Some of On The Move feels ripe for a US heavyweight such as the novelist James Baldwin. Other parts are untidily told, padded with extracts from letters home or the young adventurer's first attempts at writing. It is not quite clear how that youthful, ready-for-anything medic metamorphosed into a distinguished professor. We piece the story together from anecdotes of foolhardy adventure and episodes of clinical encounter. Sacks writes about people with migraines, Tourette's syndrome or Parkinson's disease, autism, epilepsy, colour blindness, serious mental illness and the post-encephalitics of the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York, who are the subjects of Awakenings. These are the stuff of his books: not just medical cases, but warm, quirky and aware.
The Address Book Tim Radfordl
This is a rich book with a rewarding appendix of notes. The straining for descriptive effect occasionally obtrudes; Bogard teaches creative non-fiction to university students, so he will know Samuel Johnson's advice about striking out the fine writing. The book's ambitious scope also necessarily dictates a sacrifice of depth. But these are small things. The big thing is that, as you read it, you too will want to reclaim the night and perhaps rediscover the heavens of the Enlightenment.
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So if courts are hesitant to reform and rationalize property law, why do we keep doing Restatements? I'm generally a fan of the Restatement (Third) of Property, Servitudes. Among other things, abolition of the distinction between real covenants and equitable servitudes makes a great deal of sense -- the difference between the two is a relic of the division between law and equity, and it seems silly to have different rules if a covenant is going to be enforced through an injunction or money damages. Some courts might be bold enough to make such a radical change, but my bet is that most would not. So why be court-centric? Why don't we put the same substance into a Model Law of Servitudes and try to reform property law through the legislatures? Some legislative property reform might raise takings issues (a subject I'll address in a future post), but I have a hard time seeing that as a problem with servitudes reform.
Léon Bottou received a Diplôme from l'Ecole Polytechnique, Paris in 1987, a Magistère en Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et Informatiques from Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris in 1988, and a PhD in Computer Science from Université de Paris-Sud in 1991. He joined AT&T Bell Labs from 1991 to 1992 and AT&T Labs from 1995 to 2002. Between 1992 and 1995 he was chairman of Neuristique in Paris, a small company pioneering machine learning for data mining applications. He has been with NEC Labs America in Princeton since 2002. Léon's primary research interest is machine learning. His contributions to this field address theory, algorithms and large scaleapplications. Léon's secondary research interest is data compression and coding. His best known contribution in this field is the DjVu document compression technology ( ) Léon published over 70 papers and is serving on the boards of JMLR and IEEE TPAMI. He also serves on the scientific advisory board of Kxen Inc .
Simon R. Green's irresistible inspiration met an immovable object: 'I've sold a series of books to Ace ... the third of which features a torch singer who puts across sad songs so powerfully that members of the audience go home and commit suicide. Sometimes they don't even bother to go home first. Anyway, my title was Do Lemmings Sing the Blues. My American editor's response: Over my dead lifeless body.'
Judith Merril's long-awaited memoirs have been assembled by her granddaughter Emily Pohl-Weary from a partial draft and various fragments. Mike Moorcock: 'In the new (and recommended) Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, I am credited with transforming "a formerly mild science fiction called 'Flagship' into what became known as 'New Worlds'." I suspect this is a case of editing done after Judy's death. The book is full of interesting and generally affectionate insights into the sf scene of the 40s, 50s and 60s in particular.' • Michael Swanwick remembers 'the only time I ever met the lady. It was at a Readercon, shortly before she died. I was sitting at a table with other writers when, moving with great difficulty, she sat down and joined us. "You're looking well, Judy," somebody said. She looked at him sternly and said, "I am in constant pain." Then she smiled the very best smile in the world and added, "But so what?"'
29 Aug - 2 Sep • ConJosé (60th Worldcon), San José, California. Still $180/125 reg until advance booking closes on 31 July; $200 at the door ($180 on Sat 31 Aug). Contact PO Box 61363, Sunnyvale, CA 94088-1363, USA; UK agents 52 Westbourne Tce, Reading, RG30 2RP.
R.I.P. John Nathan-Turner (1948-2002), BBC producer responsible for 130 episodes of Doctor Who from 1980 to 1989, died on 3 May aged 54. He first joined the show as a floor assistant in 1969. [JW] • Bill Peet (1915-2002), who scripted the animated 101 Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone, and contributed to many other Disney classics, died on 5 May at age 87. He also wrote 35 children's books, several of them award-winners. [PB] • Bruce Pelz (1936-2002), US fan who was a mainstay of the Los Angeles SF Society, a past Worldcon chair, and did invaluable work in archiving the history and publications of fandom, died from a pulmonary embolism on 9 May. He was 65. I'll miss Bruce's staunch support for the fan funds, and his endless punning 'Tripe Report' postcards, sent from countless exotic places as he travelled the world on cruise ships with his wife Elayne (to whom all sympathy).
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