Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes
15 Dec 2012 02:39:19
In that sense, black holes are neither here nor there. In practical terms, however, these death stars are everywhere and may mean everything to us. There is even a tiny one – a piffling four million times as massive as the Sun – at the heart of the Milky Way, the galaxy we call home. Cambridge scientists announced in October that they had peered through cosmic clouds of dust in the very early universe to identify a new population of supermassive black holes – one of them is 10 billion times more... Read Full Story
The Cook by Wayne Macauley
15 Dec 2012 02:37:33
Seventeen-year-old Zac is a loser from a "shitkicking suburb" of Melbourne, Australia. After he commits a violent crime, he is given a choice: borstal or cook school. He chooses cook school – a young offenders' rehabilitation scheme based on a farm and funded by Head Chef, a celebrity also from the wrong side of the tracks. In true coming-of-age style, the young offenders learn to chop a carrot ("you've never seen anything so funny in all your life some people had never chopped a vegetable befor... Read Full Story
In Two Minds: A Biography of Jonathan Miller by Kate Bassett
15 Dec 2012 02:34:10
In Jonathan Miller's brilliant, bubblegum-pink 2010 reimagining of L'elisir d'amore for English National Opera, there was a moment that caused bel canto purists to clutch for their heart pills. It came – from memory – early on. Adina, the heroine, was reading aloud from the story of Tristan when the orchestra abruptly abandoned Donizetti's delicate oom-pah-pah and lobbed in 19th-century music's most notorious hand grenade: Wagner's Tristan chord. It was a joke, but a serious one: half schoolboy ... Read Full Story
What should read old children?
11 Dec 2012 02:05:59
Proving that kids' books which are part of an endless series can still be full of life is Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel (£12.99 Puffin). A brand worth $550m, published in 35 languages, with 6.8m copies of this new book alone in print (the largest first run of any book this year), Wimpy Kid is hard to avoid. In this outing (book 7), Greg does Valentine's Day, where the only silver lining to his cloudy life is that best friend Rowley is even less likely to get a date than he ... Read Full Story
The Outsider by Albert Camus
11 Dec 2012 02:04:12
"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas." So, famously, opens Albert Camus's 1942 novel L'Etranger, but it's intriguing to see how differently those two sentences have been translated, despite the simplicity of Camus's construction. In Joseph Laredo's terse, widely read 1982 translation, he renders the opening as: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." In Sandra Smith's new translation, she inserts a possessive pronoun: "My mother died today. Or maybe yes... Read Full Story
Grace by Grace Coddington
11 Dec 2012 02:02:35
In 2007, a documentary team began filming The September Issue, a behind-the-scenes look at American Vogue as staff put together the magazine's fattest number of the year under the direction of Anna Wintour, its somewhat scary editor. Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada, a novel in which a woman not unlike Wintour is portrayed as a demanding monster by a former assistant, Wintour's fame preceded her; the film-makers must have thought she would be their star. In the end, though, this is not what happe... Read Full Story
Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
05 Dec 2012 23:32:25
Driving along a highway, a woman detects a weird smell: it resembles "shit, puke, burning flesh and rotten eggs". It pursues her for miles and days.
Trapped in a crevasse after falling from an ice ledge in the Andes, his leg broken, a mountain climber hears "a clean and sharp and commanding" voice which obliterates all the chatter in his own mind: if he obeys it, he knows he will be all right. He is.
I have long thought of the neurologist Oliver Sacks as the greatest living ethnographer of tho... Read Full Story
Gabby Douglas write a memoir
05 Dec 2012 23:31:15
Inspiration. That's the theme and message of the "autobiography" of teenage athlete Gabrielle Douglas, whose against-the-odds journey to triumph at London 2012 was manna for grateful US morning show producers. Douglas's co-author, Michelle Burford, is a founding editor of O – or, as she describes it, "the fabulous Oprah magazine", so the tone of the book – Grace, Gold and Glory: My Leap of Faith – is heartwarming, tear-jerking, and highly readable.
"Journey" of course, in O language, means so m... Read Full Story
The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon
05 Dec 2012 23:27:52
It is important to admit that, at first, I didn't really like this book: its opening chapter had been translated almost aggressively into American ("goddam", "jackass", and so on), and I knew and rather liked this publisher for its impressive devotion to Mitteleuropa. Guatemala, which is where Eduardo Halfon is from, is almost as far from there in spirit as it is possible to get. Also, the opening chapter has the narrator, or rather Halfon himself, trying to explain the importance of literature ... Read Full Story
Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts
03 Dec 2012 23:59:55
Earth's oceans are immense. They cover 360 million square kilometres and fill a volume of 1.3 billion cubic kilometres. Such dimensions are impossible to comprehend and blind us to the vulnerability of the seas that are our planet's lifeblood. Thus UK marine biologist Callum Roberts suggests in Ocean of Life (Allen Lane £25) that we think of them in a more telling manner. View the oceans from the scale of the planet, not from a human perspective, he argues. Then the oceans appear to form "a laye... Read Full Story
It's Fine By Me by Per Petterson
03 Dec 2012 23:58:20
According to Dr Fjeldbo in Henrik Ibsen's The League of Youth, the troublesome short-sightedness afflicting mankind can be remedied by donning "the spectacles of experience" through which "you'll see more clearly a second time". Ibsen's fellow Norwegian Per Petterson sees things differently: traumatised by the violent events that have blighted his childhood years, Audun, the young protagonist of It's Fine By Me, shields his eyes behind a pair of old sunglasses for weeks on end, creating a protec... Read Full Story
Two Brothers by Ben Elton
03 Dec 2012 23:56:27
The set-up is straight out of a Jeffrey Archer novel. Two boys grow up in a Jewish family believing they are twin brothers, and vie for the affections of a rich girl. Except, thanks to a baby swap, they're not actually siblings at all. One is a Jew and one gentile… and it's 1920s Germany. The appalling road to the Holocaust has begun – and just in case we don't get the significance, Otto and Paulus Stengel are born on the very same day Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' party is formed ... Read Full Story
