“What he finds is both hopeful and disturbing. Wildlife refuges, rather than focusing on biodiversity, breed animals for meat and traditional remedies like black bear bile. The city of Ordos plans to build a huge wind farm and solar plant, but these benefits are offset by its coal-liquification mine, “an environmentalist’s worst nightmare” of greenhouse gases and water exploitation. The Chinese dictatorship, envied by other nations for its ability to enact environmental changes without the slow democratic process, turns out to be ineffective, with power lying with developers and local bureaucracies. Readers interested in global warming will appreciate the firsthand information about China, and Watts’s travels are so extensive and China is changing so fast, some material is likely to be fresh and new even for Sinologists.”
“Your head swims. You need to read the figures again. But there they are in black and white, impeccably sourced, on pages 151 and 453 of Jonathan Watts’ gripping new book. Makes no difference if it’s the grandiose or the trivial, the ancient or the ultra-modern, the People’s Republic is now producing more of it than anyone else, more than anyone ever has, more than anyone has ever imagined doing, in the most fantastical, credibility-stretching, mind-boggling explosion of economic growth the world has ever witnessed.”
And that’s just the beginning. More terrific reviews have appeared in The Irish Times, The Beijinger, the Global Times, Literary Review, and many others. It’s really an incredible book and for anyone interested in China and it’s impact on the world it absolutely should not be missed. Congratulations, Jon!
Every once in awhile I get a pitch for a project that seems so quirky, so fun, so… out there that I justhave to see it. That was the case with author Andrew Gall and gorillastrator Vince Soliven’s Everything is Better with a Gorilla.
Who could pass after seeing something like this?
There are great decisions, like getting ice cream. Then, there are remarkable decisions, like hiring a Gorilla to mow your lawn. Not only are Gorillas conscientious workers, they also have an affinity for lawn care. Not to mention an appreciation for beauty.
Gorillas can do the job of mowing the lawn at the same speed it would take five normal human beings after swallowing Ripped Fuel pills.
Gorillas prefer the push mower, for Gorillas are very eco-friendly. However, for bigger jobs they will use the standard gas powered mower. In any case, often Gorillas choose to just eat the grass, as it’s quicker, more efficient, and more digestively fulfilling.
Hire a Gorilla to cut your lawn and you will be astounded with the results. It’s like a soft, hairy, bustling Home Depot showing up every week, appearing exclusively in your yard.
Then when I saw the wonderful illustrations that Vince created for it I knew I had to try to sell it. Of course, just because I thought it was genius didn’t mean an editor would actually write us a check for it, but the terrific Brendan O’Neill over at Adams Media got it immediately and signed the book. The authors have also just launched a series of really funny videos for the book. Check them out here.
Congratulations go out to Peter Morton Coan, whose book Toward a Better Life: America’s New Immigrants in Their Own Words was just picked up by Prometheus Books.
Long before Arizona passed its highly controversial immigration law last week, immigration has been one of the nation’s hottest and most contentious issues, with a recent CNN/Gallup poll showing that 69 percent of Americans favor less immigration. And rarely a day goes by without major newspapers & periodicals running immigration related pieces. Even President Obama couldn’t escape this issue as last year his aunt was accused of being an illegal alien and was subjected to an immigration hearing to determine her status.
When we think of immigration, we often think of Ellis Island, but while 16 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island in its 62 years of operation, since then more than 75 million immigrants have crossed our borders, including as many as 10 million illegally. Today nearly a quarter of the US population are immigrants, more than at any time since World War II. More than 900,000 immigrants became U.S. citizens in 2008 while the INS detained or deported more than 40,000, another record.
Peter Morton Coan’s previous book, Ellis Island Interviews, was an attempt to record the stories of the last surviving immigrants who came through Ellis Island from 1892-1954. The book offered the accounts of immigrants’ lives in their own words, oral histories told by the men, women and children who lived them. Toward a Better Life will utilize the same approach and will be the first book to offer a comprehensive anthology of oral histories about American immigrants from the Ellis Island era right up to today.
Clearly this is a story for our time. What all immigrants share in common is the desire for freedom: to improve one’s lot in life. Few subjects remain as controversial and emotionally charged – and central to being an American – as immigration, and in the great tradition of Studs Terkel, Toward a Better Life will provide a forum for immigrants of all kinds to tell their stories in their own words.
Jacque MacDonald is a true avenging angel – who relentlessly pursued her daughter’s killer for nearly a decade.
After her beloved daughter Debi Whitlock was brutally murdered in 1988, cops quickly ran out of leads and the baffling case went cold – but Jacque never gave up.
Now if only the reporter had included the book title…(!) Still, it’s an incredible story and nice to see it getting some attention.
Men are complex creatures. Half the time we can’t remember our wedding anniversaries or our childrens’ birthdays, but we have no trouble remembering Derek Jeter’s slugging percentage with two outs and runners in scoring position or quoting obscure lines from The Big Lebowski. We can’t find the time to mow the lawn or shop (online) for our wives’ birthday presents, but somehow we still find 18 hours a week to analyze our fantasy football teams. And every one of us still thinks – in his own self-deceiving way – that we’re just as cool as we ever were.
Of course, the only thing worse than a clueless man is a clueless man with a bruised ego, so what to do? Enter Dan Consiglio’s Of Course You’re Still Cool, Honey: And 75 More Lies to Keep Your Aging Man Happy, which combines “oh, that’s unfortunate…” photos of guys being guys with witty, satirical lies that any woman can use to keep the goofy man in their life happy. The result is hilarious, even if a little painfully close to home.
Adams Media, a division of F+W Media, Inc. will publish Of Course You’re Still Cool, Honey next year. In the meantime, Dan’s first book, The New Dad A-Z will be coming out from Andrews McMeel next month. Congratulations, Dan!
What does Barack Obama mean to black America? This is the running debate taking place somewhere in the country every day, and the answer so far is this: everything and nothing; epic transformation and elegiac stasis; a stark symbol of how far black people have come and a painful marker of the great distance left to travel.
The transcendent, jarring truth for blacks is that they celebrated their most triumphant moment at the worst of times. The housing market triggered the greatest loss of wealth for African Americans in history. Nearly a fifth of all black workers are out of work, a figure that rivals the nation’s unemployment at the peak of the Great Depression. In the country’s largest cities, the high school dropout rate for blacks is nearly half.
Over nine months of interviews beginning with Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, from the mountains of Appalachia to the Bay Area, blacks from all walks of life — entrepreneur, ex-offender, soldier, union leader, single parent, South African émigré, retiree, hip-hop activist and more — pondered the meaning of President Obama, and in doing so, laid bare the political identity of the nation’s most liberal voting bloc. Their stories, some of which are excerpted here, provide some insight into what Obama’s election meant to black Americans, and whether, one year later, it has brought the promised change to their lives.
It’s a fascinating piece and is well worth reading. You can check out the rest here.
Congratulations go out to Mark Stephen Meadows on the sale of his fascinating book We, Robot to Lyons Press.
When the Terminator said, “I’ll be back” he wasn’t kidding around. In fact, he’s been waddling about on the battlefields of Iraq since 2007. The problem, though (aside from the fact that he’s a robot assassin), is that he still needs some debugging; when he gets stuck or falls over – as he does from time to time – he can’t figure out who the bad guy is, and so he starts shooting at his friends.
In December of 2008 the US Navy’s research division received an extensive report titled Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design. The authors of the report discuss a rather mysterious 2008 event in Iraq in which several American-made robots armed with machine guns malfunctioned and opened fire on ‘friendly’ US soldiers. The authors also point to a 2007 incident when an autonomous “robotic cannon deployed by the South African army malfunctioned, killing nine ‘friendly’ soldiers and wounding 14 others.” The authors outline how hard it is to stop potentially fatal chains of events caused by autonomous military systems, or even systems in cities, homes, and schools that “…process information and can act at speeds incomprehensible to us.” They then coolly conclude, “It would be naive to think such accidents will not happen again.”
What was probably logical, and most interesting about the report, was the advice that was given to address the ethical and moral problems that can occur on the robot-occupied battlefield; give the robots a sense of ethics and morality. But the report takes a turn for the bizarre when the authors offer Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, from the science fiction novel, I, Robot to solve the problem. They offer science fiction as a guiding light by which the US Navy can navigate the rather foggy waters of ethics, war, and autonomous robots. When roboticists for the military begin to rely on science fiction as a solution for their work, we have something worth noticing.
Science fiction has always influenced engineering (the term “Robot” came from Science Fiction) but now science fiction is taking the lead, directing robotics research. While robots have always been the children of science fiction, they don’t just live on faraway battlefields anymore. Science fiction has guided engineering fact. This means that we can now look at science fiction and determine where engineering will go. By doing this we can not only learn more about the world of robots that are emerging and surrounding us but we can also understand where this powerful technology is at, predict what is coming, perceive new industries, learn new trends, and anticipate new problems.
We, Robot will introduce readers to the latest discoveries in robotics and artificial intelligence by looking at science fiction universes (Blade Runner, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc) and robot residents (Wall-E, Iron Man, Terminator, Robocop, HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I, Robot, to name a few), and will show readers how close they are to becoming a reality. It will also categorize them by which will appear earlier than others, which won’t happen for another 50 years, and which ones just won’t happen at all. Through a discussion of robots loved and hated by millions it will provide an informed, entertaining, and often surprising look at what to expect in the next decade as well as in the next year.
Congratulations to Douglas Gayeton, whose book SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town is being released on September 29th by Welcome Books. I just received my copies of the book and the final result is absolutely stunning. The book is a photographic journey of Douglas’ time spent in Pistoia, a small town in Tuscany. The images themselves are amazing, as he often shot thousands of photos of a scene and then later went back and selected only those that best captured his memories of the scene, combining them into a tableu and adding handwritten notes and stories. Critics have called the technique “flat film” because of the way it folds time into a single image. The end result is simply fascinating, as you not only get to see these wonderful images, but you also learn something about the people in the images and their lives.
In fact, here’s a video where Douglas both explains the technique and shows how the images come together. Wonderful stuff and well worth checking out.
The book also features an introduction by legendary chef Alice Waters, as well as a preface by the founder of the Slow Food Movement, Carlo Petrini.
Last week The Economist wrote a terrific review of Jonathan Baskin’s innovative branding title Branding Only Works on Cattle. Here’s a snippet:
In chatty, bumptious style, Mr Baskin calls the bluff of some traditional branding assumptions. He disputes that people buy products on the strength of brand alone: once distribution, product quality and salesmanship are taken into account, the brand may have very little impact on sales. He also waves away evidence that brain scans reveal high levels of brand awareness, responding that those brand-aware brains don’t necessarily go on to buy the product. “All we can say for sure is that branding might help create awareness, and that awareness is generally better than non-awareness.” But not all publicity is good: “a dumb commercial …is still dumb the third time I see it.”
Mr Baskin does not simply rail, but redefines branding. “For branding to mean something, it has to do something.” In other words, branding must be generated directly by the experience of the user. At a basic level, straplines such as Nike’s “Just do it” and Las Vegas’s “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” work, he says, because they play to feelings that are related to how a product might be used. His notion of branding goes much further, taking in, for example, the way an airline deals with its stranded passengers. The amalgamation of all such company-wide actions emerge to create a brand, he argues.
You can read the rest of the review here. The Economist also gave Branding Only Works on Cattle the lead in their latest newsletter here. Congratulations, Jonathan!
Congratulations(!) go out to Chris Steiner, the author of $20 per Gallon, as we just found out that the book landed on the New York Times non-fiction hardcover extended bestseller list that will be published on August 16th.
Also, the website for the book is now up. It’s at www.20dollarspergallon.com and is worth checking out, as it has a very cool interactive timeline and you can also read an excerpt, check out the reviews, etc.
Congratulations to Douglas Gayeton, whose book 
