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Skjeggtroll finished reading Terry Pratchett : a Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins

Rob Wilkins: Terry Pratchett : a Life with Footnotes (2022, Transworld Publishers Limited)

'People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.' …

It's a well written book, often funny, sometimes moving, but as a biography it's weak. The first part, which draws from Pratchett's unfinished autobiography, holds up the best, but the second part end up more as Wilkin's memorial of Pratchett than a biography about him.

It's not a hagiography, but it's all pretty surface-level. The book never really tries to get under the skin of Terry Pratchett, and neither does go into any depth about his authorship. For example, the book mentions Neil Gaiman's quote about Pratchett's anger, but it never explores this anger in any real measure, neither in how Pratchett as a person or in how it manifests in his books.

If you're a fan of Pratchett, it's a good read with enough interesting facts and details to keep you interested, but as biographies goes, it files under "mostly harmless."

#books #TerryPratchett #biography

Helen Czerski

Just finisihed this & it's brilliant: Katalin Kariko's story of her life. She was convinced that mRNA therapies could work decades ago & did the foundation work, all while being ignored, never promoted & struggling for jobs.

Today, millions are vaccinated with mRNA vaccines & she has a Nobel prize.

It's a great story, and leaves a lot for the scientific system to think about. Highly recommended.

#books #mRNA #science #biography

earthling

David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work

An Illustrated Exploration Across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest
During a meteoric career that spanned from 1825 to 1834, David Douglas made the first systematic collections of flora and fauna over many parts of the greater Pacific Northwest.

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#DavidDouglas

David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work is a colorfully illustrated collection of essays that examines various aspects of Douglas's career, demonstrating the connections between his work in the Pacific Northwest of the 19th century and the place we know today. From the Columbia River's perilous bar to luminous blooms of mountain wildflowers; from ever-changing frontiers of technology to the quiet seasonal rhythms of tribal families gathering roots, these essays collapse time to shed light on people and landscapes.

Jim Kane

What I am currently listening to:

Paul Carter's Richard Nixon: California's Native Son

Thomas S Kidd's Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh

#potus #nixon #jefferson #biography #history #reading #bookstadons @bookstodon

earthling

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

Told by one of our greatest chroniclers of technology and society, the definitive biography of iconic serial visionary Stewart Brand, from the Merry Pranksters and the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture.

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#nonfiction
#biography
#StewartBrand
#WholeEarth

earthling

Who Was Charles Schulz?

Learn more about the cartoonist who created Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the lovable Peanuts gang in this new addition to the #1 New York Times bestselling series!

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#CharlesSchulz

Charles (otherwise known as Sparky) Schulz always loved drawing from the time he was a young child, and as he grew older, he turned this passion into a phenomenally successful career. His early doodles of his mischievous dog and of a shy boy inspired two of his most familiar and beloved characters, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Here's the story about Peanuts gang and Charles's life that's sure to excite all readers but especially those who love the classic cartoon series.

earthling

The Zelensky Effect

With Russian shells raining on Kyiv and tanks closing in, American forces prepared to evacuate Ukraine's leader. Just three years earlier, his apparent main qualification had been playing a president on TV. But Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly retorted, 'I need ammunition, not a ride.'

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#Ukraine

Ukrainian forces won the battle for Kyiv, ensuring their country's independence even as a longer war began for the southeast. You cannot understand the historic events of 2022 without understanding Zelensky. But the Zelensky effect is less about the man himself than about the civic nation he embodies: what makes Zelensky most extraordinary in war is his very ordinariness as a Ukrainian. The Zelensky Effect explains this paradox, exploring Ukraine's national history to show how its now-iconic president reflects the hopes and frustrations of the country's first 'independence generation'. Interweaving social and political background with compelling episodes from Zelensky's life and career...

earthling

The Wife of Bath

From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #metoo

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Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.
A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure.

earthling

Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction

Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction is the first comprehensive textual, bibliographical, and cultural study of sixty years of Bradbury's fiction.

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#RayBradbury

Drawing on correspondence with his publishers, agents, and friends, as well as archival manuscripts, The Life of Fiction examines the story of Bradbury's authorship over more than a half-century, from his earliest writings, which include The Martian Chronicles, to his most recently published novel, Let's All Kill Constance. It shows in detail the often devious and unsuspected interconnections between his unpublished fiction, his story collections, and his most celebrated novels.

earthling

The Pursuits of Philosophy

Marking the tercentenary of David Hume's birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain.

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Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume’s autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order.
Excerpts from Hume’s autobiography at the beginning of each chapter open a window onto the eighteenth-century context in which Hume’s philosophy developed. Famous in Christian Britain as a polymath and a nonbeliever, Hume recounts how his early encounters with clerical authority laid the foundation for his lifelong skepticism toward religion. In Scotland, where he grew up, he had been forced to study lists of sins in order to spot his own childish flaws, he reports. Later, as a young man, he witnessed the clergy’s punishment of a pregnant unmarried servant, and this led him to question the violent consequences of the Church’s emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. Baier’s clear interpretation of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature explains the link between Hume’s growing disillusionment and his belief that ethics should be based on investigations of human nature, not on religious dogma.
Four months before he died, Hume concluded his autobiography with a eulogy he wrote for his own funeral. It makes no mention of his flaws, critics, or disappointments. Baier’s more realistic account rivets our attention on connections between the way

Christina Dongowski

I still haven’t read Lolly Willowes, which is a shame, I know, but this review essay on the novel and a new biography on Valentine Ackland, Townsend Warner’s partner, brought it back to my tbr pile.

I’m still awfully lagging behind my @lrb pile, but being a little bit out of synch with the news these days isn’t that bad, Anyway, a good review essay probably profits if one doesn’t read it to be in the loop.

@bookstodon #witchtodon #review #lesen #biography #queer
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n12/david-trotter/the-ultimate-socket

earthling

The Pharmacist of Auschwitz: The Untold Story

The Pharmacist of Auschwitz is the little known story of Victor Capesius, a Bayer pharmaceutical salesman from Romania who, at the age of 35, joined the Nazi SS in 1943 and quickly became the chief pharmacist at the largest death camp, Auschwitz.

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Based in part on previously classified documents, Patricia Posner exposes Capesius’s reign of terror at the camp, his escape from justice, fueled in part by his theft of gold ripped from the mouths of corpses, and how a handful of courageous survivors and a single brave prosecutor finally brought him to trial for murder twenty years after the end of the war.
The Pharmacist of Auschwitz is much more, though, than a personal account of Capesius. It provides a spellbinding glimpse inside the devil’s pact made between the Nazis and Germany’s largest conglomerate, I.G. Farben, and its Bayer pharmaceutical subsidiary. The story is one of murder and greed with its roots in the dark heart of the Holocaust. It is told through Nazi henchmen and industrialists turned war criminals, intelligence agents and zealous prosecutors, and intrepid concentration camp survivors and Nazi hunters. Set against a backdrop ranging from Hitler’s war to conquer Europe to the Final Solution to postwar Germany’s tormented efforts to confront its dark past, Posner shows the appalling depths to which ordinary men descend when they are unrestrained by conscience or any sense of morality. The Pharmacist of Auschwitz is a moving saga that lingers long after the final page.

earthling

The Personal Librarian

The remarkable story of J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict, and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray.

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In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.
But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.
The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

earthling

To Experience Wonder

To Experience Wonder is the first book to explore behind the scenes of Edna Staebler's life. At the age of 97, Edna leads an active life at her cottage on Sunfish Lake, where she writes, reads, and welcomes the many aspiring writers who come to visit.

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#EdnaStaebler

Canada's foremost cookbook author began her career, not as a cook, but as a journalist writing for Canadian magazines. She was 60 when she turned her attention to food. Food That Really Schmecks immediately became a best-seller, and continues to sell 35 years later. It's more than a book of wonderful recipes — it also describes the Mennonite way of life. The success of that book led to two more Schmecks books and many other cookbooks. Edna has received the Order of Canada among many other awards.
Over the years, Edna developed longstanding friendships with many of Canada's greatest writers, including Margaret Laurence, W.O. Mitchell, Sheila Burnford, and Pierre Berton. In 1991 she established The Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction to recognize the first or second book of a Canadian writer.

earthling

The Opium Queen

Opium Queen is the true story of the widely mythologized genderqueer Burmese opium-pioneer of noble Chinese descent, Olive Yang, who secretly ran an anti-communist rebel army supported by the CIA in the 1950s heyday of the Golden Triangle.

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#OliveYang

Olive Yang was a widely mythologized genderqueer lesbian opium-pioneer in the 1950s heyday of the Golden Triangle. After escaping an arranged marriage with a noble cousin, Olive felt that she had no choice but to lead a life of banditry with an anti-communist rebel army supported by the CIA. As her smuggling empire grew, she became so powerful and infamous, novelists were inspired to write about her evil ruthlessness and beauty. Yet, Olive's real life and identity remained a mystery to many.
To the Kokang people whom the Yang family once ruled, Olive was both folk-hero and villain. ...