La apisonadora de Internet
Disculpen el escepticismo, pero uno sigue sin creerse pronósticos como el de que el sector editorial “teme que la Red engulla al libro como está haciendo con el disco y el DVD”.
Los editores unen fuerzas frente a la apisonadora de Internet.
Millions of Pages Brought Together
El hombre como espejo del mundo
El pequeño mundo del hombre, por Francisco Rico.
“El universo, pues, tiene una afinación, canta, interpreta una sinfonía; pero el sonido y el silencio sólo se perciben por contraste: si no hubiéramos nacido dentro de ella, oiríamos esa música del cosmos”.
Círculo de Lectores reedita El pequeño mundo del hombre. Varia fortuna de una idea en las letras española, una obra de la que se ha dicho es “guía para la comprensión de la cultura antigua” y en la que se prueba que la noción del hombre “como un cosmos en miniatura” mantiene su vigencia.
Vida privada de una idea, en Babelia.
The History of the Amazon
Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, by John Hemming.
“More on NYT Sunday Book Review.Hemming’s most recent book, “Tree of Rivers,” covers ground familiar to anyone interested in the history of the Amazon. What makes the book important and, in many ways, even remarkable, are the breadth of the author’s experience and the depth of his understanding. Throughout, Hemming scatters modest references to his own extraordinary journeys. As an aside, while discussing the river’s multitude of swift, rapids-studded tributaries, he recalls that he was once nearly swept to his death in one. When explaining the potentially deadly diseases that Amazon explorers and natives alike have long suffered, he casually mentions that he has twice endured the searing fever and bone-grinding chills of malaria. Having cut trails through dense, remote rain forest, and having felt the sickening and very real danger of becoming hopelessly lost, he understands much better than most the extraordinary skill it takes for indigenous people to navigate their world”.
More on NYT Sunday Book Review.
The Wisdom Of Crowds
“Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them”, Surowiecki argues.
More on The Christian Science Monitor.
Junot y Cía
“El Pulitzer a Junot Díaz ilumina el umbral de una renovación en la literatura de Estados Unidos de la mano de escritores de origen latinoamericano que escriben en inglés”, asegura el suplemento de libros de El País.
On US ‘Exceptionalism’
Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation.
“Building on de Tocqueville’s concept of American exceptionalism, this collection of essays, contributed by some of the nation’s top scholars and thinkers, takes on the weighty task of sizing up America in a way its people and others can comprehend. Far more than simple history, they outline the current state of American institutions and policies-from the legal system to marriage to the military to the Drug War-and anticipate where these are headed in the future”.
Published by PublicAffairs.
More on The American and NPR.
The End of Food
‘Remote And Lovely’
The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore, by Robert Finch.
Estados Unidos se traiciona
Anagrama edita en España Acción de Gracias, la novela que cierra la trilogía que Richard Ford (Jackson, Misisipi, 1944) comenzó con El periodista deportivo (1986) y siguió con El día de la independencia (1995). Babelia entrevistó el último sábado al escritor, en una conversación sin demasiada enjundia pero con algunas perlas.
“Soy lento. Nunca he hecho una sola cosa importante en mi vida en la que ser rápido funcione. Obtengo lo mejor de mí mismo siendo paciente. Poniendo las palabras en tinta una detrás de la otra. Ésa es la mejor forma que conozco de hacer las cosas. Si pudiera escribir más rápido y ser tan bueno como cuando voy despacio, lo haría”.
“Las cosas que creo que mi país representa o debería representar en el espíritu humano, las está abandonando. Mi país se ha convertido en un país seudodemocrático e imperialista. Hacemos cinco enemigos por cada amigo”.
De vuelta a los bosques
“La constatación de que cada día más niños prefieren jugar puertas adentro, que es donde disponen de enchufes a los que conectar sus ordenadores, playstations y demás cacharerría tecnológica, llevó a Richard Louv a escribir en 2005 un penetrante libro que -imponderables editoriales- se ha convertido, sin más promoción que el boca a boca, en un éxito de ventas en Estados Unidos”.
Last child in the woods, en Green Card (ahora en versión web).
Environmental writing
American Earth: an anthology of environmental writing since Thoreau, by Bill McKibben.
A historical perspective of environmental writing: “America´s most distinctive contribution to the world’s literature”, McKibben says.
Last Child in the Woods
Demasiadas puertas
Internet son muchas puertas para acabar llegando al mismo sitio. Uno preferiría que hubiera menos puertas, pero que, al franquearlas, te transportaran a muchos sitios distintos. Pienso en esto mientras trato de documentarme antes de entrevistar a Junot Díaz, el flamante premio Pulitzer de novela.
Google me lleva a infinidad de páginas que a su vez me devuelven a páginas ya vistas. Cuando no me guían en círculos, el retrato que esas páginas componen del escritor “dominican-american” abundan en lo mismo. A mí, después de tener mediada la lectura de su briosa “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, me parece que el autor -esta hermosa tragicomedia, al menos- debe tener muchas más vistas. Otros planos. Otras luces.
Naked in the Woods, by Jim Motavalli
Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery, by Jim Motavalli
Motavalli has written a book, Library Journal said, that explores “why the belief that a man can survive in untamed wilderness is so important to the American psyche”.
“Joseph Knowles was a forty-five-year-old part-time painter, ex-Navy man, friend of the Sioux, and onetime hunting guide who stepped-nearly naked-into the woods to live off the land and his own devices. From 1913 to 1916, Knowles’s dispatches to the world-alternating accounts of bear clubbing and quiet contemplation, written in charcoal on pieces of birch bark-set off major newspaper wars, exploiting readers’ fears of modernization”.
Details on Da Capo Press site.
Listen an interview with the author from WBUR radio program Living On Earth.
Coming From Far, From Adventures
“Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character”.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Making Thoughtful Food Choices
“In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context — out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan’s bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating”.
More in the website of the author, Michael Pollan.
Listen an interview at NPR radio network.
Vignettes of depravity
A spicy review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte´s last book, El pintor de batallas, read on the NYT Book Review:
”(…) Vignettes of depravity, which the photographer and the soldier discuss with stoic manliness, multiply. While Faulques snapped away, men in Chad, wounded and bound, were left on a riverbank to be devoured by crocodiles. Matter-of-factly, Markovic tells of tormenting and beating a mentally retarded man in front of the man’s parents.
“The reader feels remarkably distant from these horrors, perhaps because the perpetrators have such drawn-out pseudo-intellectual discussions about who feels the least, who committed the worst wrongs. And perhaps it’s because these discussions are interspersed with cumbersome descriptions of the mural the photographer is painting and how it relates to other works of Western battlefield art: Bruegel the Elder’s “Triumph of Death,” Gerardo Murillo’s “Eruption of Paricutín,” Goya’s “Duel With Cudgels,” Paolo Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano,” Gherardo Starnina’s “Thebaid,” Aniello Falcone’s “Scene of Sacking Following a Battle.”
Science at the center
An editor worried about lack of science and technology culture: John Brockman, from Edge:
“Given the well-documented challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker’s list of Books From Our Pages?
“Instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world-of having a unity in which scholarship includes science and technology along with literature and art-the official culture has kicked them out. Science and technology appear as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities have nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum-and out of the minds of many young people, who, arriving at their desks at the establishment media, have so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action. Clueless, they don’t even know that they don’t know.
“But science today is changing our understanding of our universe and species, and scientific literacy is indispensable to dealing with some of the world’s most pressing issues. Fortunately, we live in a time when third culture intellectuals-scientists, science journalists, and other science-minded writers-are among of our best nonfiction writers, and their many engaging books have brought scientific insight to a wide audience”.
Edge presents a list of science books published in 2007.
Web 2.0 en formato libro
Una docena de libros y estudios sobre la web 2.0 española recomendados por la revista cultural dosdoce.com:
Planeta Web 2.0
Autores: Cristóbal Cobo Romaní y Hugo Pardo Kuklinski (Editorial UVIC y Flacs
Comunicación empresarial 2.0
Autores: Javier Celaya y Pau Herrera (BPMO Ediciones). Descarga gratuita.
Edición 2.0
Autor: Joaquín Rodríguez (Editorial Melusina).
Web 2.0. El usuario, el nuevo rey de Internet
Autor: Ismael Nafría (Editorial Gestión 2000).
“Web 2.0 - Manual (no oficial) de uso”
Autores: José Luis Antúnez, José Antonio Gelado, José Antonio del Moral, Roger Casas-Alatriste y Octavio Isaac Rojas Orduña (Editorial ESIC).
La revolución de los blogs
Autor: José Luis Orihuela (Editorial La Esfera de los libros).
PVP: 16 euros
Web 2.0 - El Negocio de las Redes Sociales
Autores: Bankinter y Accenture (FTF Forum). Descarga gratuita.
Tendencias Web 2.0 en el sector editorial
Autor: Javier Celaya (Dosdoce). Descarga gratuita.
Las nuevas tecnologías Web 2.0 en la promoción de museos y centros de arte
Autores Javier Celaya y Mónica Viñarás (Dosdoce). Descarga gratuita.
Informe Web 2.0
Autores: Antonio Fumero, Fernando Sáez y Genís Roca (Fundación Orange). Descarga gratuita.
La blogosgera hispana
Autores: J. Cervera, A. Estalella, F. Tricas, J. Merelo, V. R. Ruiz, G. Ferreres, F. Garrido, J. A. del Moral, J. Varela, J. Zafra, I. Escolar, R. Chamorro, F. Polo, E. Dans, H. Casciari, J.A. Gelado, V. Partal y A. Fumero, coordinado por José Manuel Cerezo. (Fundación Orange). Descarga gratuita.
Los blogs en la comunicación empresarial en España
Autores: Javier Celaya y Pau Herrera (BPMO Ediciones). Descarga gratuita.
