Life, The Universe and Everything

Tag: BooksEtc

  • Academic Publishing Rip-Offs, Part XVII??

    I’ve just seen more evidence that academic publishing, and the research assessment mechanisms based on it, are fatally broken – yet another over priced journal on a narrow field and three books I should read priced at $180 each. I don’t agree with burning books, but I’ll happily torch some publishers

  • Sprawling Wargames

    Paddy Griffith is a military historian and wargamer whose work I always enjoy reading. The reporting of his famous Operation Sealion game in 1974 was my earliest exposure to wargaming and his writings on tactics in wars from the 1790s to the 1940s have added greatly to my understanding, and to my teaching.   I was…

  • Wal-Mart won’t pay you after you’re dead

    Nor will any other big company, which seems to me to be a compelling argument that copyright should die with the creator. If the law firm my Grandfather worked for doesn’t have to pay me every time they open one of his files, why should J.K. Rowling’s grandchildren keep getting cheques for the next  century?

  • Mind before chicken before matter before egg?

    The Secret History of the World, by Jonathon Black, is a book I’ve been looking at in bookshops for a while, and I picked up a copy to stuff in my pocket for holiday reading since it at 550 odd pages it looked like a book that might last a few days. I think I…

  • Mocha Book, Grande, with cream?

    Good news of the week is that Blackwells have switched on the first Espresso Book Machine in a UK bookshop, in their Charing Cross Road Branch. Pádraig Ó Méalóid called in the Beginning of the End for bookshops? in his Livejournal but I like it. The EBM will deliver Print On Demand books in under…

  • Poetry

    I don’t usually have much time for John Waters, but I liked what he said when he spoke at the opening of Eigse Micheal Harnett last week, along with Michael Cody, whose writing I have always admired. Eigse commemorates the late Michael Hartnett, who wrote poetry in English and later in Irish.

  • Resistance to terrorism is always also an affirmation of humanism

    There is a connection which I’m afraid many people do not make in this quote, from an Adam Kirsch review of the new DeLillo book in the New York Sun. It strikes me as powerful and true, and deserves to be a bumper sticker.

  • America’s Secret War

    While people who have not kept track of the main events in the Global War on Terror will find the narrative in this book useful, I am not very impressed with George Friedman’s interpretation of the ‘secret’ motivation behind the US invasion of Iraq

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