Here comes the official end of summer. We’ll be taking Labor Day Monday off at 49 Writers, so here’s lots of news to tide you over till Tuesday:
The Northern Review out of Yukon College, Whitehorse, is publishing a special literary edition and has made a last-minute decision to include book reviews. If you are interested in reviewing a literary work with interesting northern connections, and if you can get your review done quickly, please contact Eric Heyne at efheyne@alaska.edu, and he’ll talk to you about whether the review would be appropriate and whether they can get you a copy of the book. (He’s pretty sure he can get copies of recent U of Alaska Press books, for instance–hint, hint.)
Speaking of reviews, check out Ned Rozell’s favorable assessment of Bill Streever’s Cold in the Alaska Dispatch this week.
From author Ann Chandonnet comes a tip about Main Street Rag, which she describes as a “very active Charlotte poetry publishing house [that] solicits poems from all over the country for its magazine.”
Deirdre Helfferich wrote to suggest that we add Gulliver’s Books to our list of Alaska’s independent bookstores (we did). Deirdre is a publisher (poetry, cartoons, graphic novels, nonfiction relating to Alaska); her website is www.esterrepublic.com. She’s interested in short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc. for her newspaper, The Ester Republic, and she can sometimes pay. “Book publishing is an iffy thing since I run a one-woman show, basically,” she writes. “But I’ve published books by Neil Davis, Jean Lester, Jamie Smith, and Doreen Fitzgerald.” However, she’s not accepting manuscripts at the moment.
Todd Communications has scheduled signings for several local authors this month:
9/4/2009 1-4pm Sportsman’s Warehouse (Anchorage) Rick Rydell Oh No! We’re Gonna Die Too/Blood on the Tundra
9/5/2009 2-4pm Gulliver’s (Fairbanks) Tom Brennan Snowflake Rebellion
9/10/2009 6-9pm Barnes and Noble Bob Bell Oh No! We’re Gonna Die Too
9/19/2009 1-3pm Title Wave Elise Patkotak Parallel Logic
9/19/2009 1-4pm Barnes and Noble Katy Kerris Adventure Alaska! Stories for Boys
9/20/2009 2-5pm Borders Katy Kerris Adventure Alaska! Stories for Boys
9/26/2009 12-3pm The Bookshelf Bob Bell Oh No! We’re Gonna Die Too
9/26/2009 1-3pm Cover to Cover Katy Kerris Adventure Alaska! Stories for Boys
9/27/2009 2-5pm Borders Bob Bell Oh No! We’re Gonna Die Too
10/3/2009 1-3pm Title Wave Bob Bell Oh No! We’re Gonna Die Too
10/10/2009 3-7pm Sportsman’s Warehouse (Wasilla) Bob Bell Oh No! We’re Gonna Die Too
As for me, I’m on the road in Illinois, flat contrast to Alaska. But we do have this in common: ex-governors who didn’t finish their terms, and ex-governors who are pushing out books. Last night Edgar-winning author David Ellis opened his book tour in Springfield by noting some common ground with Illinois’s infamous ex, whose book also debuted this week: both were involved in the impeachment proceedings (Ellis led the charge) and both have penned fiction (okay, Rod’s is technically memoir, but you catch the drift…)
Regardless of a book's literary merits we should assess its veracity (especially for nonfiction) by taking into account an author's background and possible biases. Ned Rozell's review (on Alaska Dispatch) of Bill Streever's book Cold uses the following quote as an example of the author's addressing of global warming:
"We are in the midst of a warm spell, we are worried about global warming, but the fact remains that even in summer, whole regions remain covered with snow and ice. An area of land five times the size of Texas is in the permafrost zone, underlain by permanently frozen ground. If the mathematical predictions are right, we are at the tail end of an interglacial period, dramatically increasing its warmth with greenhouse gas emissions. But nevertheless we remain in what a geologist one hundred thousand years in the future would clearly recognize as part of the Pleistocene Ice Age."
This, from an "environmental studies leader for BP Exporation Alaska" — that's right, the company with the re-designed sunflower logo.
According to recent research funded by the NSF and computer climate models of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the Arctic should be cooling because of changes in Earth's orbit that cause the region to get less direct sunlight. However, according to this study, in the last decade, the Arctic has been warmer than it has been in the past 2,000 years — and this trend appears to be continuing, largely because of human-caused greenhouse gases and wicked, unanticipated feedback loops. Sea ice is not just shrinking but dramatically thinning; destructive forest beetles are expanding north; Alaskan waters are turning acidic faster than tropical waters, endangering the state's $ 4,5 billion fishing industry — not to mention the fish.
How a book about cold, by a scientist, hyped throughout the media, and occupying rank 30 on the NYT bestseller list can fail to adequately address this issue is beyond me.
Thanks for bringing that up, Michael. I haven't read Streever's book yet but I appreciate this discussion, and it helps that you quoted that particular passage. Any other readers of "Cold" out there with an opinion?
Hey Michael;
Streever addresses most of the stuff you mention, and adds how he feels guilty for contributing to the state of things.
I pulled this quote about how cold the world is because I thought it was interesting, and a point most people don't think about.
I'm still reading Cold, but so far I've noticed a nice balance of information on global warming…
I read the book, too, and didn't really see the issue addressed with any complexity, or the urgency it demands.