Sunday, August 27, 2017

Potpourri of Tales

                           “Gentlemen of the jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it the most. A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog”


 The economic value of birds


Tucked away in the spare bedroom of a terrace in Sydney's Inner West lies an extraordinary collection. It's a treasure trove of priceless Australian nostalgia that almost certainly would have been thrown out if it weren't for one man's passion for the past




via my former neighbour Stephen who used to play in the bank Talking Heads

Book Review: The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant


Extracts from Grant’s Personal Memoirs, with some lessons for the present day


Border Force urges more power to stop illegal tobacco smugglers




Mystery Great Colin Dexter Dies


9780804114905_1e4b39780804119542Colin Dexter has died, age 86. He created the character Chief Inspector Morse, the beloved, curmudgeonly detective based in Oxford who likes opera, poetry, and has a fiendishly clever mind.
The first book in the series isLast Bus to Woodstock was published in 1975. The final book, #13, The Remorseful Day, was published 24 years later in 1999. The books were adapted into the Inspector Morse TV series that ran on PBS from 1987 until 2000. The show spun-off two sequels, one about Morse’s partner, Inspector Lewis, and one about a younger Morse,Endeavour.
“He was one of the greatest crime novelists of the 20th century and deserves to be ranked alongside Chandler, Christie and Doyle,” Andrew Gulli, the editor of the mystery magazine The Strand, told the NYT.
The paper also reports that he won two Golden Dagger awards from the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain and, in 1997, he received the organization’s lifetime achievement award, the Diamond Dagger.
Dexter killed off Morse in his last book, using for the title a line from an A. E. Housman poem, “How Clear, How Lovely Bright,” as a way of saying goodbye:
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

 Opera House gets new reef


The Booker longlist, announced today, is “thronged with literary titans, whose combined trophy cabinet would include the Pulitzer, the Costa, the Baileys, the Folio, the Impac and the Goldsmiths prizes,” notes the Guardian, but it also manages to squeeze in three debut novels.



Cold River etc Movie/TV Adaptations, Updates


Although EarlyWord is no longer publishing on a daily basis, we continue to update the resources listed on the right
Since July 3rd, we have added new information on 60 projects to our spreadsheet of Upcoming Movies & TV Based on Books. Download a spreadsheet to browse just the newest lists here,Adaptation Updates.
The most intriguing book and TV news doesn’t appear on that list, however, since it’s not an adaptation. It’s PBS’s announcement last week of “The Great American Read” (working title), an eight-part series, with the ambitious goal of getting people to vote for  “America’s Best Loved Book,” set to kick off in May, 2018
Also not based on a book, but arriving with several tie-ins, as well as plenty of display opportunities, is Ken Burns’s documentary The Vietnam War which debuts on PBS on 9/17/17 (included in ourcatalog of tie-ins here).

Study: How Our Creativity Changes As We Get Older


"How does the ability to come up with unusual ideas change as we grow older? Does it begin to flag in adolescence? Before then? To investigate these questions, we and our colleagues recently conducted several experiments, which we relate in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." …[Read More]
Paging Madame Defarge:
He’s married upscale trash. Anyone who brags about brand names has no class.

Baby boomers hitting the bottle and bongs at alarming levels, health experts warn


I have a hard time getting rid of books, and if you’re reading this space, you probably do too. As Summer Brennan put it, “what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose?” Not anyone I know. But apparently, you only have to own one thousand books to qualify as a book hoarder. Which seems a bit low, to be honest—unless we’re talking about one thousand books in a New York City one-bedroom, in which case, sure.
 

Michiko Kakutani– feared, respected, mercurial – is stepping away from her role at The Times. Is this the dawn of a new age of book reviewing?... Door Stoppers  

Nobody ever called Liz “speechless” before.

Depressed CEOs hold the fort, but do they make good business ...

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