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| Palin discusses VP bid, 2012, slams Johnston to Oprah Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said a White House bid in 2012 is "not on my radar screen" as she began ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Tiger Woods drives sales of physics book sky-high A photograph showing a copy of Get A Grip On Physics by John Gribbin on the floor of Tiger Woods's wrecked SUV has seen the book rocket up Amazon's bestseller chartIt's been a terrible week for Tiger Woods, but the golf star's moment of madness at the steering wheel has brought a surge in sales for a book written by a science writer teaching at Sussex University.A series of pictures released by Florida police of Woods's wrecked SUV includes a shot of the back seat, complete with waterbottle, towel and furled umbrella. But there among the shards of tinted glass in the footwell sits a well-thumbed copy of a paperback with the golf-appropriate title clearly visible: Get a Grip on Physics.This incidental role in Woods's domestic drama has been enough to create a rush to get hold of the book, with the title's sales rank on Amazon.com jumping from 396,224 earlier in the week to a high spotted yesterday by the Wall Street Journal of 2,268.Speaking in a break between lectures this morning, the author, John Gribbin, said he was "delighted that anyboy's reading my books. I just wish it was one that's still in print."Part of a planned series on subject areas which was cancelled after poor sales, Get a Grip on Physics is an illustrated introduction to modern physics first published in 1999 which tells the story of developments in physics since the 1950s, charting the discovery of the four forces of nature, the search for grand unified theories and the beginnings of string theory."It's not a book you sit down and read from cover to cover," said Gribbin, "you can dip in and out of it. Tiger Woods is absolutely my target audience. He's busy, hasn't got a lot of time, but wants to catch up on what's happening in physics."Publishers are becoming increasingly familiar with rapid rises in book sales, though the spikes are more often associated with US presidents. Barack Obama has already sparked a rush on sales of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment, but he is following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton and John F Kennedy, who set off a stampedes for titles by Walter Mosley and Ian Fleming.Gribbin has yet to see a rise in sales on Amazon.co.uk, where the book was languishing at a ranking of 71,115 this morning (perhaps because it was published in the UK under a different title: Get a Grip on New Physics), but he's hoping that Tiger Woods may graduate onto his other works.Best known for In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, an exploration of the mysteries of quantum physics still selling well 25 years after it was first published, Gribbin has amassed a back catalogue which ranges widely over modern science. His latest book is In Search of the Multiverse, which charts ideas about alternative realities from Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to recent developments in M-theory pointing to a landscape of alternative universes in string theory."Perhaps Woods will see if he can find a universe in which none of this ever happened," suggested Gribbin.Tiger WoodsScience and natureRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Celtic Revolution by Simon Young | Book review Ian Mortimer tracks the long career of Europe's poetic head-huntersDid the Celts exist? Is "Celtic" more than a cultural label? If they did exist, who were they, when did they thrive and when did they lose their cultural identity? The very word "Celt" is divisive. To some it is symbolic of independence from England. To others the whole idea of Celtic unity is a modern myth. To others still, the Celts are a long-vanished people who once burned Rome and attacked Delphi, whose descendants are scattered throughout Europe but have been subsumed within other tribes and cultures, losing their Celtic identity everywhere except in the corners of Brittany and the British Isles.Simon Young is familiar with these views. Indeed, he begins his book with an account of a dinner party in Spain that ended in acrimony simply because of a passing reference to the Celts. That unpropitious event is a good starting point, for it allows him to explain his own answer to the "Celtic question". In short, he says, the Celts did exist, and in this book he shows in three ways how they affected the development of western civilisation.The first part of the book is given over to the Celtic domination of northern Europe before the Roman empire. Rome itself only once succumbed to an attacking force – when it was burned by the head-hunting Celts in the early fourth century BC. The same tribe also defeated the Romans in pitched battle – quite an achievement considering their tactics involved stripping naked and attempting to scare their enemies into flight by a sudden loud and vicious charge, wielding long swords. Most importantly, they wiped out a number of Rome's enemies, leaving the field relatively clear for the Italian state to dominate in later years. Macedonia, for example, the only Greek political entity that looked likely to develop as a Mediterranean empire, saw its king killed by Celtic attackers in 280 BC.The second part of Young's "Celtic revolution" concerns the explosion of Celtic missionaries from Ireland in the sixth and early seventh centuries AD. Centuries after the fighting heroes had finally been swept from the battlefields of Europe, their equally fervent and heroic kinsmen in Ireland chose to practise extreme worship through exile, either by flinging themselves out to sea into leather-covered boats or by covering Europe on foot. Those who believe that Augustine's arrival in 597 marked the start of Christianity in England may be surprised to hear that Northumbria and much of the north was converted by Irish monks from Iona, acting independently of the Roman mission. True, the Celtic rites of Christian worship were eradicated in the seventh century; but by then the Celts had done their work. Just as Rome's rise to pre-eminence owed much to the Celts along the way, so too the Roman church's conversion of England owed much to Celtic missionaries.The third part is the most subtle. Think of Arthur and Guinevere, or Tristan and Isolde. The early medieval "romance" poems might have been entirely fictitious, and they were certainly embellished by non-Celts along the way (normally being written in French), but in the 12th century there was a deep quarrying of the ancient literatures of Ireland and Wales. The Arthurian stories sprang with joy into a Christendom heavy with incense and piety. Men and women yearned to hear stories of magic, heroism, lust and passion – not just the pious love of the Christian world – and they found it in the long-forgotten Celtic myths and legends. One might say that, having converted large swathes of Europe to Christianity, the Celts also provided the antidote: Arthurian courtly love.These three themes do not describe a single "Celtic revolution" but rather three distinct cultural confrontations. The title is therefore a little misleading. However, the book has a great deal to recommend it. Young wears his considerable learning lightly – not many scholars can describe 2,000 years of European history with authority – and his style is light, witty and enjoyable. Certain descriptive metaphors stick in the mind, such as the late Roman empire being like an ostrich egg in a vice that the barbarian peoples on the periphery were turning millimetre by millimetre. Or the Irish saints who launched themselves upon the sea in coracles being the "dandelion seeds of the Lord".But best of all is his way of making the scholarship work for him rather than being a slave to academic conventions and inflicting them on his readers. He has taken current thinking and used it with a specific purpose: to suggest a different way of thinking about the Celts. Rather than regarding them as a strange horde of shrieking barbarians always on the fringe of events, who were eradicated from the cultural mainstream, we might understand their history as central to European history and culture.Did the Celts exist? Of course they did. They are all around us.Ian Mortimer's books include The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England (Vintage).Historyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Turkey's struggle with modernity is brilliantly evoked in Orhan Pamuk's story of a young man's pursuit of his first true love, says Michael GorraIt's getting late in the Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk's new novel (his first since winning the 2006 Nobel prize), late in almost every sense of the word. Not dead, far from that, but the hours are small and time itself seems to be running down, as though the whole city were a memorial to its own better days. Though when was that? Under Ataturk, maybe? Or possibly before, in the Ottoman past that lies all around but of which the book's characters can hardly ever speak. It is an old city, so old that in 1975, when this stately and intricate novel begins, its principal narrator, Kemal BasmacÃ, still drives a 1956 Chevrolet. Yet paradoxically, that's also a sign of its youth, for Pamuk's Turkey itself has come late to a modernity that its citizens identify with the west.Kemal and his friends in Istanbul's moneyed bourgeoisie speak dismissively of those who seem too "Turkish", and the women in their set go in for blond dye-jobs. His fiancée, Sibel, sees herself as a modern young woman – which means that she isn't a virgin, though she only started to sleep with him "when she was absolutely sure that there would in the end be a wedding". They use the office couch at his family's export business; the employees know, and snigger a bit. Still, it's important not only that they have sex but that they're understood to have it by the few other young people in their world, who like to congratulate themselves on their bravery.One day Kemal's eye is taken by a designer handbag – the perfect gift, or so he thinks before Sibel tells him it's fake. By then, however, his eye has also been caught by the sales girl. She's a distant cousin called Füsun, a relatively poor relation whom he hasn't seen in some years, and her name carries a hint of scandal, for she's now a lustrous 18 and her parents have let her compete in a beauty contest, swimsuits and all. At first, it's just a seduction. He thinks of her as even more modern than Sibel, and love doesn't come into it. But when he discovers her "growing amazement" at the new world of sex he introduces her to, their afternoons together become an obsession. She knows of his engagement and he knows he must give her up – and he will, any day now. Then she disappears, and he learns that her family has moved.It will take Kemal almost a year to find her again, a year of driving through every neighbourhood of the enormous city, months of heavy drinking in which he loses all interest in Sibel, even after they move in together. Sibel hopes to save him from what seems an inexplicable sadness, and learning the truth enrages her. To her, Füsun is just "a common shopgirl", a slut, even though they have each only slept with one man. She breaks off their engagement; but that is only the start of Kemal's separation from the social world he had once thought to inherit.For eventually he discovers where Füsun has gone, and is invited to call at the apartment she shares with her parents in a lower-middle class neighborhood just north of the Golden Horn. The young men in the street are very Turkish indeed, and suspicious of his repeated visits. But they grow used to him, for over the next eight years he will invite himself for dinner some 1,593 times. He will eat her mother's excellent food and drink endless glasses of rakà with her father as they watch the country's single television channel. His longing for her will make him abandon the table of his own widowed mother, and in Füsun's company he will come to know Istanbul with a new depth and intimacy. She is always pleased to see him, but she now treats him as a respected older relative. For she has also rescued her honour by marrying a fat, sweet-tempered boy from her old neighbourhood, and for almost 350 pages Kemal will barely be allowed to do so much as to touch her arm.Kemal cherishes every physical relic of Füsun that he can save or steal: a barrette, a salt shaker she once touched, the little china dog that sits on top of her family's television. Those objects eventually find their home in the museum of the novel's title, a shrine to everyday life that he will spend his last years in building. Both his collecting and The Museum of Innocence itself are best understood as examples of what Pamuk elsewhere calls hüzün. It is the Turkish word for melancholy, but hüzün has a more complicated weight than the English term. It carries a theological understanding of the "place of loss and grief", it sustains notes of elegy and nostalgia, it conveys a sense of "worldly failure [and] listlessness", and it stands above all as the defining emotion of this post-imperial capital.So to both author and character, Istanbul's every place and moment of beauty seem as if irradiated by sadness. That makes the novel a modern-day counterpart to the masterpiece Pamuk set in the 16th-century city, My Name Is Red; and certainly it's a richer book than its predecessor, Snow. It does have weaknesses. Most of Kemal's friends are names rather than fully realised characters, and however vivid his desire for Füsun, she herself remains a bit shadowy. The novel, too, could have been shorter. Yet the story isn't so loosely built as it seems, and it's hard to say just which meal or moment of longing should go. The Museum of Innocence earns its length, a length that allows Kemal's story to burrow into us, a habit one looks forward to indulging.In its last pages a minor character named Orhan Pamuk reappears, a figure last seen as an awkward young man at a party. The metafictional moment makes one pause; this has been so entirely satisfying as a realist narrative. But the step into a different kind of writing is so sure-footed that it only reinforces the power of Pamuk's central conceit, Kemal's fond foolish dream of a museum built to honour his love for Füsun, his lost paradise of their days together.FictionOrhan PamukTurkeyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Hywel Teifi Edwards obituary An authority on Welsh history and literatureHywel Teifi Edwards, who has died aged 75, was an authority on the literature of 19th-century Wales, and wrote more in the course of 30 years than one person could adequately study and digest in an entire lifetime. He also displayed great eloquence, erudition and passion whether addressing rallies under the auspices of the Welsh Language Society, delivering a lecture at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, comforting the 10,000 mourners at the funeral of the rugby star Ray Gravelle in 2007, or at the National St David's Parade in Cardiff.Born to a seafaring family in the tiny village of Llanddewi-Aberarth, in west Wales, Teifi Edwards made a name in his youth as a footballer, and he pursued his passion to Aberystwyth University. His favourite team was Arsenal, and he was immensely proud to visit the new Highbury stadium in north London with a TV crew a year ago. After graduating in Welsh, he undertook research under the foremost poet of his generation, Gwenallt (D Gwenallt Jones), who suggested that Teifi Edwards should pursue a theme in 19th-century Welsh literature.Within 20 years, Teifi Edwards had become the foremost authority on the history of the annual National Eisteddfod of Wales. His book Yr Eisteddfod was published in 1976 as a celebration of 800 years of eisteddfods. Then came his magnum opus, Gwyl Gwalia: Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol yn Oes aur Victoria 1858-1868 (The Eisteddfod in the Victorian Era), published in 1980. A monograph in English for the University of Wales on the Eisteddfod appeared in 1989, followed by a book on the fascinating Eisteddfod held at the Chicago World Fair of 1893 (Eisteddfod Ffair y Byd, Chicago, 1893), in 1990.Teifi Edwards was a scholar who had deep roots in the mining valleys of south Wales. He taught for a few years at Garw grammar school, Bridgend, before being appointed as an extramural lecturer for Swansea University. At Blaengarw he met a fellow academic, Aerona, who became his wife and mother to his son Huw (the television newsreader) and daughter Meinir.The family moved in 1966 to the village of Llangennech, between Llanelli and Swansea, where Teifi Edwards soon became an activist, forming a village literary society, becoming a school governor and an elder in the local Presbyterian chapel (and writing a gem of a volume on its history), and then serving as a councillor.Teifi Edwards had a high regard for those he met in the adult classes he held in Cross Hands, Brynamman, and all over the anthracite coalfield. This inspired him to prepare a volume on the image of the coalminer in Welsh prose and poetry between 1850 and 1950, which was published in 1994. He called it Arwr glew erwau'r glo – the Hero of the Coalfield.Then, he edited 10 volumes in the South Wales Valley series which are invaluable. No other academic could have achieved such a feat or gathered together 60 leading academics to write the articles. No one could refuse his invitation – he was not afraid of using very strong language when roused.In 1989, he was appointed professor of Welsh at Swansea University and when he retired in 1995 he was made emeritus professor. During his academic career he involved himself in parliamentary politics. At the general election of 1983, he contested Llanelli for Plaid Cymru against the sitting Labour MP Denzil Davies (for whom he had a very high regard), and stood four years later at Carmarthen, where he did well, since he had served for 14 years on Dyfed county council.In his retirement, he travelled the length and breadth of Wales and also to the Liverpool and London Welsh societies. It was an incredible experience to witness him there, for he could lecture for 90 minutes without notes, and the large gathering would be mesmerised. He was the same on Welsh television, and a great favourite with the Llanelli-based TV company Tinopolis. It devoted its nightly programme Wedi Saith (After Seven) to his life and work on the day after his death. It was a superb tribute by his poetic friends to a giant of the Welsh nation.Teifi Edwards is survived by his wife and children. • Hywel Teifi Edwards, literary historian, born 15 October 1934; died 4 January 2010WalesAcademic expertsHistoryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |