wfzimmerman’s review: “Just received the review copy of this book. My first reaction is that it is a must for anyone who reads books about intelligence — it is the first single-volume history of the CIA’s entire lifetime written completely from original sources and without using classifed or unattributed data. (For which the author deserves maximum kudos!)
That being said, I am not entirely satisfied with the book — I have a nagging feeling that it’s written at the wrong level of resolution. By which I mean it is focused on providing narrative accounts of the activities of a relatively few high-level managers and Washington bureaucrats, rather than providing a detailed operational assessment of the CIA’s effectiveness.
The author is clearly aware that such assessments exist — he draws on them extensively in early chapters, for example in the discussion of the suicidal (and rather provocative from today’s perspective!) missions to paradrop hundreds if not thousands agents into the Soviet Union, China, and Korea during the 1950s.
I found myself hungering for some synthesis tables — a list, perhaps, of publicly documented CIA projects in the 50s and 60s, and their outcomes. In essence, I am wishing that this book was written by a worldly academic rather than a journalist. This is an "inside the Beltway" Woodward-style story, rather than an operational history. I can’t blame the author for this choice, since in all likelihood the audience for a Woodward-style book is at least 10x the audience for an operational history, but it does mean that the book has a hard time living up to its advance billing as a complete history of the CIA.
More later, as I read on.” Doubleday (2007), Hardcover, 720 pages tags: First edition, intelligence, CIA
The PublicAffairs imprint is celebrating its 10th anniversary. This is front-page news for book-lovers. PublicAffairs has brought out a really terrific list in that time, with books that make news, provide insight, and still sizzle. Kudos!
A reader alerted me to the Web site of St. Joan of Arc Church in the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese.
The site is loaded with left-wing material, but this item caught my eye: The parish’s weekly Bible study group held a discussion on a book titled Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman.
One of the group’s facilitators wrote:
…Since God did not see fit to preserve the original manuscripts, as an all-powerful God presumably can do, that is a pretty good sign that the Bible is not inerrant, much less a foolproof guide to the questions of the present age, such as abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, Western-style democracy, etc. We can’t set up the Bible as a false idol….
And the “Discussion questions” for this topic?
Why, if our beliefs are more profound and more rational, do we need to denigrate the gullibility and obstinacy of Bible literalists? Why does their faith appear to be more intense than ours (or does it)?
If the Bible is not the inerrant word of God, what value does it have?
Has our experience with the Bible led to any faith journey changes of course among us, as happened to the author?
Telling quotes, and kudos to Spero News for highlighting the fatuosity of posing these questions in a Bible study group.
I should note that I cut off the excerpt from Spero News at this point because the author goes on to inject some gay-bashing and “baby-killing” rhetoric. I believe homosexuality and abortion are sins, but I am in favor of effective debate on such subjects.
If, instead of “effective” I used words like “civil”, “measured”, or “respectful,” I am sure that I would get arguments from those who believe that it is not only pointless but wrong to be polite in the face of mortal sin. By using the word “effective,” I hope to place the burden of proof on the name-callers, where it belongs.
Just Re-Read ‘The Da Vinci Code’: Dan Brown’s Follow-Up Novel Delayed a Year
It’s official: Dan Brown’s millions of fans around the world will have to wait for the mega-seller’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. The author’s publishers said today that Brown’s next novel will not arrive in stores until at least 2007, more than a year later than originally planned.
Brown himself, in an e-mail sent to The Book Standard, says: “My books are time-consuming to research and complicated to construct. I am taking the time necessary to ensure that this new book is every bit as entertaining as The Da Vinci Code.”
Ok, key question, Dan: why single out The Book Standard? Why not Publishers Weekly, or the New York Times? Is Random House buying VNU? Indeed, why not give the little guy a break and write me or Greg Taylor at The Daily Grail?
Seriously, kudos to The Book Standard for this excellent bit of reporting, one of the first bits of actual news on the Dan Brown front in quite a while.
Nimble Books is the publisher of UNAUTHORIZED HARRY POTTER BOOK 7 NEWS: HALF-BLOOD PRINCE ANALYSIS AND SPECULATION, a 156-page “living book” with all the latest news and speculation about the culmination of the Harry Potter series. Customers who present proof of purchase receive free PDF updates forever.
Mimi Cummmins, HPBook6.com:
Kudos to the author for [a] very well written book [and] using new technologies that [keep] readers up to date. –This text refers to the Digital edition.
Dave Haber, Executive Editor, WizardNews.com:
very heavily documented … making this book an important source of information you’ll want to refer to over and over again.
TheBoyThatLived.com:
…a must for any Harry Potter fan
Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator, HPANA.com:
HPANA recommended book!
Greg S. Davidson, Amazon reviewer:
this is a pathfinder for a fundamentally new kind of book … the author’s prose is both lively and concise…
Tasha “Scifi-and-fantasy-aholic” (Small Town, Va, USA) (on Amazon):
As with a lot of us Harry Potter fans I tend to check out a lot of these “discussion” books rather skeptically. I’m very glad I decided to get this one. The author has done a great job of being informative, and offering many topics for discussion, even if there are a few typos. … all the information and discussions he gives more than make up for the oopses. All in all, I can honestly say, it’s more than worth it, especially since the author gives the option of permanent updates via e-mail for the book. Enjoy it and the discussions it will start.
Book Description
Through the magic of print-on-demand technology, this “nimble” guide to the work of best-selling author J. K. Rowling provides the latest news about the author and her works, updated whenever there are significant developments. Unlike a conventional book, for which editions are printed in quantity every couple of years, this “living book” goes through frequent “mini-editions” and is printed fresh whenever customers place an order.
For those who are curious about how often we update, the answer is that it is determined by the intersection of the occurrence of significant news and the sensible management of costs. Our electronic printer, Lightning Source, charges us fees every time we update the source file for a book. So we try to be strategic about when we do updates–but we love taking advantage of technology to deliver a superior product!
From the Author
As research for this book, I read: * Every on-line chat that J. K. Rowling has ever done. * Hundreds of news articles mentioning the quoted phrase “Half-Blood Prince” in a leading news warehouse and more hundreds of articles identified by Google News as mentioning the quoted phrase “Half-Blood Prince.” * Hundreds of blogs mentioning the quoted phrase “Half-Blood Prince” in the blog search engine Feedster. * Hundreds of posts on dozens of Potter-related websites. * Dozens of trademark applications at the UK and US patent offices. * Numerous biographies and critical works about J. K. Rowling. * And, of course, the entire series to date!
This book contains the results of my research. Over the years and especially in recent months, J. K. Rowling and others have let slip quite a bit of information about the series. I think I was able to pull together a lot of interesting information. You will notice that there are many quotations and that wherever possible I have provided an “attribution”—that is, I have identified author, title, date, and place of publication (often Internet). That way, you can judge for yourself whether my sources are solid.
About the Author
W. Frederick Zimmerman is the publisher of Nimble Books. He earned a B.A. with Honors from Swarthmore College and a J.D. from Wayne State University. He has read all of the Harry Potter books with his daughter Kelsey. He read the first three to her aloud, before she got too smart for him. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA with his beautiful wife Cheryl and their children Kelsey and Parker.
About Nimble Books
Our trusty Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines “nimble” as follows:
1: quick and light in motion: AGILE *nimble fingers*
2 a: marked by quick, alert, clever conception, comprehension, or resourcefulness *a nimble mind* b: RESPONSIVE, SENSITIVE *a nimble listener*
And traces the etymology to the 14th Century:
Middle English nimel, from Old English numol holding much, from niman to take; akin to Old High German neman to take, Greek nemein to distribute, manage, nomos pasture, nomos usage, custom, law
The etymology is reminiscent of the old Biblical adage, “to whom much is given, much is expected” (Luke 12:48). Nimble Books seeks to honor that Christian principle by combining the spirit of nimbleness with the Biblical concept of abundance: we deliver what you need to know about a subject in a quick, resourceful, and sensitive manner.
You can buy at Amazon or direct from the publisher for the lowest price anywhere.
An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google
One of the readers who contacted me, Frederick Zimmerman, has gone further and applied the niche approach to the keyword list itself, which I thought was interesting enough to mention here. What he’s done is quite clever. He created a list of pharmaceutical product names from the US Food and Drug Administration’s official guide, the “Orange Book”. After some cleanup, he submitted it to AdWords to get cost and traffic estimates. And now he’s selling it as an e-book on Amazon:
Not many publishers go the Amazon route, most prefer to use a service like ClickBank that offers affiliate programs and the like. Zimmerman thinks the Amazon route is more reputable, and I can see some validity in that view.
What’s even cleverer is that he’s also included the keyword information in spreadsheet format embedded within the book itself — just click on the link and it loads into Excel, ready for manipulation.
Disclaimer: Zimmerman sent me the list, unsolicited, for my opinion. If you’re looking to write pharmaceutical-targeted content, it seems like a reasonable source of information on what’s hot and what’s not among advertisers. All the usual caveats about taking keyword lists too seriously apply, of course. (If you’ve got a keyword list you want me to review, go ahead and sent it to me, I’m compiling a list of them for reference.)
what really broke the Overlook mold this year and took us far ahead was the curious phenomenon of Overlook being first out in America—and consequently the industry leader month after month after month—with that tantalizing and addictive Japanese puzzle that has swept the world, SUDOKU.
While Overlook’s SUDOKU book was out first—and now has seven Overlook cousins—unsurprisingly fifteen other publishers quickly rushed out SUDOKU books so that by Christmas there were 70 or 80 competitors with Overlook and Michael Mepham still the best established.
The ripples from Katrina reached my front door step this morning when two Katrina kids — evacuees from New Orleans who just moved into our apartment complex, Arbor Village – showed up at the spot where I wait with Parker for bus 125, which takes him to Bryant Elementary at 8:15 every morning. A very noticeable event from my strictly parochial point of view since it amounted to a 166% increase in the number of 5-year-olds at the bus stop,from 3 to 5.
Kudos to Arbor Village for providing housing for three Katrina families.
or direct from the publisher for the lowest price anywhere.