Category Archives: B - READING - Page 15

READING – JUNE 2015

Posted by on June 30, 2015 No comments

22521. (Stephen L. Dyson & Robert J. Row­land Jr.) Archae­ol­o­gy and His­to­ry in Sardinia: 
. . . . . Shep­herds, Sailors, & Conquerors
(Clif­ford D. Simak) Une Chas­se Dangereuse:
. . . . 22522. (Clif­ford D. Simak) Une chas­se dan­gereuse [= The World That Couldn’t Be]
. . . . 22523. (Clif­ford D. Simak) Pour sauver la guerre [= The Civ­i­liza­tion Game]
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Two Rediscovered Early Books by Conan Doyle

Posted by on June 23, 2015 No comments

I’ve been read­ing some ear­ly works by Arthur Conan Doyle. Some of this mate­r­i­al was only redis­cov­ered in recent years.

At the age of twen­ty, while still in med­ical school in Edin­burgh, he shipped out on a whal­ing ship for six months. The ship went to the remote arc­tic islands of Spitzber­gen [Sval­bard] and Jan Mayen, and Doyle had his twen­ty-first birth­day on the rim of the polar icepack. This was no tame adven­ture. It was 1880, and Doyle’s ship reached with­in three degrees of the record point that the British Arc­tic Expe­di­tion had turned back from in 1876. A year lat­er, George DeLong’s Amer­i­can expe­di­tion would per­ish at a sim­i­lar lat­i­tude. The pole would not be reached with cer­tain­ty until 1926, when Doyle was an old man. Peary and Hen­son, often cred­it­ed with reach­ing the pole in 1909, are now con­sid­ered doubt­ful. Doyle’s voy­age was on a com­mer­cial whaler and seal­er, dri­ven by prof­it, not glo­ry, but it was cer­tain­ly a dan­ger­ous and spec­tac­u­lar adven­ture for a book­ish young Scott, and he lat­er wrote that he left as a boy and came back as a man. He kept a diary, quite well writ­ten, but rather terse, and dec­o­rat­ed with his draw­ings. On his return, he became caught up with his exams and his first attempts to build a med­ical prac­tice, and so the diary was for­got­ten. It was not pub­lished until 2012, when it appeared as Dan­ger­ous Work: Diary of an Arc­tic Adven­ture. Read more »

READING – MAY 2015

Posted by on May 31, 2015 No comments

22416. (Dwayne Brown) Curios­i­ty Rover Finds Active, Ancient Organ­ic Chem­istry on Mars
. . . . . [arti­cle]
22417. (Ben Krause-Kyo­ra, et al) Use of Domes­tic Pigs by Mesolith­ic Hunter-Gath­er­ers in
. . . . . North­west­ern Europe [arti­cle]
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Image of the month: Leonard Cohen…

Posted by on May 1, 2015 No comments

LEONARD COHEN . CHANTEUR CANADIEN . FOLK . TOURNAGE D UN CLIP . AVEC DOMINIQUE ISSERMANN . PHOTOGRAPHE . PLAGE DE TROUVILLE . 26 JANVIER 1988 .… look­ing so Cana­di­an, it makes your teeth ache.

READING – APRIL 2015

Posted by on April 30, 2015 No comments

22421. (Frank Jor­dans) Ancient Wheat Points to Stone Age Trad­ing Links [arti­cle]
22422. (Xue-Bing Wu, et al) An Ultra­lu­mi­nous Quasar with a Twelve-billion-solar-mass
. . . . . Black Hole at Red­shift 6.30 [arti­cle]
22423. (P. Skoglund, et al) Genom­ic Diver­si­ty and Admix­ture Dif­fers for Stone-Age
. . . . . Scan­di­na­vian For­agers and Farm­ers [arti­cle]
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READING – MARCH 2015

Posted by on March 31, 2015 No comments

22416. (Dwayne Brown) Curios­i­ty Rover Finds Active, Ancient Organ­ic Chem­istry on Mars
. . . . . [arti­cle]
22417. (Ben Krause-Kyo­ra, et al) Use of Domes­tic Pigs by Mesolith­ic Hunter-Gath­er­ers in
. . . . . North­west­ern Europe [arti­cle]
22418. (Patrick Cock­burn) The Destruc­tion of Idols: Syria’s Pat­ri­mo­ny at Risk from
. . . . . Extrem­ists [arti­cle]
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READING – FEBRUARY 2015

Posted by on February 28, 2015 No comments

22391. (Jacques Futrelle) The Prob­lem of Cell 13 [sto­ry]
22392. (Andrew Armitage) Com­par­ing the Pol­i­cy of Abo­rig­i­nal Assim­i­la­tion: Australia,
. . . . . Cana­da, and New Zealand
22393. (Jean-Paul Gagnon) Democ­ra­cy and The­o­ret­i­cal Physics [arti­cle]
22394. (Natalia Loukache­va) The Arc­tic Promise — Legal and Polit­i­cal Auton­o­my of
. . . . . Green­land and Nunavut
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(Ed Bryant) Cinnabar

Posted by on February 18, 2015 No comments

Ed Bryant (not to be con­fused with the Ten­nessee politi­cian of the same name), is a savoured taste, one of those “minor” sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers, like Chad Oliv­er or Lloyd Big­gle, Jr., who make explor­ing the genre such a plea­sure. A read­er trea­sures an old copy of Cinnabar, with its moody, ele­gantly writ­ten sto­ries, with much more affec­tion than they can usu­ally sum­mon for any­thing by the big shots of the field. In the same way, a music fan will trea­sure vinyls of Tom Wait’s Rain Dogs, George Thoro­good & the Destroy­ers, or John Hyatt’s Rid­ing With the King. Ed Bryant may have been some­what influ­enced by Har­lan Elli­son, of whom he was some­thing of a pro­tegé, and with whom he some­times col­lab­o­rated, but I think his real styl­is­tic affin­ity is with Cord­wainer Smith. Raised on a Wyoming cat­tle ranch, he does not share Ellison’s urban aes­thetic, and his prose is not “con­tem­po­rary” and slangy in the way Ellison’s always was. Any­way, if you can dig up a copy of Cinnabar (pub­lished in 1975), not nec­es­sar­i­ly an easy task, you will be reward­ed with a series of inter­con­nected sto­ries, none of which seems to have an obvi­ous point, but which togeth­er cre­ate an atmos­phere which will cling in your mem­ory for decades. Read more »

READING – JANUARY 2015

Posted by on January 31, 2015 No comments

22364. [3] (H. G. Wells) The Time Machine
22365. (H. G. Wells) The Chron­ic Arg­onauts [sto­ry]
22366. (Mark McCor­ma­ck) The Declin­ing Sig­nif­i­cance of Homo­pho­bia — How Teenage
. . . . . Boys are Redefin­ing Mas­culin­i­ty and Heterosexuality
22367. (W. W. Jacobs) The Well [sto­ry]
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READING – DECEMBER 2014

Posted by on December 31, 2014 No comments

22331. (Tim Flan­nery) The Final Fron­tier — An Eco­log­i­cal His­to­ry of North Amer­i­ca and Its
. . . . . Peoples
22332. (Vic­tor L. Whitechurch) The Affair of the Ger­man Dis­patch-Box [sto­ry]
22333. (Col­in New­bury) Tahi­ti Nui — Change and Sur­vival in French Poly­ne­sia 1767–1945
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