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Thursday, June 29, 2006
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I can't recommend Paul Schneider's Brutal Journey highly enough. It tells an amazing, unknown to me, almost unbelievable story of the first crossing of North America by Europeans. There's a lot of material about its protagonist, Cabeza de Vaca, on the web, but I recommend ignoring it till after you've read the book, to keep some of the amazement going. Schneider's writing is lots of fun, straightfoward in its descriptions, but also slyly allusive and often suitably snide. There is more than one passage in the book that you read with your jaw in your lap from amazement. I read the first half on a long plane trip, and the second half in two sittings afterwards.
10:16:29 PM 
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Publisher of Renegade Titles Dies at 83: "In his first career as a journalist in the 1940's and 50's, Mr. Stuart clashed with the powerful columnist Walter Winchell and supported Fidel Castro. In his second, as a publisher, he was notorious for The Anarchist Cookbook. Written by William Powell, the book, which included instructions on making bombs and homemade silencers for pistols, was first released in 1970 at the height of antiwar and anti-establishment protests. Web sites inspired by the book are still proliferating.
Mr. Stuart published the book against his own staff's wishes. 'I liked it, but nobody else did — and of course no other publisher would touch it,' he told an interviewer in 1978. In 2000, the author, Mr. Powell, told The Observer of London that he disavowed the book, written when he was 19; later, in an open letter on Amazon.com, he called it 'a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted.' But Mr. Stuart, who held the copyright, continued to publish it.
He courted controversy again in 1996 when he reissued The Turner Diaries, an anti-government novel self-published by a neo-Nazi in 1978. It is said to have been a favorite of Timothy J. McVeigh, executed for killing 169 people with a truck bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Mr. Stuart was also famous for knowingly publishing one of the most sensational literary hoaxes of the time: Naked Came the Stranger (1969), a sex novel written by 'a demure Long Island housewife,' the dust jacket said. It was actually written by 25 reporters from Newsday, intent on proving the public would buy anything, in a kind of relay race of bad prose. The book became an immediate best seller before the hoax was revealed and stayed on the list long after." (New York Times )
(Via Follow Me Here....)
8:18:35 PM
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Tony Snow offers a crystal clear explanation: "Well, actually, he has one, and it -- you know, again, this is not, I believe the way, at least it was reported, is you've got two brigades by the end of the year, September being short of the end of the year. But I may be misreading it. In any event, you've got to keep in mind that this is not a statement of policy. Again, Gen. Casey keeps in mind a number of scenarios. You're talking about scenarios here ... And so I would caution very strongly against everybody thinking, well, they're going to pull two brigades out. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. That really does depend upon a whole series of things that we cannot, at this juncture, predict. But Gen. Casey -- again, I would characterize this more in terms of scenario building, and we'll see how it proceeds." (Salon via Carpetbagger)
(Via Follow Me Here....)
8:17:41 PM
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Free/Cheap Access to the Invisible Web: Kevin Kelly clues readers in to the fact that you can access numerous online fee-based databases by logging on to your public library's website with your library card (you do have a library card, right?). "This vast store of knowledge is found on the Invisible Web -- that part of the WWW that hides behind passwords and subscription fees, and is beyond the grasp of Google (although Google Scholar is working on this). This part of the web holds the databases that professionals and librarians pay to search, and includes the scholarly and scientific journals I crave, as well as marketing and business information, digitized magazines and newspapers, and several hundred of specialized databases built up over the years by fees -- but formerly only available to users at high prices. Very little of this material is available on the free web yet." Coverages vary tremendously by region and residency requirements do apply, although in many states you can get a library card for any library system in the state. Even non-residents can get a library card for a fee; Kelly opted for a free San Francisco card in his native state of California, and a New York Public Librarycard for $100. I just logged onto the Brookline (MA) library site and discovered I have free searchable access to the full text of all New York Times and Boston Globe articles, for starters. I have paid, oh I don't know, $3 or $5 to the Times or the Globe when I have needed to download an article in the past. Alas, my library system doesn't give me access to JTOR (of which Kelly writes), an online depository of the full text of most major scholarly and scientific journals you can download in PDF format.
(Via Follow Me Here....)
8:10:48 PM
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SF Publisher Jim Baen died. David Drake writes the obituary.
2:28:17 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 7/5/2006; 5:46:48 PM.
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