And people wonder why traditional publishing is floundering?

From Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rapper Kanye West does not read books or respect them but nevertheless he has written one that he would like you to buy and read.

The Grammy Award winner, known for his No. 1 albums and outspoken statements on everything from racism in America to the banality of Twitter, is the co-author of “Thank You And You’re Welcome.”

His book is 52 pages — some blank, others with just a few words — and offers his optimistic philosophy on life. One two-page section reads, “Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!” Another page reads “I hate the word hate!”

That 52-page collection of fortune cookies will set you back 10 bucks. The book is deliberately not wordy or anything, because that’s the author’s philosophy on books:

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed,” West said. “I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.

“I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,” he said.

*sigh*

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Explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Burton has been dead for 120 years, but he’s making news again — sort of — thanks to a new fictionalized biography, Iliya Troyanov’s The Collector of Worlds. Reviewer Ben Macintyre in The New York Times says the book “achiev[es] a rounded and satisfying portrait that traditional biography could never match.”

Macintyre describes Burton like this:

In the heyday of Victorian expansionism, a certain sort of Englishman believed he could do anything, go anywhere, discover everything, rule every­where. None believed in that credo more passionately than Sir Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, linguist, soldier, archaeologist, poet, spy, mystic, fencer, diplomat, pederast (possibly), sexual explorer (certainly), translator, controversialist and master of disguise. Indestructible, charismatic and extravagantly scarred (the legacy of a Somali spear that passed through both cheeks), Burton was also irascible, domineering, unquenchably curious and slightly unhinged.

…

This strange and brilliant man constantly invented and reinvented himself, and despite his voluminous writings, he remains an enigma.

The best way to begin to understand Burton, of course, is through those voluminous writings of his. Such as his fully annotated, unexpurgated 16-volume translation of the Eastern classic The Arabian Nights, the work he is best remembered for. Notorious for the delight he took in tweaking the sexual taboos of the Victorian age — as well as the delight he took in the resulting shock of his bashful peers — Burton was the first to bring to English readers in uncensored form this collection of bawdy tales from Persian, Indian, and Arabic sources and dating as far back as the ninth century AD.

First published between 1885 and 1888, and still an entertainingly naughty read, this is one of the earliest examples of a framing story, as young Shahrazad, under threat of execution by the King, postpones her death by regaling him with these wildly entertaining stories over the course of 1,001 nights. The stories themselves feature early instances of sexual humor, satire and parody, murder mystery, horror, and even science fiction, and have exerted incalculable influence on modern literature.

The 16-volume Cosimo set is available in both paperback and hardcover editions.

Volume I [PB] [HC] • Volume II [PB] [HC] • Volume III [PB] [HC] • Volume IV [PB] [HC]
Volume V [PB] [HC] • Volume VI [PB] [HC] • Volume VII [PB] [HC] • Volume VIII [PB] [HC]
Volume IX [PB] [HC] • Volume X [PB] [HC] • Volume XI [PB] [HC] • Volume XII [PB] [HC]
Volume XIII [PB] [HC] • Volume XIV [PB] [HC] • Volume XV [PB] [HC] • Volume XVI [PB] [HC]

In 1896, Georgiana M. Stisted, a niece of Burton’s, published her take on the man in The True Life of Capt. Sir Richard F. Burton, her attempt to “tell the truth concerning one who can no longer defend himself” and to “supply…the story of a great traveler’s life in popular form.” One of the most valuable biographies of Burton from the 19th century, it offers an intimate look at his life from birth and baptism through his military exploits and his explorations, including the search for the Nile.

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

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Danny Schechter, author of the Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, has won an Aronson Blog Award for his muckraking reports on economic, political and social issues. CUNY News Wire reports:

The Aronson Award goes to Schechter for his latest venture, the NewsDissector.org blog, which he began after 9/11 as a mini-newspaper, with analyses and muckraking news reports on the economic, political and social crises of the day.

The Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism have been presented since 1990 to journalists who measure business, government and social affairs against clear ideals of the common good. The awards are named in honor of James Aronson, the distinguished Hunter College professor of journalism who was editor from 1949 to 1967 of the crusading newsweekly The National Guardian. Aronson also worked on the staffs of the Boston Evening Transcript, New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

Cosimo congratulates Schechter on his award.

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

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

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Nearly 70 years after his death, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (1857-1943) is in the news again: his Long Island worksite is the subject of heated contention. Reports The New York Times:

Today, a fight is looming over the ghostly remains of that site, called Wardenclyffe — what Tesla authorities call the only surviving workplace of the eccentric genius who dreamed countless big dreams while pioneering wireless communication and alternating current. The disagreement began recently after the property went up for sale in Shoreham, N.Y.

A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company’s real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can “be delivered fully cleared and level,” a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.

(The Times also features an intriguing photoessay on Tesla’s work and on the Wardenclyffe site today.)

Tesla and his work remain of vital interest today because his revolutionary breakthroughs forever changed the fields of electricity and magnetism. Though he is now widely forgotten, Tesla’s greatest invention, AC current, powers almost all of the technological wonders in the world today, from home heating to computers to high-tech precision robotics. In Experiments With Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency, Tesla dazzles the reader with his keen insight and an array of experiments that pushed the boundaries of human knowledge. Adapted from a lecture given at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London, this volume continues to astound students and scholars of the history of science.

Tesla also demonstrated his breathtaking genius in The Problem of Increasing Human Energy: With Special Reference to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy. Part philosophical ponderings on humanity’s relationship to the universe, part scientific extrapolation on what technological advancement might bring to that understanding, this long essay, first published in Century Illustrated Magazine in June 1900, explores the possibilities presented by robotics, the “civilizing potency of aluminum,” one of the first proposals to use solar power to run industrial civilization, and much more.

The great inventor chronicled his own life in My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, an engaging, informative, and humorously eccentric biography. But the definitive biography of the man is John J. O’Neill’s Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, first published in 1944 and long a favorite of Tesla fans. Tesla was a close friend of Pulitzer Prize winner O’Neill, and here, O’Neill captures the man as a scientist and as a public figure, discussing how Tesla’s father inspired his life in engineering, why Tesla clung to his theories of electricity in the face of opposition, how the shy but newly popular Tesla navigated the social life of New York in the gay 1890s, Tesla’s friendship with Mark Twain, the story of Tesla’s lost Nobel Prize, Tesla’s dabblings in the paranormal, and much more.

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

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As the outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus — popularly known as swine flu — spreads beyond Mexico across the planet, conspiracy theories are racing around the Web insisting that this new virus must be the work of bioterrorists. New Scientist puts paid to such suggestions — and Intravenous Caffeine asks the obvious question:

[I]f someone was planning on a bioterrorist attack on the US, why did they start the outbreak in Mexico? Why not New York City or Chicago or any other crowded US metropolis?

Good question. Newsweek is of the opinion, however, that even a natural outbreak of swine flu “caught health officials completely by surprise — just as a bioterror attack would.”

Or would it? The government report Bioterrorism: The National Preparedness & Activities, available from Cosimo, discusses the development of new vaccines, antibodies, and improved treatment for infectious diseases caused by biological agents. It also features information on the development and testing of emergency response equipment.

Congressman (and medical doctor) Ron Paul on the swine flu scare, and how the media has overhyped the danger:

Bioterrorism: The National Preparedness & Activities is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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