The Sep­a­ratist move­ment in Québec has man­aged to train an entire gen­er­a­tion into think­ing that Québec’s entry into Con­fed­er­a­tion was some sort of con­spir­a­to­r­i­al swin­dle, but the truth of the mat­ter is that the very idea of Con­fed­er­a­tion orig­i­nat­ed in that province, and was large­ly pro­mot­ed by French Cana­di­an intel­lec­tu­als seek­ing a strat­e­gy to defend and pre­serve their cul­ture. The fact is that the prin­ci­ple threat to the lan­guage and dis­tinct cul­ture of French Cana­da was, in the 19th cen­tu­ry, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the absorp­tion of Cana­da by the Unit­ed States. The first detailed and sys­tem­at­ic pro­pos­al for a Cana­di­an Con­fed­er­a­tion was this trea­tise by Taché, pub­lished in 1858. Taché was a doc­tor prac­tic­ing in the lum­ber camps of the wilder parts of the Gaspé penin­su­la, where he became enam­ored with abo­rig­i­nal cul­ture, and col­lect­ed folk­lore. His lat­er career in jour­nal­ism focused on the devel­op­ment of a strong and dis­tinct French Cana­di­an lit­er­a­ture, prefer­ably one that “ven­tured into the unknown.” As a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, he refused to wear any arti­cle of cloth­ing not man­u­fac­tured in Cana­da. He was, in effect, a roman­tic nation­al­ist of the 19th cen­tu­ry mode. Not alto­geth­er pro­gres­sive, he pre­ferred a timid reform of the archa­ic sys­tem of seignio­r­i­al land tenure, rather than the com­plete abo­li­tion that the pub­lic clam­ored for. This lost him sup­port in his polit­i­cal career, though in oth­er issues he remained high­ly pop­u­lar. Read more »

(Fritz Leiber) Swords and Deviltry:
. . . . 15064. (Fritz Leiber) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 15065. (Fritz Leiber) Induc­tion [sto­ry]
. . . . 15066. (Fritz Leiber) The Snow Women [sto­ry]
. . . . 15067. (Fritz Leiber) The Unholy Grail [sto­ry]
. . . . 15068. [2] (Fritz Leiber) Ill Met In Lankhmar [sto­ry]
15069. (Robert Bench­ley) Hap­py Child­hood Tales [sto­ry] Read more »

Psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bardo devised and super­vised one of the most famous exper­i­ments in social dynam­ics, the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment. A group of col­lege stu­dents were cast in the roles of “guards” and “inmates” in a mock prison. Intense abus­es spon­ta­neously devel­oped, as the “guards” quick­ly evolved into sadis­tic monsters.

But this book is not just about his land­mark exper­i­ment. Zim­bardo was asked to tes­tify as an expert wit­ness in abuse of pow­er and the psy­chol­ogy of tur­ture dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tions of the abus­es in Abu Ghraib. It was this expe­ri­ence that prompt­ed him to put togeth­er a com­pre­hen­sive study of all the social psy­chol­ogy exper­i­ments, such as Mil­gram Exper­i­ment, which led up to his own work, and to blend it with a detailed analy­sis of Abu Ghraib. Read more »

God only knows how much “sword & sor­cery” type fan­tasy is in print. But if, like me, you find very lit­tle of it appeal­ing to either your imag­i­na­tion or your intel­li­gence, then it’s nice to be remind­ed that some of the clas­sics of the field remain fresh and sat­is­fy­ing. Few peo­ple can claim to have writ­ten bet­ter hero­ic fan­tasy than Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sto­ries where writ­ten with wit and sophis­ti­ca­tion. He wrote with an adult sen­si­bil­ity, avoid­ing the prissi­ness and infan­tile repres­sion that were com­mon in the field. These sto­ries, which were writ­ten over sev­eral decades, were col­lected in sev­eral vol­umes, of which this is the first. The last sto­ry, “Ill Met In Lankhmar”, is just about as good as a sto­ry about a mus­cu­lar bar­bar­ian hero can get. Read more »

15055. (Cap­tain Mar­ry­at) The Set­tlers In Canada
15056. (P. G. Wode­house) Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
15057. (Agatha Christie) Three-Act Tragedy
15058. [6] (Edgar Pang­born) A Mir­ror for Observers
15059. (P. G. Wode­house) The Inim­itable Jeeves
15060. (Gyu­la Kristó) Ear­ly Tran­syl­va­nia, 895–13245
15062. (Jan Kulich) Kut­ná Hora, St. Bar­bara Cathe­dral and the Town
15063. (P. G. Wode­house) Jeeves in the Offing 

15036. (Simon Schama) Rough Cross­ings ― Britain, the Slaves, and the Amer­i­can Revolution
15037. (Tim­o­thy Finn) Three Men {Not} in a Boat and Most of the Time With­out a Dog
15038. (Don Aker) Stranger At Bay
15039. (George San­tayana) Clas­sic Lib­er­ty [arti­cle]
15040. (Tony Karon) Condi’s Free Ride: The Fan­ta­sy of Amer­i­can Diplo­ma­cy in the Middle 
. . . . . East [arti­cle]
15041. (Glen Green­wald) Your Mod­ern-day Repub­li­can Par­ty [arti­cle]
15042. (Neil McKen­na) The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
Read more »

15000. (Jerome K. Jerome) Three Men in a Boat, To Say Noth­ing of the Dog
15001. (John Markoff) What the Door­mouse Said ― How the 60s Counterculture
. . . . . Shaped the Per­son­al Com­put­er Industry
15002. (Gar­ry Wills) Invent­ing Amer­i­ca ― Jefferson’s Dec­la­ra­tion of Independence
15003. (Bill Pat­ter­son) One Diachron­ic Con­ver­sa­tion in the Odd Genre [arti­cle]
15004. (Chris Leslie) Space Cadets and Inter­stel­lar Cit­i­zens [arti­cle]
Read more »

14940. (Thomas Jef­fer­son) Orig­i­nal Draft of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence [arti­cle]
14941. [4] (Thomas Jef­fer­son, et. al.) The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence [arti­cle]
14942. (Orson Scott Card) Empire
14943. (Antho­ny Sha­did) With Iran Ascen­dant, U. S. is Seen At Fault ― Arab Allies in Region
. . . . . Feel­ing Pres­sure [arti­cle]
14944. (Gar­ry Wills) At Ease, Mr. Pres­i­dent [arti­cle]
(William Tenn) The Sev­en Sexes:
. . . . 14945. (William Tenn) Author’s Note [pref­ace]
. . . . 14946. (William Tenn) Child’s Play [sto­ry]
. . . . 14947. (William Tenn) The Malt­ed Milk Mon­ster [sto­ry]
. . . . 14948. [2](William Tenn) Errand Boy [sto­ry]
. . . . 14949. (William Tenn) The House Duti­ful [sto­ry]
. . . . 14950. (William Tenn) Mis­tress Sary [sto­ry]
. . . . 14951. (William Tenn) Sanc­tu­ary [sto­ry]
. . . . 14952. (William Tenn) Venus and the Sev­en Sex­es [sto­ry]
. . . . 14953. (William Tenn) Bernie the Faust [sto­ry]
14954. (William Irwin Thomp­son) Pas­sages About Earth [sto­ry]
14955. (Tony Tay­lor) See­ing the Writ­ing on the Wall Graf­fi­ti in His­to­ry — from Pom­peii to Belfast
14957. (Mervin Peake) Titus Alone
Read more »

I got tremen­dous plea­sure fin­ish­ing Mervin Peake’s enig­matic fan­tasy series. I was warned that the last vol­ume would be a dis­ap­point­ment, but when I got around to it, I did not think it so. It’s true that it has a sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent “feel” from the first two, and shifts focus to oth­er mat­ters. Peake was near death, and quite ill, when he wrote it, so it con­tains some laps­es in style and inter­nal incon­sis­ten­cies. But it does not mer­it the scorn it faced on pub­li­ca­tion, or the dis­missal it gets from fans of Gor­meng­hast. Titus, who is more or less a place-mark­er in the imag­is­tic maze of the first vol­umes, acquires much more of an inter­nal voice Titus Alone. The issues and imagery of this vol­ume curi­ously antic­i­pate the cyber­punk and steam­punk styles of a half cen­tury later.