I would have glossed over this, but the Sound of Music has been on cable so much lately that my eye couldn't help but be drawn the the sunny picture of her dancing in the Alps. The Times has a joint review of her memoir and a biography. Her memoir ends with leaving England, and the reviewer has this interesting comment about the biography, which continues her life:

"To continue with the story you can skip to Page 118 of Richard Stirling’s “Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography,” an extensive cut-and-paste job that suspends its reverential tone only with the author’s panicked discovery that his subject may be close to finishing a rival book: 'I pondered why she should be writing it at all if, as I surmised, she were to be so selective. She certainly did not need the money.' Poor Richard!"

The winter edition of The Missouri Review includes found letters from Laurence Olivier to young actors. These letters show Olivier as generous enough with his time to respond to letters (which is more than I could see any famous actor doing today), and he gives his honest opinions about acting. I'm not sure how a Shakespeare scholar or an acting professor would take the following quote about playing the role of Hamlet, but I think it's one of the most refreshing pieces of craft advice I've heard in a long time:

"I would not plumb too far into psychological depths if I were you. It is simply a play about a man who could not make up his mind. If you start worrying about why he could not do this you are almost sure to get involved in a great number of readings and innuendos which will be completely perplexing to the public; he just can't and you must just feel that he can't, that's all."

Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist, left the ivory tower and infiltrated a drug gang in Chicago to study how that world works. He befriended the leader of the Black Kings, and the leader let Venkatesh run things for a day. Story and excerpt at NPR.

On a good friend's recommendation I've been visiting Fark, a media blog with links to various news articles, I think submitted by Fark members. The founder, Drew Curtis, now has a book, It's Not News, It's Fark, which came out earlier this year. It looks interesting.

Reviewed at the Times:

There’s a great story to be told about the success of Starbucks. But we’ll have to wait to hear it from somebody other than Taylor Clark. This is a shame because Clark is an enthusiastic young writer who has the seat of his intellectual pants hooked on the horns of an interesting conflict. He both appreciates the 'Starbucks experience' (whose advantages elude many of us 60-year-olds), and he deplores the very existence of a large, omnipresent, profitable corporate store chain (whose disadvantages elude many of us 60-year-olds, especially if we made a timely purchase of Starbucks stock for our retirement portfolios).

This review is worth reading because of the reviewer. The book sounds interesting, but the reviewer is nice and crotchety. He very clearly does not "get" Starbucks, and he gets quite testy with Clark's book for not explaining the phenomenon to him. At one point, Clark cites a sociologist who explains that neutral public spaces are declining, and the reviewer says, "I beg to differ. It's called a bar."

The NY Times reviews Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World." It looks like an interesting read, in line with all the recent economics books that aren't full of endless equations:

"Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the 'survival of the richest' propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work — in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues."

Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of Sound is reviewed at the NY Times.

Lovely little La Lohan has allegedly decided to write a memoir once she gets out of rehab.  Hey, it'll probably have more drugs, alcohol, and arrests than A Million Little Pieces...and it will all be true!  I'm just curious as to exactly how far back in her career the memoir will take us.  Cocaine on the set of Freaky Friday?  Heroin on The Parent Trap?  Perhaps most importantly, will she tell us exactly what drugs prompted her to participate in this little number?  I mean, it's not just bad, it's Britney bad.  And that's bad. 

I've been too harsh on technology lately. Here's a fun-to-watch interview with the inventive and optimistic Ray Kurzweil, author of (most recently) The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil predicts with a straight face that human beings will, in the next fifteen years or so, possess the technology to slow, stop, and even reverse the aging process--in other words, average lifespans will begin to increase by more than one year per year (with me still?). In the future, "full immersion" into virtual realities of our choosing will become the norm, and expansion of human civilization throughout the solar system may happen within our lifetimes (assuming we live to be 150-years old or so).

Most of what Kurzweil says is, in my skeptical judgment, probably little more than well-written sci-fi. For example, Kurzweil says that the exponential growth curves of technological innovation mean that we cannot predict the next fifty years of technological progress by looking at the past fifty years; instead, it would be more accurate to look at the last fify years of technological advancement as symmetrical to the next five years' potential. So maybe this kind of thinking is for suckers afraid to die--but it sure is intriguing!

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Just up today on Guardian: a very funny excerpt from Bill Bryson's new memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.  Bryson recalls the trials and tribulations of his boyhood paper delivery route, including self-imposed distracting questions:

What if time if stopped and I was the only thing on earth left moving?

extremely old people:

Mrs Vandermeister was 700 years old, possibly 800, and permanently attached to an aluminium walker.

extremely rich people, psychotic dogs, and what happens when extremely rich people and psychotic dogs are brought together:

Poor people in my experience have mean dogs and know it. Rich people have mean dogs and refuse to believe it.

So true.  Read it here. 

David Carradine kept a diary while he was working on Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2.  Now he's publishing it as The Kill Bill Diary: The Making of a Tarantino Classic as Seen Through the Eyes of a Screen Legend which is available for preorder from Amazon and will be released November 1st.

David Carradine did a phenomenal job in the second Kill Bill, even as he delivered Tarantino's clunky, ill-conceived superman monologue (yeah, I said it).  Seeing him playing a villain reminded me of Henry Fonda's character in Once Upon a Time in the West, a role so counter-intuitive and yet so well-cast.  It's a shame Carradine didn't see more "heavy" roles after the Kill Bill series.

Incoming fiction editor Tadd Adcox reviews Daniel H. Wilson's How to Survive a Robot Uprising, a book that is only becoming more relevant as humanity haplessly skis down the black diamond trail of total machine dependence.  Luckily, Humans United Against Robots (HUAR) is here to monitor the situation.

Robot Dog Shakespeare says (quoting Robot Dog Burns): The best laid schemes of mice and men are often crushed under the heel of the Glorious Perpetual Robot Army.

Check out our review of How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion.

(Image courtesy HUAR and KATG.) 

Sycamore Review good buddy emeritus Gil Cook reviews Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.  Lynn Truss is also the author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, which I once heard one of the most respected linguists in the country refer to as "that god-awful book."  Gil is decidedly more optimistic.

 Please enjoy.

The first chapter of Cynthia Ozick's A Din in the Head: Essays is, among other things, a beautiful elegy for Susan Sontag.  One of the things that has always struck me about Sontag is the love and admiration she elicits from other writers:

In another photograph, dated 1975, she is lying on her back, hands under her head, with strongly traced Picasso eyelids and serene lips less curled than Mona Lisa's: beautiful at forty-two. Like any celebrity, she could be watched as she aged. Ultimately there came the signature white slash through the blackened forelock, and the face grew not harder but hardier (despite recurrent illness, throughout which she was inordinately courageous).

Ozick does a wonderful job evoking the young Sontag, sketching in the impact of "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation" on the critical lanscape, and then moving ahead years later to an older Sontag looking back on those works.  The NYT also has a review of Ozick's book, by Walter Kirn.

Every now and then, we get a piece of writing that is so singular and fun, that before it has even been selected for the issue it has already been talked up passed around among the editorial staff.  It's hard to say exactly what excites us about these works, the writing itself or the idea of bringing it to our readers, but Rebecca Epsein's essay The Fun Ride is definitely one of those works that get us talking.

Ostensibly a story about two young girls whose father installs a zip-line in their backyard, the essay is really a love letter to Epstein's sister, Emily, who is almost killed by said zip-line:
 

    She paints pictures, she invents jokes, she starts questionable fashion trends among her peers, she makes her own peanut butter from scratch, she borrows our Mother’s long red nightgown and twists it, wraps it around herself, ties it into an infinite number of configurations. She demands that our mother weave her hair into experimental braided hairdos in the mornings before school.  She has thin, pale lips and dark hair with squarish bangs. 

 
Time is rendered fluidly and confidently (Epstein frequently refers to the illness that strikes her after the events of the story, a detail that colors everything else in the essay), and the narrative is unmistakeably compelling and funny.  We are really proud to be able to bring you this excellent essay.  Please enjoy.