Books and culture
« Previous EntriesLooking back at the Club of Rome
Thursday, May 8th, 2008A point discussed on the blog recently is whether Limits to Growth actually predicted rapid exhaustion of critical natural resources, or whether this was a misrepresentation by much later critics. The text itself isn’t definitive, since it contains some projections showing rapid exhaustion and others (in which discoveries boost stocks by a factor of five) [...]
Verbing the adjectivised abstraction
Saturday, March 29th, 2008I’ve been reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: Fall of a Dynasty about the Indian Rebellion of 1857 with great interest. The complacent reports of the British commanders as they went about destroying the last remnants of independent Indian power are startlingly reminiscent of the “Good News from Iraq” we got so much of in [...]
The other shoe
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008There’s been a fair bit of discussion of the recent announcement of Volume Two of The Fabrication of Australian History: The “Stolen Generation”.
What doesn’t seem to have been mentioned is that the topic of this book bears no relation to the Volume Two that was announced in 2002, with a projected publication date of 2003, [...]
Hamlet without the Prince
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008In the February edition of Prospect, William Skidelsky has a piece on the decline of book reviewing. As is standard for any adverse trend in the early 21st century, blogs get a fair bit of the blame. The write-off (lede for US readers) says
the authority of critics is being undermined by a raucous blogging culture [...]
What I’m Reading: Stem Cell Century
Sunday, February 24th, 2008Research on human stem cells has been at the centre of one the more ferocious science policy debates in the US, only partially cooled off by recent claims that the necessary cultures can be generated from samples taking from adults, rather than from human embryos destroyed in the process.
“Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for [...]
Books I’ve been reading
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007As well as Dance to the Music of Time, there’s Bob Burton’s Inside Spin a well-researched look at the operations of PR in Australia. As well as standard PR and Astroturf operations, there’s plenty of interesting material on think tanks like CIS and IPA.
Life imitates art
Monday, October 22nd, 2007My co-authors will all I thought, at first that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew.
Glacial
Sunday, September 16th, 2007In a piece on the canon wars which quotes CT member Michael Berube, the NYT asserts that college English curricula have seen “a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T.
Ozonomics in Brisbane
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007For any Brisbane readers who haven’t already made their plans for this evening, there’s a book event run by the Brisbane Institute at the Customs House tonight. Andrew Charlton will present a talk on the title “Inside the myth of Australia’s economic superheroes” based on his new book, Ozonomics Charlton is the co-author with [...]
What I’ve been reading
Sunday, July 8th, 2007National Insecurity: The Howard Government’s Betrayal of Australia by Weiss, Thurbon and Mathews, which follows up their earlier book How to Kill A Country, an attack on the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.The hyperbolic titles of these books are not to my taste (though it may help to sell books). The books themselves are less strident than the titles would suggest, and raise issues that should be debated more.
What I’ve been reading
Sunday, June 17th, 2007Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. I’ve bought a lovely Folio edition of this, and have just got started on it. While I’m not a book fetishist, and am perfectly happy to do most of my reading on screen, the book does embody a great tradition of craft values, which will, I hope, never [...]
What I’m reading
Sunday, June 10th, 2007Sophie’s World which my son received as a present and enjoyed (I read it when it came out a few years back and thought it might be good to refresh my memory).
What I’m reading
Sunday, June 3rd, 2007Vanity Fair by Thackeray.
What I’ve been reading
Sunday, March 11th, 2007It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these, so I’ll just put down a list of books I’ve read in the past few months, and open it up to discussion.
Love Libraries
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007As well as being Valentine’s Day, today is Library Lovers Day.
Prada, princesses, product placement
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007I watched The Devil Wears Prada not long ago - as the name implies, it’s not short on product placement, though of course this is part of the fun.
Draft Review of Cerulo
Friday, December 15th, 2006If they play down the risks, they are accused of not preparing for the worst case, but if they play them up they run the risk that more expectant parents will seek to allay their concerns through medical procedures that carry their own risks.More strikingly, one of Cerulo’s examples of unfair treatment of deviant groups is the Heaven’s Gate cult which, as she states believed that they would be removed from the Earth by a spaceship following the comet Hale-Bopp, their true home’…. If the material is of too little interest to be included in the main text or in footnotes, couldn’t it be placed in a supporting website or omitted altogether).Another surprising claim is that “positive asymmetry” is demonstrated by the fact that, in theology and art, Heaven is given a detailed and appealing description, while hell is described only in vague and non-specific terms.On the contrary one of the standard criticisms of religious art is that Hell and the Devil are made much more interesting than Heaven and Hell, notable examples including Dante and Milton.
What I’ve been reading
Sunday, December 10th, 2006Multiethnic Australia by Celeste Lipow McLeod. It’s aimed at a US audience, and gives a potted history of Australia since European settlement, from a pro-multiculturalism point of view.
What I’ve been reading
Sunday, December 3rd, 2006The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross.
Cole concludes
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006The Cole Commission has finally reported, and I can take some comfort from the fact that my predictions at the start have been borne out almost entirely.* No conclusive proof of government wrongdoing has emerged, no minister has resigned, and the government’s defenders have had no trouble squaring their denunciations of Saddam with the fact [...]
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