“You don’t want to be a ditch-digger when you grow up,” my grandfather used to tell me.

Well, I don’t know if he ever said that or not, to be honest, but it somehow sticks in my mind that he did. It’s the kind of thing he would’ve said.

Ditch digging is honorable work—but it’s also a hard way to make a living.

He spoke from the experience that physical labor will give a man. For most of his life, he served as a postman in the small town of Eldred, Pa., sorting and shuffling mail, slipping letters into P.O. boxes, making small-talk with customers from behind the counter. The building smelled of envelopes and stamp adhesive. It was a pretty easy gig. Full Story »

One Life, by Johnny Clegg, first released 2006, 16 tracks, ASIN B000I5YROM

We’re on our way home to find our freedom
and I’m on my way home to find you my friend
where we can stand in the light of the people
and breathe life into the land again.

“When the System Has Fallen,” Johnny Clegg

“If you have a patch of ground the size of a door, you can feed a family of four,” rhymes my friend, John Broom. John is well over 80 and has been involved in teaching gardening and feeding schemes in Africa for the Quaker Peace Foundation for decades. I believe him.

Africa itself is a vast and fertile land. Full Story »

by Chris Mackowski

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
Thomas Dunne Books–St. Martin’s Press
324 pp.

What would the world be like if the human race just up and vanished?

“Unlikely, perhaps, but for the sake of argument, not impossible,” writes journalist Alan Weisman. Perhaps a human-specific virus wipes us out or aliens kidnap us or God raptures us away. Poof—we’re gone. Tomorrow.

That’s the hypothetical premise behind Weisman’s newest book, The World Without Us.

But while the premise sounds fanciful, Weisman offers nothing but cold, hard facts and a gnawing gut feeling that something is already dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. Full Story »

by Carol White

The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President
by Julie M. Fenster

Julie Fenster’s new book is not only a fascinating look at a side of Abraham Lincoln—his daily life as an influential Illinois lawyer in the years before he became president—but an illuminating study about how he and his abolitionist associates succeeded in fusing anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs and to create the Republican party. Lincoln’s role as a wartime president tends to overshadow the fact of his crucial involvement not only in exposing his arch rival Stephen Douglas, author of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska act that opened the western territories of the United States to slavery—but in the nitty-gritty, day-to-day politicking that preceded, and was crucial to the party’s victory at the polls in the 1860 presidential election. Full Story »

The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, first published in 1513, 176 pages, ISBN 978-0553212785

The worst that a prince may expect from a hostile people is to be abandoned by them; but from hostile nobles he has not only to fear abandonment, but also that they will rise against him;

In 1513, early into the Great Wars of Italy, an Italian politician, ambassador, soldier, and political philosopher was on the losing end of one of the many internal conflicts that followed the Reniassance. After being tortured and eventually released, he moved to his beloved Florence and settled down on a farm to write what is probably one of the most important treatises on politics written – Il Principe, The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. Full Story »

Last night saw the premiere of the final season of “The Wire,” HBO’s long-running drama that started out as a gritty look at the cat-and-mouse battle between overworked, underpaid cops and ruthless drug dealers in the decaying metropolis of Baltimore, Maryland, but quickly evolved into a scathing, unforgiving tour of the failure of all the institutions we take for granted. This ambitious vision is married to some of the most honest, raw, and real characters ever to grace a television screen, making “The Wire” not only the best show on television today, but one of the best examples of modern American thought and commentary we have. Full Story »

I realised today it has been more than 21 years since I first came across Terry Pratchett. I was only 12 at the time; young, gawky, bookish.

His books were like the opening of a window.

Pratchett is the creator of the epic Discworld fantasy series. They started off as a light-hearted send-up of the swords-and-sandals fantasy epics of Beowulf and Tolkien. Then they became an original world.

It is one of my annual joys. This year, when Making Money came out I chortled with joy and phoned one of my best mates to gloat that I’d got it first. Instead he turned the tables on me to say how much he’d already enjoyed it. Full Story »

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, first published October 2007, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0439895293

The dividing line between comic books and graphic novels – for many – seems to lie in the question: “Would I show this to a kid?”

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, or When the Wind Blows, by Raymond Briggs, are astonishing reinventions of the art, claiming a space in literature that defies either category. Both opened up the creation of artworks that tell human stories; allowing emotion and empathy with the images to fill the space left by the absence of words.

Taking four years to research and produce, The Arrival stands alone – not just amongst graphic novels – but amongst all art. It is like stumbling across The Kiss by Auguste Renoir placed inconsequentially at the base of the stairs in London’s Tate Modern, or hearing Pachelbel’s Canon played in the midst of a mix of faded pop-songs. Full Story »

If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, first published 1979, 254 pages, ISBN 978-1857151381

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!”

These are the first lines of Calvino’s entertaining novel. Welcome to the world of post-modern literature.

What is the modern writer to do? Every story, and every variation of every story, has been told. You already know the plot of virtually any movie before it even comes out. Even the final twists have all been taken care of. Umberto Eco, another of the post-modern greats, once asked the question, “How does a post-modern writer say ‘I love you’?” How, when the phrase itself is so cliched it has lost all the meaning which you wish to convey to your beloved? By saying it anyway. Full Story »

Earlier this month my fellow Scrogue Gavin Chait and I discussed the ins and outs of creating a centralized standard for social networking–basically being able to migrate your “online identity” from LinkedIn to Facebook to MySpace and so on. (Short version: Gavin loves the idea, but I was wary of the potential privacy and security problems.)

Yesterday I found out that Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal, is also advocating for open social networking, publishing a “minifesto” on the difficulty of managing many different identities across multiple platforms: Full Story »

How much land does a man need? by Leo Tolstoy, first published 1886, collected short-stories 256 pages, ISBN 978-0140445060

“What things one does dream,” thought [Pahom]. – “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

The greatest struggle in the American experience is the one between democracy and capitalism. As de Tocqueville observed, “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?” Americans like to think of themselves as the people who brought the world the bellwether concepts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But the “pursuit of happiness” for Americans has tended to follow the Coolidge dictum: “The business of America is business.” Full Story »

Five Moral Pieces by Umberto Eco, first published 2001, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0156013253

“The modern world looks at war through eyes different from those with which it looked at the problem early in the twentieth century, and if someone were to talk today of the beauty of war as the only form of world hygiene, he would go down not in the annals of literature but in those of psychiatry.”

Umberto Eco is one of the world’s foremost moral philosophers. Many may not know his studies in philosophy and reason but will have heard of The Name of the Rose (1980) or seen the movie of it staring Sean Connery (in 1986). His writing is much more than that. Full Story »

The Saint’s Getaway by Leslie Charteris, first published 1932, 250 pages, ISBN 978-1558820845

For the song and the sword and the Pipes of Pan
Are birthrights sold to a usurer
But I am the last lone highwayman
And I am the last adventurer

Like so many serialised literary characters – such as James Bond or Sherlock Holmes – Simon Templar has outlived and outshone his creator. Leslie Charteris (originally Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin), though, has some claim to having lived the life he based his character on.

Simon Templar started life as a particularly effervescent vigilante and … drifted. His adventures have him defrauding drug dealers in ’30s England, stopping a plot to start a second world war in 1930, moving to the US to assist the war effort by spying for the US government, before returning to England to raise hell. The dialogue is witty, the descriptions breathtaking, and the in-your-face banter is a breath of fresh air next to all those all-to-serious meaning-of-life books. The Saint knows who he is and is blithely untroubled by suggestions to the contrary as he biffs the ungodly. He chain smokes, he drives at unsafe speeds, he mocks the police and – against every principle of free-booting buccaneerhood – he has a regular girlfriend (although, he was somewhat modern in his approach). Full Story »

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, first published November 1966, completed 1940, 384 pages, ISBN 978-0679760801

“… who are you then?”
“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

Goethe, Faust

Hands on the table. This is my favourite book. I first read a tattered and badly translated copy in my early 20s. Even there Bulgakov’s language and the sheer inspired delight of this epic shone through. And that was before I even knew the context and history of this work.

“Afterwards, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late, various institutions presented reports describing this man… It must be acknowledged that none of these reports is of any value. Full Story »

American Gods by Neil Gaiman, first published 2002, 624 pages, ISBN 978-0380789030

America inspires both awe and loathing. The scale of the place; its open spaces, wealth, ambition and ability to turn ideas into global phenomena.

The Iranian youths rioting against “The Great Satan” are wearing blue jeans and iPods. The stone-throwing anti-globalisation protestors listen to American music. The most fervent supporters of American-style capitalism are the survivors of pure communist states; like Poland and Lithuania.

American-leftie self-loathing and declarations that George W Bush is turning the US into a fascist dictatorship are vastly amusing to those of us who have survived brutal autocracies.

Some outsiders are drawn to the US, to explain her. Not just to others, but to Americans themselves. Full Story »

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, first published 1957, 1 200 pages, ISBN 978-0452011878

“For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing – you who dread knowledge – I am the man who will now tell you.”

Published 50 years ago in 1957, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. The story is simply told. Full Story »

Cry, the beloved country by Alan Paton, first published 1948, 320 pages, ISBN 978-0743262170 (Schroguely Works is our new feature on books of interest to thinking-minded folk.)

“There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.”

Alan Paton wrote these words in 1948.

1948.

Before Apartheid. Before legalised hate. Before it was too late. It is the most beautiful book ever written. And the people who needed to read it most never did.

Full Story »