James Patterson, Maxine Paetro: 4th of July (Woman's Murder Club)

Bestselling author James Patterson has recently honed his craft toward the social; that is to say, he's contributing to the production of a game that players will be able to engage with on platforms such as Facebook. The website, All Facebook, reported this in December, 2010. The game is an interesting take on the equally interesting books that the author's penned over the years. Below is a YouTube trailer of the game. James Patterson also wrote: Cross Fire (Alex Cross), Witch & Wizard: The Gift, and The 9th Judgment (Women's Murder Club).

John M. Logsdon: John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

The Dallas Morning News recently mentioned John M. Logsdon this way:

The Rockwall Republican, the longest-serving Texan in Congress , will finally ascend next year to the plum position that most lawmakers never get to enjoy: committee chairman. The oldest member of Congress will chair the most future-looking panel of them all, the House Science and Technology Committee. The committee's agenda is highly technical but central to building a competitive economy and skilled workforce. Its jurisdiction includes scientific research and education, space exploration, clean energy innovation and climate change research. Hall said that Elon Musk, the founder of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and other major space contractors would be asked to testify before his committee. SpaceX successfully launched its first test capsule last week from Cape Canaveral in Florida. John M. Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University, said Hall's committee also will have to monitor NASA's progress on a deep-space rocket and crew capsule that must be built by 2016. "I can say with a fair degree of assurance that NASA is finding it technically and financially difficult to meet some of the targets in the authorization bill," Logsdon said. "I would expect him to raise some of the questions to NASA about how they are planning on going forward," he said.

You can read that full length article, here.

The Connector: How Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg rewired our world and changed the way we live: A short biography of TIME's 2010 Person of the Year

eWeek recently said this about Time Magazine's bestowing its "Person of the Year" honor to Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg:

Now that Mark Zuckerberg has been given the rare honor of being named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, perhaps it’s time to reflect on how this young man moved from creating a Website to help college students connect to building Facebook into a global social and cultural phenomenon. According to some analysts, Zuckerberg’s Facebook is accessed by one-tenth of the human population, a number that’s sure to grow. This is a signal achievement in human as well as computing history. But in addition to its influence on the lives of all those users, Facebook has insinuated itself into virtually every part of life and commerce. A quick look at Google News shows a range of separate stories about Facebook, from its integration with Bing to it use of facial recognition to tag photos. There are stories about the Time magazine story, of course, and about 1,500 other stories on this event.

The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health

In March 2010, The Boston Globe mentioned the book, "The China Study," this way:

Eric Faulkner, a professional in high tech, is baking a batch of vegan cookies in his Lowell loft. He minces few words to explain why he became a vegan. “I’m scared to death of cancer,’’ says the lanky 42-year-old. After reading “The China Study’’ (Benbella Books), which purports that animal protein can accelerate the growth of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, Faulkner ate his last cheeseburger. For the past eight months meals in his household have been healthy remakes of meaty standbys. “I make a great avocado Reuben sandwich, a faux meat loaf, roasted butternut squash soup, and lots of pasta,’’ says Faulkner, whose wife and 8-year-old daughter have also converted.

Read the rest of that Boston Globe piece, here. There's plenty criticism about the book, however. Take Chris Masterjohn at Cholesterol-And-Health.Com as an example:

The generalization from the milk protein casein to all "nutrients from animal-based foods" is clearly unwarranted. If Campbell took caution to study the issue further before generalizing from casein to all proteins, why didn't he take the same caution before generalizing from casein to all animal proteins or all animal nutrients? Indeed, in later pages of The China Study, Campbell acknowledges that he is making this generalization: ". . . casein, and very likely all animal proteins, may be the most relevant cancer-causing substances that we consume."16 Why this generalization is "very likely" to be true is left unexplained. Campbell is aware that casein has been uniquely implicated in health problems, and dedicates an entire chapter of The China Study to casein's capacity to generate autoimmune diseases.17 Whey protein appears to have a protective effect against colon cancer that casein does not have.18 Any effect of casein, then, cannot be generalized to other milk proteins, let alone all animal proteins. Other questions, such as what effect different types of processing have on casein's capacity to promote tumor growth, remain unanswered. Pasteurization, low-temperature dehydration, high-temperature spray-drying (which creates carcinogens), and fermentation all affect the structure of casein differently and thereby would affect its physiological behavior.

Read that full article here.

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.

Michael Pollan: Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

Austin 360 recently wrote:

In his most recent book, "Food Rules," Pollan doles out 64 guidelines that are as easy to remember as his most well-known mantra: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (His second most-repeated rule? "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.") "I really don't want people to have to count calories and to read labels," he says. How we eat has changed so much in the past 50 years that we all could use the reminders: "Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk." "Always leave the table a little hungry." (One of his personal favorites is "The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead.") Pollan says that one of the biggest problems is that we've been conditioned, primarily by food marketers and manufacturers, to think that we're supposed to spend as little time as possible shopping for, cooking and eating our meals.

Find the rest of that article here.

Devra Davis: Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family

In "Is your BlackBerry making you sick?" from the Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin writes:

I've seen enough scientific reports about the potential hazards associated with cellphones to make me concerned about his exposure, but also enough contradictory studies to leave me confused. In October, for example, the European Journal of Oncology published a study that found a link between wireless radiation and heart irregularities. Two new books - Ann Louise Gittleman's "Zapped" and Devra Davis's "Disconnect" - promise to settle the debate about whether mobile devices are bad for you. [...] Davis makes a compelling case for U.S. authorities to update their standards, especially in light of how much we now use our devices and the number of teenagers who now have them. Even the National Cancer Institute, which says there is no consistent link between cellphones and cancer, notes that children may be at a greater risk because their nervous systems are still developing at the time of exposure.

See that Washington Post piece here. The Seattle Times mentioned the book and author's work in "Put down that cellphone and back away: Do an EMF audit of your house."

In "Disconnect," scientist Devra Davis focuses on cellphone radiation and what she believes (and shows pretty convincingly) the industry has done to bury the bad news. Health writer Ann Louise Gittleman, author of "Zapped," also tackles cellphones, but she goes even further, pointing out that potentially dangerous electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are and lurking in places we'd never suspect: wall outlets, electric blankets, dimmer switches, hair dryers, iPod docking stations, refrigerators, electric razors, digital cameras, and even those electronic collars dogs wear that let them through their doggy doors.

See that Seattle Times piece here. See also: Advances in Electromagnetic Fields in Living Systems: Volume 5, Health Effects of Cell Phone Radiation, Lawsuits call for more information on dangers of cell phone radiation.: An article from: Trial, Radiation Rescue: Safer solutions for cell phones and other wireless technologies, Cell Phones and The Dark Deception: Find Out What You're Not Being Told...And Why, Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age: An Insider's Alarming Discoveries About Cancer and Genetic Damage, The Invisible Threat: The Risks Associated With EMFs & Effective Interventions.



In "The disturbing truth about cellphones," from The Globe and Mail, this is reported: Dr. Davis says brain cancers typically take decades to develop, and the fact that they're being found after 10 years in cellphone users after relatively light exposure by today's usage standards is worrisome. “For such a risk to show up in cellphone users within 10 years given what we know about brain tumours, which is that they can have a latency of 40 years, is deeply, deeply disturbing,” she said in an interview. [...] Dr. Davis writes that experiments indicate these waves do pack a biological punch. Rats exposed to just two hours of microwave radiation had broken strands of DNA, the damage known to occur in cancer. The rats also had brain-cell alterations, memory lapses and fluids leaking from their brains into their blood, indicating a breach of the blood-brain barrier.





From the Environmental Health Trust: Designated a National Book Award Finalist for When Smoke Ran Like Water (2002, Basic Books), Devra Davis founded Environmental Health Trust in 2007 in Teton County, Wyoming to provide basic research and education about environmental health hazards and promote constructive policies locally, nationally and internationally. Dr. Davis lectures at Georgetown, Harvard, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and other universities, and was Founding Director, Center for Environmental Oncology, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and Professor of Epidemiology at the Graduate School of Public Health (2004-2009). The Secret History of the War on Cancer was a top pick by Newsweek, is forming the basis for national cancer policy revisions by the South African Cancer Society, and is being used at major schools of public health, including Harvard, Emory, and Tulane University. Dr. Davis also was the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences and Scholar in Residence, 1983-1993. Her new book, Disconnect, selected by TIME magazine as a top pick, provides shocking detail about cell phone radiation and your health, is receiving kudos from experts and policy makers around the world, and is the subject of broad multi-media coverage.





From Wikipedia: Devra Lee Davis (born 1946) is an American epidemiologist and writer. She was born June 7, 1946, in Washington, DC, the daughter of Harry B. and Jean Langer Davis, and was raised in Donora, Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh, where she graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School. Her book When Smoke Ran Like Water, which begins with the tale of the Donora Smog of 1948, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. Davis's second book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer was published by Basic Books in October 2007. Her new book, "Disconnect," debuted in September 2010. It discusses the dangers of modern cell phone use and the ways in which the cell phone industry has gone to lengths to cover these up.

The December 17, 2010 Charlie Rose Conversation with Stephen Cohen

CHARLIE ROSE: Joseph Stalin’s reign of mass terror on the Soviet Union has been called the "other Holocaust." Millions of men, women, and children perished in his vast web prison and slave labor camps which Solzinitzin called "The Gulag Archipelago." Millions of others though somehow survived and were freed after Stalin’s death in 1953. A new book by an NYU professor and Russian scholar Stephen Cohen tells the stories of these survivors that is called "The Victims’ Return." I’m pleased to have Stephen Cohen back at this table. Welcome. / STEPHEN COHEN: Thank you, happy to be back.

Read the full transcript here. The Moscow Times had this to say about the book:

As historian Stephen Cohen shows with sharp analysis and deep pathos in his new book, “The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin,” the question of what to do with the gulag’s victims, and the legacy of the man who put them there, did not end with their liberation. It has continued to haunt Russia for decades, along with ever-changing interpretations of how the country should address its own past. Memoirs by Solzhenitsyn and other gulag survivors, as well as recent best-selling studies such as Orlando Figes’ “The Whisperers,” have familiarized Western audiences with accounts of the gulag. But Cohen, a professor at Princeton University, is one of the first to focus on survivors’ experiences after their release. “The Victims Return” draws on literary journals, memoirs and interviews with former inmates Cohen befriended in the ’70s to survey individual experiences of post-gulag life. At the same time, it analyzes the political decisions at the top that shaped them.

Read that Moscow Times piece here.

Theodore Roosevelt, Post-Presidency from KERA's Think Podcast

[2010-12-14 12:00:00] Why was Theodore Roosevelt so influential and famous overseas even after his presidency? We'll discuss the last decade of his life this hour with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Edmund Morris, whose new book is "Colonel Roosevelt" (Random House, 2010)

Download the KERA radio podcast here. Consider this Salon.com review and tell us what you think. "Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt (and the author of a critically panned biography of Ronald Reagan), has returned with the third and final volume of his Roosevelt biography. "Colonel Roosevelt," with its descriptive and narrative power, its thorough exploitation of sources, and its interplay of man and nation, may be the best biography ever written about the life of an American president." We can't tell if the reviewer liked the book or not. Find that review here. "Colonel Roosevelt" is the third and final installment in the epic biography of the man, by Morris. The other two are: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex (Modern Library Paperbacks). Other books by Morris: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Ten Acres is Enough.

Where Are The 'Hackers' Now? from NPR Podcast Science Friday

In his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, author Steven Levy profiled some of the personalities whose work brought PCs to the people, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Levy discusses his book, recently reissued, and hacker ethics in the Internet age.

Download the podcast here. See also: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, On The Path



MIT's periodical, "Technology Review," recently said this about the anniversary edition of the book: "In Hackers, Captain Crunch shows up primarily as an adjunct to the nascent Apple computer company, where he was briefly employed to create a circuit board that, when connected to a phone, could enable an Apple II to reproduce his feats of phone hacking. Fearing legal entanglements, the board was never released, and Captain Crunch didn't last long at the fledgling company, but the "blue box" on which the board was based became the workhorse of the phone hacker "phreaking" community." See that TR article here. Pair the Hackers book with the movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley." Note: "Hackers," starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, is not as relevant.

How Language is Changing from KERA's Think Podcast

Syndicated description:

[2010-12-20 13:00:00] From the archives: How is language changing and what do we lose when a language disappears forever? In July we talked with linguist and author David Crystal. His latest work is "A Little Book of Language" (Yale, 2010).

Download the podcast here. Other books by David Crystal: How Language Works, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, Words Words Words, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

William Powers and Paper in the Digital Age

In 2007, William Powers wrote an essay, "Hamlet's Blackberry." The paper was a part of the Discussion Paper Series, out of Harvard University. The subtitle and underlying theme to the essay is that "... Paper Is Eternal." Powers writes:

We live in an age obsessed with new technologies. The sophisticated modern consumer knows the fine points of all the latest media devices. There are countless popular magazines dedicated to helping us stay abreast of our media devices, and they cover every imaginable kind of technology except the one on which the magazines themselves are printed. Paper is the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years, the one that has lasted the longest and had the profoundest effect on civilization. One can easily make the case that without the technology that is paper, there would be no civilization. Yet most of the time, we don’t even think of paper as a technology. And so we don’t ask the questions we routinely ask about other technologies: How does it work? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Is it easy and enjoyable to use? Paper doesn’t seem to require much consideration because it’s so simple: a thin, flexible material that reflects light, crisply displaying any marks you make on it. What more is there to say?

Find that essay here, on Harvard's servers. In July NPR's Morning Edition covered the book and author. The story's webpage prefaces the subject with a series of questions: "Do you find yourself checking Facebook as soon as you wake up in the morning? Do you answer e-mails on your Blackberry while surfing the Web? Even as you read this article, is your right index finger twitching on the mouse, just itching to click on something new?" The webpage continues: "Powers' book is not a Luddite manifesto. The writer may question the way we use our gadgets, but he certainly doesn't condemn it. ("With a few keystrokes, I can bring up an old manuscript from the British Museum. That is miraculous," he says.) He does, however, recognize the downside of constantly being flooded with new information — or what he calls the "conundrum of connectedness."" Read from that feature story's webpage here, from/on NPR.org. And download that Morning Edition podcast here. Powers was also a guest on This Week in Mobile; YouTube video below.

Isabel Allende

The other day, the San Francisco Chronicle listed a "best of 2010" list that focused on Bay Area authors. Of the books, Island Beneath the Sea, by Isabel Allende. In this novel about a slave in what is now Haiti, Allende creates a unique, accessible entry point to histories that deserve to be told. Read that complete list here. Wikipedia's introduction to the article on the author, this way:

Isabel Allende Llona (born 2 August 1942) is a Chilean writer with American citizenship.[1] Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus) (1982) and City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias) (2002), which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author".[2] In 2010 she received Chile's National Literature Prize.[3] In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[4] Allende's novels are sometimes based upon her own personal experiences and often pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many American colleges to teach literature. Allende adopted American citizenship in 2003 and has lived in California with her husband since 1989.

The same Wikipedia entry contains a section on the criticisms that author Allende has received over the years.

Despite or perhaps because of her commercial success and "being compared to Gabriel García Márquez," Allende has been the subject of negative criticism from other authors and literary critics — among them Roberto Bolaño.[27] In an article published in Entre paréntesis, Bolaño writes that Allende's literature is anemic and compares it to a person on his deathbed.[28] Bolaño has been one of her harshest critics, saying that it is to give her credit to call her a writer and that she is rather a "writing machine".[29] Literary critic Harold Bloom concurs with Bolaño that Allende is a bad writer, and adds that she only reflects a determinate period and that afterwards everybody will have forgotten her.[29][30] Of Bolaño, Allende said to El Clarín that she is honoured to be represented by him as a Chilean, although she remembered Bolaño regarded her as trash.[31] In the same interview, Allende recognises that she has rarely had good criticism in Chile and that Chilean intellectuals "detest" her. Novelist Gonzalo Contreras says that "she commits a grave error, to confuse the commercial success with literary quality".[32] Allende disagrees with these assessments of her, and she has also been quoted as saying: The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing. There was a review of my last book in one American paper by a professor of Latin American studies and he attacked me personally for the sole reason that I sold a lot of books. That is unforgivable.[33] Alternatively, it has been noted[by whom?] that "Allende's impact not only on Latin American literature but also on world literature cannot be overestimated."[19] The Los Angeles Times has called Allende "a genius,"[19] and she has received many international awards, including the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize,[19] granted to writers "who have contributed to the beauty of the world."[19] She has recently been called a "literary legend" by Latino Leaders Magazine, which in its 2007 article named Allende as the third most influential Latino leader in the world.[19]

Find that Wikipedia article, here. She was also a speaker at TED.



Other books by Allende: The House of the Spirits, La isla bajo el mar (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition), Ines of My Soul: A Novel, La casa de los espíritus, Daughter of Fortune: A Novel (P.S.), Paula: A Memoir (P.S.), City of the Beasts (P.S.)

Charlie Rose - Ingrid Betancourt from YouTube - CharlieRose's Channel by CharlieRose

Ingrid Betancourt discusses her memoir 'Even Silence has an End - My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle,' the book chronicles Betancourt's six years as a hostage of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia known as FARC www.CharlieRose.com

Watch the video on YouTube. Or check CharlieRose.com for the full interview. This article's utterly depressing. If you're feeling sick about having to pay bills or getting dumped, read it, and you'll feel lucky.