Plucino Male, 46. Alessandria, Italy

This booklet is packed with motivational quotes to help the reader through the "2009-***" recession.
Sources are from Mark Twain, Disraeli, GB Shaw, Russian proverbs etc.

"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today"

I expected a collection of even wrier material: especially because I deal on a daily basis with wry Brits, I was waiting for more useful sharp quotes to retort back.

If you want to buy a Keep Calm and Carry On deckchair, T-shirt or other stuff, you can visit www.keepcalmandcarryon.com

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
After the mastodontic, hard-going and Pulitzer-winning "The Ants", Hölldobler and Wilson had put together a shorter, manageable and lavishly illustrated volume, "Journey to the Ants".
Here, they explore the most interesting aspects of the lives of ants (and of the people who study them, known as myrmecologists).
Some of the covered topics are: evolution, communication, symbionts, parasites and predators.

my second crime novel, after Ellroy's Black Dahlia. After 70 years, still fully enjoyable!

Due to the fact that crime novels are 0.1% of my readings, in my inexperience I am not in the position to state that Chandler was a ground-breaker for the English language (my impression) or not. Maybe I should pay a visit to Dashiel Hammet?

Put the blame on all the hype around it - I think it's hugely overrated. "Time" considered it among one of the 100 best novels (?) since 1923 and the rumor goes it's the best graphic novel ever. I think we should come down to Earth and realize it's a comic series with unimaginative and conventional graphics, the end is a no-brainer and "heroes with problems" have been anticipated at least 20 years by good old Marvel.
A nice read, so let's move on.

The gist of the book is that there are 3 superpowers (EU, China, USA) - the First World - and they are competing to gobble mouthfuls of the Second World. Some Second World countries are smart enough to negotiate the process, like Kazakhstan or Malaysia; others will be ripped apart like Iraq or Russia.

I misunderstood it for an essay on a par with Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard", but it is yet another travelogue, written for the USA reader.

The below pattern appears in so many USA non-fiction books that I think there is a specific school of "creative" writing teaching so:

*lots of practical examples with no theory
*hundreds of bigheaded pages of notes and biblio that nobody will read
*some folkloric touch about the people the author interviewed, like Egyptians eating kebab, Russians with an icy vodka...

What I disliked about the book:
*the author comparing himself to Arnold J. Toynbee - but A.J. Toynbee (nephew of famous Arnold Toynbee) took 17 years to compose a serious 12-volume opus magnum, whereas this is little more than an instant book
*the utter despise for India
*typical colloquial usage of "American=USA"; the rest of Americans are probably some sub-species of American (Latin American, etc.)

I gave it 2 stars because apart from his clichés and lack of depth, Khanna is a bold writer, see his statements about the future of Russia and Indonesia.

Final notes
1) suggested deeper reading on geopolitics, Brzezinski:
http://www.anobii.com/books/002ac0fdbd5e4cab1f/
2) A journalist wrote in 1948 about Earth divided by 3 superpowers (Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania) - Orwell, "1984"...

The essay by Eric Nash is interesting, but the quality of many pictures disappointed me.
Images do not come from the Adams estate but from the the US national archive, so some of the most important works are excluded. Nash is quoting photographs you will search to no avail - they are not included in the book.
Worthwhile buying (in order to read the essay) if you come across a cheap /secondhand copy.

What is Ambergris? Where is Ambergris? When is Ambergris?

A city of saints and madmen, somewhere on river Moth, on a parallel Earth. A Byzantium (or Manhattan?) reeking of fungi and enigmas, born out of a genocide. A ruthless city without rulers, ruled by rituals like the cataclysmic Fresh Water Squid Festival.