Archive for January 20th, 2008

Martin Luther King Day

By at 20 January, 2008, 11:19 pm

If you need to be reminded of why this holiday is so important, check out the sections on the fight for civil rights in America in  the Audio version of “The People’s History of The United States: Highlights from The 20th Century (Abridged) by Howard Zinn and read by Matt Damon (Why Damon? Remember the […]

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Reading through the stack

By at 20 January, 2008, 11:13 pm

The Sunday New York Times Art & Leisure had a nice piece on Jimmy Breslin, who increasingly seems the last link to a generation of columnists such as Murray Kempton, and others who predated him such as Joe Mitchell and A.J. Liebling and Damon Runyon.   David Denby goes to great length in The New […]

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Wham-O creator Richard Knerr dies at 82

By at 20 January, 2008, 10:00 pm

Genius comes in many forms. Richard Knerr, is the man who brought to the world (he didn’t invent, he marketed) such products as the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, SuperBall, the Slip ‘N Slide, and Silly String. Simply put: Are these not essential artifacts of our times? Doesn’t the mere mention of them trigger happy memories, […]

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French novels about the Nazi era — a trend?

By at 20 January, 2008, 9:52 pm

Sign and Sight is a website that provides a roundup of European cultural journalism. In this week’s magazine roundup there was this item: Le Nouvel Observateur 10.01.2008 (France) “What he says is scary.” With these words the magazine introduces its interview with Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, whose new novel “Le Village de l’Allemand ou le […]

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