celticman's blog

‘Freeconomic’ is a made-up word. We get it. Although few of us buy into it. Mark Boyle’s goal was quite simple. He outlines it in the Prologue. I wasn’t aware there was a ‘Buy Nothing Day’. Most of the days of my week are buy nothing days. But I’d be stretching it a bit to manage 365 days. Mark Boyle on Buy Nothing Day, 28 th November 2008, decided he wouldn’t spend a penny for a year. Ironically, he provoked a media feeding frenzy. ‘Be the...

Maureen Myant, like most writers, was a writer in search of a publisher. I’ve read the first and her latest, The Fallen , in her four book, South-side of Glasgow, police-procedural published by Hobeck Books. I also read a fair bit of her reissued first book, The Search . The Confession , which kicks off the crime series, is her best. The point of view shifted in her first Southside novel. Mostly the story was told from the point of view of DI...

Maureen Myant is on a roll four or five of the same books (around 80 000 words a year) same characters, Glasgow Southside Series. I read around a quarter of her first novel, The Search , which I take was her doctoral dissertation in Creative Writing from Glasgow Uni. It was set in Poland, 1942. OKish, I won’t finish reading it. Habeas corpus , you shall have the body. Police procedural centred on (the story being told mainly from point of view)...

Nadia Dalbuono (2015) The American The American is one of a series of books featuring Detective Leone Scamarcio. Daluono’s book was published before the election of the moron’s moron Trump, when the idea of destabilising society—with false-flag operations—and saving democracy by appointing a dictator belonged in Roman History and not current affairs. The CIA has been at work at home and abroad assassinating presidents and asset-stripping...

I read some books. Pick others up and start reading them. Think that’s interesting and realise I’ve read it before. I was going to say something about grief. But don’t really know what I’m talking about, which isn’t unusual. I couldn’t, for example, make a podcast about it, as Rachel Wilson did, The Grief Network. Or write this book. Here (more or less) is her mission statement. ‘When my mother died, I took it for granted a group tailored to...

I’m not sure who Adam Rutherford is. Professor Hannah Fry has presented a couple of quirky programmes for the BBC. She’s a model scientist and role model for those girls that think science is just for boys. Science matters they tell us. But is also, like everything else, biased. Their Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything is tongue-in-cheek. Because anyone and everyone knows that the complete guide to absolutely everything is on your phone...

The story is in the title. A pamphlet printed in her native Gaelic and later in English. From some ‘sketchy notes’ Isabella MacIver Thomas travelled by the SS Clansman from Lewis to Canada, March 1880. Three years after her wedding to join her husband, (and first cousin) James Thomson. Then by the Canadian Pacific Railway out through to America—Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, Minnesota and back again to join him—in Canada at Pembina in the province...

Marilyn Shimon recognises that Holocaust literature has become a literary category. It’s one that speaks to many of us, including me. I’m never happier than when I’m reading about someone being miserable. Power corrupts. But as Robert A. Caro in his study of Lyndon B. Johnson shows—it also reveals. We can learn lessons from Holocaust survivors about what it means to be human but treated as sub-human. Everyone has their story. Marilyn Shimon...

Graham Farmelo’s biography of Paul Dirac won the Costa Book Award the year it was published. That was a while ago. I need to do the maths (or arithmetic). Sixteen years ago. You’d need to go back 100 years to inhabit the world of Paul Dirac. Einstein’s special theory of relativity had not yet changed the world. But had changed the way the world was viewed. A Kuhnian revolution in scientific thought. Paul Dirac was a genius whose work Einstein...

James Van Praagh (1998 [2009, 2012]) Talking to Heaven Living with the Dead (Talking to Heaven) (2002), screenwriter John Pielmeier, Director Stephen Gyllenhaal, starring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. I watched Living with the Dead while scrolling through Prime. It’s based on James Van Praagh’s best-selling memoir. But, of course, instead of a wee baldy fat guy with pretension of being a screenwriter, Ted Danson (Cheers) plays James Van...