What a Plant Knows written by Daniel Chamovitz
19 Jun 2012 23:03:56
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it feel an insect's spindly legs? How do flowers know when it's spring? Can they actually remember the weather? And do they care if you play them Led Zeppelin or Bach? From Darwin's early fascination with stems and vines to "Little Shop of Horrors", we have always marvelled at plant diversity and form. Now, in "What a Plant Knows", the renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz presents an intriguing and refreshing look at how plants experience the w... Read Full Story
News about Twilight Saga
19 Jun 2012 23:01:36
Bloody-disgusting.com claimed Lionsgate and its subsidiary Summit wanted to make more money from the series, which has made more than $2.5bn (£1.6m) at the global box office. "They'll deny it, right here, right now. We'll get plenty of eggs in our face. Still, the fact will remain: it's true," promised the site, which has a strong track record of producing genuine exclusives. "In fact, they're already discussing it internally. It will happen."
Lionsgate told Deadline it has no plans to reboot t... Read Full Story
She died, but her books become the eternal
19 Jun 2012 22:59:37
Gitta Sereny, the veteran journalist whose unflinching studies of some of modern history's most reviled figures attempted to make sense of their crimes, has died. She was 91.
Sereny attracted praise and criticism for her profiles of senior Nazis and child murderers but was universally acknowledged as among the most tenacious interrogators of her generation.
"She was an enormously spirited person, extraordinarily brave and very, very determined," said Stuart Proffitt, her publisher at Penguin P... Read Full Story
What is about book The Second World War by Antony Beevor?
19 Jun 2012 01:57:45
In doing so, he is playing to his strengths. Many of the chapters on the Nazi-Soviet war find Beevor at the top of his game, in command of a huge range of sources, with a fine eye for place and detail, deftly manipulating incident and character, and making effective use of soldiers' diaries and letters to create a vast human tapestry of war. The prose is relaxed and retains a spring in every paragraph. He excels, too, at grand strategy – as a diplomatic historian, he is a match for AJP Taylor. T... Read Full Story
There is still no actor of the role Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
19 Jun 2012 01:56:06
Producers are to bring a new stage musical version of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the West End next summer.
Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes will return to theatre for the first time since the culmination of his transatlantic Bridge Project to direct the production, which will officially open at the London Palladium in June 2013 after a short preview period. Tickets will go on general sale from October.
Though this will be the book's first major theatrical outing, Dahl's... Read Full Story
Caitlin Moran became an author of sitcom called The Big Object
19 Jun 2012 01:54:21
Caitlin Moran, the award-winning Times columnist and author of the bestselling book How to Be a Woman, has written the pilot for a Channel 4 sitcom about an overweight 16-year-old looking for a boyfriend.
The Big Object focuses on the lives of three characters, two sisters and a mother, but no casting decisions have been made.
Shane Allen, Channel 4's head of comedy, said the comedy's title "was chosen to be deliberately ambiguous", and is a reference to the main character's hunt for a boyfrie... Read Full Story
What is the connection between JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer and South Africa?
15 Jun 2012 18:40:22
Secrecy laws planned for South Africa fundamentally threaten free speech and investigative journalism, and could have a chilling effect on the rest of Africa, a united front of human rights lawyers, newspaper editors and Nobel prize-winning writers have warned in interviews with the Guardian.
The protection of state information bill – dubbed the "secrecy bill" – envisages draconian penalties of up to 25 years in prison for whistleblowers and journalists who possess, leak or publish state secret... Read Full Story
How Much is Enough? by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
15 Jun 2012 16:41:07
Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky (a father-and-son/economist-and-philosopher combination) are firmly rooted in the tradition of enlightenment rationalism, but they too seek an economics of enough. Yet it is also the inherent optimism of enlightenment rationalism and its presupposition of continual progress and growth that forms the intellectual hinterland for How Much is Enough?'s opening problematic.
Back in 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote the essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchi... Read Full Story
Philip Roth is still becomes a literature prizes winner
15 Jun 2012 16:38:28
Philip Roth paid tribute to his "dear friend" Carlos Fuentes on winning Spain's prestigious literary prize the Prince of Asturias award yesterday.
Won in the past by Fuentes himself, Günter Grass, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster – and last year by the Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen – the €50,000 Asturias award is for an author "whose literary work represents a significant contribution to universal literature". Roth beat 23 other contenders from around the world to take this year's prize. H... Read Full Story
Ru by Kim Thúy
14 Jun 2012 19:29:44
"Life is a struggle," runs a Vietnamese proverb, "in which sorrow leads to defeat." Thúy's fictionalised memoir adopts a similarly unsentimental attitude to a life of extremes. Born into a wealthy South Vietnamese family as the Tet offensive rages, she flees the Communist regime, endures a brutal boat journey and a Malaysian refugee camp, and emerges, cold and mute, in Quebec. Thúy's debut contains around 100 vignettes, some dealing with her journey, others delving into the strange customs of Ca... Read Full Story
The winner of nternational Impac Dublin Literary Award
14 Jun 2012 19:28:00
British author Jon McGregor has beaten the Pulitzer prize-winning American writer Jennifer Egan to win the world's richest literary award for his novel Even the Dogs.
McGregor's third novel, the fractured story of an alcoholic who dies between Christmas and New Year, and the drug addicts and derelicts who knew him, was named winner of the €100,000 (£80,000) International Impac Dublin Literary Award on Wednesday evening. Nominations for the prize are received from libraries around the world – Ev... Read Full Story
Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis - new book, new review
14 Jun 2012 19:27:06
In the cover photo on the back inside flap of Lionel Asbo: State of England, the book's haughty scribe ("Martin Amis is the author of two collections of stories, six works of non-fiction and 12 previous novels...") gazes out, in glowering profile, at an anonymous London street. The pavement appears moist from a sudden rainstorm. (Has Amis been drenched in the downpour on his way to the photo-shoot? Is that expensive grey suit peppered with damp? The trademark tousled mane weighted by droplets, o... Read Full Story
