“Orwell would have recoiled at seeing the symbol of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists on otherwise unblemished brows, even if the emblem was tamed by its new white-magic associations.”
George Orwell
Of the people that took the photo that work in my office (across the street from where I took this), I think Roland was the first.
Pamela Paul: “While the temptation to correct errors - which often reverberate from blog to blog - can be strong, counterblogging can be counterproductive. Authors report sad tales of the flaming feedback loops that follow such confrontations.”
The article links to the most blogged-about books of 2005, and I'm linked on the page for Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd (which links to my 'just quote' of a review of the book). Most of the writers asked seem overly-sensitive about reactions they read in weblogs, but then again, aren't writers overly-sensitive to begin with? (And the same for bloggers?) Dowd seems the most sensible about following what bloggers say about her by deploying human filters—her assistant and her sister—to forward her the important reactions.
Dowd's book is not listed in the top-20 list, however, but two technical aspects of the list strike me as interesting: you do not need an account to view the list and also search engines are allowed to index the list, though not archive it in a cache. (But what, no links so that I can purchase any of the books, with the newspaper getting a cut?) It's unusual for The New York Times to allow search engines to index anything—but it's very smart, because users coming in through search engines are more likely to click on the ads which most bloggers and weblog readers probably have learned to ignore.
Here are the books on the list that I've read, with, if applicable, a link to my short review for each:
- 3. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (my brief review)
- 5. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (my brief review)
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- 12. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki (my selection as best book of 2004)
- 14. 1984 by George Orwell (my favourite book of all time)
japh on Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens: “with chapter headings like 'orwell and the left', 'orwell and the right', 'orwell and america', and 'orwell and the feminists' (to name a few), you know that hitchens is trying to cover all the ground. he succeeds in my mind, and with enough detail to leave you pleased with his arguments.”
japh on Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens: “hitchens has led a life of curious adventure and incident, all the while developing a world view based on being a contrarian. regardless of your take on hitchens and his views, letters is a worthwhile read. it reminds us of the fire and strong-mindedness of youth, and makes us feel painfully complacent in our everyday lives.”
Ray Cassin: “Debate about the morality of bombing German cities began, in Britain at least, almost from the time that the RAF started doing it, and Orwell used his Tribune column "As I Please" to attack wartime critics of the bombing campaign. His argument rested on a kind of perverse egalitarianism: the technology that had made it possible to bomb entire cities, he said, thereby made everyone a potential target, which was surely a good thing. This spreading of the risk, he said, not only meant that war's victims were no longer overwhelmingly young men in the front line, but that bloated capitalists and apparatchiks could no longer find a place to hide.”
Cassin argues that Orwell's reputation as a moralist is inflated because “his attack on the critics of the bombing campaign was facile and pernicious”. Not linked in the article, "As I Please" is available online. I quoted from it in August of last year.
Geoffrey Nunberg: “[A]s advertisers have known for a long time, no audience is easier to beguile than one that is smugly confident of its own sophistication. The word "Orwellian" contributes to that impression. Like "propaganda," it implies an aesthetic judgment more than a moral one. Calling an expression Orwellian means not that it's deceptive but that it's crudely deceptive.”
A Q&A between Ben Greenman and Louis Menaud. This is a great line: “[Orwell] tried to be swayed by women; he was just unlucky.”
Menaud's article, Honest, Decent, Wrong: The invention of George Orwell is also available online:
"Big Brother" and "doublethink" and "thought police" are frequently cited as contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as "liar" and "pervert" and "madman." They are conversation-stoppers. [...] The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope to "1984."
Jeet Heer: “Hitchens, too, can be a cranky curmudgeon, who has always taken independent stances, no matter how unpopular. In the last year, Hitchens has offended many of his erstwhile colleagues on the left by strongly supporting the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Writing in Counterpunch, a popular left-wing Web site, Jack McCarthy described Hitchens as a "lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical contrarian."”
Jack McCarthy unwittingly described what I like about Hitchens, easily my favourite writer at the moment. I just finished Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters, and I don't know if he adequately makes the case that Orwell matters, but does, however, make a good case why Orwell mattered when he was alive, much more than his contemporaries would acknowledge. Orwell, as Hitchens points out, was right about the 3 great issues of the 20th century: fascism, Stalinism, and (less so than Hitchens leads on) British imperialism.
Niall Fergusson, in a book I read recently, The Cash Nexus, argued that the American military, for its size and strength, is, if anything, under-extended. What Hitchens has to say about American imperialism (a pill less bitter to swallow than Islamic imperialism), I'd like to know.
