Friday, December 10, 2004



How much was known about Hitler before he came into power? How much was on the record about the nature of the Nazi regime in its early days? How pervasive was its anti-Semitism, and how much of that was documented long before the outbreak of the war? What was known about Hitler's dreams of conquest? Was the Holocaust foreseeable?
A common answer to all these questions has often been "We never knew....," as if somehow the entire history of the Third Reich took place on a distant planet, unknown and unknowable.
Our aim is simple: To puncture this myth.
Our target audience: Anyone with curiosity about an unspeakable time.
Somewhere between the ring of Hell reserved for extreme right and left wing bloggers and the one reserved for revisionists is the likely future of our final solutions

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back
Until recently, I thought electronic books were sharing a graveyard with eight-track tapes, Betamax video recorders and record players. Industry predictions five years ago that e-books would quickly replace paper never came to pass. I figured the digital book had failed because everyone shared my distaste for the first generation of clunky, book-sized devices designed for viewing them.
But it turns out the e-book market has been changing course and, though still tiny, has been growing at double-digit rates. It is, in fact, the fastest-growing segment of the comparatively static publishing world. Between 2002 and 2003, the number of e-books sold rose 71 percent, according to the industry's trade association, the Open eBook Forum. The industry posted record sales in the first quarter of 2004, a 46 percent increase compared with the same period last year. Still, last year's sales of 1.4 million downloadable books are minuscule compared with the more than 2.2 billion books sold in the United States in 2003.

The explosion of cellphones and other hand-held devices with small screens capable of displaying text [Malborro Man of Fallujah - via Barista ]
• · It is a great book -- you really should read it ... few statements inspire more dread. The more fervently a friend urges a book on you, the more suspect it becomes, and the more fraught the fact that you almost certainly won't read it. Your Best Friend's Reading List; [Now I published my Cold River, I am finding out the hard way that nobody needs it (smile). There's one book -- no, he won't name it -- that spoke so deeply to me about what I thought was sad and funny and beautiful about the world, that I didn't want anyone else to know about it. If I were dating someone and truly felt a profound connection, I wouldn't go to my friend and say, 'You've got to try sleeping with X. It's fantastic! There are some books that I don't want to whore around. Dating and whoring aside, Sometimes a River is just a River Trivia: Freud was born on the banks of the Morava River without a cigar in his mouth]
• · · Kogarah boys never laugh: Clive James
• · · · Let me finish Suicide notes become a bestseller
• · · · · 1980: John Lennon shot dead