Author plans posthumous comeback, saying her book “will not be published until after I kick the bucket.”
Category Archives: Authors
Fabrications
Chef Robert Irvine, whose book Mission: Cook! is available for online reading through HarperCollins website, has not had his contract renewed by Food Network because he exaggerated his involvement with Britain’s Royal Family on his resume. Irvine says, “I am truly sorry for the errors in my judgment.”
In related news, the author of Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years admits to making up the whole thing. “She didn’t live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn’t trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She’s not even Jewish,” according to the AP.
Also, an adviser for Mr. Obama, a popular U.S. presidential candidate, says the candidate was pandering to his Mid-western audience with his protectionist language. That is, a Canadian official states in a memo that the candidate’s adviser said these things to him in response to the official’s trade concerns. Oh my, who to believe?
Chattanooga Seminar on unChristian
This Tuesday, David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group and co-author of unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity and Why It Matters, will speak on the subjects in his book at First Presbyterian in Chattanooga. Admission is free, but call ahead to aid seating.
Writing to See
Anecdotal Evidence has some good writing quotes from John McGahern. “Writing is an instinct. I’d say that I write to see. I suspect that unless there’s a sense of excitement and discovery for the writer, the reader will not have much sense of excitement or discovery either.”
Mark Steyn Threatened by Liberals
Liberalism undermines the freedoms which enable it by opposing those truths which should be self-evident. Case in point: Mark Steyn is being challenged before The Canadian Human Rights Commission for an excerpt from his book, America Alone, printed in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. The Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like Steyn’s arguments against Islam and have charged him with hate speech.
Here’s the excerpt. Steyn points out that many other publications have reprinted portions of his book, labeling them “alarmist.” In response, Steyn asks, “So what would it take to alarm you?” If what Steyn has written is over the top, cultural changes or specific acts should rational people be alarmed by?
It’s hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book “alarmist” accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada’s Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few.
(via Cranach)
More on and by Buckley
Commentary is publishing one of Buckley’s last essays, “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.” Here’s the start of it:
In the early months of l962, there was restiveness in certain political quarters of the Right. The concern was primarily the growing strength of the Soviet Union, and the reiteration by its leaders of their designs on the free world. Some of the actors keenly concerned felt that Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was a natural leader in the days ahead.
But it seemed inconceivable that an anti-establishment gadfly like Goldwater could be nominated as the spokesman-head of a political party. And it was embarrassing that the only political organization in town that dared suggest this radical proposal—the GOP’s nominating Goldwater for President—was the John Birch Society.
The society had been founded in 1958 by an earnest and capable entrepreneur named Robert Welch, a candy man, who brought together little clusters of American conservatives, most of them businessmen. He demanded two undistracted days in exchange for his willingness to give his seminar on the Communist menace to the United States, which he believed was more thoroughgoing and far-reaching than anyone else in America could have conceived. His influence was near-hypnotic, and his ideas wild. He said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and that the government of the United States was “under operational control of the Communist party.” It was, he said in the summer of 1961, “50-70 percent” Communist-controlled.
Welch refused to divulge the size of the society’s membership, though he suggested it was as high as 100,000 and could reach a million. His method of organization caused general alarm. The society comprised a series of cells, no more than twenty people per cell. It was said that its members were directed to run in secret for local offices and to harass school boards and librarians on the matter of the Communist nature of the textbooks and other materials they used.
The society became a national cause célèbre—so much so, that a few of those anxious to universalize a draft-Goldwater movement aiming at a nomination for President in 1964 thought it best to do a little conspiratorial organizing of their own against it.
Several writers on Commentary’s blog, Contentions, are paying tribute to Buckley. Max Boot says, “He managed on a number of occasions to keep the conservative movement as a whole from lurching into loony-land.” The above essay is a case in point, I believe.
William F. Buckley Jr. Has Died
William F. Buckley Jr. died last night. May his tribe continue to increase.
New Leif Enger Novel Coming
Author of Peace Like a River, Leif Enger, has another novel coming. Watch for So Brave, Young, and Handsome on shelves this May. Peace Like a River was an Amazon.com’s Best of 2001.
Bertrand to Be on the Mars Hill Audio Journal
Ken Myers has interviewed J. Mark Bertrand on worldview, reading, and other fun topics. That should be a great interview. You can subscribe to the MP3 version of the MHA Journal for $30/year. It’s always very interesting.
In fact, you can listen to several recordings in their CD Bonus section. Note these two: “Vol. 66 – Leon Kass, on how new technologies have changed the assumptions many people have about their children” and “Vol. 53 – Dana Gioia talks about the life and work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and reads a poem inspired by the death of his wife, ‘The Cross of Snow.'”
Write While the Iron is Hot
Anecdotal Evidence is talking about Thoreau’s thoughts on writing. “A feeble writer,” Thoreau says, “and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of other, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.”