Roy Miller's Blog, page 180
May 25, 2017
Bookstore News: May 25, 2017
This content was originally published by on 25 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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ABA President says goodbye; Politics and Prose and Busboys and Poets Split; inside Amazon’s Manhattan store; France’s traveling tiny bookstore; and more.
Outgoing ABA president’s Farewell Letter: Betsy Burton, co-owner of The King’s English Bookshop and outgoing American Booksellers Association president, reviews the progress booksellers have made in talks with publishers..
D.C. Bookselling Partnership Ends: Politics & Prose will no longer manage the book sections inside three Busboys and Poets locations.
A Look Inside Amazon’s Manhattan Store: CNBC offers a short video tour inside the new Amazon store in Columbus Circle which opens today.
R.J. Julia Store in Connecticut Opens: The independent bookseller has opened a new bookstore in Middleton, Conn. serving Wesleyan University.
California Bookstore to Celebrate Anniversary: Issues in Oakland is marking its 10-year anniversary on June 4.
Bestselling author John Katz writes about a memorable event at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, N.Y.
Libro.fm Adds Harry Potter: The downloadable audiobook service available at independent bookstores now offers the Harry Potter series for sale.
Ranking Toronto’s Bookstores: BlogTO ranks the top dozen bookstore in Toronto, with Type Books coming out on top.
France’s Traveling Tiny House Bookstore: La librairie itinérante is mobile bookstore offering 3,000 books that will tour France this summer.
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Witcher 3 : All Tech Considered : NPR
This content was originally published by Jason Sheehan on 25 May 2017 | 2:00 pm.
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Monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia and his adopted daughter Ciri are at the center of a complex story in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
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Monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia and his adopted daughter Ciri are at the center of a complex story in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
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For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we’ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we’re running an occasional series, Reading The Game , in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.
Any video game can tell an epic story. That’s what they’re made for. They are our myths and fireside tales, our deepest, strangest form of play. The good ones do epic — world-ending, apocalyptic, stakes as high as the tall corn — like taking a breath. But only the great games can go small. Can tell the tiny tales that knit a narrative together and make it feel true.
That’s what The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is best at. And I oughta know. I spent a full week of my life playing it.
And I’m not talking a few hours a day for seven straight days here. That’s for tourists. Dilettantes. No, I spent a solid week inside the skin of Geralt of Rivia — father, monster hunter, Nilfgaard’s number one lover-man of witches, sorceresses and succubi. 170-odd hours, from opening tutorial to the minute the credits started to roll. I regret nothing.
When I began, I was terrible. Just me and my dumb horse, Roach, wandering the countryside and being bludgeoned, stabbed, burned, poisoned or disemboweled by everything on two, four or eight legs. When I finished, I was better. Rich, powerful and deadly as all hell.
But I was other things, too. Regretful. Sad. Homeless. Hunted. I had fresh scars and the blood of friends on my hands. I’d done a lot of good and a fair amount of bad (for arguably good reasons) as Geralt. And as the man inside him, I remained haunted by pieces of it.
The plot of Wild Hunt is … complex. At it’s most simplistic (and, therefore, most honest) it is about a man who has misplaced his adopted daughter and will do anything — including bringing about the end of the world — in order to get her back safely. That the man (Geralt) happens to be a monster-hunting bad-ass with two swords and a wicked face scar, and the daughter (Ciri) is following in the family tradition, but is also being chased all over the world by elves and trans-dimensional ice monsters? That in the course of his adventures, Geralt will (among other things), put on a play, murder a tree, find an old lady’s frying pan and have sex on a stuffed unicorn? That’s all just gravy.
It is the story of a man looking for his daughter. It is the story of a lot of people looking for a lot of missing things — friends, comrades, nations, history — all of which swirl together into the main narrative.
It is the story of a man looking for his daughter. It is the story of a lot of people looking for a lot of missing things — friends, comrades, nations, history — all of which swirl together into the main narrative. Unsurprisingly, The Witcher series is based (loosely) on a series of books by polish author Andrzej Sapkowski (of which a new one has just been announced, called Season Of Storms, along with a brand-new Netflix TV series). But here, now, in my living room, the land is at war. Monsters are everywhere. There is death and horror and tragedy at every turn. And into this rides a man on a horse with a sword and a past.
The Bloody Baron — that’s where most people say the story gets good. About 10 hours in, you meet a great, loud fat man who has put himself in charge of a town ravaged by the war. His wife and daughter are missing. And in trade for information about Ciri, Geralt has to find out what happened to the Baron’s family. It’s one of those encounters that seems like it’s going to be simple, but becomes twisted and strange and tragic and, before you know it, has taken hours and days from you like a thief. It deals with drunkenness, abuse, loyalty and rage, medieval fantasy PTSD and magic. It is storytelling with weight, which gives an early example of the stakes Wild Hunt is willing to put on the table and, eventually, the horrors from which it will not shy.
The Bloody Baron. That’s a story that people who’ve been Geralt remember. But for me, it was a rock troll and a boat … and a painted chicken.
One day, I stumbled upon a troll, stockaded in by the planks of broken boats near a river. He was bigger than me, this troll. Far more dangerous. But also talkative. Funny in his gravel-mouthed way. He told me a story about being asked by a group of soldiers to guard their boats. They’d promised they would make him a soldier if he did this, and the troll really wanted to be a soldier — to wear shiny armor and carry a flag.
Good games are epic. Great games are true. And Wild Hunt is that rarest of modern, digital myths: One that is both.
Problem was, how could he guard the boats without walls to protect them? His solution: smash the boats and use the wood to make walls. The troll was proud of his idea. But the soldiers had never come back and he felt like he was owed something. What he wanted was for Geralt to find him some paint and make a flag for what was now his castle. “A chicken,” as he called it — the Redanian eagle, banner of one of the two sides in this war — that would make him official. I had a choice. I could kill the troll (it was a monster, and hunting monsters was my business), or I could find some paint. I found some paint. That’s just how my Geralt rolled. Friend to trolls. A decent man in a bad place.
There were a hundred of these — brief interactions that sometimes ended with me dabbing a chicken on a wall, small moments that stuck with me after I switched the game off. It is rare for a big game to be so focused on the small things. Exceedingly rare for it to be made up, more or less, of a thousand trivial, funny, sad, often pointless stories which all, in their way, cut the path that the plot will ultimately follow.
Good games are epic. Great games are true. And Wild Hunt is that rarest of modern, digital myths: One that is both.
Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, videogames, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
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BookExpo's Librarians' Lounge 2017: Full Schedule
This content was originally published by on 25 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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An space exclusively for librarians to recharge (yourself, or your phone), to meet old and new friends, hear from a some popular authors and take home some signed copies and more.
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Confronting the Legacy of Racism in America
This content was originally published by on 25 May 2017 | 3:06 pm.
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“Lynching is back in America’s headlines.” That’s how a recent op-ed in The Guardian put it, alluding to the killing of Richard Collins III, a black college student and newly commissioned Army lieutenant who was stabbed to death last week on the campus of the University of Maryland.
Officials are investigating the fatal stabbing as a possible hate crime. Sean Urbanski, the University of Maryland student charged with killing Collins, was a member of the white supremacist Facebook group, “Alt-Reich: Nation.”
The killing has echoes of past racial crimes, and it has many Americans asking: How does this still happen in 2017?
Ibram X. Kendi looks to the nation’s violent past for answers. He’s the author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016.
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Michael Bliss, Historian Who Dispelled Myths of Insulin’s Discovery, Dies at 76
This content was originally published by IAN AUSTEN on 26 May 2017 | 12:18 am.
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Professor Bliss, who taught at the university from 1968 to 2006, published “The Discovery of Insulin” in 1982. His account upset the commonly held wisdom that the discovery had mainly been the work of two inexperienced researchers from the countryside: Dr. Frederick Banting, a surgeon, and Charles Best, a recent college graduate who had yet to enter medical school.
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The Nobel was awarded only to Dr. Banting and J. J. R. Macleod, the head of the university’s physiology department. Most earlier accounts viewed Dr. Macleod as undeserving of the honor, placing him on an overseas holiday while Dr. Banting and Mr. Best labored away.
But using newly released documents — including lab notes and contemporaneous papers that the university had long suppressed to avoid embarrassing the researchers — Professor Bliss detailed a far more complex, if no less acrimonious, story, revealing that the discovery was indeed a team effort by the three and, to varying degrees, others.
While chronicling the infighting among the researchers, “The Discovery of Insulin” also illuminated the science of endocrinology. Shelley McKellar, a professor of medical history at Western University in London, Ontario, who studied under Professor Bliss, said the book, like all of his work, was written in clear, nonacademic prose that made the subject accessible to the general public.
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“Deep down he was a writer,” said Professor McKellar. “He always tried to disseminate his research to the widest possible audience.” She noted that he would speak not only to medical conferences but also to women’s social clubs in church basements.
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In an essay he wrote in 2004, Professor Bliss said his shift to medical history had been due in part to his family — his father was a small-town doctor on the shore of Lake Erie in southwestern Ontario — as well as “a kind of midlife change of pace.”
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He chose the development of insulin as a subject partly because earlier accounts, he found, were inadequate. He was also inspired, he said, by his reading on Arctic exploration.
That “raised for me a methodological interest in the possibility of very detailed, day-to-day recreation of past discrete events,” he wrote, adding, “If you could virtually retrace the footsteps of Arctic explorers could you virtually redo the insulin experiments?”
John William Michael Bliss was born in Leamington, Ontario, on Jan. 18, 1941, to Dr. Quartus Bliss and the former Anne Crowe. He grew up in Kingsville, a farming and fishing town just to the west. In early childhood, Michael, as he was known, would join his father when he was called out to perform his duties as the local coroner. For a while, he considered following his father into medicine.
But that thought was dispelled one weekend when the police came by their house with a drunk who been in a brawl and needed stitches. The man was ushered into his father’s home office.
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“As I sat and watched on that Sunday afternoon in his consulting room,” Professor Bliss wrote, “with blood and alcohol fumes everywhere, reflecting on my own complete disinterest in and lack of all manual skills, I decided that this was not what I wanted to do in life.”
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He met his future wife, Elizabeth Haslam, at a high school dance in Harrow, Ontario, another farm town. They married in 1963, and both studied at the University of Toronto. Mrs. Bliss, a retired teacher, survives him. Besides their daughter Sally, he is also survived by two other children, Jamie and Laura Bliss; a brother, Robert, and four grandchildren.
Robert Bothwell, another historian at the University of Toronto, said that Professor Bliss had favored writing his books — 14 in all — as expansively as possible. “A Canadian Millionaire” (1978), for example, is nominally a biography of Joseph Flavelle, a Toronto businessman who built his fortune starting in the meatpacking business. But the book is also a tour of the meatpacking trade and Toronto politics in the early 20th century, a portrait of a clique of Methodists who dominated business in Toronto, and a discussion of Canada’s role in World War I.
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Professor Bliss had a sometimes uncomfortable relationship with other historians who studied Canada. Unlike some of their works, his business histories, while revealing flaws in both the character and practices of his subjects, were generally sympathetic toward them and business in general. And while he maintained that he was suspicious of all ideologies, his politics were decidedly conservative, if not in a partisan sense, during a time when Canadian history was more commonly viewed from the left.
Professor Bliss was among a small minority of Canadian intellectuals who favored the talks that led to a free-trade agreement between the United States and Canada in 1988, a forerunner of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1993.
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Until his retirement, he wrote often provocative opinion articles for newspapers and appeared frequently on radio and television, in addition to publishing books.
Last year, in a video interview recorded for his induction into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, Professor Bliss said that by the end of his career he had considered himself almost entirely a medical historian, and that he believed that his medical books were his most important works.
Among them are “Banting: A Biography” (1984); “William Osler: A Life in Medicine” (1999), about the renowned Canadian surgeon who helped found Johns Hopkins Hospital; and “Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery” (2005), about the pioneering American neurosurgeon and writer (whose own biography of Osler won a Pulitzer Prize).
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“Medicine,” Professor Bliss said, “is a wonder that takes you from small town Canada to the Nobel Archives.”
Prof Michael Bliss CMHF 2016 Video by cdnmedhall
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Ice Cream, and Summer Reads, Courtesy of Penguin Random House
This content was originally published by on 25 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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No matter your age, what says summer better than ice cream and good books? This year, the Penguin Random House Library marketing team is determined not to let kids have all the fun.
Stop by the Librarians’ Lounge on Friday, June 2, from 2:30-4 p.m. to enjoy some free ice cream, mingle with great authors, and be among the first to learn about Penguin Random House’s Summer Book Scoop Campaign for adults. You can take home some signed advance copies, as well as free library display kits (including posters and bookmarks) that feature the perfect summer reads for grownups.
And you can enter a sweepstakes for a chance to win one of three $500 gift certificates to host an ice cream social at your library for your patrons.
Authors scheduled to appear include Jane Green (The Sunshine Sisters, Berkley), Melanie Benjamin (The Girls in the Picture, Delacorte, Jan. 2018), Fiona Davis (The Address, Dutton, Aug.), and Deb Perelman (Smitten Kitchen Every Day, Knopf, Oct.).
Friday, June 2, from 2:30–4 p.m., at the PW BookExpo Librarians’ Lounge (Booth 875).
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What I Learned as a Journalist, Book Doctor, Ghostwriter, and Publicist
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 25 May 2017 | 1:30 pm.
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By the time I was five years old, I already knew what I was going to be when I grew up. Disillusioned with my previous fantasy careers of zookeeper and cowgirl, I set my sights on something much more attainable.
*deep breath*
I was going to be a famous writer.
Simple enough, right? As you’ve probably guessed by now … not so much.
Thankfully, there are many ways to earn a living as a wordsmith while you work toward becoming the next Stephen King. (Note to Mr. King: don’t worry; you’re still safe.) And, best of all, each one of them will teach you something valuable you can apply to your writing career.
This guest post is by J.H. Moncrieff. Moncrieff writes psychological and supernatural suspense novels that let her readers safely explore the dark corners of the world. She won Harlequin’s search for the next Gillian Flynn in 2016. Her first published novella, THE BEAR WHO WOULDN’T LEAVE, was featured in Samhain’s CHILDHOOD FEARS collection and stayed on its horror bestsellers list for over a year. The first two novels of her new GhostWriters series, CITY OF GHOSTS and THE GIRL WHO TALKS TO GHOSTS, will be officially released on May 16, 2017. When not writing, J.H. loves visiting the world’s most haunted places, advocating for animal rights, and summoning her inner ninja in muay thai class. To get free ebooks and a new spooky story every week, check out her Hidden Library. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook.
Since not everyone will choose such a roundabout path to literary fame and fortune, here’s some of my hard-earned wisdom for you.
What Being a Journalist Taught Me About Writing
Journalists get to do cool stuff. They have adventures—investigating crime scenes and covering fires and staking out biker gangs in the back of a cop car. My journalism career gave me endless story fodder, but it also taught me a few lessons I’ll never forget.
Treat writing like a business. Journalists have to worry about these little things called deadlines. When an editor gives you one, you meet it. Meet your deadlines or you don’t get paid. Surprisingly, it’s an easy choice to make.
How civilians, police, and reporters really react. As someone who writes mysteries, suspense, and other novels dealing with death, this knowledge has been invaluable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read manuscripts where people act in bizarre ways: cops hire civilians and give them guns, reporters surround a home and scream questions at the parents the second a child goes missing, and so on. My experience has ensured I won’t make the same mistakes.
Sources are everything. If you write police procedurals, talk to a cop. If your protagonist is a doctor, see if you can follow some friendly neighborhood physicians on their rounds. Does someone find a body in your story? Spend a few minutes asking a forensic anthropologist what it would look and smell like. You don’t have to write what you know, but you better know what you write.
Kill your darlings. Journalists follow the inverted pyramid formula—the most important stuff goes at the top and trickles down from there. This practice stems from the days when stories were cut to fit newspapers, so articles often lost a few lines from the bottom. One thing journalists learn in a hurry is to write lean. There’s no room for extraneous information. If it doesn’t advance your story, kill it.
What Being a Book Doctor Taught Me About Writing
Book doctors perform the same function as substantive or developmental editors. Simply put, they’re hired to fix your book. The only difference is that agents and editors are usually the clients instead of writers.
Editors are essential. Many writers believe they can edit their own work. Take it from me—a professional editor who has a copyeditor and three proofreaders check her stuff—you can’t. With publishing budgets being what they are, it’s worth hiring your own editor before you submit your manuscript, or before you put that book up for sale. It will save you a lot of heartbreak.
Pick a side. The great majority of the stories I’ve worked on were fatally flawed because the writer couldn’t decide which story to tell. I’ve seen romances with no romance, horrors that weren’t scary, thrillers that were actually food memoirs in disguise, and historical fiction with no plot. So much hassle can be avoided if a writer gets really clear about what the story is before beginning work on the first draft.
Kill your darlings. Book doctors have to be tough. We’re not there to be your buddy or pump up your ego; we’re there to make your story better. I can always tell which authors will go the distance. They’re the ones who thank you for your hard work, lick their wounds, and crawl back into the trenches to emerge with a much better second (or third, fourth, or fifth) draft. The ones who pout, scream, accuse us of being jealous of their talent, or pull the silent treatment? They don’t get far.
[Want to land an agent? Here are 4 things to consider when researching literary agents.]
What Being a Ghostwriter Taught Me About Writing
Over the last few years, ghostwriters have become synonymous with James Patterson, but the truth is, tons of books—even bestselling books—were written by ghosts. Lots of people have interesting stories to tell, but may not have the ability to put it all together. That’s where ghosts come in.
Writers’ block is a myth. When writers are slacking, they often point fingers at their muses or lack thereof. “I wasn’t inspired,” or “The story wasn’t speaking to me.” When you have to sit down every day and put your emotions, heart, and talent into a story that isn’t even yours, you quickly learn how little inspiration has to do with it. Writers can write anything if they put their mind to it and stop making excuses.
Not everything you write will be a masterpiece—and that’s okay. Perfectionism is not an option for ghostwriters. You may be asked to write characters you hate, plot developments you feel are unrealistic, and settings that are less than authentic. Perhaps you’ll be hired to write a tell-all book you secretly believe is a complete fraud. It doesn’t matter. People enjoy reading lots of different books, and few of them are perfect. It can be strangely freeing to write something you have no personal attachment to.
Kill your darlings. Ghosts don’t get to have darlings! You may think you’ve come up with the most profound turn of phrase ever, but that’s not your job. Your job is to sound like the client. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter how clever you were. That gem is going to end up on the cutting room floor.
What Being a Publicist Taught Me About Writing
If you want to be a successful writer, you could do a lot worse than become a publicist. During my years promoting everything from Halloween parties and museum exhibits to genealogy conferences and musicians, I’ve gained some valuable insights.
9% of writers are doing social media wrong. The endless “Buy My Book” Facebook updates, the spammy automatic messages on Twitter, the passive-aggressive blog posts that bemoan your latest defeat at the hands of the publishing industry? They’re not helping you.
Relationships are everything. Want someone to buy your book? Be their friend. Get them to like you. But not because they’ll buy your book, because you genuinely find them interesting and want to communicate with them. Use social media to connect to people in an authentic way, and book sales will follow. You can’t fake sincerity. At least not for long.
Clarity is crucial. If a reporter calls, wanting to know more about what I’m promoting, I don’t ramble on for twenty minutes about the background of everyone who’s ever worked on the project. I sum it up in a sentence, a sentence designed to suck them in and make them say, “Tell me more.” A lot of writers hate elevator pitches and query letters, and I get it—writing them is like being stuck in the seventh circle of hell, but they’re so important. People have short attention spans, so grab ’em while you got ’em.
Kill your darlings. Publicity is about trying different things until one of them works. It might take ten, or twenty, or even thirty ideas until you hit on the right combination of public appeal and client approval. You have to keep moving, and keep pitching, until that wonderful moment when all the stars align. If you get stuck on the first idea you come up with, it’ll never happen. You’ll never see the magic.
What have your jobs taught you about writing? I’d love to hear your stories!
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With a Bazaar of Gizmos and Apps, Tackling Readers’ Tech Questions
This content was originally published by J. D. BIERSDORFER on 24 May 2017 | 3:51 pm.
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Among those products, which is your favorite and why?
Smartphones have wiped out my need for most other gadgets, so I have a symbiotic relationship with my iPhone. I knew that I was on the hook when Steve Jobs announced the product back in January 2007, because there was so much obvious potential. I got my first iPhone the day the product was released (June 29, 2007).
Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone at Macworld SF (2007) Video by EverySteveJobsVideo
I also took a pretty deep dive into the App Store back in 2010 when I was writing a book on iPhone apps, and that really opened my eyes to the device’s versatility.
I still have more than 240 useful apps on my phone because of that book — a document scanner, a banjo tuner, the complete works of Shakespeare, a guide to interstate exits, BBC News with live radio, and the list goes on. I especially like some of the photography utilities, namely Tap Tap Tap’s Camera+ and Pro HDR X from eyeApps. I use those two a lot in a hobbyist Instagram feed where I take generically composed tourist photos in popular destinations, superimposed with plastic farm animals.
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What could be better about the iPhone?
As I’ve had my current iPhone 6 for a couple of years now and the battery is starting to wear out. I wish it had a removable power cell. I’m curious about the potential bells and whistles that may be part of the new iPhone that may be announced this year, since it’ll be the iPhone’s 10th anniversary.
Since I have such a considerable iOS app investment, I don’t think I’d jump to an Android phone anytime soon, but never say “never.”
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What tech product are you currently obsessed with using at home?
I love my outdated 7-inch Google Nexus tablet, as it’s the perfect screen size to read comfortably, scrolling through the morning news with my thumb while having that first cup of caffeine in my other hand (Bewley’s Dublin Morning Tea, for the record).
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What do you and your family do with it?
Although it falls in the Helpful but Creepy category because of all the personal-information harvesting, I find that the Google app regularly fetches online stories that I actually want to read. The weather, travel and package reminders are very useful, and I find On Tap handy for instant data.
What could be better about it?
I wish Google would hurry up and release a new tablet in the 7-inch form factor so I can upgrade to the latest operating system.
What was the last electronic gift you bought?
I got my partner a print/digital subscription to The Economist and — because we were planning some space-saving renovations earlier this year — HGTV’s Home Design software. If there aren’t any new must-have gadgets at the time, I tend to give books or home furnishings as gifts instead.
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May 24, 2017
3 Books on Cyber War
This content was originally published by CONCEPCIÓN DE LEÓN on 24 May 2017 | 6:10 pm.
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The fear of a massive cyber attack became fact on May 12, when over 200,000 computers were hacked in a global blackmail attempt. Hospitals were locked out of medical records; individuals were prompted to pay a ransom in order to access their computers. Yet cyber war and, as such, cyber security, remains murky territory. These books address the cyber threat — and one, published decades ago, shows that the cyber world may have been foreseen in literature.
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DARK TERRITORY (2016)
The Secret History of Cyber War
By Fred Kaplan
338 pp.
Fred Kaplan draws from conversations with prominent American government leaders, including former directors of the National Security Agency, to deliver a behind-the-scenes look at policy formulation over the last several decades. Kaplan writes: “If America, or U.S. Cyber Command, wanted to wage cyber war, it would do so from inside a glass house.” Anything we can do, he argues, adversaries could replicate or learn to do better. (The May 12 cyberattack used technology that originated in the United States.) The book traces the United States’ advances in cybersecurity, and Kaplan concludes that though a fair amount of effort is put into developing cyberoffenses, less is focused on protecting the country from potential attacks.
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CYBER WAR (2010)
The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It
By Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake
290 pp.
Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush who criticized the president for ignoring his pre-9/11 warnings about a looming Al Qaeda threat, argues that more resources should be invested into warding off cyberattacks. Though the government has set up protections for intelligence and military information, the private sector remains vulnerable. Clarke and his co-author outline what a cyberattack in the United States might actually look like — trains would be disabled, the financial system and electrical power grids damaged, medical records wiped out. Clarke and Knake lay out a plan they argue will give the United States a fighting chance.
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NEUROMANCER (1984)
By William Gibson
304 pp.
Don’t be put off by this book’s date of publication; though it appeared before the advent of the World Wide Web, William Gibson’s seminal work is eerily prescient. Much of the book takes place in cyberspace, an expression Gibson coined and defined as a “graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.” Gibson’s protagonist, Case, is a computer hacker who can plug into his machine to intimately experience the electronic transmissions — in other words, enter “the matrix,” another term conceived by Gibson. After Case is caught stealing by his former employers, they damage his central nervous system, cutting off his access to cyberspace. When he is offered help repairing his nervous system in exchange for his hacking services in a nefarious mission, Case jumps at the chance. And so begins the novel’s swift unfolding. The canonical book explores the implications of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.
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Searching For A Summer Escape? These 6 Books Will Carry You Away : NPR
This content was originally published by Maureen Corrigan on 24 May 2017 | 6:55 pm.
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Journeys, near and far, into the past and even into near space, are the subject of the novels, memoirs and narrative histories that make up book critic Maureen Corrigan’s early summer reading list.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Journeys near and far, into the past, and even into space are the subject of the novels, memoirs and narrative histories that make up our book critic Maureen Corrigan’s early summer reading list. Here are her recommendations.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: There’s still time to make travel plans for August 21. That’s the date when a total solar eclipse will cross the continental United States, the first such eclipse in 99 years. The total eclipse can only be witnessed within a 70-mile-wide path called the path of totality which stretches from Oregon to South Carolina. According to David Baron, it’s nature’s most awesome show. And he should know. Baron is a self-professed umbraphile, or eclipse chaser. He’s also a science writer who’s just written a suspenseful narrative history about the last total solar eclipse to cross North America in the summer of 1878. Baron’s book is called “American Eclipse,” and it follows a group of 19th-century adventurers who raced out to the Rocky Mountains to study the last eclipse up close.
Thirty-one-year-old Thomas Edison was one of this intrepid band. Another was astronomy professor Maria Mitchell, who took some of her Vassar students out to Colorado to prove that women could do science too. As the eclipse got underway, Baron vividly describes how the temperature plummeted, nocturnal animals emerged from hiding and familiar colors of mountains and trees shifted. The total eclipse itself lasted about three minutes, the same span of time predicted for the upcoming August 21 eclipse. But Baron makes those three minutes seem transcendent. Experiencing a total eclipse, he says, is like falling through a trapdoor into a dimly lit, unrecognizable reality. The sun and the moon are thoroughly foreign, an ebony pupil surrounded by a pearly iris. It is the eye of the cosmos.
If David Baron is obsessed with eclipses, Helene Stapinski is obsessed with family history. But she’s not one of those genealogy bores predictably intent on proving her relation to royalty. Rather, Stapinski wants to get to the bottom of a long-ago murder case that propelled her great-great-grandmother Vita from southern Italy to Jersey City in 1892. Stapinski’s atmospheric new book “Murder In Matera” is part memoir, fiction and travelogue. And it reads like a detective story, with Stapinski playing the part of her clan’s Columbo. As she tantalizingly tells readers in her introduction, by the end of her 10-year investigation, Stapinski would travel deep into the countryside and dusty archives of southern Italy and discover one shotgun blast and five dead bodies, most of them belonging to my family.
Transatlantic family calamities of a more comic sort are the subject of Francesca Segal’s novel of manners called “The Awkward Age.” Segal’s heroine, Julia Alden, is a middle-aged widow with a teenage daughter. Julia has fallen for a divorced American obstetrician with a teenage son. The foursome move in together into Julia’s north London home, and the teenagers, at first, loathe each other. But when a truce is called, trouble of the erotic sort ensues. This is a smart and droll domestic drama reminiscent of the work of those two magical Lauries, Laurie Colwin and Lorrie Moore. Two American writers with one-of-a-kind voices and sensibilities have written superb new memoirs about their parents.
To my way of thinking, nobody gives ordinary human beings their due with the grace and precision that Richard Ford does. His slim new memoir about his parents called “Between Them” is so gently spellbinding that I’ve already read it twice. Ford’s father was a traveling bleach salesman in places like Mobile and Little Rock during the 1930s and early ’40s. So part of the bonus of this little book is that it sits readers down in the company car and takes us on an unsentimental but enchanted journey through the long-ago landscape of the American South. According to Sherman Alexie, his mother Lillian was a beauty, a liar, a sometimes loving, sometimes abusive parent who lost custody of her kids at least once and a strong-willed woman who gave up drinking cold turkey one day and never looked back.
I’m just skimming the surface of Alexie’s portrait of his mother in his whirlwind of a memoir called “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me.” There’s straight personal history here, as well as fable, poetry, and raw and mordant accounts of life on the Spokane Indian reservation where Alexie grew up. Unexpected revelations are a constant throughout this memoir. At one point, Alexie tells us white folks love to think that Native American culture is progressive and liberal, but it is often repressive. Indians are quick to socially judge one another. I wouldn’t realize it until I read more widely in college, but living on an Indian reservation was like living inside an Edith Wharton novel, a place where good and bad manners were weaponized.
For decades, the weapon of choice in John Grisham’s thrillers has been his main character’s quick wits. This summer, Grisham is publishing his 30th novel. This one is a standalone, and it’s the perfect beach book for bibliophiles. “Camino Island” is a heist caper that begins when a gang of thieves successfully steals a priceless literary treasure, the handwritten manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s five novels, which are kept in a vault deep in Princeton’s Firestone library. I’ve been there. This could never happen. But as usual, Grisham is such a deft suspense writer, he makes me believe. Even if you can’t get yourself to the solar eclipse’s path of totality this August 21, any of these very different books will get you onto the path of a totally good story.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we’ll talk about the investigations surrounding General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser. My guest will be Matthew Rosenberg, who covers intelligence and national security for The New York Times. He knows Flynn from the years Rosenberg was covering Afghanistan and Flynn was the U.S. military intelligence chief there. I hope you’ll join us.
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GROSS: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer for online media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I’m Terry Gross.
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