Yesterday Bill Gates issued a global challenge on health. He put up $200 million to spur research on diseases that haven’t been studied sufficiently by scientists, because they occur mainly in poor parts of the world, rather than here in the West. This is a wholly admirable thing to do. But the rhetoric of his announcement was also interesting….
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Category: Books
69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess
Stewart Home is a brilliant literary provocateur, and his latest novel, 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, does not disappoint (even if it is not the best thing he has done)….
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Kaleidoscope Century
John Barnes’ SF novel Kaleidoscope Century is a clever alternative history of the 21st century, hilariously dystopian….
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Unauthorized Autobiographies
I am enchanted by the mini-genre of “Unauthorized Autobiographies.” Actually, I only know of two books that fit this genre: Chuck Barris’s wonderful Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, recently reissued because it has been made into a film, and the new one, of/by the pseudonymous Lemony Snicket….
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Adrian Tomine–Summer Blonde
Adrian Tomine’s latest collection, Summer Blonde, contains four 32-page stories from his comic Optic Nerve. They are beautiful stories, naturalistic in setting, and all about depressed and socially awkward teens and twenty-somethings…
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Jane Jacobs–The Nature of Economies
Jane Jacobs is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which revolutionized thought about urban planning in the 1960s. But in her 80s she is still very much alive, and intellectually vigorous. Her latest book, The Nature of Economies, is surprisingly fresh and provocative, if also deeply problematic….
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