Books – Page 3 – Slugger O'Toole

The rise of fundamentalists

Brian Walker on March 22, 2010, 4:08 pm | Readers 9

It’s the atavistic fear of Northern Ireland writ large – the fundies are outbreeding the rest of us. It’s not about race, it’s about religion according to Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Eric Kaufmann, reviewed by the son member of the father and son team of climate sceptics Dominic Lawson. Now it’s “hyper-breeding Muslims” and the distortion of the politics of Israel and the Middle East by the over-fertile ultra-orthodox Haredim, …

“This is just a baby step towards bringing our archives to a wider public”

Pete Baker on January 18, 2010, 9:57 pm | Readers 0

The Royal Society’s celebration of its 350th anniversary continues with the Guardian noting that more wondrous things have been made available online – stunning 3D facsimiles of maunscripts from their archive. The Guardian mentions Isaac Newton’s early biographer and friend – they met in 1718 – William Stukeley’s Memoirs of Newton’s Life, source of the apocryphal tale of the falling apple. Among the other manuscripts online is, another friend and correspondent of Newton’s, philosopher John Locke’s 1681 draft constitutional document …

Colm Toibin lifts the £30,000 Costa Prize…

Mick Fealty on January 5, 2010, 9:58 pm | Readers 17

Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn has won the Costa prize… Eileen Battersby reports: Tóibín, who receives £30,000 (€33,491), defeated the 2009 Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel and her popular and populist novel Wolf Hall . He has also emulated his countryman Sebastian Barry, who won last year en route to winning the overall Costa Book of the Year. The result confirms a pattern by which Costa, formerly the Whitbread, revises the Booker. Surprisingly, however, the most contentious Booker shortlist omission, William …

“when our eyes tell us something different”

Pete Baker on December 19, 2009, 8:16 pm | Readers 0

Mick’s been pestering asking me, and others, for a post on a recommended book for Christmas. But since I’m still an independently minded blogger, and I’ve already made one recommendation recently, I thought I’d do something else. So, instead of a book I’ve read, here’s a book I’ve just put on top of my to-be-read list – Seeing and Believing: The Story of the Telescope, or How We Found Our Place in the Universe by Richard Panek. Why? Well my …

That’s not a “Little Planet”, it’s a dwarf planet..

Pete Baker on December 7, 2009, 11:32 pm | Readers 5

If you thought the last honk for Pluto was to be heard in the Illinois Senate, you’d be wrong. From the Professor comes news of the perfect Christmas gift for your inner space geek. MSNBC’s Cosmic Log’s Alan Boyle’s The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference. Available at all good book stores. Samizdata’s Dale Amon was at the launch. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell sent her apologies.. Just don’t mention plutoids.. Pete Baker

“the Wild West of European finance”

Pete Baker on November 29, 2009, 2:41 am | Readers 12

In today’s Guardian, Terry Eagleton reviews Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools – “As O’Toole points out, bribery, tax evasion and false evidence under oath have not simply gone unpunished; the very idea of penalising the culprits is viewed by the governing elite as unsporting or even unpatriotic.” This is partly because Ireland, having in O’Toole’s words “imported” its modernity from elsewhere, is in some ways a country with a first-world economy and a third-world political system. Local, cronyist and clientelist …

Book Review: “The Bankers” by Shane Ross

Mack on November 12, 2009, 3:59 pm | Readers 18

The Bankers: How the Banks Brought Ireland to Its Knees is an important book. It is a highly readable account of the defining political and economic story of our time. How a group of elite bankers fueled a credit bubble, fought back against government pressure in the wake of it’s collapse and ensured the survival of their culture at taxpayers expense. Shane Ross, the author, is an Irish Senator and business editor of the Sunday Independent. An extract from the …

“like stakeholders in the Pequod..”

Pete Baker on October 23, 2009, 2:59 am | Readers 11

Oxford based Clutag Press are taking orders for the fourth volume of Archipelago – a collection of writing of an archipelagic nature. The volume, costing £10.00, including P&P for Britain and Ireland (£15.00 elsewhere), will be launched on 26 November 2009. The Bodleian bodcasts mentioned previously can be found here – new direct link to Seamus Heaney’s contribution [10.9 Mb mp3 file]. And from editor Andrew McNeillie It’s three years and three issues since ARCHIPELAGO’s keel was laid, her plot …

Gaelic Athletic Association 1884 – 2009: 1 In Ulster…

Mick Fealty on July 20, 2009, 9:48 pm | Readers 51

A few years back I remember talking to a senior DUP politician about the fact that the two populations (despite a considerable amount of Peace Processing that’s what they substantially remain) in Northern Ireland each seem to have quite separate public lives that essentially remain locked to one another… it was that thought which prompted me to suggest to the Newsletter’s Sam McBride the small scale inert character of the Twelfth at the hub of many rural Protestant populations may …

Codex Sinaiticus online

Pete Baker on July 8, 2009, 2:20 am | Readers 6

Will Crawley notes that the British Library – in collaboration with St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Leipzig University library, the national library of Russia in St Petersburg, and the Instititute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at Birmingham University – has made available online pages, transcriptions, and translations, of what is believed to be the oldest bible in the world, written in Greek, the 4th Century Codex Sinaiticus. More on the project here. As the BBC report says – “For those …

“Wasn’t the 18th Century blogging’s Golden Age?”

Pete Baker on July 7, 2009, 7:22 pm | Readers 0

Via the Professor. This does look interesting [If you like that sort of thing – Ed]. Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, available [sometime] at Amazon. There’s also a dedicated website with some sample extracts – such as an intelligent, US-focused, version of the old favourite “Journalists vs. Bloggers”. [Adds It’s worth noting his comments on that chapter.] His own blog Wordyard is here. And here’s his answer to the question “Who …

“By yer man James Joyce isn’t it?”

Pete Baker on June 16, 2009, 3:35 pm | Readers 6

As Mick said, it’s Bloomsday! Which is all the excuse I need to repost this still excellent video. Those of a sensitive disposition are duly warned, again, that James Joyce enjoys the language in all its fecund nuttiness. Enjoy. Oh, and now without subscription, here’s a good digested read from last year’s Irish Times. From the Irish Times archive “By yer man James Joyce isn’t it?” About a fellow called Leopold Bloom it all takes place on the June 16th …

“listening to a river in the trees..”

Pete Baker on June 3, 2009, 11:33 pm | Readers 5

As noted back in May 2006, Seamus Heaney has been working on a modern English account of the work of the 15th-century Scottish makar Robert Henryson [c 1420-1490]. Here’s a link to the Guardian interview at the time. And one of his translations from Henryson – “The Toad and The Mouse”. What was intended as a tale of Four Fables and a Testament has now been published as The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables And back at the Guardian …

Unionism needs to get in tune with the zeitgeist of today’s European Union

Mick Fealty on April 30, 2009, 6:43 pm | Readers 27

Eamon McCann’s been reading what sounds like a fascinating book by a man who was a player during the early, and most traumatic years of the Northern Irish troubles… Eamon buys the argument that Unionism could to get itself off the tribal hook, and into an attractive, and fashionable space. He quotes Robert Ramsey here: “To me, the most important aspect of the development of the Ulster Scots identity is that it would take (unionism) out of the internationally damaging …

Not the enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab lands

Mick Fealty on April 2, 2009, 6:38 pm | Readers 4

I’m always a little wary of getting involved in problems in other parts of the world, particularly in areas where people are inclined to draw glib comparisons with home, but there’s a great little review of Rachel Shabi’s book on the Mizrahi Jews of Israel, ie those who settled there from other Arab and Muslim countries. Richard Crowley notes: “In Israel, the popular narrative is that the Jews had to flee the Arab lands to escape persecution and that Israel …

“That never is Sam Beckett’s handwriting. I can read every word.”

Pete Baker on March 23, 2009, 3:42 pm | Readers

The Guardian’s Nicholas Lezard reviews the “treasure trove” that is The Letters of Samuel Beckett : Volume 1, 1929-1940 – the New York Times tells us it’s the first of four volumes. From the Guardian Here is the authentic early Beckettian tang, straight from the source, unmediated by artifice. He may always have been a verbal show-off but underneath the pyrotechnics lie real humour, real pain. “My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is …

“an uncomfortable but timely message”

Pete Baker on March 18, 2009, 4:03 pm | Readers 0

With a Northern Ireland-specific Bill of Rights apparently marooned within a wider conversation, the Irish Times has a timely review of Life Without Lawyers by Philip K. Howard. From the Irish Times review Some liberal commentators take the view that legal rights are like piped water – they cannot get enough of them. Howard’s analysis is a welcome antidote to this view. He discusses the creation of legal rights in the US which have given free rein to disruptive children, …

“A brave and hugely challenging and demanding book…”

Mick Fealty on March 4, 2009, 10:13 pm | Readers 10

We have review of Eoin Ó Broin’s Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism, London: Pluto Press, 2009 from Douglas Hamilton a former policy advisor in Sinn Fein, who broadly welcomes the commitment it singles from the party towards a more conversational politics, inside the party at least…By Douglas Hamilton This is a hugely important book, not just for Sinn Féin, but also for what the author calls the left republican project more generally in Ireland (those parties and …

“The man with the electric brain”

Pete Baker on February 28, 2009, 8:00 pm | Readers 3

Like Reason‘s Jesse Walker it’s been a while since I’ve read Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld Saga series, but his “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” was an early, and breathtaking, example of the possibilities of the sci-fi genre for a stunned 11-year-old living in rural Northern Ireland. The 91 year old author, who received a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America grand master prize and a World Fantasy lifetime achievement award in 2001, died earlier this week in his home …

“Praise what or whomsoever you will.”

Pete Baker on February 15, 2009, 9:46 pm | Readers 1

Oxford based Clutag Press are taking orders for the third issue of Archipelago – “Our voyage is a brief interlude, a cry in the wilderness, across the waste of waters, in the wake of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the luxury yacht Climate Change. Undaunted we offer celebratory interactions with landscape and nature, history and remembrance, by both writers and visual artists, including: Norman Ackroyd, Niamh Clancy, Tim Dee, Ivor Gurney (represented by five hitherto unpublished works), Michael Longley, …