Books & Reviews
Sunday, 29 January 2012
ANN Patchett's seventh novel, State of Wonder made a big splash upon publication, with many critics comparing it to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This is nonsense. Comparing Kurtz, the cruel conqueror of an African tribe in the heart of the...
Sunday, 22 January 2012
APPLE has unveiled a glimpse of the classroom of the future, launching a new version of its iBooks software that will allow publishers to create interactive textbooks for iPad-owning students.The new textbooks offer a host of functions which experts...
THE Volkswagen Beetle has a unique and colorful history, with principal characters that include the Nazi dictator who personified evil, the legendary designer of Germany's most celebrated race cars and the Jewish advertising executive who pioneered...
Sunday, 15 January 2012
THIS is a collector's item. And not just because of its obvious historical importance. The first edition of Pathlight: New Chinese Writing magazine is a metaphor of the cooperation between Chinese and Western agencies in this case, the influential...
MEDIA icon Bill Cosby at 74 still looms larger than life over the American psyche. Emerging from a Philadelphia housing project, ultimately success followed success as a comedian, actor, producer, author, educator, musician and activist.Breaking US...
Sunday, 8 January 2012
FIRST lady Michelle Obama is a behind-the-scenes force in the White House whose opinions on policy and politics drew her into conflict with presidential advisers and who bristled at some of the demands and constraints of life as the president's wife...
THE rapid rise in Chinese power in East Asia is causing a re-examination of traditional attitudes and policies in the region. Thant Myint-U examines with an historian's eye the relations among India and China and the land in-between.That the...
Sunday, 25 December 2011
ON Benjamin Buchholz's second day in Iraq as a US army officer, a young Iraqi girl was struck and killed by a military convoy while trying to catch a bottle of water thrown to children by the roadside as a gift.!The tragedy and its aftermath...
CHINESE-AMERICAN writer Yan Geling has written about various women with dramatic stories. Now, she has switched her subject matter to a man for Inmate Lu Yanshi. In her latest novel, Yan narrates the ups and downs of protagonist Lu Yanshi's life...
Sunday, 18 December 2011
NOTORIOUS British double agent Kim Philby may be regarded as a traitor in his home country but 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union he remains a hero in Russia for divulging Western secrets.A Russian publisher has unveiled a major new...
ONE of the reasons why the otherwise peripatetic Xu Xi (pic) has been living mostly in Hong Kong for the last two years is her commitment to facilitating the rise of new writing from Asia.She helped design Asia's first low-residency master's in fine...
RUSSELL Hoban (pic), the prolific fantasy and children's author perhaps best known for Riddley Walker, a post-apocalyptic novel that relied on a language he created, has died, his publisher said on Thursday. He was 86. The former illustrator,...
Sunday, 11 December 2011
IT'S A bit of a surprise meeting Gish Jen. One doesn't quite expect the writer to be so diminutive, almost bird-like in her demeanour, flighty, emotional and cheerful laughing and crying almost in the same breath as she talks. A little gravitas...
RICHARD Branson swashbuckling billionaire entrepreneur, sportsman and activist is accustomed to speaking his mind. Ask the employees and customers of his Virgin group of more than 400 companies around the world.From records to airlines, mobile...
Sunday, 27 November 2011
IN THE mid-1980s John Grisham, then a small-town lawyer and disillusioned member of the Mississippi state legislature, would fill the time between meetings and court hearings writing a novel about an ambitious young lawyer embroiled in a life-or-...
THE American beat generation author Jack Kerouac is said to have spent just eight days on active service in the US merchant marines on board the SS Dorchester in 1942; but his short stay furnished him with notes for his first novel and, after nearly...
Sunday, 20 November 2011
LECH Walesa's wife says she paid a huge price for her husband's struggle against communism. In an autobiography coming out next week, Danuta Walesa talks publicly for the first time about her loneliness and fear for the family's unity as her...
TROPICAL weather can have a desultory effect on some people, though it doesn't slow down the native conniver at the heart of George Orwell's novel Burmese Days. The personal and political intrigue between the natives of Burma (now known as Myanmar...
Sunday, 13 November 2011
CATHERINE the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House), by Robert K. Massie: Pulitzer Prize laureate Massie has written a biography of Russia's great Empress Catherine that is well, great. Massie, awarded the Pulitzer for Peter the Great, knows...
EVERYBODY knows at least one a pretentious foodie who insists on froo-froo ingredients, laborious techniques and over-the-top dishes. Well, this year they're out of luck. Because 2011 was a year when cookbooks even those by high-end and...
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