Category: books

the 10 oddest travel guidebooks

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Thanks Peter Long for the tip on guides for my future travel:

The 10 oddest travel guides ever published.
By Paul Collins …

1. The Truth About Hunting in Today’s Africa, and How To Go on Safari for $690.00, by George Leonard Herter (1963)

2. A Guide Through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, by William Wordsworth (5th edition, 1835)

3. Das Generalgouvernement, by Karl Baedeker (1943)

4. Fodor’s Indian America, by Jamake Highwater (1975)

5. Bollocks to Alton Towers by Robin Halstead, et al. (2006)

6. Travel Guide of Negro Hotels and Guest Houses, by Afro-American Newspapers (1942)

7. Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations, by John Ryan et al. (2006)

8. The Night Climbers of Cambridge, by “Whipplesnaith” (1937)

9. A Tramp Trip: How To See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day, by Lee Meriwether (1886)

10. Overland to India and Australia, by the BIT Travel & Help Service (1970)

“Baboons Are Simply Too Small for Leopard Bait” – Slate.com

Uncommonly British Days Out

Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out

Barbecue Secrets DELUXE

On By Rick McIn barbecue, books, foodLeave a comment

From Rockin’ Ronnie by email:


Greetings, barbecue fans!

ron1531.jpgAfter a year-long sabbatical, my barbecue batteries are recharged and I’m back in the game. I’m writing to let you know that I’m working on my next book, a special expanded edition of Barbecue Secrets called Barbecue Secrets DELUXE!

The full-color book will include the best recipes, tips and stories from Barbecue Secrets as well as my second book, Planking Secrets. It will also have a bunch of new recipes, new photos and some new stories from my last four years along the barbecue trail.

I’m in the middle of putting together the manuscript of the book, and I’m having a blast!

I have two invitations for you to join in the fun:

1. I invite you to follow along and preview some of the new recipes before the book comes out. I’ll be showcasing them on my Barbecue Secrets blog at http://barbecuesecrets.libsyn.com/. There are already a couple of great summer salsa recipes up there now. Whenever I post a new recipe I’ll point to it with a post on my Twitter account. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/rockinronnie.

2. You’re also invited to share a favorite grilling, plank-cooking or barbecue recipe. If I include it in the new book I’ll make sure you get credited and I’ll give you a free copy when it’s published!

Also, Denzel Sandberg and I have launched the “Ronnie & Denzel’s” line of all-natural barbecue sauces. Check it out on my website:

That’s all for now. If you’re going to be up at Whistler for the Canadian National Barbecue Championships on the first weekend of August, I’ll see you there. The Butt Shredders are putting on our aprons in an attempt to reclaim that big trophy. Otherwise, have a great summer and happy cooking!

Yours forever in smoke,
Rockin’ Ronnie

—————————————–
Ron “Rockin’ Ronnie” Shewchuk
Barbecue Evangelist

RonShewchuk.com

The Stone Diaries – finally

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Carol Shields‘ 1995 novel is essential CanLit since it won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.

Her “profound insights into human nature” make it essential. Or so they tell me.

… the fictional autobiography about the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through marriage and motherhood, Daisy struggles to find contentment, never truly understanding her life’s true purpose. …

Wikipedia

I’ve started and failed to finish this classic several times over the years. Yet recently I got through an audio version. Yay me.

MP3 files got jumbled, though. The timeline jumped forward and backward somewhat randomly. I kind of liked that.

The Stone Diaries (Penguin Essential Edition)

The Stone Diaries (Penguin Essential Edition)

Leave a comment if you have an opinion on this book.

Nudge – the book – libertarian paternalism

On By Rick McIn books, economicsLeave a comment

Listened to an Economist magazine interview with one of the authors of a fascinating new book called Nudge.

Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

… how to steer people toward better health, sounder investments, and cleaner environments without depriving them of their inalienable right to make a mess of things if they want to.

Thaler is a hard core economist who believes government should intervene in our lives. But only by giving us better information to make decisions.

… policymakers should “focus on making the world easier”, he argues in a new book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness”, written with Cass Sunstein, a law professor (and an adviser to Barack Obama). By this he means defining more carefully and simply the financial choices that people have to make, and building “sensible default options” into the design of financial products …

Getting it right on the money – The Economist

the greatest recluse author – Trevanian

On By Rick McIn books, product endorsements1 Comment

I recently learned that one of my favourite authors died in 2005.

One obituary:

TREVANIAN, author of The Eiger Sanction, Shibumi and The Summer of Katya, is no longer with us. He died on Dec. 14 in London. Even when he was alive, no one knew who he was, because Trevanian was merely a pseudonym. Rodney Whitaker was his real name, and he published both fiction and nonfiction under multiple pen names. He may be the only person who can claim to have sold millions of books worldwide without making one single promotional appearance or doing one single booksigning or live interview. …

Metroactive

It was often rumored that he was actually Robert Ludlum using a pen name to which Trevanian stated, “I don’t even know who he is.

Mr. Whitaker lived much of his life in a little Basque village on the French side of the Pyrenees and used it as a setting in his writing.

Trevanian tried to disappear in 1979, actually doing a farewell interview with the NY Times that year. But that pseudonym did not die until The Summer of Katya (1983).

Then nothing for 15-years.

When I saw — unexpectedly — Incident at Twenty-Mile (1998) appear on the shelves, I assumed it was a successor, perhaps a son. The book was excellent — but much different than his earlier work.

Then <a href=”Hot Night in the City (2001)

And Death Dance (2002)

Finally, the last book before his death:

crazyladies.jpg

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street: A Memoir (2006)

It’s an excellent read, somewhat based on the author’s own life. A life still shrouded in mystery.

Trevanian’s final novel is the warm, entertaining coming-of-age story of an imaginative boy in working class New York.

He has additional unpublished works in the works, I understand.

Middlesex wins most important prize in literature

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Middlesex is a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. It was published in 2002 and was selected the summer 2007 must read for Oprah’s Book Club.

A Novel

Middlesex: A Novel

Just finished listening to it on MP3. Excellent.

The narrator and protagonist, Calliope Stephanides (later called “Cal”), an intersexed person of Greek descent …

Born a girl, he lives his live as a man.

The books jumps between the story of his coming-of-age and his immigrant family history.

New to me in this book was the horrific description of the Great Fire of Smyrna (1920). I’ve often wondered why Greeks and Turks are such mortal enemies. It’s because of atrocities like this: up to 360,000 Anatolian Greeks killed in the Pontic Greek Genocide during and after WW I.

It’s from this horror that Cal’s grandparents (brother and sister) escape to Detroit, Michigan.

Middlesex is entertaining and fascinating from start to finish. Extremely well written, yet very down-to-Earth and accessible. It would make a terrific movie.

The author Jeffrey Eugenides teaches at Princeton.

eugenides_jeffrey200211072.gif

Mighty Hermaphrodite – NY Review of Books

eat whatever you want without gaining weight

On By Rick McIn barbecue, books, food, good newsLeave a comment

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has some good news …

images.jpegDo you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. …

NY Times

He’s the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Fleshmarket Alley – Ian Rankin

On By Rick McIn books, product endorsements, TVLeave a comment

200px-ianrankin.jpgOver the years at least a half dozen people have recommended the Scottish author Ian Rankin.

I’ve just finished listening to one of his books on MP3. Excellent.

Rankin is a “grape-picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist, college secretary and punk musician” turned writer.

Fleshmarket Close is a 2004 novel … named after a real close off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. It is the fifteenth of the Inspector Rebus novels. It was released in the USA under the title Fleshmarket Alley. It was the second episode in the second Rebus television series starring Ken Stott, airing in 2006.

I’d like to see that BBC production. Rebus is a compelling, complex character.

An Inspector Rebus Novel

Fleshmarket Alley: An Inspector Rebus Novel

If you like crime fiction, Ian Rankin is highly recommended.

listen to statistician Bjorn Lomborg

On By Rick McIn books, health & fitnessLeave a comment

… Global warming is an important issue and one which we should address. But there is no sense of proportion either in environmental terms, or indeed in terms of the other issues facing the world.

If you just take the environmental problem first, it’s very clear that what causes by far the majority of deaths is lack clean drinking water and lack of sanitation. Millions of people are dying each year from this. …

mariama-drinking-clean-tangarwashane-water-smaller-735851.jpg
Courier-Journal

The second biggest problem is indoor air pollution, which probably kills somewhere between 1 and 3 million people each year, basically because people are too poor to use good fuels and end up using dung or cardboard or whatever they can find. Only a very distant third comes climate change, which the WHO puts at 150,000 to die right now. …

indoor-air-pollution.jpg

One of the top climate change economists has modelled – and several papers that came out a couple of weeks ago essentially point out – that climate change will probably mean fewer deaths, not more deaths. It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths.

… the bottom line is there are many problems in the world where we can do much more at much lower cost. …

TCS Daily – A Conversation with Bjorn Lomborg

Lomborg’s the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World.

the decline of Lonely Planet

On By Rick McIn books, product complaints, travelLeave a comment

Through my websites, people have bought hundreds, perhaps thousands of Lonely Planet guidebooks. They reinvented the genre, in my opinion. Never buy any other company without first comparing against LP.

Sadly, for the past 6-7 years I’ve started to notice problems.

LP author Thomas Kohnstamm has a new book coming out this week:

A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism

Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism

THE Lonely Planet guidebook empire is reeling from claims by one of its authors that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay.

Thomas Kohnstamm also claims in a book that he accepted free travel, in contravention of the Melbourne-based company’s policy.

His revelations have rocked the travel publisher, which sells more than six million guides a year – guides that generations of tourists have come to rely on.

Mr Kohnstamm, whose book is titled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? said yesterday that he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including their titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, South America, Venezuela and Chile.

In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.

“They didn’t pay me enough to go Colombia,” he said.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating – an intern in the Colombian consulate. …

News.com.au

These days I am more likely to buy from other companies: Moon and Footprint, for two.

BBC recently purchased controlling interest in Lonely Planet. BBC has their own problems, however. I’m not sure LP can recover.