The Frank O’Connor Prize shortlist is as follows:
via Blog of a Bookslut.
…is awarded to Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 by Frank Dikötter
“This meticulous account of a brutal man-made calamity is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century. With access to hitherto hidden archives, Frank Dikötter has created a harrowing, superbly-written indictment of Mao’s disastrous revolutionary experiment that led to the unnecessary deaths of 45 million Chinese people. This epic record of human folly is stunningly original and hugely important, and casts Chinese history in a radical new light, with a devastating psychological portrait of the dictator whose “Great Leap Forward’ plunged China into catastrophe.â€
The nation’s major internet service providers, at the urging of Hollywood and the major record labels, have agreed to disrupt internet access for online copyright scofflaws.
The deal, almost three years in the making, was announced early Thursday, and includes participation by AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon. After four copyright offenses, the historic plan calls for these companies to initiate so-called “mitigation measures†(.pdf) that might include reducing internet speeds and redirecting a subscriber’s service to an “educational†landing page about infringement.
The internet companies may eliminate service altogether for repeat file sharing offenders, although the plan does not directly call for such drastic action.
ISPs to Disrupt Internet Access of Copyright Scofflaws | Threat Level | Wired.com.
An ideologically diverse group of 90 law professors has signed a letter opposing the PROTECT IP Act, the Hollywood-backed copyright enforcement/Internet blacklist legislation now working its way through Congress. The letter argues that its domain-blocking provisions amount to Internet censorship that is barred by the First Amendment.
Dozens of law professors: PROTECT IP Act is unconstitutional.
Acknowledgments also offer an all-too-rare view of the writer as actual human being. We often think we’re seeing the author’s real self when we read her fiction, but as any author who’s ever been asked what happened after she fled her family of international superspies and threw in her lot with a group of itinerant circus performers knows only too well, this is a delusion. The acknowledgments at the back of a novel are tantalizing because they’re often the only true thing amid a pack of lies. And at the end of a really great book, how wonderful to recognize that it was written not by a monolith or a beam of white light or the manifestation of the goddess Athena, but by a living, breathing person who remembered to thank her agent.
