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Welcome to DelMio.com, a vibrant online magazine designed to encourage reading by extending the experience of a book beyond the final chapter.
DelMio offers a rich multimedia experience for those who love books - including live discussions, opportunities for libraries to share programming and a place for book lovers to connect online. DelMio is committed to providing readers with credible, well-researched information they can count on for accuracy.
July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments »
By Diane Evans, Delmio.com
As we approach the Fourth of July weekend, we prepare to celebrate our many precious freedoms – two of those essential ones being freedom of speech and expression.
Freedom, of course, requires tolerance – tolerance to those of different race, creed and belief. However, tolerance doesn’t mean we compromise our values as Americans. A governor or public official that lies and cheats, a financier or corporate executive that commits fraud; all should accountable. Public pressure should side with honesty and honor.
So why is Hyperion Books so casual about author and journalist Chris Anderson using unattributed passages — closely mirroring material from Wikipedia and other sources –in his soon-to-be-released book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.”
Anderson is no novice. He is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, and his previous book, “The Long Tail,” became influential in business circles. Yet now, in a simple blog post, he has confirmed the use of unattributed material by saying it was his “screwup.” His explanation: That in the “rush” to finish the book, credits were omitted, and that passages in question “were mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides.”
For its part, Hyperion said it was satisfied with the explanation – kind of like the teacher satisfied with the lame, “dog ate my homework” excuse.
Hyperion now plans to work with Anderson to make corrections for an electronic version of the book and subsequent hard copies. The 80,000 first-print copies have already been shipped.
Interestingly, Anderson’s new book talks about the wisdom of free products on the Web. He said he depended on Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia of free user-contributed articles generally considered “questionable” as a reliable source of information, to describe meanings of phases such as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The Virginia Quarterly Review discovered the borrowing of text and ideas.
Ironically, the controversy has been noted on Anderson’s Wikipedia page.
At a time when book publishers have been repeatedly called into question for intellectual honesty, Hyperion and Wired, for that matter, made it easy on themselves while protecting a financial investment. In this case, tolerance short-shifted the ethics that are sacred in journalism and publishing.
Anderson now joins a long list of authors called into question for plagiarism, with lawsuits even extending to “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling.
In Anderson’s case, his acknowledgments are on the table. Sure, you can say it’s a small thing, involving information in the margins. But that’s like saying a small lie is acceptable, or perhaps a small incident of fraud.
Tolerance in such cases reduces our collective expectations, and the unwritten standard to which we hold journalists and authors. We all lose when we lower our standards.
At the very least, I would have felt better to hear a serious mea culpa from Anderson and his publisher.
June 17th, 2009 | No Comments »
You may not have heard of the next generation of great scientists yet. Here’s your chance to get acquainted: Read What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. The book’s editor assembled a cast of up-and-coming smart people and asked them to look into their space-time continuum portals for a look to the future of science. Among things they saw is a migration northward as climate change continues, and one doomsday scenario: The extinction of the human race. Homo sapiens exstinctus. The folks at VSL were appropriately terrified.
Publisher Random House says, “This wide-ranging collection of never-before-published essays offers the very latest insights into the daunting scientific questions of our time. Its contributors—some of the most brilliant young scientists working today—provide not only an introduction to their cutting-edge research, but discuss the social, ethical, and philosophical ramifications of their work. With essays covering fields as diverse as astrophysics, paleoanthropology, climatology, and neuroscience, What’s Next? is a lucid and informed guide to the new frontiers of science.”
June 16th, 2009 | No Comments »
By Diane Evans, DelMio.com
Looking for something to do this summer? Go to the library.
You might find more than you expect. And the best part is it’s free.
In addition to innovative summer reading programs and other interesting activities, libraries are also a source of free computer access.
This is a big deal for many communities. In one recent survey, more than 70 percent of libraries identified themselves as the only source of free access to computers and the Internet in their area, according to the American Library Association (ALA). And, Internet services are escalating rapidly within the nation’s libraries. The ALA also reports that more than 76 percent of all public libraries provide Wi-Fi access, up from 65.9 percent one year ago.
In the national debate over stimulus spending for broadband networks, library proponents make an effective argument that libraries can play a significant role in bridging the digital divide. In a recent conversation, Sari Feldman, president-elect of the Public Library Association (a division of ALA), pointed out that libraries not only provide public access to Internet service, but they also give people needed support – in figuring out how to fill out an online job application, for example. A majority of large retailers, Feldman noted, now require online applications.
The Cuyahoga County Public Library in Northeast Ohio, where Feldman is executive director, is an example of a library system with dozens of programs that help level the playing field for those with no Internet access in their homes. People receive help with job searches and applications, for example. In another initiative, college-bound students learn to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
These are ways libraries stand to further elevate their relevance as places where people can go to help improve themselves and seek new opportunities. They can be a place to go, especially for those otherwise shut out of opportunities that require Internet access.
No surprise libraries figure prominently in the debate over how to provide Internet access to those under-served or not served at all.
Yet even in the best-case scenario, one where all public libraries provide public accessibility to high-speed, high-capacity Internet service, that alone isn’t enough to break down economic, social and educational barriers that result from the digital divide.
The other part of the equation: People must take the personal initiative to use the services available to them in order to reap the benefits.
I’m reminded of my 83-year-old dad who not long ago went to the doctor complaining of various aches and pains. He was really complaining of being shut out – of playing golf, for example, or bocce.
“Go to the gym,’’ the doctor kept telling him.
Finally, after hearing it enough times, he went to his version of the gym – the one he set up in his basement. His health improved dramatically.
Looking for a new job? A more effective, efficient ways to learn new skills? How to do better in school? Ways to beat the summer heat?
Go to the library.
May 6th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
By Diane Evans
Mothers teach — sometimes without even knowing it.
Ever take a packed lunch to school as a child? Ever look inside to find a small note from mom next to your pudding snack?
In that instance, mom taught that the written word sends a message — no matter how brief.
Mother’s Day is this coming Sunday. But if your sentiment simply won’t fit on a note or greeting card, try a book.
You can pick a book to send almost any message you’d like to your mother (or to the woman in your life who most fits your ideal of a mother). Motherhood is one of those subjects that literature has conferred blanket coverage — on par with love, heartbreak, war and peace.
As children, we learn about Old Mother Hubbard, who sets the stage for the extent to which mothers fuss. Old Mother Hubbard goes everywhere — to the baker’s, the tavern, the tailor’s and so on — and that’s just to pamper the dog.
As we grow, literature breaks the news to us (in case we missed the point in real life) that a mother’s role can get a lot more complicated.
In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, for example, Ma Joad shows how a mother’s courage and wisdom can keep a family going in the really tough times.
Or take the figure of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Karenina shows that even when a mother’s personal life goes really astray — to the point of desertion — her connection to her child can transcend even the worst behavior.
Most of us probably have mothers somewhere in the spectrum between Ma Joad and Anna Karenina. (Hopefully closer to Ma Joad.) Regardless of where a mother’s virtue lies, Mother’s Day is an occasion to put her under the spotlight.
If you are looking for a book to give your mom, to express warm feelings or to make her laugh, here are a few titles on display at the Chautauqua Book Store inside the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in western New York: (While summer programming doesn’t open until June 27, the bookstore stays open year round.)
—Dear Mom: Thank You For Everything or The Incredible Truth About Mothers, both by Bradley Trevor Greive. Both titles feature nature photography with captions reflecting thoughts you might expect from a mother. For example, next to a sleeping polar bear cub, a caption reads, “A child’s dreams are tomorrow’s reality.”
—Thoughts with Love for Mother, by Anne Geddes. This is a little book of sayings, such as this one by Cecilia Lasbury: “There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children. One of these is roots. The other, wings.”
—Zelda’s Moments with Mom, part of the Zelda Wisdom series by Carol Gardner and Shane Young. Again, photos with captions, such as “Being a mother also means enthusiastically sharing dreams, however unrealistic as in, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a cowboy.’”
—Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice, by James Lileks. It’s a humorous look at parents who figure things out for themselves and do just fine.
May 5th, 2009 | No Comments »
Chances are, if you’ve lived away from mom and dad for any length of time, you either a) had a roommate from hell or b) were the roommate from hell.
Maybe you shared an apartment with a roomie whose laundry took on a smelly life form of its own or who never heard of washing dishes. Or perhaps you spotted the tell-tale hashmarks of a fork having scraped the contents of your peanut butter jar.
I Lick My Cheese: And Other Real Notes from the Roommate Frontlines by Oonagh O’Hagan is a compilation of real-life notes posted by roommates or “flatmates” as the original U.K. version termed them. They range from cute and fun to sarcastic to angry rants to really disgusting re-creations of certain, um, transgressions allegedly perpetrated by a room- er, flatmate.
The author’s Web site, roommatesanonymous.com, has a substantial collection of posted photos of said notes. The best of these are immortalized in hardcover in the recent U.S. book or its 2007 U.K. predecessor, I Lick My Cheese and Other Notes: From the Frontline of Flatsharing. You can log in and add your own stories from the “Frontline” at the Web site. Or just read in horror and be grateful your situation wasn’t that awful. Was it?
May 4th, 2009 | No Comments »
Can’t get enough of Dan Brown?
Fans will soon feast this year, as the film adaptation of Angels and Demons hits the big screen next week, and another book featuring the Robert Langdon character, The Lost Symbol, will be published in September.
Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was a smash hit in 2003 and the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard movie was a hit (though not necessarily with critics) in 2006.
Brown’s latest book compresses the action into 12 hours. Doubleday is excited about the prospects of another blockbuster, and the publisher plans a first printing of 5 millions copies – the largest first print in Random House Inc. history, says www.danbrown.com.
“This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey,” said Brown at his Web site. “Weaving five years of research into the story’s twelve-hour timeframe was an exhilarating challenge. Robert Langdon’s life clearly moves a lot faster than mine.”
Need a refresher on The Da Vinci Code? Start here.
April 30th, 2009 | No Comments »
Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts has made a career out of reporting on Alex Rodriguez and his reported use of steroids.
A-Rod reveals new details, including allegations that A-Rod, also dubbed A-Roid (he has several less-flattering nicknames among fellow New York Yankees), starting dabbling with performance-enhancing drugs in high school and continued in New York after he left the Texas Rangers, contradicting his admissions of drug use to date.
In a public statement about his steroid use, Rodriguez said he felt the pressure as baseball’s highest-paid player (not to mention the pressure-packed New York media cauldron) to do anything to be the best player possible.
A flurry of accusations, denials, admissions and so on preceded and followed baseball’s Mitchell Report on steroids, and no doubt more will come.
Names that pop up in the book include Madonna, trainer Angel Presinal, former Major Leaguers Kevin Brown and Jose Canseco (himself author of controversial books) and former coaches – even high school teammates. And, to quote the New York Daily News, ”dalliances with out-of-town floozies.”
Adding insult to injury, Roberts reports he was unpopular at Hooters, where baseball’s richest player tipped the minimum 15 percent.
A-Rod is set for May 12 publication by HarperCollins.
Other DelMio posts on baseball:
Veeck as in Wreck.
Three baseball must-reads.
Yankee Doodle not always dandy.
April 29th, 2009 | No Comments »
Baby's got a gun
Tor.com, purveyor of sci-fi and fantasy lit, gives away a fair amount of its properties no doubt in hopes of luring dollars from grateful readers.
This can present some risk. What if readers don’t like it? Or worse: What if they just go on reading the freebies, sponging all these books and short stories without ever spending a dime?
Well, it must work on some level, because Tor keeps doing it. A recent endeavor is a whacky short story by Terry Bisson, TVA Baby.
TVA Baby starts out in the skies over the Tennessee Valley, or the Mississippi River, depending on who’s right, and things (literally) take a rapid descent from there. It’s a bumpy ride, narrated with a unique point of view. Some comments by readers that followed found the occasional lapses in logic and continuity annoying, which might miss the point. See for yourself.
Or if you prefer, hear for yourself.
And if you’d like to get a virtually limitless stream of free stuff from Tor, sign up here.
April 28th, 2009 | No Comments »
Aspiring writers receive lots of advice, often conflicting advice.
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,” Dorothy Parker once wrote, “the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
Strunk & White have long found themselves on the bookshelves of many writers, nestled next to the dictionary, thesaurus, AP Stylebook and a few other select titles (We would include William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and James Kilpatrick’s The Writer’s Art). Last week, it turned 50, or 90-something, depending on your perspective.
Happy birthday, The Elements of Style.
The Elements of Style rose to prominence in 1959 when E.B. White revised William Strunk’s original text four decades after Strunk first self-published the book while an English professor at Cornell (White was his student in 1919). It got some free press from White in The New Yorker and a boffo review in the
New York Times.
Elements has been revised several times since then, although it still can seem a tad quaint at times. And not all writers or “experts” appreciate Strunk & White’s “little book” of rules for writers. Then again, rules were made to be broken, no?
April 27th, 2009 | No Comments »
German novelist Hans Fallada wrote his World War II-era novel, Every Man Dies Alone, based on the real-life resistance movement started by a middle-aged couple in circa 1940 Germany. The couple distributed anti-Nazi messages on handwritten postcards all around Berlin.
Fallada, a successful novelist before the war, never saw the book go to print. He suffered from mental illness and died of a morphine overdose in 1947 just months before it was published, reports veryshortlist.com.
But now the story is being published in English.
Otto and Anna Quangel started their campaign after learning that their only son had been killed during Germany’s invasion of France.
“Mother! The Fuhrer has murdered my son,” read the first postcard Otto wrote and left to be seen in public.
Famous Holocaust survivor Primo Levi calls Every Man Dies Alone “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.”
Resistance is not always futile.
April 24th, 2009 | No Comments »
The newspaper columnist who “discovered” the musician who became the subject of columns, then book, and now movie tells how his encounter with Nathaniel Ayers led to this series of events, culminating – for now – in the movie being released amid a ton of buzz starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.
Steve Lopez talked to NPR a year ago about how this unlikely friendship grew: “Lopez says his friendship with Ayers has ‘always been a two-way street, it’s not just me doing for him.’ The writer explains that the musician re-ignited his passion for journalism and gave him a sense of well-being: ‘You know, there’s this humility, there’s this good feeling I have from giving something,’ Lopez says.”
The story is pretty well-known at this point, of how Ayers had been a promising violinist at the prestigious Juilliard School who dropped out as he struggled with schizophrenia. He moved to L.A. and landed on the streets there.
As Lopez wrote about Ayers in the Los Angeles Times, readers sent instruments to Lopez on behalf of Ayers. One thing led to another, Ayers got off the street and into an apartment and treatment for his mental illness.
Hear excerpts from the movie and from Lopez on radio before the movie was released: “It was the violin that turned my head,” he told NPR, then he noticed the player was in rags and the violin had only two strings.
The book is The Soloist: A Lost Dream, and Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.
