Reviews and News:
Roger Kimball: Impending coup at St. John’s College.
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Joe Gould had no teeth, slept on the street, and wrote essays and poems that would appear alongside the work of Virginia Woolf and Picasso. “For the literati, Gould peddled a seductive notion: He was compiling the shirt-sleeved history of the common man. ‘I am trying to present lyrical episodes of everyday life,’ he wrote. ‘I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.'”
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The many stories of autism: “The authors of this interesting and engaging volume are journalists, each with a family connection to autism, and they tell autism’s story largely from the families’ perspectives. Their history of autism, which takes the reader from the 1930s to the present day, clearly shows the importance of parents as advocates for their children with autism. Not all that long ago, parents were routinely faced with doctors’ advice to ‘put your child in an institution and get on with your life’. They had to fight for the right to education for their children with autism, and founded schools and, later, adult services. The struggle faced by parents, and their commitment to their children, leap from the pages – as do the remarkable contributions of parent-scientists such as Bernard Rimland and Lorna Wing. For parents, the book will be a striking reminder of how far we have come in establishing the rights of those with autism and their families.”
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George Steiner’s “continental” mind.
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Malcolm Forbes reviews William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction: “Much of Cervantes’ life consisted of encountering and surmounting hard knocks, and weathering the debilitating fug of desengaño, or disappointment, which plagued late-16th-century Spain. His father was hounded by creditors and eventually jailed, which resulted in a childhood spent largely on the move and blighted by poverty and dishonour. Egginton’s early chapters depict an adolescent Cervantes seeking solace by writing poetry. However, the book truly takes off when he trades his native Spain and relative peace for Italy and war.”
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Jutland 1916, a great and inconclusive battle.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Atlantic, Joy Lanzendorfer traces the rise of copyright infringement in self-publishing:
“One day two years ago Rachel Ann Nunes, who writes Mormon fiction and romance novels, received an email from a reader asking a strange question: Had she collaborated with someone named Sam Taylor Mullens? Nunes had never heard the name before. But the reader went on to say she had noticed similarities between one of Nunes’s novels, A Bid for Love, and another self-published book by Mullens. When the reader confronted Mullens about the parallels, she was told the two authors were simply collaborators. If that was a lie, the reader said—and it was—then Nunes may have been the unwitting victim of plagiarism.
“With that single exchange, Nunes found herself part of a trend affecting many professional authors in the age of self-publishing. An anonymous stranger seemed to have stolen her book, changed it superficially, and passed it off as her own work. First published in 1998, A Bid for Love did well enough to spawn two sequels before it eventually went out-of-print. Mullens’ book, titled The Auction Deal, looked like the same story with much of the same language. In Chapter 2, Nunes writes, ‘The dark brown curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for twenty-eight of Cassi’s twenty-nine years.’ Compare that to Chapter 2 of Mullen’s book, which begins, ‘Dark brunette curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for the thirty-one years of my life.’
“There was one major difference between the books: The Auction Deal had sex scenes and was being marketed as mainstream romance—the most profitable category in self-publishing. ‘I was floored,’ Nunes said. ‘I didn’t believe it was true that someone would do that.’
“In the world of self-publishing, where anyone can put a document on Amazon and call it a book, many writers are seeing their work being appropriated without their permission. Some books are copied word-for-word while others are tinkered with just enough to make it tough for an automated plagiarism-checker to flag them. (Though the practice is legally considered copyright infringement, the term ‘plagiarism’ is more widely used.) The offending books often stay up for weeks or even months at a time before they’re detected, usually by an astute reader. For the authors, this intrusion goes beyond threatening their livelihood. Writing a novel is a form of creative expression, and having it stolen by someone else, many say, can feel like a personal violation.”
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Image of the Day: Stockholm’s metro stations
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Poem: Marly Youmans, “Amara Sings of Alchemical Cycles”
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