Book Review: The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

Publishing Banned Books: Olga Gardner Galvin on the Literature of Freedom

She grew up openly reading forbidden books in buses and other public spaces, so it's fitting that Olga Gardner Galvin entered the world of publishing when she left the Soviet Union for the United States.

Today, as founder of ENC press, Galvin publishes the kinds of books that would have been banned in her homeland. Her independent publishing house specializes in social satire, from classics like We, by Yevgheniy Zamyatin to contemporary titles like Junk, by Christopher Largen.

"All my satire has one thing in common," says Galvin. "It kicks and screams against any kind of nanny state interference."

A Dark Vision of Existence

Should the human race voluntarily put an end to its existence? Do we even know what it means to be human? And what if we are nothing like we suppose ourselves to be?

In this challenging philosophical work [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race], celebrated supernatural writer Thomas Ligotti broaches these and other issues in an unflinching and penetrating manner that brings to mind some of his own imperishable horror fiction. For Ligotti, there is no refuge from our existence as conscious beings who must suppress their awareness of what horrors life holds in store for them.

Yet try as we may, our consciousness may at any time rise up against our defenses against it, whispering to us things we would rather not hear: Religion is a transparent fantasy, optimism an exercise in delusional wish-fulfillment, and even the quest for pleasure an ultimately doomed enterprise.

Drawing upon the work of such pessimistic philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer and Peter Wessel Zapffe, as well as the findings of various fields of study such as neuroscience, moral philosophy, Terror Management Psychology, the sociology of self-deception, and the theory of uncanny experience, Ligotti presents a compelling contrivance of horror for the consideration of his reader.

Perhaps most provocatively, Ligotti sees in the literature of supernatural fiction a confirmation of the cheerless vision he is propounding, dovetailing into his book the overarching theme that, having been ousted by evolution from the natural world, the human race has been effectively translated to a supernatural order of being.

In this state of existence, we are denied slumber in nature’s arms and must exist in a waking nightmare in which we are taunted by hints of our true nature.- from The 2010 Black Quill Award Nominations: Best Dark Genre Book Of Non-Fiction

A Bill of Rights For eBook Users

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

* the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
* the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
* the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

-The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Roger Ebert N-Word Huck Finn Tweet Controversy

The word is nigger. Enough with the censorship already! Ebert should have told all his ridiculous critics on this mountain out of molehill issue to go fuck themselves. I'll write a separate post on that greatest of all American novels, Mark Twain's masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, later.

Non-Fiction or Novels?

Just saw something about E.O. Wilson's first novel, Anthill (which I wasn't aware of until today). Asked why a novel, Wilson replied: "People respect non-fiction, but they read novels."

This is generally true. I didn't realize until recently just how few copies of even a non-fiction "bestseller" are actually sold. Sometimes it's just a few thousand copies. There are occasional exceptions (a celebrity biography; a book that captures the public imagination such as A Brief History of Time) but when the masses read books, it is fiction to which they turn. I don't think my grandmother would have ever read a huge book about the space program, or a history of Texas or Poland, but she devoured novels by James Michener on all of those subjects. I never saw her even touch a work of non-fiction, though.

I'm a little different, because I've always been a reader of both. Maybe when I was a kid it was almost all fiction, but I soon came to have such a thirst for knowledge that non-fiction came to take up a major share of my reading time. Today, when I get into a non-fiction book I really like, I can finish it much faster than a novel (unless it's a very short novel) I'm reading. However, recently my personal trend has gone back to mostly novels. At least those are the books I am buying the most. Maybe it's because fiction still excites me in a way a non-fiction book can't. I love getting lost in the story, and I'm currently attracted to series fiction, books with endless sequels that allow you to never leave the world you've fallen into in your imagination, which means I'm purchasing larger quantities of fiction almost by necessity, and then keep discovering new series that intrigue me. There are so many out there that I could never find the time to read all the books I want to, even if allotted ten lifetimes, but I'm reading as fast as I can, and I'll probably die with a book in my hands. Who knows, when that day comes, I may be back on a non-fiction binge, and the book you find in my cold hands will be a 1000 page history of reading.

How about you? Do you read novels exclusively or do you venture into more challenging territory from time to time (not that a novel can't be challenging, but most of what the public reads is popular genre fiction)?

The Essential Man’s Library

100 Must-Read Books

There are the books you read, and then there are the books that change your life. We can all look back on the books that have shaped our perspective on politics, religion, money, and love. Some will even become a source of inspiration for the rest of your life. From a seemingly infinite list of books of anecdotal or literal merit, we have narrowed down the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man.

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library

The Arizona Atheist Reviews The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief

For the last several years I've made it my mission to refute various books by Christian apologists...I've decided to write a refutation of James S. Spiegel's book The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief, published by Moody Publishers in 2010.

The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief, by James S. Spiegel: A Refutation

Robochrist

Director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls) has written a book called Jesus of Nazareth:

Building on the work of the great Biblical scholars of the twentieth century—Rudolf Bultman, Raymond Brown, Jane Schabert and Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminars, among others—filmmaker Paul Verhoeven disrobes the mythical Jesus to reveal a man who is, after all, startlingly familiar to us, a man who has much in common with other great political leaders throughout history, human beings who believed that change was coming in their lifetimes.-source

Robocop itself is a "retelling" of the life of Jesus (apparently an obsession with Verhoeven):

I read a Los Angeles Times Calendar section interview with Verhoeven when Robo Cop first came out. He said the reason why he did the movie was because it was a retelling of the story of Jesus Christ. He said Jesus "is the greatest" story ever told. He went on to say that he had been a Pentecostal Christian. But had since left the faith, but remained interested in the Christ story. There are, hence, many Christ-like moments in the film.-Hollywood Jesus



Paul Verhoeven on Jesus of Nazareth

There are questions of personal identity that arise in Robocop that we can also see in L. Frank Baum's creation the Tin Woodman from the Oz books. How did he become a tin man? It happened because the wicked witch put a spell on his ax, so when he was chopping wood (his original name? Nick Chopper!) it sometimes chopped off a part of his body instead. The tinsmith would then make new replacement parts for him, until eventually he was all tin. So were Nick Chopper and the final Tin Woodman the same person?

Cool Bookstores

If you love bookstores and browsing in bookstores like I do, you'll be interested in this.


The World’s 6 Coolest-Looking Bookstores

Looking them over, the one I'd most like to visit is Shakespeare & Co. Antiquarian Books.



The photo directly above reminds me of all the used bookstores I so often frequented on wondrous weekends of literary exploration. I could spent hours in one small section of a book-crammed aisle like that, lost in the land of paper and ink, and forgetful of everything going on in the outside world. What I wouldn't have given to spent every spare moment in such places. I sometimes still fantasize of owning such a store, and with my own collection, purchased over many years, I would probably have a good beginning to an inventory. If, that is, I could bear to part with any of my precious volumes.

Free for Free

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Atheism: The Case Against God

Atheism and the Case against God

Publish at Scribd or explore others: School Work How-to-Guides & Manu Non-fiction theory thinking

For those unfamiliar with George H. Smith, he's a market anarchist just like me and SE.

I haven't read this book in its entirety yet, but hope to.

J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night, Free!

Alongside Night Free PDF Edition


“J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully, the special thirtieth anniversary edition of this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.” --Congressman Ron Paul

Building on the prophetic novels of Orwell, Rand, and Heinlein, J. Neil Schulman created in Alongside Night the first of a new generation of libertarian novels, telling the story of the last two weeks of the world's greatest superpower through the perceptive eyes of a young man caught up in the maelstrom of the final American revolution.

Alongside Night scored lavish praise for a first novel when it appeared in 1979, winning accolades from luminaries such as the English novelist many consider the greatest of his generation, and from the American to win a Bicentennial Nobel Prize in Economics. Ten years later the Libertarian Futurist Society voted the book into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for novels embodying the spirit of liberty, alongside Orwell's 1984, Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

J. Neil Schulman's classic novel of the last and first days of America is available once again, and perhaps, this time, its prophetic clarion call will be heard ... if there's still time.

-from AlongsideNight.com

h/t to out of step

Chris Hallquist On Eagleton’s Book

I’m honestly tempted to say the book is the worst I’ve ever read...

On Terry Eagleton’s new book Reason, Faith, and Revolution

Prologues and Epilogues

In skimming through a book of advice for fiction writers, I came across a section on the use of prologues and epilogues in novels. The advice was to avoid prologues all together and just get right to the action. I can't object to that, but I have read novels that used prologues (in fact I'm reading one now) and there is no doubt that sometimes they work.

Another objection that this author had, though, was that too many readers simply skip them completely, the same way most people don't bother reading the acknowledgments page (I'm a weirdo, I even read those). Now, that I don't really understand. If it's part of the novel, why wouldn't you want to read it? What kind of novel readers are these?

Two of Hayek's Greatest Essays

Here are two of Hayek's greatest essays in one small and beautiful volume at a very low price. It is a perfect way to introduce yourself and others to this giant of the 20th century.

The book begins with Hayek's most excellent essay on money. It is also his most radical. He plainly says that central banks cannot be reformed. There can never be sound money so long as they are in charge. He calls for their complete abolition, no compromises accepted. He wants the market in charge of money from top to bottom.

His words predicting crisis followed by wild swings in valuation are up to the minute. He also relates the quality of money with the recurrence of crisis, showing an excellent application of Austrian theory.

Hayek was deeply influenced by Mises, and this shows here in the area of money.

The second essay is "The Pretense of Knowledge," his shocking Nobel speech that explained why the very idea of government in our times is unintellectual, presumptuous, and untenable. He is as critical of socialism as he is of interventionism. He shows that the state is not capable of doing all that it is charged with doing, and why conceding it any role in social and economic management is dangerous to liberty.

It was not the speech everyone expected. But it lived up to Hayek's lifelong commitment to telling truth to power.

This small book is really a first in the Hayekian literature: small form, powerful words, and by the great man himself.

A Free Market Monetary System and The Pretense of Knowledge