August 6, 2008
The race for the White House is heating up and Dover has the perfect novelty items to help you commemorate one of the most electric election years in American history! Our new McCain Paper Dolls and Obama Paper Dolls feature realistically rendered dolls of each candidate, full wardrobes of outfits worn on the campaign trails, brief biographies, and bonus “Election Night Scorecards.” Read on for more about these up-to-the-minute releases or use this link for complete information—
August 5, 2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn became a household word when I was in high school. I read The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle. I did not read The First Circle until last year. Solzhenitsyn was an impressive writer.
My local paper, The Daily Gazette in Schenectady, New York, wrote a great editorial on Solzhenitsyn today, all the more impressive because I can’t ever remember the paper devoting an editorial to an author.
The death of the famed Russian author and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn Sunday won’t receive the kind of attention it would have had it happened at the height of the Cold War, but it certainly is worth noting. There was a 19th century concept in Russian literature called “the superfluous man,” a man born to wealth and privilege who gambles, engages in duels, chases women, and suffers from boredom. Solzhenitsyn was the antithesis of that; he was a deeply moral man of great courage and integrity.
Today it is hard to understand just how revered writers were by the people of the old Russia and Soviet Union — and how feared they were by their leaders, whether tsarist or communist. Most people who could read loved literature and poetry, and there was a long history of writers, from Dostoevsky to Gorky to Pasternak, running afoul of the authorities, living in fear of death, prison or exile.
August 3, 2008
Here is an article that I wrote for the Sunday Gazette on the dangers of reading in public.
There were six of us waiting outside Hometown Healthcare on State Street in Schenectady. It was a Saturday morning, July 5, and none of us wanted to be there, but teeth and other body parts have a way of causing pain on holidays as well as ordinary days.
We were a cross-section of the Mohawk Valley — male and female, young and old, black and white, from Schenectady, Amsterdam and Fonda. What struck me as unusual, however, was that four out of the six of us were reading books while waiting for the clinic doors to open.
Seeing one person read in public is unusual, at least in my experience.
When Eleanor Burns, a literacy volunteer and professor at Fulton-Montgomery County Community College, was alive, you never saw her in public without a book, but she was unique. Sometimes I still see a person reading in a doctor’s office, but generally it’s a magazine not a book, and the ever-increasing number of televisions in waiting rooms is killing that. To see four people reading books in public at the same time, however, is worth taking note of.
August 1, 2008
The New York Times national edition on July 23rd carried a two and a half inch news brief on the declining health of the book section in the Sunday LA Times. It appeared in the “Arts, Briefly” columns of the Arts Section. According to their short piece the Sunday stand-alone book review section is going to be folded into the paper. As of Thursday the 24th the LA Times itself still wasn’t saying anything officially but confirmed an announcement was expected in a few days.
On the 27th they made it official announcing in their opinion section under the lead “Moving our Pages”:
July 9, 2008
DENVER — A man accused of checking out hundreds of books and DVDs from libraries around the Denver area and then trying to sell them has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Denver prosecutors say 34-year-old Thomas Pilaar also was ordered Tuesday to pay $53,549 in restitution.
June 27, 2008
Take the 82 minute DVD (why 82 minutes instead of 60 minutes?) containing excerpts from Mike Wallace’s best interviews out of its pocket in the back of the book, pop it in your DVD player and drop the book in the nearest garbage can.
June 25, 2008
If novelist Robert Coover had his way, all book shops would close their books and doors forever. Coover’s vision of books is one in which they will be written, distributed and read by a computer or some other electronic reading device; a future without printed books. Coover, who is also the founder of the Electronic Literature Association, is not alone in his vision of the future. He is joined by other writers and cyberpunks who claim we are on the verge of a publishing and reading revolution greater than that brought about by the Gutenberg press. Whether in the New York Times Book Review or at writers’ conventions, Coover’s message is the same: “The book is dead.” But to paraphrase an even greater novelist than Coover, “The news of the book’s death has been greatly exaggerated.”
Other Articles by Dan Weaver
