Opening reception on March 12, 2012 from 3:30-5:00 p.m. Historic photographs of the Mississippi River by Henry P. Bosse are juxtaposed with modern photos of river restoration projects completed by the non-profit group, Living Lands & Waters. Quotes from Mark Twain’s prose link the river’s past with the present. The exhibit is a partnership with…
Books
Books, New Whitewater, Press Release, School District, University
Mark Twain T-shirt Art Contest for K-12 Students
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Best to all the contestants, and appreciation to those supporting the contest — Mark Twain T-shirt Art Contest for K-12 Students For the fourth year in a row, the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded a local partnership to bring the national Big Read initiative to Rock, Walworth and Jefferson County. Mark Twain in…
Books
Sacha Scoblic‘s Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety
by JOHN ADAMS •
I’m sure to have questions about why I’m reading Sacha Scoblic‘s Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety. The answer is that I saw an essay Scoblic wrote around the time of Amy Winehouse’s death, on sobriety and the false notion that art somehow justifies (or requires) addiction. (See, Amy Winehouse: The Insidious Response to Her Addiction and…
Books
A farewell to the card catalog
by JOHN ADAMS •
I’m surprised there’s one still around. There was a chance for serendipity when searching through a card catalog, despite the undeniable inefficiency of it, too: It will be the end of an era when the public card catalog is removed from its home in room 224 of Memorial Library on the UW–Madison campus. Via UW…
Books, Free Markets, Liberty, Planning
Luskin on Atlas Shrugged, Paul Krugman, and Crony Capitalism
by JOHN ADAMS •
Donald Luskin’s spent years criticizing Krugman, not as much for Krugman’s economic accomplishments (Krugman’s a Nobel laureate) but for his subsequent politico-economic columns in the New York Times. Krugman is Luskin’s white whale, but that obsession isn’t as interesting to me as Luskin’s observation (toward the end of the video) that Atlas Shrugged is, principally,…
Books
Local Bookstores Support E-Book Effort
by JOHN ADAMS •
The Phantom Stranger, a defender of sound principles and good literature, kindly passed along a link to a Journal Sentinel story about local bookstore support for ebooks. From June 9 to 11, three bookstores (Boswell, Next Chapter, and Books & Company) will sell ebooks from Unbridled on their store websites for only 25 cents. That’s…
Books, Free Markets
Wall Street Journal Book Review: Your Teacher Said What?!
by JOHN ADAMS •
When asked if it wasn’t hypocritical for a multimillionaire director of Hollywood films to denounce capitalism as “evil,” Michael Moore averred that the free-market economy “did nothing for me.” It was, presumably, a devotion to Sandinista economics that enabled his purchase of an expensive Upper West Side apartment and covered his daughter’s private-school tuition. While…
Books, Free Markets
‘Birds of America’ by John James Audubon Sets Book-Sale Record – WSJ.com
by JOHN ADAMS •
Maybe print’s not dead after all. In a four-minute bidding battle in London that set Sotheby’s astir, an original edition of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” on Tuesday set what the company called a record for the sale of printed books at auction. Michael Tollemache, a London fine art dealer and bird enthusiast, bought…
Books
Amazon Introduces Kindle Singles – WSJ.com
by JOHN ADAMS •
Books, Review
Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists
by JOHN ADAMS •
I’ve read Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists twice — once in hardcover, and once on the Kindle. (A particularly astute recommendation brought the book to my attention.) While thinking about the book, I decided to search for information on the author, and came across a review in the New York Times. It surprised me, a bit,…