photo by Jerry Bauer
Friday, November 16, 2007 at 07:44AM My Genghis Khan novel Ruler of the Sky will finally get reissued in the U.S. My agent just informed me that a company called Boyston Books, located in Manhattan, wants to bring out a new edition, and they have obtained hardcover and trade paperback rights.
In the meantime, if you read German, check out this edition; Ruler has just been reissued yet again in Germany.
Friday, November 16, 2007 at 05:52AM I am a bit late in getting to this, but Frank Rich's New York Times column of last Sunday, about coups in Pakistan and the US, resonated with Naomi Wolf's even more alarming piece at the Huffington Post about growing restrictions on travel and what they might portend.
Rich writes, "Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon."
Monday, November 12, 2007 at 06:17AM Over at his blog at the Atlantic's site, Matthew Yglesias reminds us that "smart correspondents have made the point that one of the...oddities of western press coverage of Benazir Bhutto is that you tend not to hear about how she's a huge crook. Corruption in a middle-income country, of course, is nothing new and Pakistan in general is not a paragon of good governance. Still, the best of my knowledge Bhutto and her husband [Asif Zardari] stand out as unusually corrupt by Pakistani standards, which is precisely how she wound up ejected from power."
Yglesias links to an article by the New York Times's John F. Burns, published on January 9, 1998--a long piece, but extremely illuminating.
Sunday, November 11, 2007 at 12:05PM There are eulogies galore for Norman Mailer, but one of my personal favorites is "The Big Guy," blogger Phil Nugent's appreciation.
Saturday, November 10, 2007 at 07:48AM Listened yesterday to a speech of Paul Krugman's on American Public Media's Word for Word. Turned out to be unexpectedly uplifting and heartening, as is this superb review by Michael Tomasky.