Letters Remain

Tag: books

  • Why Preserve Endangered Languages?

    With his book on “the politics of language” due to be published next year, international correspondent for The Economist, Robert Lane Green, is interviewed in More Intelligent Life. The discussion I find most intriguing is this on the saving of threatened world languages: Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Is there a book that explains…

  • The Body Language Resource

    That “gestures come in clusters, like words in a sentence, and that they must be interpreted in the context in which you observe them” is the golden rule of understanding body language, says ‘The Book of Body Language’: a fantastically comprehensive body language resource, hosted by Westside Toastmasters. In the chapter on hand and thumb…

  • The New Nature-Nurture Argument

    As it stands, the nature-nurture debate is wrong, proposes David Shenk in his book on the subject, The Genius in All of Us. Shenk submits the idea that we overestimate the effect genes have on many heritable traits, especially intelligence (or that ever-elusive ‘genius’). According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff…

  • Fiction-Writing Rules, from Fiction Writers

    Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s lauded book of the same name, Ten Rules of Writing, The Guardian asks a selection of 28 authors (from Margaret Atwood to Will Self) for their ten rules of writing for the aspiring fiction author (part two). Elmore Leonard’s ten are included, and he summarises them with the following: My most important rule…

  • Things Every Programmer Should Know (Languages)

    As part of a continuing series*, O’Reilly requested “pearls of wisdom for programmers” from leading practitioners of the craft, publishing the responses. The end result is the O’Reilly Commons wiki, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. The contributions that appear in the final, published book are freely available as are sixty-eight further contributions that didn’t…

  • Our Fascination with Cookbooks

    Cookbooks are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cooking while hiding that fact between the sautéing of onions and the reduction of the sauce. That wonderful proposition comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fascination with cookbooks, and how they are used in our homes. The first thing a cadet…

  • The Success of James Patterson

    In what is likely the most extensive profile of author James Patterson I’ve read, we are bombarded by a plethora of incredible statistics: Patterson outsells John Grisham, Stephen King and Dan Brown combined; he authored one in every 17 hardback novels bought in the U.S. since 2006; and he has written 51 New York Times bestsellers…

  • Dava Sobel on Writing Science Books Full-Time

    Reflecting on her career as a science writer (she started as a technical writer at IBM before graduating into science journalism), Dava Sobel–author of the award-winning book Longitude–offers some thoughts on what it means to be a full-time author of popular science books: Both my parents loved to read, convincing me by their behavior that the best way…

  • Ways of Reading, Writing, Learning

    A Working Library’s Ways of Reading could be called the nine rules of reading, writing, and learning. My favourite three: Always read with a pen in hand. The pen should be used both to mark the text you want to remember and to write from where the text leaves you. Think of the text as the…

  • Anatomy of a Price War

    With the recent Amazon–Walmart price war on books and the 1992 airline industry price war as the backdrop, James Surowiecki takes a look at how price wars start, how they can be avoided, and how to (possibly) win at them. The best way to win a price war, then, is not to play in the…