Tag: reading

  • An essential guide to fostering online community

    Building Social Web Applicationsby Gavin BellO’Reilly (October, 2009) Gavin Bell draws on his extensive experience to offer a well structured guide to adding community elements to a website or application. His book will help any professional planning a social strategy, designing a set of social features, determining the types of relationships to foster among users,…

  • Richard Fleming's Walking to Guantanamo: A closely observed true thing

    Walking to Guantanamoby Richard FlemingCommons (Oct 1, 2008) I loved this book from start to finish. Fleming is a charming and self-deprecating travel companion: the best kind. His pictorial eye strives to transmit clear, unfiltered images and as his readers we make up our own minds about the pros of cons of hitchhiking across Cuba.…

  • When it comes to thinking, bigger really is better

    Michael Port, author of a number of bestselling sales-guru business books, has now come out with a pocket volume called The Think Big Manifesto: Think You Can’t Change Your Life (and the World?) Think Again. I like the arresting graphic design of the book (a publicist sent me an advance copy) but was somewhat wary…

  • Invincibility overrated

    Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman My review rating: 4 of 5 starsSomething Jonathan Lethem might have cooked up after watching all three seasons of the Venture Brothers while perusing the Watchmen graphic novel. I enjoyed it! View all my reviews.

  • I'm interviewing Nicholas Meriwether

    Over on the Well, in the public Inkwell topic, I’m interviewing my pal Nick Meriwether about his new book, All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead, a scholarly work looking at the Dead phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. You can submit questions to this interview by mailing them to inkwell AT well…

  • This doesn't surprise me

    Quoting from More Alan Furst Blogging: More Alan Furst blogging, this time from Unqualified Offerings: Unqualified Offerings: Henry Farrell got me into a to-do for novelist Alan Furst at GWU this evening. The food was fabulous and the author did not disappoint. Controversial GWU President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg did the introduction, and it was good…

  • How to teach science

    Quoting from The Poor Man: He Sat Right Down And Wrote Himself A Letter: [I]t is a waste of time to teach utterly uninterested schoolkids how to calculate reaction rates and trajectories of cannonballs and so on, things which are going to be about as useful to most of them in the grown-up world as…

  • noticing gujari girl

    Thanks to Gwen, I’ve found gujari girl: I never thought the first person in Walnut Creek to whom I’d defend Oakland would be an Indian guy from New York! I’m now two L(G)L behind on photos. If I post mine we’ll have triangulation on a few of the scenes from the other day.

  • DeLillo's 'The Names'

    In following the Plame Affair updates this morning I was reading the comments following a post (about evil Bob Novak) at Kevin Drum’s site. One comment mentioned the Philip Agee story. I don’t know much about it, but it may have inspired the law that was allegedly broken from within the White House, and it…

  • Diversity in the real world

    In People Like Us, noninsane conservative columnist David Brooks writes Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature…

  • administrivia: new category: "dog ears"

    All my life, I’ve turned down the page at the corner of the book I’m reading whenever a passage of writing strikes me in some particular way: as writing itself, or because it confirms or disputes some ongoing argument I’m having with myself. The gesture is vestigial, the first step in highlighting or underlining, annotating…