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book notes
5/18/2008
Swing Hammer Swing! author, Jeff Torrington, 1935-2008
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"It is the spirit of Glasgow distilled into 400 pages," wrote one critic about Swing Hammer Swing!, the book which took 30 years for Scottish writer Jeff Torrington to complete and which won two
Whitbread Awards in 1992, for best first novel and book of the year. "Each tiny drop intoxicating – and thus to be slowly savoured – but you can't help just necking half the bottle at one go. No-one has ever encapsulated so much of the language, humour, attitude, philosophy, character and restless energy of the dear green place (Glasgow)."
Jeff Torrington, long suffering from Parkinson's disease, died last Sunday aged 72.
Birds do it, bees do it, and even, if public television is to be believed, walruses do it, and when they do, it looks ridiculous. One of the funniest sex scenes ever written occurs in Jeff Torrington’s Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), when Glaswegian hero Tom Clay (his torso a busy blur, his MacDougall at attention) gives the delectably slutty Becky McQuade a right seeing-to in 1960s Glasgow. After dancing “boozily” together, there follows “a little Simon and Garfumbling,” as Tom’s hands frolic like frisky salamanders up Becky’s dress, leading to “what old Walt Whitman calls ‘libidinous prongs’ forking up through me, that carnal revving of the senses as the moral brakes ease off.” (Oh, my!) Torrington’s homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses is a Scottish masterpiece, and is criminally and inexplicably out of print. Thieve, slander, swindle, donate soft-money—do whatever you have to do to find a copy
-- Susan McCallum-Smith, writing for urbanite
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Swing Hammer Swing!
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book notes
5/14/2008
Philippe Sands before the House Committee
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Philippe Sands, Professor of International Law at University College London, has testified before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee about the findings in his new book, Torture Team, which examines the legal implications of the Bush administration's policy of torture. The Bush administration has always claimed that the legal authority to use violent tactics "came from the bottom up", that they were simply reacting to requests from "people on the ground". But that is merely part of the cover-up and spin Sands told the committee. It was top-down. It was the US government's explicit and deliberate policy to abrogate the Geneva conventions and subject the supposedly most dangerous captives to what were euphemistically called "aggressive interrogation techniques", 18 specific techniques that flouted international definitions of illegal torture. Following his testimony, Sands appeared at the forum Beyond the Torture Debate, Charting the Legal Path from 9/11 to Guantanamo.
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Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
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book awards
5/5/2008
Graham Robb wins 2008 Ondaatje Prize
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The Royal Society of Literature has announced that Graham Robb has won the 2008 Ondaatje Prize for his book The Discovery of France. "An elegantly written and continuously intriguing account of the landscape and legends which, in part, explain the histories of the very different regions of France", was the opinion of judge Elaine Feinstein. "A hugely impressive feat of cultural archaeology by a writer whose gifts resemble those of an imaginative novelist. Part cartography, part biography of a nation, it reveals how tribal and mythical this country actually is", was the comment of judge Professor Russell Celyn Jones. The £10,000 Ondaatje Prize is given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place. See Ondaatje Prize
for shortlisted books and winners from past years.
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The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, from the Revolution to the First World War
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book awards
5/2/2008
Raja Shehadeh wins Orwell Prize for Palestinian Walks
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Human rights campaigner and lawyer, Raja Shehadeh, has won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for his book
Palestinian Walks. "One way of measuring the quality of your freedom is just to take a walk. Raja Shehadeh’s book", according to the Chair of the Orwell Prize, Jean Seaton, "records how brutalising the loss of a landscape is, both to the losers, and to the takers: there are no winners. Palestinian Walks is a stoic account of a particular place, but one which – like many of Orwell's own works – has universal resonance. The judges felt it made landscape into the essence of politics, and political writing into an art." Palestinian Walks was published last August to much critical acclaim:
Towards any proper understanding of history there are many small paths. This constantly surprising book modestly describes walking along certain paths which have touched the lived lives of two millennia. Its walking guide is an elderly man who confesses; his confessions often encounter a perennial wisdom, and what he is talking about and walking across is one of the nodal points of the world's present crisis. I strongly suggest you walk with him. - John Berger, author of Here is Where We Meet: a Fiction
This exquisitely written book records a sensitive Palestinian writer's love for the landscape of his country, over which he has hiked for many years. It reflects not only the intense beauty of that landscape, but also some of the terrible dangers that threaten it and its occupants. This is a book that is hard to put down because of the profound natural beauty that Shehadeh describes, and his manifest passion for his homeland. - Rashid Khalidi, author of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood and Resurrecting Empire
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Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape
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book awards
4/22/2008
2008 Krasnza-Krausz Book Awards announced
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Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945, the catalog for the internationally acclaimed exhibition curated Matthew S. Witkovsky, has been awarded one of the 2008 Krasnza-Krausz Book Awards.
Across Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland, photography fired the imagination of hundreds of progressive artists, provided a creative outlet for thousands of devoted amateurs, and became a symbol of modernity for millions through its use in print and advertising...In a region where the dominant cultural model encouraged art to be instructive and critically engaged with contemporary issues, photography flourished and helped negotiate the oftentimes uncertain prospects of this sudden transition to modernity.
Widespread attraction to photography in central Europe inspired the rise of the illustrated press, innovative techniques such as photomontage, and the proliferation of commercial studios and other camera-friendly institutions. The region also witnessed the spread of surrealist and documentary photography, as well as the emergence of politically engaged photography that furthered agendas across the ideological spectrum. To recover these images is to be reminded how well connected the region once was and how singular and forceful a contribution was made there, not only to the history of photography, but also to modern consciousness.
- from the online catalog.
Founded in 1985 by Andor Kraszna-Krausz, The Krasnza-Krausz Book Awards recognise and celebrate excellence in photography and moving image publishing. See the Krasnza-Krausz Book Awards page for all the winners.
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Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945
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book notes
4/19/2008
Glenn Greenwald on the Pennsylvania debate and Great American Hypocrites
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Following Wednesday's Democratic debate in Pennsylvania, many pundits have commentated that the media has finally gotten tough with Barack Obama. They decribe how the media is now less focused on attacking Hillary Clinton and, at last, closely scrutinizing Barack Obama, asking him the tough questions and putting him on the defensive. Glenn Greenwald stands out, however, amongst media commentators in providing a rational explanation for this:
What you really see happening here is, throughout 2007, when it looked as though Hillary was going to be the nominee, or at least the media and the right wing assumed that that was the case, she was the target, overwhelmingly, of these sorts of attacks. The media discussed at length what they said was her artificial laugh, the sort of cackle that kind of masked a soulless, satanic quest for power underneath. They talked about whether she was showing cleavage. These kinds of personality attacks were directed at her when it looked as though she was the nominee.
Now that Obama looks to be the nominee—and the media and the right assume that—he clearly is receiving the preponderance of these attacks. And as I said, it's always done in the same demonizing way to suggest that he’s out of touch with mainstream America, even though he grew up as—in a single home and his accomplishments are self-made, in contrast to George Bush and John McCain, and that he obviously is subversive and hates America and won’t defend it the way all progressives won't. And that's the theme that clearly is being dumped on him the way it always is whenever they identify who they think the progressive leader is. - excerpted from DemocracyNow!
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is now an active blogger and Salon Magazine columnist. His previous books, How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy, were both critiques of the Bush administration and were both New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Great Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.
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Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics
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book awards
4/12/2008
Francis Parkman Prize to Jean Edward Smith for FDR
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"After seven years of incompetence in Washington, D.C., I think the country is ready to look back at the type of leadership we had in someone like Roosevelt," Jean Edward Smith said on learning that he had won the Francis Parkman Prize for his biography of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Roosevelt is a superb topic".
"I was born and raised in Washington while he was president. I always considered him the president and everyone who came after as a sort of successor." You look at American history, and there's Washington and Lincoln and then FDR."
Jean Edward Smith on Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal": "It was the first time that Americans thought of their government as a solution to the problems that individuals and society at large were experiencing."
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