Tag Archives: books

New email users and those overwhelmed by the size of their inboxes will find this book useful.

A lot of what I read is about gender issues, sexuality and similar, and an email exchange off-blog recently made me think about why these are valuable beyond simply the information they contain. Studying these areas provides a continual reminder that other cultures, other times, other people don’t see the …

One of my most surprising, “whow” books of 2004, was The Fossil Hunters, by Adrienne Mayor. Posted on my blog is a reconstruction of the skeleton of a Protoceratops, a dinosaur that lived in what is now the Gobi desert. Below is a Scythian “griffin”, placed into the same stance. …

Ringo bashers: suck flam and stick this in your paradiddle. Ex-Beatle drummer Starr and comic book demigod Stan Lee (Spider-man, Incredible Hulk, X-men, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, etc, etc) — who between them are 147 years old — are teaming up on a new animated superhero series for TV, DVD, publishing …

They’ve arrived. No, I don’t mean the Turks, but the hordes of visitors at Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years: 600—1600 AD. It was like a rugby game in there today, albeit a very polite one. But the exhibits, if not perhaps the exhibition, deserve the attention. I only …

I’ve always thought of Piranesi as a sculptor; when I look several times a week at the giant, spectacular, if rather ugly “Piranesi vase”, which towers above your head in a riot of decorated marble in the Enlightenment gallery in the British Museum, that’s perhaps not surprising, but I’m learning …

One of the most important and insightful jazz writers alive, Gary Giddins, whose most recent book is Weather Bird – Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century, a collection of his Weather Bird columns from the Village Voice, will be chatting live with all comers tomorrow, Wednesday January 26 …

The nominees for the National Book Critics Circle awards for the publishing year 2004 in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, biography/autobiography, criticism, and poetry have been selected. The winners will be announced this March at the organization’s 31st annual awards ceremony. Most notable is a little memoir by the former …

Just the other day I was musing on my ’90s experiences in the Cleveland music scene: DJing clubs and on the radio, writing two books and for various local and national publications, compiling a greatest hits collection for Cleveland. And since Cleveland really isn’t all that big a town (are …

From a young age I noticed how certified heroes were mostly male. I failed to notice, before Monuments and Maidens