pivic Stockholm, Sweden

Colbert, previously of The Daily Show, today resides over The Colbert Report, a near-daily TV extravaganza in which he plays an American right-wing TV pundit, thrashing everything liberal in his path. While the show deals with reality, its contents are rarely as such. For a lot of outsiders - i.e. non-Americans* - the contents of his show often seem exotic, making the humor quite evident. To a lot of Americans, I know this is not the case. As the syndicated right-wing rhetoric is often reminiscent of Hitler's charms, Colbert evolves his humor on that and hence, his show is ripe with comments like:

"Once upon a time, racism was a terrible problem in this country."

"If there's a bigger contributor to left-wing elitist brainwashing than colleges and universities, I'd like to see it. There's an old saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Which means a _lot_ of knowledge must be a _really_ dangerous thing. And it is. Look no further than the example of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. He skipped sixth grade, got a Bachelor's from Harvard followed by a Master's and a Ph.D., and then embarked on a distinguished academic career of blowing people up. Most Ph.D. biographies have similar endings."

So, the book is much of the same, also with annotated margin comments! Chapter names vary from The Family, Religion, Sex & Dating, Homosexuals to Class War, The Media, Immigrants and Science, which are just as confrontational, prejudiced, narcissistic and funny as you'd expect.

Reading this book is quite like watching his show. Or watching Bill Hicks do his routine about how the American government fabricated the story on Oswald killing JFK. It's reality gift-wrapped, although Hicks wasn't right-winged, erhm.

All in all, a very funny read that aggravated me on more than one occasion, enlightened me on several and made me think of another Colbert quote:

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

* This isn't applicable to countries where one person owns all media. Yes, you, Italy, and...Rupert Murdoch!

This is a very well-written pop-psychological look on the borderline personality disorder. The book is quite dated: it’s built on the diagnosis criteria from DSM-III and as such omits mentalisation-based treatment as the method is just too new. But otherwise, to me (a complete layman), this is very well-written and contains many examples of how people with BPD can behave, and what most have in common. The book is written for the lay-person and is very easy to understand. I think all who read it will get the big picture and a firm grasp of the mechanics of the borderline – of course generally speaking. The many examples throughout the book are really great, and there’s a portion written for the persons who aren’t diagnosed with BPD but live/cope/work with somebody borderline.

If I overlook how abject Hitchens' arrogance at times threatens to overlook the importance of this book, it is very valid in this time. This book delves into how religion, indeed, poisons everything it touches, and responds to ideas such as "faith brings happiness" and "what would the world be like without faith?". It also displays how religions are man-made, anti-intellectual and basically corrupt. While it's OK for christians to stone people who make fun of bald men, for muslims to pay the local imam cash to let it be known that he/she is in straight descendant from Mohammed and for followers of the Dalai Lama to think the Heavens appointed him (and for Steven Segal to be made "highly enlightened" for the right amount of cash) and for rabbis to bite the foreskins off young boys, reason doesn't. The power of this book is in Hitchens' ability to display how ludicrous it would be to have faith of the wrong kind.

A documentary on Mary Bell, a girl who in 1968, aged 10, killed the first of two younger boys. Sereny has done startling work with hundreds of hours of interviews with Bell about her childhood, her extremely damaged mother, what happened to her during and after the trial, and what has become of her life up until the mid-1990s. This is a highly insightful look into the mind of a child whose existence was torn apart due to her mother's and her own actions, and also into what I think is the kill-the-monster attitude that modern society carries, e.g. in the James Bulger case. This puts Deborah Spungen's book on her daughter in the corner - and hopefully lets us forget it.

I love 33 1/3. My fave title is "Paul's Boutique", but this one is up there.

Vincentelli offers trivia (e.g. Lasse Hallström's apartment being the one used as Agnetha's in his video for "One Of Us") next to very interesting gems (e.g. starting "Dancing Queen" with the chorus because Björn & Benny couldn't find a proper way to start it) and intricate information on how ABBA fit/didn't fit culturally during the 70s and 80s, and how "ABBA Gold" changed the general perception of ABBA in the 90s.

This is, culturally speaking, an in-depth look of how one of the most popular bands of the 20th century (and beyond) crafted some of their very best songs, a bit of what their world looked like and why we're bonkers for these wonderful tracks. A work of love.

I’ve been listening to Neubauten for a long time, and this book is enlightening. It consists of 300 pages of interview material with all former members conducted during 43 interviews, yet that’s not the point. “Nur was nicht is, ist möglich.” – “Just what is not is possible”, as Blixa Bargeld sings in “Ende Neu”, defines the anarchic knife’s edge where this band, that has now existed for more than 28 years, is and always has been. The book takes the reader from their shaky, anarchic and drug-addled existence in 1980, West Berlin, to their present, third roster, explaining where their journey has taken them. From funny anecdotes to how the band squandered themselves through drugs (in ways both good and bad, as Neubauten logic has it), how the band nearly quit in the mid 90s and what instruments, structures, lyrics, sound, politics and language means to them. Highly interesting if you’re into the band, very well-written biography on a ground-breaking band if you’re not.

If one can say anything about this book without spoiling some of the elements, I'd say you cannot even move past the first page, so for those paranoid, read no further!

This is an absolutely marvellous book on a seemingly rampant blindness that leave its victims in a visual sea of milky white. Saramago delves into what this blindness means on many levels, foremost individually as well as for society in large, and shows humanity from within its core in a variety of ways.

To me, this book displays humankind and the surrounding world at the base level. When stripped of sight, our senses are shocked, and then, as through cooking, reduced to display our core values.

I haven't read Saramago prior to this novel, but I hear his way of writing is the same almost everywhere: long sentences, few punctuations and no quotation marks to show who's saying what in dialogue. It's very interesting, yet I think some may dislike it.

When "Microserfs" hit, I was enthralled. It said a lot about my life: popular culture as I was a sprawling 20-something working with computers? C'est moi; second helping, please. Today, "jPod". I'm still in the same line of work, still surrounded by wonderful autists and Coupland sniffs most of the air out off that atmosphere.

The twists and turns of the book are otherworldly, even Monty Pythonesque, and I shan't give any away. Wikipedia will give you the plot. I'll just say that I think Coupland's existential ponderings are interesting kicks and that I loved some of the characters; Ethan's mom scared me the most, by far.

Some things in the book are very Coupland, e.g. dressing a lot of illegal refugees in nerd, e.g. a Nine Inch Nails Fragility 2.0 tour t-shirt. Pop culture-references hail while the plot thickens, loosens up and gives way to a sort of Bill Hicks-ish atmosphere, circa "it's just a ride".

Factual, emotional, filled with humanity as well as the seemingly opposite, this is a view of what happened with the 589 persons who were on death row in America in 1972, when the death penalty was deemed unconstitutional. 322 of these people were released from prison since then, and Cheever looks into what happened to them since, indirectly in search of a factual answer to the question: is capital punishment worthless or good? Of course not. But this book raises many questions regarding the subject, and looks into many a crack in the American justice system; what happens to those who are innocent but sent to death row? What constitutes a technical parole violation and just how hard does it hit somebody who used to be on death row? Any word on racism? Should people on death row be denied education? Where is William Henry Furman? This is very well written, some times bordering on poetry, but always factual, by a lawyer. Highly recommendable.