Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything

In 2005, The Guardian wrote:

Bryson has been chosen as one of the winners of the prestigious EU Descartes prize for science communication for his rough guide to science, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Descartes is a 'prize of prizes' and Bryson was nominated by the Royal Society after winning the Aventis prize for science writing for the book in 2004. Accepting his award, Bill Bryson said: "Never has someone been more generously awarded for his ignorance. I'm very grateful to all the scientists who, without exception, helped me to discover the wonder of their science. "I'm especially grateful to the Royal Society for nominating me for this award and in recognition of that, plan to return a small portion of the prize to the Society, in the hope they'll be able to buy the staff a seasonal drink."

Find that Guardian story here. In 2003, NPR featured the book and author on All Things Considered. You can find that webpage here.

The best of the fiction year – review Justine Jordan rounds up our critics' recommendations - from The Guardian

Of course, Freedom is on this list. But here are a few other interesting tidbits, from this "best of" list. For example:

Surely the year's most pleasurable read and now a Costa contender, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, charted teenage highs and lows at an Irish boarding school: Patrick Ness called it " a rare tragicomedy that's both genuinely tragic and genuinely comedic".

Jeffrey Burke from Bloomberg, had this to say about the book, last month:

For his second novel, Murray has gone from impressive to world-class. “Skippy Dies” concerns a few months in the life of a Catholic boys high school in Dublin called Seabrook College. There’s sex and drugs and high jinks, wimps, bullies, queen bees and brains, jaded teachers, a questionable coach and an administrator so perfectly full of himself that I was reminded of Stephen Dedalus’s bloviating Mr. Deasy in “Ulysses.” This is far from the musical TV series “Glee,” though. Characters that verge on cliche prove unpredictable. A teacher ripe for burnout finds inspiration in a World War I uniform. A femme fatale reveals the stony investment adviser within. The punk selling diet pills isn’t the worst pusher in school.

See that Bloomberg piece, here.

Christopher Tayler applauded Ian McEwan's "elegant and surprising" response to global warming in Solar (Jonathan Cape, £13.99): "instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual".

In March, The New York Times reviewed the book:

Ian McEwan has long had a penchant for creating unsavory, disreputable characters: children who bury their mother in the basement (“The Cement Garden”), a Machiavellian sadist who preys on a pair of middle-class tourists (“The Comfort of Strangers”), a dead woman’s conniving former lovers (“Amsterdam”), an adolescent girl who makes false accusations against a man that will alter his life and the life of her entire family (“Atonement”). In his latest novel, “Solar,” Mr. McEwan’s protagonist — a fat, middle-aged Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Michael Beard — joins this gallery of distasteful antiheroes. In the course of the book he will not only cheat on five wives and innumerable girlfriends and send an innocent man to jail, but he will also steal another scientist’s plans for stopping global warming and try to turn them into a big, moneymaking machine. This self-deluding scientist will come to embody just about everything that has brought about the climate-change crisis in the first place: greed, heedlessness and a willful refusal to think about consequences or the future.

See the complete Guardian list here. Jordan breezes right by the titles, so it's a quick run-down.

Better Than Freedom from The Slate.com by staff writers and editors

Editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg's pick:

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. Weisberg's Law states that any Jew more religious than you are is mentally insane, while any Jew less religious is a self-hater. The Finkler Question demonstrates this rule's applicability in Britain, where the striations of Semitism have their own complications and subtleties. It centers on three old friends, one a goy who thinks he might be Jewish, one a Jew ashamed of Israel, and a third who thinks the other two must be nuts. Like Phillip Roth, to whom he is fairly compared, Howard Jacobson is a magnificent prose stylist who is often at his most serious when he is being uproariously funny. This novel, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, is both a send-up of some very silly people, and an examination of Jewish identity in relation to rising tides of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I don't think you have to be Jewish to find it funny, touching, and troubling.

The book was also listed on one of The Guardian's "best of 2010" lists, in which it was said:

It was a great 12 months for the comic novel, with Howard Jacobson's uproarious investigation of grief, friendship and British Jewishness, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a Man Booker winner that surprised and pleased in equal measure. Reviewer Alex Clark found it "a terrifying and ambitious novel, full of dangerous shallows and dark, deep water", bringing knockabout humour to bear on the most serious themes.

Read our post about that Guardian list for 2010 here.

Slate Contributor, Sara Dickerman's pick:

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. I read The Imperfectionists: A Novel in one sleepless gulp. It is a novel, as the subtitle informs you, but a multifaceted one: Each chapter stands as its own finely wrought short story about one of the various employees (and in one case a consumer) of a once-revered international newspaper based in Rome. For a group of professional observers, the journalists have whopping blind spots—the fossilizing stringer has never gotten around to purchasing a computer; the lonely business writer decides to date the very thief who robbed her. Rachman's prose is wildly witty but never arch, and even as his characters tangle themselves into absurd predicaments, you can't help but sympathize with them.

Read The Slate's full best-of list here.

Children's books special from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk by Kate Kellaway

The Story of the World's Greatest Paintings by Charlie Ayres (Thames & Hudson £9.99) is a picture book about pictures – 20 of the world's greatest masterpieces to be precise – and would make a great present. Ayres has approached the task with zest and the result is rich, interactive and engaging. The book is also marvellously informative – including curious details about the personal lives of artists. I did not know that Vermeer had 15 children and fretted about money, nor that Botticelli was uncompromisingly undomestic. He never married – the idea gave him nightmares (11+).

Read the full feature, story here. See also: The Story of the World's Greatest Paintings, Art: The World's Greatest Paintings Explored and Explained

Links on "NYC Yarn Crawl" | Facebook

Best in show: knit your own dog | Life and style | guardian.co.uk · www.guardian.co.uk. Highlights of a new book that will help you knit your very own ...

Check the discussion out, here. See also: Knit Your Own Dog: Easy-to-Follow Patterns for 25 Pedigree Pooches, Pet Projects: The Animal Knits Bible

Buying books is fun, with a glass in your hand from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk

Author, author: Elif Batuman: Before I first acquired a Kindle, exactly one year ago, I didn't usually buy books while under the influence of alcohol. I won't say I never did it, because that would be a lie. But it wasn't a habit. After a couple of glasses of wine, I tend to fixate on the present. I have no use for five to seven days' delivery time. The Kindle is wonderful for drunk people because you can climb into bed, press one button, and The Anatomy of Melancholy instantaneously materialises before you, plucked by the so-called Whispernet out of the surrounding ether.

The Guardian piece is spot on (as the Guardian usually is), not only about the point about drunk shopping. This is exactly why the iPad and the Nook collects dust, and why our Kindle, not the DX but the smaller one; see, the reader is about portability and readability; i.e. the portability of our book collection, and the readability of the text. Bibliophiles don't care about a moving graphic of some motion of the page flipping across the screen; we also don't need the text laser-etched into our corneas. And we need something that will last a week, without having to recharge.

What's the best way to test a novel before you read it? from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk by Robert McCrum

First line, last line, or Ford Madox Ford's p99 challenge? Actually, a good book should pass all of these. Ford Madox Ford is such an evergreen English writer. The Good Soldier is one of the most remarkable and influential novels of the 20th century. Currently FMF is back in the news for his dictum that you can judge any book by any one of its pages. What he actually said was: "Open the book to page 99 and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." This lit crit nugget was first picked up in the USA by the punk rock band, Pg. 99, but it is now enjoying a vogue as an ideal way to cut through the blizzard of overproduction in books of all sorts. The p99 test does many things, but it also ruthlessly speeds up the selection process in a crowded marketplace. Some will say it's unfair, random and capricious, but I disagree. As readers we pay a lot of attention to (and love to quote) those striking first lines, for example: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Read the full Guardian article here.

An economy kept afloat by mafia cash is not just the stuff of Le Carré thrillers | Jonathan Freedland

If that sounds like the plot of a thriller, that's because it's the set-up of the new and utterly riveting John le Carré novel, Our Kind of Traitor. The Russian gangster is Dima, whose fate we follow as a rogue unit in British intelligence seeks to reel the would-be defector in to safety on England's shores.


Now here's another storyline. Leading banks around the world, desperate for cash in the financial crisis, turn to the proceeds of organised crime as "the only liquid investment capital" available, eventually absorbing the greater part of a staggering $352bn of drugs profits into the global economic system, laundering that vast sum in the process.


Sounds far-fetched, but that's no fiction. That tale was published in the Observer in December 2009, when the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime admitted that colossal piles of drugs money had kept the world financial system afloat when it looked dangerously close to collapse.

- read the Guardian article here.

Is Justin Bieber really old enough for a biography? from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk by Dorian Lynskey

The teen sensation is set to publish his first memoir and be the subject of a biopic. Is it really the right time? As if Justin Bieber's supernova status were not already bewildering enough for anyone past the age of majority, the baby-faced Canadian singer, who looks even younger than his 16 years, has just announced his first memoir, First Step 2 Forever: My Story, via HarperCollins. He may not be the youngest celebrity to write an autobiography – Drew Barrymore and Charlotte Church were both 15 when they published, respectively, 1990's Little Girl Lost and 2001's Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far) – but he is the only one who can also boast a forthcoming 3D biopic (apparently helmed by the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, no less) about his prodigious rise.

Is the G really giving Bieber a credible mention? Check out this gravy train of dead trees: Justin Bieber: The Fever!, Justin Bieber (Get the Scoop), FAME: Justin Bieber, Justin Bieber: The Unauthorized Biography ("unauthorized", "biography")

Does humanitarian aid prolong wars? from The Guardian World News by Andrew Anthony

Exactly what took place in Ethiopia 25 years ago will probably never be established beyond doubt. After all, it was a war zone mired in chaos, desperation and human misery. It may be, as Geldof insists, that the vast majority of aid his charity raised reached its intended recipients and that none was used, contrary to the BBC report, to buy military hardware.

But according to a new book by the Dutch writer Linda Polman, such positive outcomes are the exception in the field of humanitarian aid. In War Games: the Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, Polman argues that humanitarianism has become a massive industry that, along with the global media, forms an unholy alliance with warmongers.

You can read the full Guardian, The Observer article here.