Author: Michael Janairo

From Christopher D. Ringwald’s A DAY APART press release:

Ringwald is a journalist (and a former Times Union reporter) and educator based as a visiting scholar at The Sage Colleges in Albany, NY. A DAY APART has been hailed by Asma Gull Hassan as “a solemn, brilliant call to multi-faith commonalities and by Solomon Schimmel as “illuminating and inspiring.”

(Oxford University Press, Jan. 2007; Aly Mostel, publicist, 212 726-6111)

Lecture by author. Thursday, January 25, 2007. Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Ave., Albany, NY. Sponsored by Friends of the Albany Public Library. Contact John Sirin (518) 427-4344) or sirinj@uhls.lib.ny.us

That’s right. They did it on “If I Did It.” You can read James Walcott’s review here. One of the best lines is a paranthetical:

(who knew a book about a double homicide could be so flipping coy?)

• MJ Auch has a new book out about an 11-year-old who loses a hand and must learn to live with it. The story is here.
• A blogger suggests that Boswell was a prototypical blogger.
• The New York Times next author up for serializing a novel is none other than Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon.
• The NEA director of the Big Read plans to blog about related events around the country.
• Ryszard Kapuscinski, the world famous Polish writer and journalist, has died in Warsaw at the age of 74.

Novelist John Ringo, the miltary science fiction and adventure author, signs his latest thriller “Unto the Breach” at 7 pm at Flights of Fantasy bookstore (488 Albany Shaker Road, Loudonville NY 435-9337).

Albany Public library plans a spelling bee for adults next month. More info here. Any hopefuls out there?

A review in today’s Slate about Steven Poole’s new book “Unspeak” seems worth a look. Times Union editorial cartoonist John de Rosier showed me this link. His favorites are “ethnic cleansing” and “death tax”:

Unspeak, writer Steven Poole‘s term for a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument, deserves a place in every journalist’s daily vocabulary. Such gems of unspeak, such as pro-choice and pro-life, writes Poole in the opening pages in his book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality, represent

an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.

Pro-life supposes that a fetus is a person and that those who are anti-pro-life are against life, he writes. Pro-choice distances its speakers from actually advocating abortion, while casting “adversaries as ‘anti-choice’; as interfering, patriarchal dictators.”

Poole’s list of suspicious phrases rolls on for more than 200 pages. Tax relief and tax burden, which covertly argue that lowered taxes automatically relieve and unburden everybody. Friends of the Earth casts its opponents as enemies of the earth and implies that the Earth is befriendable, a big, huggable Gaia.

The full article is here.