Category: Books
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Gang Leader for a Day – Sudhir Venkatesh – Book Review – New York Times
Gang Leader for a Day – Sudhir Venkatesh – Book Review – New York Times: “On a hot summer day in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh, a callow sociology student with a ponytail and tie-dyed T-shirt, walked into one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects, clipboard in hand, ready to ask residents about their lives. Sample question: ‘How…
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Love, Bludgeoned and Bent by the Camps
NYT: Martin Amis’s new novel, “House of Meetings,” tackles the same sobering material his 2002 nonfiction book “Koba the Dread” did: Stalin’s slave labor camps and the atrocities committed by the government during the failed “Soviet experiment.” The novel is everything that misguided earlier book was not. Whereas “Koba” weirdly mixed chilling, secondhand historical accounts…
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Review: Tiger Force
Tiger Force, Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, [rating:5/5] This is a harrowing book. Especially reading it now, looking back on Vietnam with an eye on Iraq. Tiger Force was an elite group of US special forces working in free-fire zones in Central Vietnam. Some of these units were investigated (though never charged) with war crimes…
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The Plot Against America
Dexter Filkins reviews Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 99/11, in the NYT Book Review: The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual…
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American Idyll
From the Digital Journalist: For a more perceptive and profound patriotism immerse yourself in Burk Uzzle’s latest book, A Family Named Spot. Here you will find some of the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that make this country great, all displayed unabashedly and without apology or sentimentality. They are also portrayed without disdain but with great affection.…
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Review: The Few And The Proud
The Few And The Proud; Marine Corps Drill Instructors In Their Own Words, by Larry Smith. [rating:4/5] Okay, if I gave out C+ or B-, this would be there. The book contains profiles and interviews of various drill instructors from the WW2 era to today. Some of these are very interesting, and others are not.…
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Review: In the Belly of the Green Bird; The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq
In the Belly of the Green Bird; The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, by Nir Rosen. [rating:4/5] Nir Rosen’s book gives us something I hadn’t seen much before- the view of an occupied Iraq from the Arabic point of view: A nervous soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff…
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Review: Keep Sweet; Children of Polygamy
Keep Sweet; Children of Polygamy, by Debbie Palmer & Dave Perrin. Grade, regular reader: D; Polygamy-obsessed: B. Picked up a signed copy of Keep Sweet at a small bookstore in Creston, BC, just a few kilometers from where the events in the book took place. The inscription from Debbie Palmer, “Hope you enjoy” struck me…
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Review: Dispatches from the Edge
Dispatches from the Edge, by Anderson Cooper. Grade: A. Don’t mistake my high rating of this book for any vindication of broadcast media. I don’t watch TV news, finding it generally shallow. And before I quote from the book, showing you some of Cooper’s observations, I’ve got to ask, did he really need three photos…
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Gross-Out Magazine Shock Comes to the U.S.
From PDN: Through a spokesperson, Shock editors declined to be interviewed for this story, though the company did provide an advance copy of the magazine for review. The first issue of Shock is a medley of photojournalism essays, paparazzi, and upsetting images including a self-immolating protestor and a child held hostage with a blade to…
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Review: Blue Nude
Blue Nude, by Elizabeth Rosner. [rating:4/5] It’s about a painter and a woman who models nude for art classes. He’s German, she’s Jewish. He has a studio in Point Reyes. She lives in The City. San Francisco. I want to remember these passages: I was married for a while, she says. To a photographer. Danzig…
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Review: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka. [rating:5/5] Now I see his energy is all redirected towards this woman and her son- they will become his substitute family. He can speak with them in his own language. Such a beautiful language that anyone can be a poet. Such a landscape- it would…
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JPG Magazine
From JPG Magazine: We’re the great in between: not quite amateur, not quite professional. Some do it for art, some as a kind of visual journal, some because they want to become a professional one day, and some just because we have to. It’s just what we do. Here. Submissions for the next issue will…
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Photo Books Show Two Different Iraqs
From PDN: With the benefit of more time, two recent photo books have tried to show the war from new angles. They take fundamentally different approaches: one from the viewpoint of the American solider, the other from the viewpoint of the Iraqi citizens. Here. The books:
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Midnight Train to Warsaw
Though it won’t be published for another eight months, you’ve got to check out the preview to photographer Andrew Faulkner’s book, Midnight Train to Warsaw.
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The Web This Morning
Podfading Digital music biz Gum book Quicksilver for OS X Contract of Wifely Expectations Black flags block US sign Saddam Shark ‘This is not Sgt. John Haggett’ NYT: Negroes with guns
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The Web This Morning
Domestic wiretapping, 5,000 Americans spied on, most cleared NYT: Shadows in Iraq His morning after, Jay McInerney Book Review: State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration