Word: booker
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...love words, I love languages," says Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning Indian novelist. "It's only when you know many languages that you realize there are few boundaries between them." His latest book, Sea of Poppies - recently short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize - crests along the collision and collusion of tongues found aboard the Ibis, a 19th century schooner plying the Indian Ocean. Its crew speaks a babble of English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Malay, Tamil, Chinese - and yet, through "the alchemy of the open water," as Ghosh writes, they communicate sufficiently well to sail this great wooden hulk...
...Longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize (and a strong candidate for the shortlist to be announced on Sept. 9), The Lost Dog tells the stories of two people, Tom Loxley and Nelly Zhang. Tom, a divorced Anglo-Indian literary scholar who lives in Melbourne, has lost his dog in the vast wilderness of the Australian bush. He is there staying in the holiday home of his friend, Nelly, while he finishes a book on Henry James and the uncanny. Nelly, an artist who lives and works in a disused Victorian textile mill called the Preserve, located...
Left on the altar of the anodyne was a much more interesting convention that might have been. Some truly invigorating change was bubbling just below the surface of this gathering. Young, black Democrats like Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, and Adrian Fenty, mayor of Washington, D.C., talked openly about the straitjacketing effect of special interests on the Democratic party - especially the teachers unions, with their resistance to education reform. It is an opinion that Barack Obama shares, or at least used to share. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, he expressed his frustration at the educational establishment, calling...
...honoring the contributions of their forebears without alienating the broader, multiracial audiences they need to win. I've spent part of the past year tracking dozens of these rising stars and have concluded that anyone who thinks Obama is unique is not paying attention. Consider Newark, N.J., mayor Cory Booker. His troubled city is into its third generation of African-American political leadership but not necessarily the good kind. Its previous two black mayors-Kenneth Gibson and Sharpe James-became ensnared in fraud and corruption prosecutions (Gibson was ultimately acquitted; James was not). Booker, 39, is something else entirely...
...Booker shares the metabolism of Washington mayor Adrian Fenty, a triathlete who recently waved away an ambulance after he tumbled from his bike near a city freeway. Fenty, 37, has demonstrated a Zelig-like ability to appear wherever cameras are rolling-whether at crime scenes or neighborhood block parties. But his boldest move came when he engineered a city-hall takeover of Washington's struggling public schools. He hired a no-nonsense outsider, Michelle Rhee, to reform the crumbling system; it's a huge gamble politically, but the city's future could depend on its success...