Word: books
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Amazingly, there is. Charles Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking) is the more accessible of the two. (The other book, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero [Oxford], while philosophically deeper, is self-consciously obscure; its author, Robert Kaplan, writes in Zen koans and could have penned the Fendi tag line...
...makes it sexy to be a number cruncher. (The sexy image was reversed--for the few bohemians who saw it--by the 1998 art-house flick [pi], the story of a psychotic, self-mutilating mathematician who discovers a very big number that holds the secrets of the universe.) Books on mathematics, such as Fermat's Enigma and A Beautiful Mind, the tale of a schizophrenic mathematical economist who wins the Nobel Prize, hit best-seller lists here and abroad. (I came to appreciate the eclectic taste of our friends across the pond when my book The Man Who Loved Only...
When Tomb Raider IV hit stores last week, you were also able to pick up a Lara Croft comic, a Lara Croft candy bar, a Lara Croft action doll. A Pokemon-esque Lara Croft card game is selling briskly, as is Lara's Book (a cultural dissection by Generation X author Douglas Coupland). Coming soon: a Lara Croft movie from Universal Pictures and 60-ft.-tall Croft wall paintings in major cities across America...
...recovering from a stroke." Douglas' influence also extended to casting: "I told Lauren Bacall there was a perfect part for her," he recalls. "When I said she'd play the madam of a whorehouse, she uttered some expletives, then agreed." Now Douglas is embarking on his eighth book, a new movie and an adolescent rite of passage: next week he will be bar mitzvahed for the second time. "In Judaism you can be re-bar mitzvahed at 83," he says. "I've asked guests to donate to charity in lieu of gifts, but I do expect a lot of fountain...
Steel calls his book a "meditation" on Robert Kennedy's life. Relieved of the burden of having to tell the whole story, Steel's book is brisk and analytical. He paints this Kennedy as haunted by all sorts of demons, not the least of which was his important role in urging his brother John to commit American forces in Vietnam. This made R.F.K. reluctant to step forward as the candidate of the anti-war movement in 1968 until the bolder Eugene McCarthy had demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson's unpopularity in his own party...