to copyright and fair use.tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-23854928431012262002012-01-11T22:57:00.000-08:002012-01-11T22:59:29.500-08:002012-01-11T22:59:29.500-08:00
At his blog via Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan answers a reader's question each day. This response is about the state of book publishing. I can't find much to argue with in his answer.Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-77146425005714541192012-01-03T00:32:00.000-08:002012-01-03T00:37:46.527-08:002012-01-03T00:37:46.527-08:00And So It Goes
Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
by Charles J. Shields
Henry Holt
I saw Kurt Vonnegut three times. Once when he was on stage in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, probably at the event mentioned in this biography as demonstrating his increasing phoniness as he became famous. Another time in the 70s was in Boston. I was an arts and culture editor and writer for the Boston Phoenix and other Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-92000247598473815062011-12-27T23:05:00.000-08:002011-12-28T03:13:33.495-08:002011-12-28T03:13:33.495-08:00
R.I.P. 2011
Among the authors we lost in 2011: fictionist and literary journalist Wilfrid Sheed, Zen master and author Joko Beck, playwright and author Vaclev Havel (also a day job: first president of Czech Republic), author and playwright Max Wilk, author and psychologist James Hillman, and (directly below him in the photos) novelist Ernesto Sabato. Next row: poet Ruth Stone, fictionist, Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-20342692665666206712011-12-15T22:30:00.000-08:002011-12-15T22:30:14.008-08:002011-12-15T22:30:14.008-08:00Living in a Modern Way: California Design 1930-1965
edited by Wendy Kaplan
MIT Press
California’s population is getting older, and more people are leaving than arriving. That’s the opposite of phenomena that defined California in the 20th century, when good jobs, sunshine and possible stardom attracted millions of California dreamers.
There are two photos in this book that tell the growth storyCaptain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-8633510928831000152011-12-13T00:33:00.000-08:002011-12-13T03:01:00.707-08:002011-12-13T03:01:00.707-08:00Eagles: Taking It To The Limit
By Ben Fong-Torres
Running Press
Jackson Browne’s recent tour reminds us that the California stars of the 1970s are still around and remembered. I may have witnessed their collective apex, when Browne, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles played at the Capital Centre outside Washington, DC in 1976, in a benefit for the presidential campaign of Linda’s boyfriend, Jerry Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-79620257488369519922011-12-10T02:38:00.000-08:002011-12-13T00:36:53.758-08:002011-12-13T00:36:53.758-08:00Coffee Talk:
The Stimulating Story of the World’s Most Popular Brew
By Morton Satin
Prometheus Books
Since a book on coffee is likely to be read mostly by coffee fanatics, there are several requirements. First, it must provide glowing detail about how wonderful coffee is, and how good it is for you. Fortunately, the latest health studies have been very positive, so that’s not the problem it Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-10474277652365806672011-12-06T00:06:00.000-08:002011-12-06T00:06:27.309-08:002011-12-06T00:06:27.309-08:00The Roof at the Bottom of the World:
Discovering the Transantarctic Mountains
By Edmund Stump
Yale University Press
Don't mistake this for a glitzy product of the new Arctic and Antarctic tourism. These photos were taken over a period of some 40 years by a geologist who has explored the entirety of this mostly unknown but titanic system of mountains that spans the continent of Antarctica. Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-40034229557676025442011-11-26T00:45:00.000-08:002011-11-28T21:44:53.544-08:002011-11-28T21:44:53.544-08:00The Essential William James
Edited by John R. Shook
Prometheus Books
Long eclipsed by the giants of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung (James met them: liked Jung, hated Freud) and seemingly made irrelevant by drug-happy behaviorists that dominate psychology now, William James is currently receiving new interest and respect. His trust in self-examination and what's sneeringly referred to as Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-74364745565935181542011-11-16T00:24:00.000-08:002011-11-16T00:24:12.681-08:002011-11-16T00:24:12.681-08:00I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet
Edited by Mark Martin
Verso
As noted in Bill McKibben’s introduction, this collection of 10 stories arrives in the growing shadow of the Climate Crisis. But these are not stories primarily about the Climate Crisis, and only a few mention specific manifestations. Instead they are meant to illuminate (as McKibben says), “not to push us in Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-33137682928922970362011-11-03T23:16:00.000-07:002011-11-11T16:37:34.543-08:002011-11-11T16:37:34.543-08:00The Great Leader
By Jim Harrison
Grove Press
Jim Harrison has written a police procedural? The author of historical family sagas like Legends of the Fall, whose last novel was entitled The English Major? Like that last one, this new novel is about a solitary man in his 60s dealing with his changing life, but here he’s a retiring detective obsessed with one last case, and this gives the personal Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-15970649511334298322011-10-25T20:56:00.000-07:002011-10-25T21:10:15.354-07:002011-10-25T21:10:15.354-07:00
Hallie Flanagan
For Pleasure: Early Fall
Apart from books I've read or am reading for review: I've almost finished Robert D. Richardson's biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin.) Richardson is truly a pleasure to read, and he sets a very high bar for biographies. He's an example to be emulated, and I simply don't know of a better biographer. Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-23768898725053284362011-10-03T02:53:00.000-07:002011-10-03T02:53:23.602-07:002011-10-03T02:53:23.602-07:00
Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism
by Bradley G. Shreve
University of Oklahoma Press
The usual narrative of Native American activism begins with Alcatraz and the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s. But scholar Bradley Shreve makes a persuasive case that activism was rooted in earlier decades, and specifically that much of its characterCaptain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-55673897890120560032011-09-25T01:51:00.000-07:002011-09-25T01:53:04.692-07:002011-09-25T01:53:04.692-07:00Why Marx Was Right
by Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press
I suspect no American academic would dare write a book with this title, for fear of losing the comforts of tenure for a cell at Guantanamo. But in the UK at least, the previously influential works of Karl Marx are being reevaluated for contemporary relevance—especially now that capitalism is not proving to be such a utopian success. Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-57684605146077406732011-09-07T00:25:00.000-07:002011-09-07T00:25:46.707-07:002011-09-07T00:25:46.707-07:00The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
The MIT Press
What Marshall McLuhan did in analyzing the meaning of 1960s media, Peter Lunenfeld does for the electronic media of 2011—chiefly the computer and the Internet. Like McLuhan, he coins or adapts catchy new expressions for his concepts, like “unimodernism,” “unfinish,” “web nCaptain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-67902187751386570242011-08-30T01:50:00.000-07:002011-08-30T01:52:48.959-07:002011-08-30T01:52:48.959-07:00
My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
Edited by Sarah Greenough
Yale University Press
In this odd corner of the Internet I review books--not just texts but books--the physical things--how they look and feel--their confidences and auras--and so regarding this book I have to wonder--what were they thinking?
The letters--even 650 or so of them--of artist Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-91808861060664950142011-08-25T00:35:00.000-07:002011-08-25T00:44:00.509-07:002011-08-25T00:44:00.509-07:00For Pleasure: Galileo's Dream
Of the summer reading I outlined, I did complete that lovely volume of Margaret Atwood's stories (Moral Disorder,) and a number of James Hillman essays in Puer Papers as well as in Picked Up Pieces--more on those in a later post. I also read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Mother Night, but I'll probably take a break in my journey through his novels to read a Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-57754322103197396232011-08-20T00:49:00.000-07:002011-08-20T01:50:31.760-07:002011-08-20T01:50:31.760-07:00Darwin just never goes out of style. It seems that with the unique and daunting challenges of the 21st century, his work is even more important. These three books are evidence for that impression.
Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity by Christian de Duve (with Neil Patterson) (Yale University Press) is forthrightly dedicated to this theme. De Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-91403690936970066682011-08-14T22:19:00.000-07:002011-11-28T21:45:38.719-08:002011-11-28T21:45:38.719-08:00A Couple (of Books) in Search of Happiness
In The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding foresees that the onrushing climate crisis in combination with resource depletion and other factors will create catastrophes that force major changes, including (and especially) the transition to a no-growth, steady-state world economy. So in such a society, what will replace material acquisition and the joy of Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-64059862219576528052011-08-10T00:52:00.000-07:002011-08-10T01:56:29.308-07:002011-08-10T01:56:29.308-07:00The Great Disruption
by Paul Gilding
Bloomsbury Press
Our first truly human evolutionary test was whether we could anticipate the future catastrophe we were blindly causing, and act effectively in time to prevent it. Well, we flunked that one. Like other recent books on the climate crisis, this one asserts that the global catastrophe is unstoppable.
Gilding, an Australian former human rights Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-62567927363095318902011-08-02T02:31:00.000-07:002011-08-02T23:00:45.601-07:002011-08-02T23:00:45.601-07:00
American Georgics: Writing on Farming, Culture, and the Land
Edited by Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M Gregg & Brian Donahue
Yale University Press
This is a collection of agrarian writing--about farming and the land--in America from its founding as a nation until just about now. It's of more than historical interest, not only in the general ecological way but in view of the new interest in local Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-59234098975959663192011-07-28T22:17:00.000-07:002011-07-28T23:29:15.034-07:002011-07-28T23:29:15.034-07:00What works, what doesn't? Eventually the public dialogue will get to this, once all the denial and posturing about energy and the Climate Crisis comes to naught. Actually, at least two groups are looking closely at these questions: ordinary people who need to watch their energy costs closely and are open to alternatives, and the researchers, policymakers and journalists professionally involved Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-28998263521859041772011-07-24T01:31:00.000-07:002011-07-24T01:32:27.434-07:002011-07-24T01:32:27.434-07:00The Dalai Lama met with President Obama in the White House on the last day of his recent trip to the United States. As in past visits to the White House, the Dalai Lama wasn't photographed in the Oval Office, which might suggest he was being treated as a head of state. But the Chinese government protested vociferously anyway.
So it is in the current phase of Tibet's troubled history with ChinaCaptain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-25117623806636077912011-07-15T01:16:00.000-07:002011-07-15T03:13:24.825-07:002011-07-15T03:13:24.825-07:00While Beyond Boundaries (reviewed below) is essentially a brief for the research and potential of a new technology, these three books are outside analyses of the nature, uses and future of new and on-the-horizon technologies by people who know these technologies well.
The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allensby and Daniel Sarewitz (MIT Press) examines the many aspects of technological Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-67054584043719802112011-07-13T23:18:00.000-07:002011-07-13T23:25:11.680-07:002011-07-13T23:25:11.680-07:00Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains With Machines—And How It Will Change Our Lives
by Miguel Nicolellis
Times Books
The results of his research on brain-machine interfaces (BMI) has made Miguel Nicolellis a famous scientist, even capturing the attention of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. This book describes his experiments, culminating in the monkey with electrodes Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3707173.post-61067585399852065602011-07-07T23:24:00.000-07:002011-07-07T23:33:11.183-07:002011-07-07T23:33:11.183-07:00
The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change by Philip Conklin, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker and George Denton, with photographs by Gary Comer
The MIT Press
In late June, U.S. government scientists announced that more of Greenland’s ice melted in 2010 than in any year since comparable measurements were first made in 1958. Melting of the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Captain Futurenoreply@blogger.com0