Showing posts with label new york times book reviewers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new york times book reviewers. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

thank GOD the Vatican isn't run by book reviewers...

...or we'd never have any Saints and Martyrs.

The book reviewers' world - amateur and professional - seems a material one , consumed by the almighty dollar figure on the cover of any book they choose to review.

Or so it seems : but there is actually a more acceptable reason for their surface shallowness.

Simply overwhelmed by all the books offered up for review, they share among themselves one simple - brutal - rule of thumb : if a book is really, really good a big canny commercial publisher would be offering it up for sale, at a hefty price.

If it is merely good, it would be at least published by some sort of commercial publisher or , if self-published, at least offered for sale at a hefty price on Amazon.

But a book researched, written and offered up for free on its own website, in an act of charity, merely because the subject of the book after all offered up his life in an act of charity ?

Interesting concept - worthy even - but we don't have time to review it.

Sorry.

So dear blog viewer, if you want to read all of "Life's Manhattan Project" for free - with colourful illustrations by the author to boot - cling to this blog site like a shipwrecked sailor clings to a log.

Otherwise, be prepared to pony up $9.99 and taxes to get the e-book version from Amazon Kindle : black and white text without the illustrations.

Or patiently wait for the off chance it might published in hardcover by one of the Big Six/ Five/ Four  publishers at $39.95 a pop.

On that lachyrmose day, it might be expensive enough to be dissected by even the very overwhelmed book reviewers at the New York Times....

Archive of older posts

Why My Urgency ?

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

PEER REVIEW

The best form of 'peer review' is a diversity of comments from around the world - I welcome yours.