London Review of BooksLiterary review publishing essay-length book reviews and topical articles on politics, literature, history, philosophy, science and the arts by leading writers and thinkersGazillions Neal Ascherson: Organised Crime- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Karabas was gunned down in 1997. He and his mob had taken over the port city of Odessa as law and order disintegrated in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. One might call his reign a comprehensive protection racket. But, looked at in another way, Karabas became the only reliable source of authority and social discipline. He arbitrated the city's commercial disputes (10 per cent of net profits was his price); he kept the drug peddlers to one area of Odessa, and prevented the horrific...http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/asch01_.html Letters- (Found June 24, 2008 ) The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 13http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/letters.html Angry Duck Jenny Turner: Lorrie Moore- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Once upon a time, as Lorrie Moore begins, 'there was a not terribly prolific American short-story writer who, caught ten years between books with things she called Life and others called Excuses, was asked to write an introduction to her own Collected Stories.' Moore has not published a book since Birds of America in 1998; among much else, Birds of America contains a biting, unresolved debate about the point of writing fiction. And now, here she is, prefacing her own stories. 'How to do this...http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n11/turn03_.html Up from the Cellar Nicholas Spice: The Interment of Elisabeth Fritzl- (Found June 24, 2008 ) On 1 May, only five days after news broke that a 73-year-old man, Josef Fritzl, had immured one of his seven children, his 18-year-old daughter Elisabeth, in a specially fortified cellar under his house in the small town of Amstetten in Lower Austria, and kept her there for 24 years, abusing her persistently and fathering seven more children on her, Elfriede Jelinek, Austria's Nobel Prize winning novelist, posted a short essay on her website under the title 'Im Verlassenen'. It begins: 'Austria.http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n11/spic01_.html Short Cuts John Lanchester: Who's Afraid of the Library of America- (Found June 24, 2008 )http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/lanc01_.html At the Door Peter Campbell: Open Sesame!- (Found June 24, 2008 )http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/camp01_.html Diary Thomas Jones: The Last Days of eBay- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Around the turn of the millennium, one of the friends of friends' bands whose gigs I used occasionally to go to in the basements and back rooms of North London pubs was an indie guitar group called Keane. One Friday night in the early summer of 2001 at the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road, my girlfriend gave their manager (an ex-boyfriend of hers) a couple of quid for a homemade CD. 'That'll be worth a lot of money one day,' he said. I assumed he was joking; I privately thought it was slightly...http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/jone01_.html The Olympics Scam Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London- (Found June 24, 2008 ) In the mornings, there is a clinging, overripe smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving like swallows. Hard hats and yellow tabards monkeying over the scaffolding of shrouded towers,...http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/sinc01_.html Plato Made It Up James Davidson: Atlantis at Last!- (Found June 24, 2008 ) Of all the many disappointments of 1977, the ITV series Man from Atlantis has to be one of the greatest. The title suggested a programme that would have something to do with the lost underwater kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil...http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/davi02_.html Short Cuts Daniel Soar: David Davis v. Miss Great Britain- (Found June 24, 2008 )http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/soar01_.html |