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From Other Worlds: Triggers

Phil — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:00:43 +0000

On the eve of a secret military operation, an assassin’s bullet strikes U.S. President Seth Jerrison. He is rushed to hospital, where surgeons struggle to save his life. At the same hospital, Canadian researcher Dr. Ranjip Singh is experimenting with a device that can erase traumatic memories. Then a terrorist bomb detonates. In the operating room, the president suffers cardiac arrest. He has a near-death experience—but the memories that flash through Jerrison’s mind are not his memories.

It quickly becomes clear that the electromagnetic pulse generated by the bomb amplified and scrambled Dr. Singh’s equipment, allowing a random group of people to access one another’s minds. And now one of those people has access to the president’s memories—including classified information regarding an upcoming military mission, which, if revealed, could cost countless lives. But the task of determining who has switched memories with whom is a daunting one, particularly when some of the people involved have reasons to lie …

Book of the Week: The Folded Earth

Phil — Sat, 12 May 2012 11:00:17 +0000

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2011 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HINDU LITERARY PRIZE FOR BEST FICTION 2011

WITH HER DEBUT NOVEL, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Anuradha Roy’s exquisite storytelling instantly won readers’ hearts around the world, and the novel was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Postand The Seattle Times.

Now, Roy has returned with another masterpiece that is already earning international prize attention, an evocative and deeply moving tale of a young woman making a new life for herself amid the foothills of the Himalaya. Desperate to leave a private tragedy behind, Maya abandons herself to the rhythms of the little village, where people coexist peacefully with nature. But all is not as it seems, and she soon learns that no refuge is remote enough to keep out the modern world. When power-hungry politicians threaten her beloved mountain community, Maya finds herself caught between the life she left behind and the new home she is determined to protect.

Elegiac, witty, and profound by turns, and with a tender love story at its core,The Folded Earth brims with the same genius and love of language that madeAn Atlas of Impossible Longing an international success and confirms Anuradha Roy as a major new literary talent.

Armchair Adventures: Travel: A Literary History

Phil — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:00:38 +0000

Taking the form of fact-filled travelogues, stunt-writing spectaculars, or genre-blurring imaginative works, travel writing has never been more popular than it is today. But beyond the self-conscious literary artistry of today’s narratives lies a rich and well-documented history of travel writing, stretching back over several thousand years and incorporating the work of mariners and missionaries, diplomats and dilettantes alike.

From the ancient world to the present, Peter Whitfield offers the first broad survey to range over the whole history of travel writing, highlighting more than one hundred texts, including works by Marco Polo, T. E. Lawrence, Christopher Columbus, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, and Captain Cook. Whether their travels were merely for pleasure or the result of exploration, military occupation, or trade, the writers discussed here all sought to reimagine their surroundings and, through their writings, reinterpret them for the reader. Because of that personal, interpretive approach, Whitfield shows, their work inhabits a strange borderland between fact and fiction. Over time, as our travel objectives have changed, so too has the tone of travel writing, eschewing the traditional stance of cultural superiority in favor of a deeper sensitivity to other peoples and places. The book is rounded out by numerous illustrations from manuscripts and books of travel in the collection of the Bodleian Library.

A world-class examination of a little-explored genre, Travel: A Literary History offers an accessible look at the history of travel writing that will make a great addition to any carry-on.

A Minute for Poetry:John Stokes’ Horse

Phil — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:00:34 +0000

In the figure of John Stokes’ horse–a crudely-carved toy horse depicted in a David Blackwood engraving–Peter Sanger locates an imaginative gesture requiring the suspension of disbelief, for child and adult alike–a winged mount into a world where myth and memory mix. Looking at language, memory and art through the lens of language presents the very sort of riddle on which Sanger’s poetics thrive. This collection also exhibits a preoccupation with light–shadows, reflections, signals, moon, water–and assails the present state of public discourse in a section called “Civics”. These poems evoke, in Sanger’s words, “imagination’s creative energy, immanent in time and yet timeless, evidence of love, devotion and patience, evidence that by seeing art through its eyes we see more clearly through our own.”

New Release: Sacré Bleu

Phil — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:00:51 +0000

It is the color of the Virgin Mary’s cloak, a dazzling pigment desired by artists, an exquisite hue infused with danger, adventure, and perhaps even the supernatural. It is . . . Sacré Bleu. In July 1890, Vincent van Gogh went into a cornfield and shot himself. Or did he? Why would an artist at the height of his creative powers attempt to take his own life . . . and then walk a mile to a doctor’s house for help? Who was the crooked little “color man” Vincent had claimed was stalking him across France? And why had the painter recently become deathly afraid of a certain shade of blue? These are just a few of the questions confronting Vincent’s friends, baker-turned-painter Lucien Lessard and bon vivant Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who vow to discover the truth about van Gogh’s untimely death. Their quest will lead them on a surreal odyssey and brothel-crawl deep into the art world of late nineteenth-century Paris. Oh là là, quelle surprise, and zut alors! A delectable confection of intrigue, passion, and art history, with cancan girls, baguettes, and fine French cognac thrown in for good measure. Sacré Bleu is another masterpiece of wit and wonder from the one, the only, Christopher Moore.

New Frontiers: Sciencia: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Astronomy For All

Phil — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:00:51 +0000

Sciencia gathers together six individual volumes spanning the realms of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, and astronomy. Lavishly illustrated with engravings, woodcuts, and original drawings and diagrams, it inspires readers of all ages to take an interest in the interconnected knowledge of the modern sciences.

Mystery Sundays: The Stranger

Phil — Sun, 06 May 2012 11:00:23 +0000

A woman is found dead, apparently the victim of a tragic car crash. It’s the first in a spate of seemingly inexplicable accidents in Tanumshede and marks the end of a quiet winter for detective Patrik Hedström and his colleagues. At the same time a reality TV show is being shot in the town. As cameras shadow the stars’ every move, relations with the locals are strained to breaking point. When a drunken party ends with a particularly unpopular contestant’s murder, the cast and crew are obvious suspects. Could there be a killer in their midst? As the country tunes in, the bodies mount up. Under the intense glare of the media spotlight, Patrik faces his toughest investigation yet.

Book of the Week: Milligan’s Meaning of Life

Phil — Sat, 05 May 2012 11:00:33 +0000

With his lightning-quick wit, unbridled creativity and his ear for the absurd, Milligan revolutionised British comedy, leaving a legacy of influence that stretches from Monty Python’s “Flying Circus” to the work of self-confessed acolytes such as Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry today. Throughout his life, Milligan wrote prolifically – scripts, poetry, fiction, as well as several volumes of memoir, in which he took an entirely idiosyncratic approach to the truth. In this ground-breaking work, Norma Farnes, his long-time manager, companion, counsellor and confidante, gathers together the loose threads, reads between the lines and draws on the full breadth of his writing to present his life in his own words: an autobiography – of sorts. From his childhood in India, through his early career as a jazz musician and sketch-show entertainer, his spells in North Africa and Italy with the Royal Artillery, to that fateful first broadcast of “The Goon Show” and beyond into the annals of comedy history, this is the autobiography Milligan never wrote

Growing Things: Compost, Vermicompost and Compost Tea

Phil — Fri, 04 May 2012 11:00:16 +0000

Part of the NOFA Guides series.

Information on composting techniques, including:

Principles and biology of composting
Temperature, aeration and moisture control
Composting methods
Materials (additives and inoculants, biodynamic preparations)
About costs (site preparation, equipment, labor and time)
What do you do with it?
Compost tea and other brewed microbial cultures
Compost and the law

With extended appendices including a recipe calculator, potting mix recipes, and a sample compost production budget sheet.

New Frontiers: Evolution: The First Four Billion Years

Phil — Thu, 03 May 2012 11:00:33 +0000

Spanning evolutionary science from its inception to its latest findings, from discoveries and data to philosophy and history, this book is the most complete, authoritative, and inviting one-volume introduction to evolutionary biology available. Clear, informative, and comprehensive in scope,Evolutionopens with a series of major essays dealing with the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology, with major empirical and theoretical questions in the science, from speciation to adaptation, from paleontology to evolutionary development (evo devo), and concluding with essays on the social and political significance of evolutionary biology today.A second encyclopedic section travels the spectrum of topics in evolution with concise, informative, and accessible entries on individuals from &Aristotle and Linneaus to Louis Leakey and Jean Lamarck; from T. H. Huxley and E. O. Wilson to Joseph Felsenstein and Motoo Kimura; and on subjects from altruism and amphibians to evolutionary psychology and Piltdown Man to the Scopes trial and social Darwinism. Readers will find the latest word on the history and philosophy of evolution, the nuances of the science itself, and the intricate interplay among evolutionary study, religion, philosophy, and &society.Appearing at the beginning of the Darwin Year of 2009—the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of theOrigin of Species—this volume is a fitting tribute to the science Darwin set in motion.