Accompanying this plague is a feel-good propaganda campaign that enjoys the collusion of the major media outlets, including such true hi-tech believers as the NY Times and NPR-print and broadcast venues that are themselves cheerily being rendered obsolete by the hi-tech rampage-and that in subtle ways positions the destruction of book culture like so: “books” in and of themselves are nothing, only another technology, like the Walkman or the laptop. What is sacred are the texts and those are being transferred to the Internet where they will attain a new kind of high-tech-assured immortality. Like dead souls leaving their earthly bodies the books are, in effect, going to a better place: the Kindle, the e-book, the web; hi-tech's version of Paradise.

This massive deportation of literary texts to a new home in electronic heaven has about it an air of inevitability that makes its consummation seem all but certain, a veritable act of God."

More at:

http://www.evergreenreview.com/120/electronic-book-burning.html

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The latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement has a review by Professor Donald Rayfield, Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary College, University of London on Trotsky.

"Only Vladimir Nabokov might have written a more compelling account of Trotsky's end. . . . a dethroned Russian in exile, waiting for his killer to come from the homeland even while he is desperately trying to complete his biography of the killer (Stalin)". Donald Rayfield applauds two new versions of Trotsky's life and black-farce death.

Bertrand M. Patenaude

STALIN’S NEMESIS

The exile and murder of Leon Trotsky

352pp. Faber. £20.

Robert Service

TROTSKY

A biography

600pp. Macmillan. £25.

More at:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6883576.ece?&EMC-Bltn=GHNBNB#

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November 5 issue of the New York Review of Books has the following articles online.

Anti-government demonstrators in Wenceslas Square, Prague, November 20, 1989, by Timothy Garton Ash

"I spent many hours of my life standing in the crowds in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague; their behavior was both inspiring and mysterious. What had moved these individual men and women to come out in the streets, especially in the early days, when it was not self-evidently safe to do so? Who, in Prague, was the first to take a key ring out of his or her pocket, hold the keys aloft, and shake them-an action that, copied by 300,000 people, produced the most amazing sound, like massed Chinese bells? It is surely time for contemporary historians, with hours of television, video, and radio footage at their disposal, to take up the challenge of trying to analyze 1989 from below, and not merely from above..."

Which Way for Hamas?, by Nicolas Pelham and Max Rodenbeck

"Nearly four years after winning the 2006 elections, and two years after its gunmen overpowered Palestinian Authority forces to seize control of the Gaza strip, Hamas no longer acts like an opposition suddenly thrust into power. In a sense, it has become captive to its own success as it struggles now to reconcile the pressing needs of day-to-day governance with the ideology it preached in opposition, and to reconcile as well its Palestinian cause with its wider Islamic one, and its cult of guns and martyrdom with more pragmatic instincts..."

David Bromwich extensively reviews The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President by Taylor Branch.

More at:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23295?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_content=91953923&utm_campaign=November+5%2c+2009+issue+_+ulhdkl&utm_term=TheConfessionsofBill

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CNN Reports on the European Union launch of its digital library

The European Union has launched a digital library that offers documents dating to nearly 60 years ago, in 23 languages.All documents ever edited on behalf of European Union institutions, agencies and other bodies will be available in thelibrary, the organization said in a news release. "The digital library frees the memory of the European Union tied to paper since its beginning," said Leonard Orban, the union's commissioner for multilingualism. The electronic library is free toindividuals, companies and libraries worldwide, which can download documents as PDF (Portable Document Format) files, Orbansaid. About 12 million pages -- roughly 110,000 EU publications -- are available for download, according to officials. Details at:

http://lisnews.org/node/34912/

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How To Start Your Children on Science Fiction

Where's the best place to start your kids with reading Science Fiction? Here's a booklist of some of the best Sci-Fi for the discerning young adult, because it's never too early to teach them about the dangers of dystopian societies.

http://io9.com/5384382/where-to-start-with-young-adult-science-fiction

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Fiona MacCarthy asks what to do with Eric Gill in the UK Guardian

'Mad about sex'

"His work looks ever more extraordinary and radical, while his domestic life seems increasingly disturbing. On the opening of a new exhibition of early 20th-century British sculpture. Gill created his own life in the wilderness. He transported his workshop and his family from Hammersmith to the village of Ditchling in Sussex. Here they lived in deliberate primitivism. Another wonderful example of Gill's carving in the RA exhibition, the pugnacious Hampshire Hog, conjures up the sheer creative vigour of these days of sandal-wearing self-sufficiency. Gill and Epstein, a frequent visitor to Ditchling, photographed one another naked and made ambitious plans to collaborate on carving a 20th-century Stonehenge on the Downs, a gigantic group of godlike human figures celebrating fecundity and virility. Gill's Stonehenge would have included contemporary literary celebrities. William Rothenstein wrote to him excitedly: "Epstein shall carve Shaw nude and you shall make Wells glitter in the light of the sun."

Gill stands out as the great oddity in 20th-century sculpture. In defining modernism there is a clear link between say, Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth. But "with Eric Gill we have to deal with a different kind of otherness", his close friend the artist David Jones pointed out. In 1913 Gill became a Roman Catholic, an event he was to look back on as the most crucial of his life. By now he had broken with Epstein. He stood on his own as a Catholic artist in a primarily Anglican country, working almost exclusively for Catholic clients. Artistically, he had resolutely made himself into an outsider, "a stranger in a strange land". His sexual obsessiveness he rationalised into seeing sex as an aspect of God's glory. Gill's most sexually explicit images represented Christ and his holy bride, the church."

More at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/17/eric-gill-exhibition-fiona-maccarthy

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The Walrus Magazine says "Why you should resist the lure of book clubs. Reading is arguably the second-most intimate human activity, and, as with the first-most intimate human activity, there are people who will try to convince you that it’s better done in groups. These groups are called book clubs. I am in one. Maybe you are, too. If so, here’s why we’ve both made a terrible mistake.

In theory, there’s much to recommend book clubs. They encourage reading. They enrich authors who, as you may have heard, are not particularly in the business of being enriched these days. They spur socializing, usually face to face, another valuable and endangered activity. Public book clubs - most notably Oprah’s, or CBC’s Canada Reads - have become an essential economic engine for the publishing industry. And the book club remains appealing to anyone who, like me, romanticizes long arguments over sonnets in smoky coffee houses, or who occasionally longs for the womb of the lecture hall - where, as eager students, we were convinced that each new unread novel held the power to shape our lives.

So it’s not surprising that our collective interest in book clubs is growing, even as our interest in reading shrinks. This year, the Globe and Mail - which, like many major newspapers, reduced its coverage of actual books - launched a semi-regular column on book clubs titled, depressingly, Clubland. (The word “clubland,” of course, is usually associated with dance clubs, and seems here like a ham-fisted way to make book clubs sound sexy and fun - you know, like dancing! - in much the same ham-fisted way book clubs are designed to make reading seem sexy and fun.)" More at"

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.11--between-the-sheets/

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John Mullan in the UK Guardian looks at the ten best fictional journeys to the moon. They include "Prelude to Space, by Arthur C Clarke Written in the 1940s, Clarke's first sci-fi novel narrates in a realistic manner the first manned voyage to the Moon by the rocket Prometheus - a complex two-stage spacecraft powered by a nuclear reactor. Stronger on technology than character, it was explicitly written to encourage the belief that landing on the Moon was possible.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A Heinlein Heinlein loved the Moon and used it as a setting for many of his sci-fi tales. This novel takes us to a penal colony, controlled by a giant computer (Holmes IV). Naturally there is a rebellion on the part of the moon-dwellers (aka "Loonies"), with the mischievous computer apparently joining in.

Explorers on the Moon, by Hergé Tintin, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus (plus Snowy in a bespoke dog's space suit) travel to the Moon, where they discover large amounts of the ice for which Nasa is presently searching. The evil Captain Jorgen has hidden himself on the craft, planning to hijack the rocket for a foreign power."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/17/ten-best-moon-journeys-mullan

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Catholics sent packing by Stephen Fry was a headline in the UK Evening Standard

"Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens would have made few friends in the Catholic community last night after they triumphed in opposing the motion in the Intelligence Squared debate 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.'

Fry said he had been very nervous as the debate, held at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, "really mattered" to him. He was also indignant at being labelled a "pervert" by Catholics whom he described as "these sexually dysfunctional people." He asked why Catholics couldn't be as peaceful as Quakers.

Hitch weighed in with the observation that the Catholic Church had in its time supported everything from Hitler to child abuse. No wonder Ann Widdecombe and John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja in Nigeria, were sent home with their tales between their legs after unsuccessfully proposing the motion. Hail Marys all round."

http://londonersdiary.standard.co.uk/