Cosimo author Peter Robbins — coauthor of Left at East Gate: A First-hand Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident, Its Cover-up, and Investigation, about England’s notorious 1980 close-encounter event, will appear at the monthly meeting of Disclosure Network/New York on Sunday, March 1st, from 2pm to 5pm, at the LGBT Community Center at 208 West 13th Street. Admission is $8.

DN/NY is dedicated to documenting the cover-up of UFOs for the past 50 years as part of the Disclosure Project, which has taken over 400 hours of videotaped testimony of military, intelligence, government, corporate, scientific, pilot and FAA witnesses who have been first-hand observers of UFO activity.

Robbins will address a wide variety of cutting edge topics of major interest and concern to DN/NY members, and will also allow a running Q&A within his presentation.

For more information on Robbins’ appearance, visit Disclosure Network/New York.

Left at East Gate is available at Amazon and other online booksellers.

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Always cause for celebration: newly found work from the author of beloved classics:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has acquired a previously unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, written while Tolkien was a professor at Oxford during the 1920s and ’30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The house will publish The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in the U.S. and worldwide on May 5. The publication will mark the first extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigúrd the Völsung and The Fall of the Niflungs. The book will include an introduction by Tolkien, drawn from one of his lectures on Norse literature, with commentary, notes on the poems by Christopher Tolkien.

via Publishers Weekly

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Danny Schechter, author of the Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, has garnered yet more praise for his prescient and hard-hitting attention to the global financial crisis in the years before it came to a head.

Veteran media critic and Emmy winner Rory O’Connor, in his latest column for mediachannel.org, “Embedded Business Press Misses Story of the Century,” rips apart the “complaisant business press” that “missed the story of the disaster now threatening the very pillars of the global capitalist system itself”:

Complicity, careerism, access, ratings, deregulation, glory, money, corporate and conglomerate media… the reasons behind our pusillanimous press coverage of the run up to the financial meltdown are much the same as those underlying the run up to war – and so are the results. Business reporters ‘embedded’ on Wall Street — as enamored of titans of commerce as their Pentagon press peers were with Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell – are now piling bad information on top of no information. Once again, we-the-people are paying the price in treasure and sadly, in some cases, blood.

Of course, I’m not alone in pointing fingers. As the AP’s David Bauder recently reported, “some of the nation’s top financial journalists believe reporters dropped the ball as the nation’s economy tumbled toward crisis mode.”

But O’Connor singles out some journalists who were doing their jobs during those crucial years, including Schechter:

There were also, however, many shining examples of journalists doing their jobs well, asking tough questions, getting surprising answers, and presenting them to a world still stuck inside a frothy financial bubble about to burst. In some cases they toiled at major outlets such as the New York Times and the Financial Times, where columnists including Paul Krugman, Joe Nocera, the estimable Martin Wolf and others all did their best to call attention to the gathering storm. But in most instances they were outliers – bloggers, researchers, and even filmmakers — people who didn’t usually specialize in business reporting or even analysis. Veteran gadfly and self-styled News Dissector Danny Schechter was first, and is still foremost, among them.

Schechter (DISCLOSURE: my colleague and business partner at the Globalvision) was so far ahead of the curve that he managed to research, shoot and edit an entire documentary predicting the coming collapse (In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts) literally years before it unfolded. Schechter, who blogs at MediaChannel’s News Dissector site, also began writing about the coming crisis daily (some said obsessively,) while simultaneously aggregating information from a wide range of other sources, including many specialized economics blogs. When he began, many within progressive media circles were puzzled at Schechter’s newfound focus and wondered why he had departed from his earlier emphasis on “politics” – as if the economic shenanigans and subprime crimes he was detailing had no political dimensions!

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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The original Kindle has been sold out since November, and finally the replacement model is here. The New York Times seems to love it:

Amazon’s newest version of its popular e-book reader (see their announcement here) looks a whole lot more attractive and seems to have a simpler, more intuitive interface (the new joystick controller helps). The Kindle 2 is thinner (thinner than an iPhone, to give you some idea), has a crisper black-and-white display, turns pages much more quickly and should hold its battery charge for about 25 percent longer than the previous version. New features include text-to-speech and the ability to transfer content to other devices (such as mobile phones and other Kindles). It’s the same price as the outgoing model ($359) and will be shipped Feb. 24. Amazon is taking preorders now. The online retailer has said customers who are already on the waiting list for the old Kindle will get new Kindle 2’s.

Sounds great. And looks great, too:

So gorgeous! And what’s that they say about not such thing as being too thin…?

The new Kindle will be available February 24, but you can preorder it now.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s got a new rival for the e-book/e-reader business:

Plastic Logic, maker of an electronic book reader, plans to announce partnership deals on Monday that it says will bring a number of major publications to its planned device.

The company plans to make a device with a 10.7-inch diagonal electronic display, larger than the screens on an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader, two of the more popular models currently on the market. Plastic Logic says the device will be available early next year. It uses the same technology to display print as its main competitors.

…

Unlike the other products, the screen of the Plastic Logic Reader is big enough to more closely approximate the look of a printed newspaper or magazine page.

Ooo, that sounds nice too.

So, buy a new Kindle now, or wait for Plastic Logic’s e-reader? Can’t a girl have both?

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This Thursday, February 12, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of English scientist, naturalist, and geologist Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the undisputed father of modern biology… even in spite of the bogus controversy that continues to swirl around his theories. Plans for commemorations around the world are detailed at Darwin Day Celebration, but what better way to honor the man and the profound impact he had on the modern world than by reading his own words?

On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life is the 1859 work that launched the controversy. Widely accepted as the seminal work in modern biology, it is Darwin’s explanation of how, through careful observation, he deduced that traits can be selected for within a population of living creatures, and that new species arise from dramatic changes in existing ones. The theory, of course, caused an uproar that can still be heard today, even though subsequent science has indisputably proven the correctness of Darwin’s theory, and has, indeed expanded upon it, revised it, and refined it to the point that Darwin himself with likely be astonished.

Most devotees of science know that the theory of natural selection was independently arrived at, at almost the same time, by Darwin’s friend and colleague British biologist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). In Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications, Wallace explores the state of Darwinism as a scientific theory as it stood in 1889, when this book was originally published. Natural selection was under fire as an insufficient explanation for evolution, but Wallace believed that this was only because it was not understood properly. To combat the opponents of natural selection, he offers examples of evolution at work in nature, including a study of variation and coloration, sterility in crossbreeds, fertilization methods in plants, and the importance of the struggle for survival. A good primer for anyone wanting to know more about Darwin’s theory of evolution, Darwinism is written in an easy-to-read style that will appeal to lay readers and scholars alike.

Not all of Darwin’s fans know that he was already famous at the time he published Origin: He had made a name for himself with the book The Voyage of the Beagle (first published in 1839 under the title Journal and Remarks). Much of the basis for his conceptual breakthrough was his research during the five-year journey he undertook on the HMS Beagle, an English exploratory vessel, which sailed South America and the South Pacific from 1831 to 1836. This replica volume reproduces the 1845 second edition of his recounting of that trip, originally called Journal of Researches. Enthralling both as a tale of travel adventure and as a naturalist’s diary, Voyage is even more fascinating for the hints it offers, from decades prior to the publication of Origin, of the observations of the natural world and the thought processes that followed that would combine to revolutionize the field of biology.

Cosimo books are available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Join Cosimo in celebrating the contributions of African-Americans over the course of the history of the United States with these classic works of the African-American experience.

In the 1865 book The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) makes his case for the intellectual and moral equality of negroes at a time when the majority of white society believed otherwise. Called at the time of its publication “the best account of the ability of the Negro ever put in print” and “an incontestable argument,” this volume presents more than 50 portraits of African Americans who, in the face of prejudice and slavery, managed to make a difference. The enormous achievements of the author — who was born into slavery and escaped to the North, where he became a prominent abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian — combined with the work’s clarity and vision make this an essential slice of black history.

Other influential and important works by William Wells Brown include The Escape or, A Leap for Freedom, Clotelle, or A Tale of the Southern States, and The Negro in the American Revolution.

The 1921 book The Social History of the American Negro, by African-American author and educator Benjamin Griffith Brawley (1882-1939), offered a new examination of the history of black people in America in light of the new flowering of cultural interest — on the part of whites as well as blacks — in the post-World War I period.

A highly readable and tremendously informative foundational overview of the grand and terrible story of Africans in the New World, this work explores: the role of the Negro in the Spanish exploration of America; the development of the slave trade; the difficult social positions of the Indian, the mulatto, and the free Negro; early slave insurrections; the Negro in the American Revolution; first steps toward abolition; Negroes in the West; the impact of Nat Turner and the Amistad case; Sojourner Truth and the influence of the women’s suffrage movement; the Civil War and Emancipation; and much more.

Nigerian slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) was sold to white slavers when he was eleven. He worked on a naval ship and fought during the Seven Years’ War, and eventually, he was able to purchase his freedom and move to England, where he was safe from being captured back into slavery. There, he was an outspoken advocate of the abolitionist movement.

His 1789 autobiography, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, was the first of its kind to influence a wide audience. He told the story of his life and suffering as a slave. He describes scenes of outrageous torture and made it clear to his readers how the institution of slavery dehumanized both owner and slave. Equiano’s work became an important part of the abolitionist cause, because he was able to portray Africans with a humanity that many slave traders tried to deny. Anyone with an interest in the slave trade or the abolitionist movement will find this book essential reading.

Cosimo books are available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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From The New York Times:

In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper.

The last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. The Post said in a statement Wednesday that in the printed newspaper Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the commentary section, and Style & Arts. Book World will occasionally appear as a stand-alone print section oriented around special themes like summer reading or children’s books.

I can’t say that I lament this loss as much as some other book lovers do. Newspaper book review sections, no matter how highbrow and prestigious they are or were, simply cannot cover the breadth and scope of the book world today. It was always great to get a review in one of them, but so many worthy books were left out. The smart and active book community online is only just starting to make up for that, but clearly online is the future.

And that’s just fine.

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