Santa is so yesterday. These arctic explorers (and their books) are the real north-polar stars, according to John R. Bockstoce 1. Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage By William Edward Parry 1821 In one of the most astonishingly successful expeditions of the 19th century, 28-year-old William Edward Parry, commanding two [...]
Archive for December, 2009
Five Best Books on Arctic Exploration
Posted in History on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged December 27 2009 on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Why do engineers become terrorists? Among those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, eight were engineers. Among Islamic extremists worldwide, engineers are significantly over-represented, relative to their prevalence in the general population or the population of those with a university education. Why? A recent analysis argues that the combination of an engineering “mindset” and the [...]
Ready to communicate with dolphins? Take a spin in your flying car? Unfortunately, the future doesn’t always turn out as predicted. With just days left in the year, you might be trying out a few cool things you expect to use in 2010 – an e-reader, a talking GPS system, mittens wired to run your [...]
Unreal time
Posted in The Word, tagged December 27 2009 on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Which comes first, drunk o’clock or stupid-thirty? The term “real time” has become such a part of English that we have forgotten how unreal it sounds. Earlier this month, Google announced it would be adding real-time information to its search results, and we already expect real-time information about all sorts of other things: traffic, weather, [...]
The loneliness network
Posted in Health on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Strange as it sounds, loneliness may be contagious The holiday season is entering the home stretch, but flu season is just getting going. And so, we’re warned, the upcoming New Year’s parties and homeward airplane trips and visits to the mall to return our gifts won’t just mean encounters with crowds, they will mean opportunities [...]
What My Daughter Taught Me About Compassion
Posted in Living on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Sarah understood that changing the world meant starting with our relationship. President Barack Obama has been in office nearly one year, making it two since my late daughter Sarah trudged through a freezing winter in Iowa to help him win the nomination. According to a Gallup poll conducted on the anniversary of the presidential vote, [...]
Judges Gone Wild
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Michigan defines judicial bias down. The fallout is already coming from this year’s Supreme Court Caperton decision on judicial bias, and it isn’t good. A new rule on judicial recusal in Michigan shows how the decision could expose nearly every judge to charges of prejudice. In Caperton v. Massey, the Supremes set out a new [...]
Kerry of Tehran
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, tagged Iran on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
His trip would convey legitimacy that the dictatorship is especially eager to have at the current moment. John Kerry lost the Secretary of State sweepstakes to Hillary Clinton, but that hasn’t lowered his diplomatic ambitions. The Journal reported Thursday that the Senate Foreign Relations Chairman is mulling a trip to Iran, and with the blessing [...]
The Senate Postmortem
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health, Politics on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Every Democrat cast the deciding health-care vote. In the post-dawn hours on Thursday the Senate passed ObamaCare 60 to 39, in the first vote on Christmas Eve since 1895 and after the longest consecutive session in Congress since World War I. We are thus heading toward the first U.S. entitlement program dragged across the finish [...]
The World’s District Attorney
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Legendary prosecutor Robert Morgenthau on his famous cases, his brawl with Mike Bloomberg, and why he’s sounding alarm about Iran. In the criminal justice system, the people of Manhattan have been represented for 35 years by New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. This is his story. Mr. Morgenthau, who inspired the original D.A. character [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: the definitive list
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Selected by the Guardian’s Review team and a panel of expert judges, this list includes only novels – no memoirs, no short stories, no long poems – from any decade and in any language. Originally published in thematic supplements – love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part three)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996) An angry, impassioned fantasy of how to take down corporate America, and an ingenious modern version of the myth of the double. Palahniuk’s unnamed narrator, in revolt against the nesting instincts of modern consumerism, goes looking for the intensity of primal male experiences, and finds the maverick prankster Tyler Durden. [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part two)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974) When Haldeman returned from Vietnam, with a Purple Heart for the wounds he had suffered, he wrote a story about a pointless conflict that seems as if it will never end. It was set in space, and the enemies were aliens, but 18 publishers decided it was too close [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part one)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams’s inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: War & travel (part three)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française (2004) Némirovsky, a bestselling novelist and a Russian Jew living in Paris, was taken to Auschwitz in 1942 and died the same year. Her handwritten manuscript was salvaged by her two young daughters who, orphaned and traumatised, did not release it for publication until 64 years later. The two unfinished novellas [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: War & travel (part two)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
William Eastlake: The Bamboo Bed (1969) Captain Clancy is leading his men across the Vietnam hills when he is mortally wounded. As he lies dying on his bamboo bed, search-and-rescue pilot Captain Knightsbridge makes love to the beautiful nurse Jane in his helicopter (which, in poignant synchronicity, is itself dubbed the “Bamboo Bed”). Meanwhile two [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: War & travel (part one)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Junghyo Ahn: Silver Stallion (1990) It is September 1950, and General MacArthur — known throughout war-struck Korea as “General Megado” — has just landed his troops at Inchon. The soldiers establish an encampment named Texas Town, receiving local women who, as a consequence, are publicly shunned as “Yankee wives”. The devastating impact of MacArthur’s assault [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Comedy (part three)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
John Lanchester: The Debt to Pleasure (1996) Tarquin Winot, an epicure nonpareil, is the unreliable narrator of Lanchester’s debut, a delicious emulsion of gourmand musings, recipes, egotism, erudition and delusion. As Tarquin takes us with him on his jaunt through France, the sea air tickling his false moustache, his reminiscences of a life spent cultivating [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Comedy (part two)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Denis Diderot: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (1796) Jacques and his master are journeying to an unknown destination, as befits the philosophy in the title. Jacques starts to recount a tale clearly lifted from Tristram Shandy, but any linear narrative is diffused by comic mishaps, bawdy anecdotes and hobby horses galloping off in all [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Comedy (part one)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954) Amis’s first and — many would say — best book mixes sexually charged campus novel with angry-young-man critique of academic inertia, bourgeois convention and artistic pretension, with hilarious results. Jim Dixon is a history lecturer at an English university who doesn’t like his job but feels he has to try [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Love (part three)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Cees Nooteboom: All Souls Day (1999) Arhur Daane, a Dutch documentary film-maker, has lost his wife and child in a plane crash. He wanders round Berlin as he plans his next project, a film showing the world through his eyes. He meets a philosopher, sculptor and physicist. It is when he meets the young student, [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Love (part two)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Johann Wolfgang Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Legal trainee Werther meets Lotte at a ball. They dance and recite poetry; Werther falls in love. Albert, Lotte’s fiance, returns from a business trip; Werther gets depressed. Lotte and Albert marry; Werther shoots himself. This epistolary novel turned young Goethe into a national superstar, inspired [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Love (part one)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Henri Alain-Fournier: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) Le Grand Meaulnes — translated as The Lost Domain or The Wanderer — is a magical fable of adolesence, erotic awakening and idealised desire. Narrated by 15-year-old François Seurel, it is the myth-like story of how his friend and hero Augustin Meaulnes, lost in a snowy country lane, stumbles [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Crime (part three)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men (2005) The bag-of-loot thriller is as old as the hills, but McCarthy makes it lean and fresh and ready to run. No Country For Old Men drives its hero hell-for-leather along the Texas border with an implacable killer on his trail and a good-hearted sheriff dawdling some distance [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Crime (part two)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
RJ Ellory: A Quiet Belief in Angels (2007) A young boy grows up in the Georgia backwoods, and from the moment his father dies on a day full of sinister omens, his whole life is lived under the shadow of a serial killer who targets little girls and might have links with his family. He [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Crime (part one)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Nelson Algren: The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) The golden arm — golden because it deals cards automatically and brings its morphine-addicted owner his fix — belongs to Frankie Machine. A second world war vet, Frankie takes us through Chicago’s impoverished little Poland: there’s Zosh, Frankie’s wife, wheelchair-bound though doctors can’t find cause or [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Family & Self (part three)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer (1961) Binx Bolling, born of good family and earning a decent living as a stockbroker in New Orleans, embarks on an undefined quest for meaning. His endless trips to the cinema and his stoic pursuit of his secretaries amount to much the same thing: a groping search for something (anything) to [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Family and Self (part two)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
John Galsworthy: The Man of Property (1906) “Those privileged enough to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight – an upper middle-class family in full plumage.” Galsworthy’s introduction to the Forsyte clan focuses on the miserable marriage of the enigmatic “heathen goddess” Irene to the ghastly, [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: Family & Self (part one)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Kobo Abe: The Face of Another (1964) Unrecognisably disfigured by “leech-like” scars after a laboratory accident, the scientist who narrates Abe’s disturbing novel embarks on a mission to replace his face with a convincingly life-like mask. He finds, however, that his sense of self cannot be so mechanically restored with pigment and silicone. An uncanny [...]
1000 novels everyone must read: State of the Nation (part three)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
VS Naipaul A Bend in the River (1979) Another great 20th-century writer visits the sub-Saharan Africa explored in Conrad’s Heartof Darkness, soon after the white colonialists have disappeared. “Black men” have assumed “the lies of white men” and the narrator, Selim, observes with the outsider perspective of a Muslim Asian as a dictator tears apart [...]
