Rebecca Solnit reviews in the London Review of Books 'Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming and the Future of Water in the West' by James Lawrence Powell

"The Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. Its dams and reservoirs are failing, silting up while the water level drops. It’s too cold for many of its species of endangered fish. It isn’t even red any more. Yet it’s less than 150 years since the first white men floated down the Colorado. They were led by Major John Lesley Powell, who saw that there wasn’t enough water to irrigate the vast agricultural society that people wanted to build in the American south-west, but whenever he tried to point this out he was shouted down or ignored.

A lot of what Solnit calls ‘junk science’ was conjured up to justify the building of unsustainable cities and the sowing of thirsty crops in the desert, and vast engineering products were undertaken to make it, briefly, possible. ‘Building those dams and reservoirs … was a big-government project for the benefit of Westerners who for the most part considered themselves individualists and independents. This delusion of self-sufficiency, along with the fantasy that enough water could be found to supply the region, launched the eco-tragedy now unfolding.’" More here.

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Flintoff and friends

Stephen Fay reviews in The Times of London five different accounts of this year's Ashes Test series between England and Australia.

"Once upon a time everyone at Lord's knew their place, the amateur gentlemen at the crease, the professional players at their bowlers' marks and the sporting hacks in the press box. Now everyone is mixed up together - and the sporting journalist has to fight for jobs covering the Ashes against the cricketers who are now too old to fight for the urn itself. There is plenty of time for idle chatter in the press box at cricket matches, and one divisive topic is the way in which distinguished former Test cricketers have been pushing journalists out of the most desirable jobs. Accomplished cricketers have always found places in the box (R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, for example), but for some decades the best English cricket writers had been journalists and authors: Neville Cardus, E. W. Swanton, Alan Ross, John Woodcock, John Arlott. Today, the cricket correspondents of The Guardian, The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and, until recently, The Independent, are former England cricketers, and they have heavily infiltrated the Sunday papers. This causes much grumbling among the “proper” journalists, who have learnt their trade and can be trusted to take an accurate shorthand note.

Now is a good moment to explore the state of play, for the end of an Ashes series between England and Australia has become a publishing event. In 2005, England’s victory was immediately celebrated in ten books exploiting the most exciting sporting event in England since the football World Cup in 1966. Last summer, England beat Australia to win the Ashes again, and already five books about the series have been published. This reduction in the number of titles says something about the quality of the cricket. This year’s Ashes were tense, unpredictable and at the mercy of the weather and the fates, but the series never reached the heights achieved by two stronger teams in 2005. Mike Atherton quotes the verdict of a colleague: “A lot of joy [this time] but an absence of ecstasy”. The muted judgement of the England captain, Andrew Strauss, is quoted in each of these books: “When England were bad they were very, very bad, and when they were good they were just about good enough". More here.

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The Observer Books of the Year include Peter Carey's choices.

Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury) has huge ambition and an author equal to the task. Travelling from Nagasaki to Guantánamo, this very beautiful novel sets out to grasp the nettle of our modern history. The most utilitarian of us will find it "relevant and contemporary". At the same time, it is a work of art, as human as the feel of another's hand. Colum McCann once wrote himself inside the skin of Nureyev. In Zoli he created Romany characters that Romany readers have been pleased to own. Now, in Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury) [winner this week of the National Book Award for fiction], he has reinvented the city of New York in all its breathing, fighting, whining, joyous clamour. Much more here.

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‘Unfriend’ is New Oxford’s word of the year

‘Birther’ was in the running and so was ‘death panels’, but in the end the New Oxford American Dictionary can only pick one word of the year. For 2009, it is ‘unfriend’, says Oxford University Press.

Or in New Oxfordspeak: "unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, 'I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.'"

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. More here.

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The queen of crime: Maj Sjöwall

Is the description by The Guardian of Swedish Crime writer Maj Sjöwall who with her partner Per Wahlöö started writing the Martin Beck detective series in Sweden in the 1960s. "They little realised that it would change the way we think about policemen for ever. Unlikely as it may sound, the books have become international bestsellers, over 10m copies sold and counting. Classics of the thriller genre, they've been made into films and adapted for television. Subsequent generations of crime writers are fans. There's no doubt that the latest left-leaning Swedish author to hit the bestseller lists, Stieg Larsson, would have read them. Some say the couple wrote the finest crime series ever; that without them we would not have Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.

Yet if Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö had not met, the books would not have existed; and if they hadn't fallen in love, the books would be nowhere near as good as they are". The interview is here.

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Pierpont Morgan Exhibition on Jane Austen available online

This exhibition includes 'The Divine Jane', a short documentary film specially commissioned for the exhibition A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy. It examines the influence of Austen's fiction — and her enduring fame — through interviews with leading writers, scholars, and actors.

"Each of the six interviewees was invited to look closely at the Morgan’s outstanding collection of Austen letters and manuscripts and ask themselves the question curators always consider: what can be learned about an author's life and work from these unique documents?

Other questions put to the interviewees touched on several subjects: When did they first read Austen and what were their initial impressions? What is the relation between Austen's life and work? Why does she remain so popular? And, if you could invite Austen to dinner, whom else would you invite, and why? By asking the same questions of each participant in isolation, we were able to create a conversation between them on screen. The film also records the emotional responses of those first encountering a letter or manuscript penned by Austen.

The Divine Jane: Reflections on Austen provides unique and engaging insights into the life and work of Jane Austen and shows her letters and manuscripts, of which the Morgan is a major repository, in a new and illuminating light.

The Divine Jane was directed by Francesco Carrozzini, an accomplished photographer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The Wall Street Journal. Francesco originated the New York Times online magazine's Screen Test interviews, and his short film titled 1937 premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival".

More here.

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Ten of the best: teachers

From John Mullan in The Guardian:

Abelard was a brilliant early-medieval theologian and rhetorician who agreed to take on Héloïse as a pupil. The two began an affair, and when it was discovered, she was sent to a nunnery and he was castrated. The story has often been retold, notably by Alexander Pope. "From lips like those what precept failed to move? Too soon they taught me 'twas no sin to love."

Holofernes

The schoolmaster in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost is a loquacious pedant whose version of English boasts itself "full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion". No pupil can have understood him.

Thwackum

The eponymous hero of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is adopted by Squire Allworthy, who is obtuse enough to hire a man called "Thwackum" to educate him. Thwackum is a clergyman who "maintained that the human mind, since the fall, was nothing but a sink of iniquity" and "whose meditations were full of birch". More here.

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Odd book title of the week

The Itinerary of a Breakfast. John Harvey Kellogg. New York. Funk and Wagnall. 1926 Libraries Australia via Debbie Campbell report

1926 edition: no holdings in Australia: http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an27950481

1918 edition: at Avondale College: http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an24834754

1920 edition: at the University of Adelaide: http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an13939983