The Puzzle of Left-handedness by Rik Smits
02 Oct 2012 02:31:51
Bizarrely, five out of the last seven American presidents have been left-handers, including Barack Obama. It is, admits Smits, a Dutch science journalist, an "improbable number". His history of handedness is a fascinating cornucopia of science and superstition. Surprisingly, scientists have still not fully explained why people are either left- or right-handed, or why there has always been a stable left-handed minority of about 10%. But Smits, who is himself left-handed, is understandably aggriev... Read Full Story
What prepares for readers JK Rowling?
02 Oct 2012 02:30:56
With under 24 hours to go before publication of JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, the Harry Potter author's first adult novel is already topping charts as booksellers predict "vast" sales. But despite a strict embargo early reviews are already appearing, with some critics saying that Rowling has retained her magic, and others calling the novel "dull".
Copies were being delivered to shops today, to be ready for Thursday morning when a strict embargo lifts at 8am. Although no one is expecting The ... Read Full Story
What is going to sell Andy McNab?
11 Sep 2012 00:11:36
Former SAS man Andy McNab has made almost £1m after the ebook platform he co-founded was sold to Tesco for £4.5m.
Mobcast, which has 130,000 titles available for download to tablet computers and mobile phones, was founded by the soldier-cum-author in 2007 along with the company's boss, Tony Lynch. The pair each held a 22% stake in the startup, with McNab's shares registered under his real name of Steven Mitchell.
McNab said: "As an author I always thought the ability to carry your library arou... Read Full Story
How to Solve the World's Trickiest Problems by Eric Knight
11 Sep 2012 00:09:56
Knight applies his theory to a wide range of problems, flitting in consecutive chapters between the environment, the banking crisis and the death of Osama bin Laden. When it comes to fighting terrorism, the Rhodes scholar believes killing terrorists isn't the answer. Instead we need to promote a wider democratic agenda that steers allegiance away from extremism. See, it's easy. Simply "reframe" the problem and all becomes clear.
Knight studied climate change at Oxford, and the book is littered ... Read Full Story
150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye by Will Gompertz
11 Sep 2012 00:08:37
Gompertz has written an energetic and comprehensive romp through modern art, starting unusually early in the 19th century and continuing right up to Ai Weiwei. He's got them all in, from Courbet to Rothko to Hirst. Although his book is short on illustrations for a beginner's guide, it's a well-balanced history. He gives the right amount of space to the European postwar avant garde including Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys. At the end there is an appropriate page or two about the deale... Read Full Story
Downfall Phil Mac Giolla Bhain
05 Sep 2012 00:50:08
The Scottish edition of the paper had planned to start running extracts today from a book entitled Downfall: how Rangers FC self-destructed by Phil Mac Giolla Bhain.
But within 24 hours of its lengthy puff announcing its serialisation the paper ran a leading article explaining that it had changed its mind.
The decision followed the jamming of its switchboard as hundreds of Rangers fans called to complain while others took to Twitter. Rangers itself lobbied the paper and threatened to ban Sun j... Read Full Story
Mediterranean Seafood by Alan Davidson
05 Sep 2012 00:47:10
In the 1960s, while working for the Foreign Office in Tunis, Davidson produced "a fairly primitive roneo'd booklet" to help his British friends identify fish in the local markets and restaurants. Elizabeth David later sent it to an editor at Penguin who commissioned Davidson to write Mediterranean Seafood, published in 1972. A revised edition (which appeared just before the author's death in 2003) and North Atlantic Seafood (1979) are now culinary classics, despite the author's modest self-descr... Read Full Story
Rhapsody of Blood by Roz Kaveney
05 Sep 2012 00:45:48
The opening quotes set the tone perfectly: Nietzsche's "If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god?" and Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun". What follows is a novel that treads a sometimes precarious line between scenes of gruesome horror and deft comic touches. The horror is a disturbing vision of the abuses humans can and do inflict upon each other, as might be expected from an author with a long record of human rights activism. Kaveney's background as critic, poet, literar... Read Full Story
Curious Behaviour Robert Provine
03 Sep 2012 09:24:58
Consider the bizarre events of the 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). What began as an isolated fit of laughter in a group of 12-to 18-year-old schoolgirls rapidly rose to epidemic proportions. Contagious laughter propagated from one individual to the next, eventually infecting adjacent communities. Like an influenza outbreak, the laughter epidemic was so severe that it required the closing of at least 14 schools and afflicted about 1,000 people. Fluctuating in in... Read Full Story
Richard Bach can't fly anymore
03 Sep 2012 09:19:04
Richard Bach, the author of the 1970s bestselling novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull among other writings rooted in themes of flight, is in a serious condition after his small plane crashed in Washington state.
His son, James Bach, said his father was on his way to visit a friend on the San Juan Islands on Friday when his amphibian plane clipped a power line during landing and crashed.
Bach said his father, who was flying alone, suffered a head injury and broken shoulder. He was in serious co... Read Full Story
Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" will become a new good film
03 Sep 2012 09:17:28
Warner Bros. has passed on the project, making it the second studio to decline after Universal decided not to move forward last year over budget concerns, according to an individual with knowledge of the deal.The individual cited concerns over producing a project of this magnitude in a way that would satisfy the best-selling novels' die-hard fans as one possible reason for the project stalling. Thirty million copies of the books have been sold in 40 countries.Imagine Entertainment's Ron Howard w... Read Full Story
Blade Runner by Scott Bukatman
30 Aug 2012 10:55:02
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the excellent BFI Film Classics series, 12 of them have been reissued with striking new cover designs and forewords. Bukatman's brilliantly succinct yet wide-ranging analysis of Blade Runner was published in 1997 and its reissue is timely: this year marks the 30th anniversary of Ridley Scott's immensely influential SF film based on a Philip K Dick novel. He explores the role of vision ("seeing is everything in Blade Runner, but it guarantees absolutely nothin... Read Full Story
