The Saratoga Springs children’s author was among a group of people (organized by Emma Dodge Hanson and including Jane Haugh) who traveled to Africa to give gifts to orphans, including books.
Click more for the story from Times Union staff writer Leigh Hornbeck.
The Of Books and Bicycles blog has a link to a Bible quiz. Give it a shot at http://www.gotoquiz.com/ultimate_bible_quiz
The quiz reminds me of a book I’m reading now, a review copy of a book coming out next month, called “Religious Literacy” — it’s a fascinating book saying that knowing about religions in the U.S. isn’t only a religious matter, but also a civic matter. That book includes a quiz about the major religions that the writer gives to his college students. I plan on reviewing the book for the Times Union when it comes out.
My colleague Casey Seiler handed me this book the other day and said, “Here’s a title that is purely meant to get D’Souza on talk shows.”
Sure, it’s just not right to judge a book by its cover. But with something like 172,000 books published last year in the U.S. (I think I saw this figure in Publishers Weekly), readers have to filter through the onslaught somehow.
Here’s what a reviewer says about the above book in the NYTimes:
He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible.
The reviewer is Alan Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of “Does American Democracy Still Work?”
Here’s the list of finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, to be announced in March:
Nonfiction:
Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)Memoir/Autobiography
Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Poetry
Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)
Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
W.D. Snodrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)Criticism
Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the WestFrom Within (Doubleday)
Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon(Viking)
Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences(McSweeney’s)Biography
Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin’s Press)
Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)
From a Web site calling itself IranMania:
The documentary has a flashback to 2002 when eight internationally renowned writers, poets, and intellectuals, including American novelist Russell Banks and Nobel laureates Jose Saramago and Wole Soyinka, traveled to the West Bank and Gaza to visit Darwish and observe the state of the Palestinians living there.
Click “more” for complete article:
At the Saratoga Springs Public Library ( 49 Henry St., Saratoga Springs NY 584-7860), the reading group, Writers on Reading, welcomes Susannah Risley who will read her own work and lead a discussion of The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Free and open to the public.
Donna Liquori also writes in today’s column:
I’m looking for some examples from fellow bibliophiles for an upcoming column on books that
have changed lives. Do you reread something every year? Is there one book that set you on a
different path? I want to know. Drop me an e-mail and a few publishable sentences explaining
why your particular book is so important. Also, drop me a line whenever you read something
great. It doesn’t have to be a new book. I’m looking to broaden my recommendations throughout 2007. Thanks and Happy New Year.
You can contact her at bilbiofiles@hotmail.com
From the Times of London:
The world’s libraries are heading for the internet, says Bryan Appleyard. If this means we lose touch with real books and treat their content as ‘information’, civilisation is the loser
‘The majority of information,” said Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, “lies outside the internet.”Redmer was speaking last week at Unbound, an invitation-only conference at the New York Public Library (NYPL). It was a groovy, bleeding-edge-of-the-internet kind of affair. There was Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, a book about the new business economics of the net. There was Arianna Huffington, grand panjandrum of both the blogosphere and smart East Coast society. …
Full story is here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2557653,00.html
The following was written by Biblio Files columnist Donna Liquori and published in today’s Times Union. Contact her at bibliofiles@hotmail.com. Seems like a good day for a lover of books:
6:52 a.m.: Wake up. I’m late. Today’s the big day.
7 a.m.: I down a cup of coffee and head out for a quick walk. It’s cold and rainy … the
perfect day for what I have planned. I do a mental inventory of the books I’ve stockpiled next
to my bed. I’ve planned this day as an antidote to a frantic holiday season that left me
feeling, well, wilted.
7:36 a.m.: Home. Time to banish the children and husband from the house.
8:40 a.m.: I push them out the door with lunches, kisses and absolutely no guilt
whatsoever.
