TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Video: Marina Hyde interviews Charlie Brooker The full interview between Marina Hyde and fellow Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker, in which Charlie talks about his new book, The Hell of it All and explains why he often finds writing so hard it makes him blubCharlie BrookerMarina HydeAndy Gallagher feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Christian publishing giant Zondervan pulls 'kung fu' book Evangelical publisher Zondervan has pulled a leadership book featuring a kung fu theme after Asian-American Christian leaders ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Critical eye review roundup Roundup of reviews"The Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism is supposed to be based on transparency, the level playing field and the rule of law," Paul Mason wrote in the New Statesman. "Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street shows that much of this is an illusion. If Andrew Ross Sorkin's account is accurate, secrecy and personal networks ran all the way through the worlds of politics, regulation, finance and financial journalism right up until the crisis hit . . . Sorkin's book is a monumental piece of work and, thus far, the definitive account of the economic crisis from a Wall Street perspective." "While no one can be happy that the tale ends with taxpayers paying hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up failed banks and fallible bankers, there are few signposts to better outcomes," Stephen Foley said in the Independent. "Too Big to Fail stakes a good claim to being the definitive story of our once-in-a-lifetime crisis.""John Cassidy does not believe that recent calamities should be blamed on the heads of just a few bankers or politicians . . . Instead, he argues that the central culprit is an idea – the uncritical adoption of unworkable and 'utopian' free-market concepts," Gillian Tett wrote in the Financial Times, reviewing How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. "Cassidy's book is to be strongly applauded. Not just because it is highly readable but, most importantly, because it tries to paint a more subtle picture at a time when too many people are still seeking simplistic stories and villains to blame." "The point is not so much that individuals personally do not act as rational agents (though they often fail to do so): the trouble lies deeper," Peter Clarke said in the New Statesman. "For there are many situations in which, by pursuing our individual interest in an apparently rational way, we help to produce an outcome that is collectively irrational . . . How Markets Fail does not claim to have all the answers, but it deftly illuminates some crucial problems in the light of our recent experiences." "How Markets Fail is . . . about human shortcomings," Jeff Randall observed in the Daily Telegraph, "the conceit and negligence of those who buy and sell in markets, and the woeful performance of the regulators who failed to identify a juggernaut of a disaster, even though its headlights were on and the horn was blaring.""Despite its title this is in many ways a conventional political book – ghostwritten, replete with down-home anecdotes, self-serving and a little shallow," Toby Harnden wrote in the Daily Telegraph, reviewing Going Rogue. "While Sarah Palin probably isn't en route to the White House, there seems little doubt that, in truth, she's laughing all the way to the bank." "It is no more self-serving than other beleaguered politicians' accounts of themselves," Mary Dejevsky said in the Independent. "The woman whose quip about 'lipstick' being the only difference between a 'hockey mom' and a pitbull became her tagline has something to say, and she goes all out and says it. Good for her . . . While generous to McCain himself, she is vicious about members of his team, whom she accuses of making her the scapegoat . . . Before reading her defence, I doubted she would return to mainstream politics, still less to the presidential trail. Now, I am not so sure."HistoryPoliticsSocietyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist Mary Midgley enjoys an exploration of the left-brain/right-brain divideThis is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain.McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philo–sopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. He questions the accepted doctrine that the left hemisphere (Left henceforward) is necessarily dominant, the practical partner, while the right more or less sits around writing poetry. He points out that this "left-hemisphere chauvinism" cannot be correct because it is always Right's business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues. Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually knows what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence.Thus patients with right-brain strokes – but not with left-brain ones – tend to deny flatly that there is anything wrong with them. And even over language, which is Left's speciality, Right is not helpless. It usually has quite adequate understanding of what is said, but Left (on its own) misses many crucial aspects of linguistic meaning. It cannot, for instance, grasp metaphors, jokes or unspoken implications, all of which are Right's business. In fact, in today's parlance, Left is decidedly autistic. And, since Left's characteristics are increasingly encouraged in our culture, this (he suggests) is something that really calls for our attention.The book's title comes from the legend of a wise ruler whose domains grew so large that he had to train emissaries to visit them instead of going himself. One of these, however, grew so cocky that he thought he was wiser than his master, and eventually deposed him. And this, says McGilchrist, is what the Left hemisphere tends to do. In fact, the balance between these two halves is, like so many things in evolution, a somewhat rough, practical arrangement, quite capable of going wrong. The bifurcation seems to have become necessary in the first place because these two main functions – comprehensiveness and precision – are both necessary, but are too distinct to be combined. The normal sequence, then, is that the comprehensive partner first sees the whole prospect – picks out something that needs investigating – and hands it over to the specialist, who processes it. Thus the thrush's Left is called in to deal with the snail-shell; the banker's Left calculates the percentage. But, once those pieces of work are done, it is necessary for the wider vision to take over again and decide what to do next.Much of the time this is indeed what happens and it is what has enabled brains of this kind to work so well, both for us and for other animals. But sometimes there is difficulty about the second transaction. Since it is the nature of precision not to look outward – not to bother about what is around it – the specialist partner does not always know when it ought to hand its project back to headquarters for further processing. Being something of a success-junkie, it often prefers to hang on to it itself. And since we do have some control over this shift between detailed and general thinking, that tendency can be helped or hindered by the ethic that prevails in the culture around it.McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. (Thus, as a shocked nurse lately told me, it is proposed that all nurses must have university degrees. Who, she asked, will actually do the nursing?) And the ideal of objectivity has developed in a way that would have surprised those sages still more.This notion, which now involves seeing everything natural as an object, inert, senseless and detached from us, arose as part of the dualist vision of a split between body and soul. It was designed to glorify God by removing all competing spiritual forces from the realm of nature. It therefore showed matter itself as dead, a mere set of billiard-ball particles bouncing mechanically off each other, always best represented by the imagery of machines. For that age, life and all the ideals relevant to humanity lay elsewhere, in our real home – in the zone of spirit. (That, of course, was why Newton, to the disgust of later scholars, was far more interested in theology than he was in physics.) But the survival of this approach today, when physicists have told us that matter does not actually consist of billiard balls, when we all supposedly believe that we are parts of the natural biosphere, not colonists from spiritual realms – when indeed many of us deny that such realms even exist – seems rather surprising.Why do we still think like this? Why can't we be more realistic? McGilchrist's explanation of such oddities in terms of our divided nature is clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating. Though neurologists may well not welcome it because it asks them new questions, the rest of us will surely find it splendidly thought-provoking. And I do have to say that, fat though it is, I couldn't put it down.Mary Midgley's Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature is published by Routledge.Mary Midgleyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Wrinkle in Time, well worth two Newbery medals The inspiration Madeleine L'Engle's book provided for this year's winner, added to her own, makes a fitting tribute to a true children's classicWriting yesterday about Rebecca Stead's Newbery medal win for When You Reach Me I was catapulted back to my 11-year-old self and my total adoration for Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Stead's heroine is engrossed in L'Engle's book, itself a Newbery winner published almost 50 years earlier, and according to reviews A Wrinkle in Time plays a large part in Stead's novel (I haven't read the Stead yet but it sounds fun and is on my ever-expanding list).Strangely, I'd reread A Wrinkle in Time only a couple of weeks ago, after spotting it in a secondhand bookshop complete with one of its follow-ups, A Wind in the Door, which I'd never read before. Having written previously about children's books that don't live up to an adult reread, I was slightly nervous about tackling such a favourite, but it was just as wonderful 19 years on and I can't believe I'd forgotten about it for so long.Starting, Bulwer Lytton-esque, with "it was a dark and stormy night", L'Engle pitches us immediately into the world of Meg Murry, a bright, geeky, independent misfit who desperately misses her absent father, adores her "dumb" baby brother Charles Wallace and "hate[s] being an oddball". Meg is deliciously grumpy as a heroine, and Charles Wallace sweetly precocious and bossy – he's not actually stupid, he just didn't speak until he could do so in full sentences, and he's also psychic.The stormy night whisks a strange old tramp, Mrs Whatsit, into the midnight kitchen where Meg, Charles and their mother are sipping cocoa, leaving them with the enigmatic statement that "there is such a thing as a tesseract". Their mother goes white: it turns out their father is missing because he's travelled through a wrinkle in time – a tesseract – to fight the evil dark Thing which is taking over the universe. "The fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points," says Charles Wallace (told you he was precocious).The children are quickly spirited away from the adults (essential to remove grown-ups from children's fiction as quickly as possible) by Mrs Who, Which and Whatsit, who actually turn out to be stars who gave up the fight against the dark Thing. After leaping around the universe a bit they end up at Camazotz, a terrifying planet where everything is regulated and regimented and the same, all controlled by IT, a disembodied brain which has Mr Murry in its power and quickly takes over Charles Wallace. The scene where he's in IT's control, his eyes twirling, a "revolting twitch" in his forehead, brought tears to my eyes just as it did as a child. "Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home," thinks Meg, disorganised, unruly, rude and called on to save the day. "Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you."I hadn't realised A Wrinkle in Time was one of the most frequently banned/challenged books in the US (apparently a parent thinks it "undermines religious beliefs [by promoting] witchcraft, crystal balls, and demons", according to this report). The Guardian's children's books editor Julia Eccleshare, in her obituary of L'Engle, tells us that L'Engle – an Episcopalian - was also attacked "for being too religious by the most secular of critics while ... being one of the authors most banned from Christian schools and libraries that regarded her brand of religion as deeply suspect".Well, it's their loss – A Wrinkle in Time is, I think, one of the truly great children's books, and fully deserving both of its eight-million-and-counting sales, and its role in Stead's own win. The scope of the book feels so much larger than the 200-odd (fairly large-type) pages it encompasses:. "I remember a friend saying to me, 'There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L'Engle when they were small, and those who didn't,'" writes Cynthia Zarin in her New Yorker profile of L'Engle. I'm happy to say I'm one of them.Children and teenagersAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |