“Call for Book Reviewers and Bloggers - PopMatters” plus 2 more |
- Call for Book Reviewers and Bloggers - PopMatters
- Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers - Associated Content
- Business Book Reviews - Time
| Call for Book Reviewers and Bloggers - PopMatters Posted: 13 Apr 2010 07:45 AM PDT PopMatters seeks intelligent and open minds to review books covering the entire spectrum of popular culture, from the big guns of the megapublishers to the edgy voices coming from the radical indie presses. Ideal reviews provide contextual commentary and bring an historical awareness to the piece—PopMatters book reviews are far more substantial than the average "liked it / hated it" review. ***Although we love fiction at PopMatters, we're presently looking for more coverage of non-fiction titles, particularly coverage of a range of topics in cultural history.*** We are happy to arrange author interviews when possible, as well. Many of our writers are called upon for their opinion by notable members of the media such as the BBC, NPR, MSNBC, Radio Australia, and VH1. Publications such as USA Today.com, Alternet.org, and Movies.com regularly pick up links to PopMatters articles and post quotes from PopMatters writers. Many PopMatters stories are carried across McClatchey-Tribune's wire services with more than 60 US newspapers and 1,200 media clients worldwide and MCT Campus, a national wire service reaching more than 1,000 college and high school newspapers. Interested parties should send a query with your background and areas of interest, along with three samples of your writing, including one review of a book not in our archive that would be your first published piece at PopMatters if you are accepted, to: Interested in writing for the PopMatters' books blog, Re:Print? In Re:Print, we are especially interested in covering new vistas in publishing (eBooks, web-exclusive publishing, hypertext projects) and book-related issues, such as censorship, rights arguments, and the struggle for essential truth in memoir and non-fiction. Send your application to:
Note: we are unable to pay you monetarily for your work at this time. However, you are not uncompensated in some form; your 'pay', as it were, is the privilege of publishing with this reputable magazine, wherein you are rewarded with this platform to broaden your readership, currently over 1.2 million unique readers per month, and counting. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers - Associated Content Posted: 13 Apr 2010 07:45 AM PDT Gaudy Night is the third book about Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, but the first one I read about both of them. I wish in some ways I'd been more careful to read the other two first, because then the way their relationship developed would have been much more satisfying. But it was still a really wonderful read, and I love where Sayers takes her characters. For the curious, you ought to read Strong Poison and Have His Carcase before starting Gaudy Night, if you wish to read them in order. First and foremost, this is a mystery, and a very good one. Harriet returns to her college of Shrewsbury at Oxford, and is shocked when she finds a horrible drawing on the grounds. Later she finds a nasty message shoved in her pocket. Some of the professors (all female, for this is a women's college) also start finding horrible notes - one professor's work is destroyed - and eventually the students are targeted as well. Harriet is drawn into the mystery at the request of the Dean, and spends a good deal of time analyzing the notes and trying to catch the "Poison-Pen" at work. Which of the college's female professors would stoop to such low horrors and crude messages? As usual, Sayers' characters are so well-drawn that I feel I know them in real life. This book really brings Harriet into her own as a character. She was barely in the first book, Strong Poison (though she did give a good account of herself when she was onstage), and though I'm not quite done with Have His Carcase it seems the characters' relationships are definitely secondary to the mystery. Gaudy Night is different, for although it is a cracking good mystery, it isn't just that. It's a wonderful character and relationship study. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Posted: 06 Apr 2010 05:02 AM PDT The End of Wall Street Roger Lowenstein (Penguin Press; 339 pages) If a novelist lined up as many dramatic events as the author does here, his work would be blasted as contrived. Lowenstein, a magnificent business writer, creates an almost novelistic accounting of the all-too-real 2008 financial collapse. The book opens in late summer: Lehman Brothers is a hairbreadth away from collapse, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been taken over by the feds, and AIG is veering toward disaster. After several decades of laissez-faire regulation, Wall Street is crying out to be rescued by the government. The irony is overpowering, says Lowenstein. "Less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when prevailing orthodoxy held that the free market could govern itself, and when financial regulation seemed destined for near irrelevancy, the United States was compelled to socialize lending and mortgage risk, and even the ownership of banks, on a scale that would have made Lenin smile." Lowenstein is terrific at walking the reader through complex economic events, and he artfully traces the development of the subprime-mortgage disaster. It sounds like a lofty ideal when Angelo Mozilo, a co-founder of Countrywide, says in a speech in 2003, "Expanding the American dream of homeownership must continue to be our mission, not solely for the purpose of benefiting corporate America, but more importantly, to make our country a better place." Countrywide and others made mortgages available to anyone with a pulse, aided and abetted by Wall Street, which created the market for exotic mortgage derivatives. By 2008, "banks and investors had plied the average American with mortgage debt on such speculative and unthinking terms that not just America's economy but the world's economy ultimately capsized." Lowenstein has a pitch-perfect sense of the Street's monumental recklessness. The chorus line of overpaid bad actors in this book is endless. Held out for particular scorn is Lehman CEO Richard Fuld, who has "the daring of a gambler who believes, deep down, that he will always be able to play the last card." Maybe he did, yet as the book impressively shows, Fuld lost. We all did. THE BOTTOM LINE: Is anyone in charge here? Wall Street as we knew it failed and needs a reboot. The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World Walter Kiechel III (Harvard Business; 347 pages) Kiechel, a former managing editor of FORTUNE, hails the rise of strategy, saying it has eclipsed "any other change worked in the intellectual landscape of business over the past 50 years." The "lords" are Bruce Henderson of BCG, Bill Bain of Bain & Co., Fred Gluck of McKinsey and Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. He traces their quest to understand how companies gain competitive advantage. The strategy revolution, Kiechel writes, "features a rowdy parade of ideas and analytical techniques jostling each other down the historical road." THE BOTTOM LINE: Who says that business is anti-intellectual? Thank You for Firing Me! How to Catch the Next Wave of Success After You Lose Your Job Kitty Martini and Candice Reed (Sterling; 232 pages) Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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