Blogroll

Book Review: A Kidnapping in Milan by Steve Hendricks

George Orwell said they defend the indefensible. According to George Carlin, they “conceal reality.” Both reasons can explain how euphemisms have come to pervade modern media and be increasingly relied upon in government and politics. The so-called war on terror has generated plenty of them, from “regime change” to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Yet one of […]

RIP Hugh Prather

Through the Publishers Weekly blog I see Hugh Prather died. While I’m quite skeptical contemptuous of most self-help, touchy feely or pop psychology books, I’ve probably read Hugh Prather’s Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person more than any other book in the last 35 or so years.

Written in a journal style, […]

Book Review: Death as a Side Effect by Ana María Shua

Dystopian literature stems from no particular geographic boundaries. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell were British, Margaret Atwood is Canadian, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut were American. Thus, while Ana María Shua sets Death as a Side Effect in her native Argentina, the conditions that beset that future society are perhaps universally possible.

Survival is […]

Weekend Edition: 11-20

Blog Headline of the Week

Tiger Woods Cheats On Facebook With Twitter

Bookish Linkage

Lonely Planet comes up with its list of the world’s greatest bookshops. (via)

Even the National Security Agency has written about the world’s most enigmatic manuscript.

Michael Orthofer of the Complete Review and its accompanying blog, The Literary Saloon, […]

Friday Follies: 2.37

Being “sequaciously servile” results in $110,000 sanction for bankruptcy lawyer.

This (and the proliferation of “reality” TV) is why I don’t own a gun.

Gee, occifer, the reason I be driving now after just one beer is that I was following the guy who knows where the Easter Bunny is. Or maybe he thought […]