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Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee - Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
- Year: 2010
- Pages: 304
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- №42
Hoarding recently got a representative–for better or worse–in pop culture with the arrival of TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive; I’ll leave it to your own judgment if this is a good or bad thing, or just how “pop culture” TLC is, but in any case, it goes to show the tabloid power of psychological problems. Everyone gapes and gawks at home filled to the ceilings with piles of accumulated junk and wonders how these squirrely people can live their lives this way.
Stuff is an attempt by a noted academic and active therapist in the field (Randy Frost, along with a coauthor who is rarely mentioned by name) to summarize the state of scientific knowledge about hoarding, where it comes from, why it doesn’t easily conform to stereotypes, and how at least some of these people can be successfully treated.
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The Magicians
by Lev Grossman - Publisher: Plume
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 416
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- №41
In 2009, you cannot write a book about young magicians without knowing that your book will be held up against the Harry Potter series and probably discarded. Since J.K. Rowling dropped her cultural bomb on us all those years ago, we’ve already seen a glut of second-rate wizardry series, just as Stephenie Meyer’s already-execrable Twilight Series launched a tidal wave of slapdash “vampire” novels trying to catch even a sliver of the current mania. Ironically enough, when Grossman did a piece on Meyer for Time, he gushed and flattered and compared her to Rowling in a way that will be important later.
Lev Grossman is not a stupid man; his admiration for Meyer notwithstanding (and I hold the hope that it’s more recognition of her pop lit. cachet), his book reviews for Time are usually pretty good, and he seems like an all-around sensible guy. It seems unlikely, then, that he would dash out yet another book about teenage wizards and expect, without any sense of irony, for it to be lauded and praised. No, what you’ll find is that The Magicians is one part pastiche, one part bildungsroman, two parts satire, and one part miserable, myopic teenage pop lit.
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Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink - Publisher: Riverhead
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 256
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- №40
My interest in Drive was piqued by a presentation that Pink gave during a TED talk. The idea itself is interesting, but it also dovetails nicely with my general focus of study during my MBA coursework , namely intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. That might sound a little like jargon; it gets easier.
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Hitch-22
by Christopher Hitchens - Publisher: Twelve
- Year: 2010
- Pages: 448
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- №39
Christopher Hitchens is hard to get a handle on. The same people who gleefully forward me his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would of course be aghast at his most controversial book, God is Not Great; similarly, those who would cheer No One Left to Lie To: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton wouldn’t likely appreciate The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A man who for many years called himself a socialist and or a Trotskyist, Hitchens now finds himself largely decamped from the Left, operating in some vague political DMZ, his politics both hawkish and liberal.
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- color
- n. The spectral composition of visible light.
- n. A particular set of visible spectral compositions, perceived or named as a class[.]
The modern English Color is now the same as the Latin from which it came, though the intervening steps are not: the Latin led to the Old French color, which led to the Anglo-Norman colur, which visited Middle English as colour. The Old Latin root is colos, which referred not to color in general but any sort of covering, which contributed to the earliest sense of the world, which referred to the color of the skin or complexion in particular. The Old Latin comes from the PIE *kel-, meaning to cover or conceal. Our modern definition is from the 14th century, from Middle English, at which point it had replaced the word previously employed, blee.
Blee was a perfectly lovely word, from the Old English blēo, and I’m sorry it left the language. It came from the Proto-Germanic *blījan (“light” or “happy”), itself from PIE *bhlē̆i-, which also meant “light” in color or complexion. Along an evolutionary fork, it gave us the Old English blīþe, from whence “blithe” (as in “blithely”), which meant a light of mood (“glad”) rather than of color.
Of course, as anyone who’s ever looked at a box of crayons can attest, there is a wide variety of color words in use, despite the relatively circumscribed nature of our word for the phenomenon in general.
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Notes from a Small Island
by Bill Bryson - Publisher: Harper Perennial
- Year: 1997
- Pages: 282
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- №38
There is a peculiarity to Englishness which is historical, polite, and understated. After all, consider that England was, at one time, one of the most powerful nations on the planet and remained so for many years, despite the size of its landmass being vanishingly small and its natural resources slight. At the same time it was flashing its Germanic roots by turning the rest of the world into its empire, it was also cementing its reputation for stodginess and quaintness. Bill Bryson, though a native of Iowa and everything that entails, lived in the U.K. for most of his adult life, before moving back to the US in 1995 (and eventually winding up back across the Atlantic in 2003).
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