The first book in Jon Scieszka’s new series introduces Jack Truck and his buddy Dump Truck Dan, best friends who share a passion for destruction.
NY Times reviews, 2, ny-times-reviews
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Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. The olive-coloured Avon ripples away, three or four metres further below. In the background is an arched pedestrian bridge, a willow tree with its lower fronds stroking the water, and the massive red brick wall of a derelict flour mill. In the next picture, Pavey is standing next to the freshly whitewashed wall of the White Bear pub, looking more agitated, as if he’s afraid I still haven’t got the point. It’s the same stance, except that this time the hand has risen above his head. It hovers about two metres above the level of the road; it comes three-quarters of the way up the casement of the pub window. I got the point. If you’d tried to stand where Pavey was standing on Monday, 23 July 2007 - the day water levels peaked in Tewkesbury - you’d have been treading water., When the Floods Came · James Meek on England’s Water, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/meek01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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When Raymond Williams died suddenly, aged 66, in January 1988, estimations of him were sharply divided. There were those who regarded him as a deservedly influential literary and cultural critic, a major socialist theorist and an exemplary instance of the union of intellectual seriousness and political purpose. There were others who thought he had for too long enjoyed an inflated reputation, that he was a muddy thinker and verbose writer who had been swept to a form of cultural celebrity by the vogue for working-class sentimentalism in the 1960s and lefter-than-thou self-righteousness in the 1970s., Upwards and Onwards · Stefan Collini: On Raymond Williams, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/coll01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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Towards the end of Bernhard Schlink’s best-known novel, The Reader, the narrator is pondering his future after taking his state exam in law. He has just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.’ He has lost his belief in post-Enlightenment law as enacting a gradual but steady progress towards ‘greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks and retreats’. Now the law seems to him more like Odysseus’ journey - a process that endlessly circles back to its original starting point only to set off again. In this reading, the Odyssey is a story of motion, at once successful and futile, driven and without aim: ‘What else is the history of law?’, The Iron Rule · Jacqueline Rose: Bernhard Schlink’s Guilt, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/rose01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep. Why would we ever allow ourselves to drop off if sleeping was entirely optional? Sleep is such a dangerous place to go to from consciousness: who in their right mind would give up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a person when they’re not looking? As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time., Diary · Jenny Diski tries to stay awake, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/disk01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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, Short Cuts · Jeremy Harding tries to listen to the World Service, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/hard01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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, In the Park · Peter Campbell: Frank Gehry’s Pavilion, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/camp01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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New Labour’s exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which is, let’s not forget, still in power. The phenomenon seemed odd when it began - Lance Price was called in front of a Parliamentary committee in December 2005 to account for his temerity in publishing his insider’s account. By now we’re used to it, and it’s getting to the point where it would be more surprising for a New Labour insider not to publish a book explaining how he/she was both a. more at the centre of things than anybody had hitherto suspected while also b. not to blame for any of the stuff that went wrong., Not My Fault · John Lanchester: New Labour’s Terrible Memoirs, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/lanc01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel. I got to know both of my travelling companions during a brief period living in the town of Marfa, Texas, which is also where I found the truck, parked in front of the post office: boxy, banged up, covered in sky-blue house paint, the half-smashed windshield a lattice of stars and linear cracks, like a flag. A Mexican man in his sixties walked outside with his mail and drove it away. Then I found it parked out by the cemetery. Jesse Santesteban, the owner, showed me where he’d signed the engine compartment like an artist, and said I could take a closer look. The doors had handmade wooden armrests, and the seatbelts were fashioned of canvas and chain link. An orange shag carpet covered the floorboards. I offered him $1200 cash. He handed over a green plastic keychain that read ‘Laugh, live, love and be happy!’ and warned: ‘Don’t take it over 45 or it’ll throw a rod.’ A friend later explained: ‘That’s a polite way of saying the engine will explode.’, Diary · Sean Wilsey Goes Slow, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/wils07_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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‘Netherland’ is an ambiguous word. It evokes, of course, the Netherlands inhabited by the Dutch, one of whom, Hans van den Broek, tells this story of a few late years spent in that New World city founded almost four hundred years ago on Manhattan Island as New Amsterdam, in what was then the territory of New Netherland. But ‘netherland’ could also mean any faraway place, as in those ‘nether regions’ of the city where Hans’s teammates from the Staten Island Cricket Club spend their nights. (Hans spends his nights in Chelsea, a Manhattan neighbourhood hardly described in this book, notable for a high concentration of well-built gay men, new condominiums, art galleries, bank branches and large home-furnishing outlets.) ‘Netherland’ also has sinister overtones of Never Never Land, and sounds like a euphemism for Hades., Men in White · Benjamin Kunkel: Another Ian McEwan!, http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/kunk01_.html, http://www.lrb.co.uk/homerss.xml, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif,
London review, 1, london-review
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