A Place in the Auvergne: Thursday, 17th April 2008

REVIEWS FOR 'A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY' BY IAN WALTHEW

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardcover July 2007; Phoenix paperback May 1, 2008)

'Stressed city couple seeks slower life in Cotswolds idyll'. The premise is so familiar there's even a predictably technical term for it: 'downshifting'. Yet it's hard to think in those terms about A Place in My Country, given the care with which Ian Walthew has skirted all the sprung traps of nostalgia and sentiment. A thoughtful observer and magpie-ish collector of oral history, Walthew has a sharp sense of the absurdities and the assets of his native land, reinforced by years living overseas. In his country life, escaped cows and the hunt ball jostle for space with barn raves and hawkish property developers. Avoiding the usual bland elegy for the rustic and redemptive, his book is a valuable memoir, both personal and social, a meditation on belonging in one of many Englands.
The Observer

‘I have been reading about the British countryside all my life but this is the first post-modern take on a national asset so routinely taken for granted. Author Ian Walthew takes a 12-inch plough to the cosy complacency that so many apply to the subject and reveals that 21st century rural life is not a place for the genteel - in a corner of Gloucestershire most commonly viewed by outsiders from their 4x4s as they hurry to overpriced weekend retreats, he finds a farming heartbeat that is proud and defiant, defended by a cast of characters that outshine The Archers. A revelation of a book.’
Tim Butcher
Author of Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
(Richard and Judy Galaxy Book of the Year 2008, 3rd Prize Winner)

'Far from being an idealistic paen to the English countryside, the book becomes a hard-edged and moving account of life rural Britain today.'
Sunday Times

'a poignant portrait of country life....the book could have been a rollicking, laugh-a-minute riff on ignorant townies having to ask what exactly a heifer is. There are certainly some fine comic episodes.. but it quickly turns into something more sombre - and more interesting...His beautifully written book is an elegy for an England that is dying, or at least in terminal decline.'
Max Davidson, Daily Telegraph

‘When stressed out media exec Ian Walthew panic buys a Cotswold cottage as an escape route from the urban treadmill, he unwittingly acquires a window on a corner of rural Britain at work and at play, and his writer’s eye sees just what’s going on. Walthew has a genuine gift for bringing both people and places to life and marshals his runaway real life narratives with a novelist’s skill. The story of his surprising friendship with his neighbour Norman - who is trying to keep his ramshackle farm and his dignity together with a few strands of baler twine, while his millionaire neighbours embrace the prairie concept of modern industrial farming - is compelling and often deeply moving. And Walthew’s own struggle with age-old issues of identity, friendship, community and a place to call home are fresh, sympathetic and never trying. It’s not the sort of book you’d pick up expecting a page-turner, but that’s exactly what it turn's out to be. It even has a proper ending.’
Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.
What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’
Financial Times

‘Having lived and worked abroad as a director of the International Herald Tribune for most of his adult life, Walthew, along with his Australian wife, Han, made a snap decision, aged 34, to buy a house in Gloucestershire, and embrace life in the country.
This is familiar territory, but Walthew combines his own story - coming to terms with the untimely deaths of his father and brother - with that of the land and the people who make up village life.
Funny, touching and ultimately very moving, this is a beautiful, unsentimental account of a personal loss that is reflected in the rapidly changing texture of life in rural England.’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Even peripheral characters…really come to life; as does the beauty of the Cotswolds and the harsh realities it conceals. A Place in My Country is an edifying consideration of the English countryside, its rich history and its attempt to adapt in today’s world’
Times Literary Supplement

’Unlike many escape to the country books this is a revealing and sometimes painful account of life in 21st century English countryside. Walthew discovers how class and wealth splinter rural communities but also finds personal contentment, if not a perfect idyll. It is beautifully written and very moving. This is a great book, if you like to have your misconceptions about our land thoroughly challenged’
BBC Countryfile Magazine

‘This is a story about a man who leaves the reassuring numbness of the rat race, in order to relearn how to live. Not usually a non-fiction reader, I'm generally wary of 'confessional' books, which I often find narcissistic and dull. A Place in My Country is beautifully written, poignant and wise and has all the narrative pace of the best fiction. For anyone who loves England but doesn't necessarily know why.’
Lucy Wadham, Author of Lost, Castro’s Dream, Greater Love (Faber and Faber)
Her first novel, 'Lost', was shortlisted for the Macallan Gold Dagger Award.

‘A tale of moving to the country that even those who actually live and work there might enjoy…’
The Shooting Times

‘All of life is here – birth, death, struggles with illness, hard work, lots of laughter. It will make you smile gently to yourself, laugh out loud, shed a quiet tear and feel angry about the changes happening in our countryside’
NFU Countryside Magazine

‘A riveting read....a warning to newcomers about the dangers of upsetting village hierarchies and sensibilities'
Country Life

‘One of “The Top Ten Summer Holiday Books You Must Own” Mail on Sunday

‘At the age of 34 Ian Walthew was the worldwide marketing director of the International Herald Tribune living in various parts of the world and leading a jet-set lifestyle. He was also on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Faced with a move back to London, he resigned and rather than buy a property in London he and his Australian wife bought a cottage in the Cotswolds to give Ian the peace which he needed to recuperate.
The cottage was next door to Norman's farm. Norman was a bit fearsome until you got to know him, but his struggles to keep the farm going in the face of falling prices and competition from the highly mechanised 'agri-business' arable farms kept him under a lot of pressure. Little by little Ian and Han develop a relationship with Norman and the other characters of this tightly-knit community.
When I started this book I did wonder if it was going to be an English version of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence - an amusing and entertaining read but ultimately rather superficial. I couldn't have been further from the truth. This isn't just the story of two people wanting an escape from the city; it's an examination of the state of the British countryside and a careful consideration of whether or not the way of life is sustainable. At times the writing had me close to tears.
The stars of this book are the people. Although Ian narrates the book he doesn't dominate it, but allows the villagers to shine through. It was fascinating to see his relationship with them develop after it was initially assumed by some people in the village that he and Han would be part of a more upper-class set. The couple's growing relationship with Norman sees him take a fuller part in village life. Geoff, the larger than life landlord of the local pub becomes a firm friend, but it's Tom, the ex-gamekeeper, to whom Ian becomes closest and who introduces him to the real country way of life.
It's several days now since I finished the book, but I was so moved by it that I didn't feel able to write about it immediately. It's by no means an easy read, but it's one of the most rewarding books that I've read for quite a while.’
www.thebookbag.co.uk

'Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone. The story of finding the dream cottage, the impulse buy, and the last-minute panic are standard for this genre, but Walthew has some more interesting things to say. His outgoing personality - and perhaps his cosmopolitan background, and his Australian wife - allowed him to integrate into village life but keep an outsider's point of view. He gradually realised that the villagers were far from the united community of townies' dreams, and that economics was forcing drastic changes on traditional rural life. Highly recommended.
Oxford Times

The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other

In a new play to the National Theatre in London, 27 actors perform for 90 minutes without uttering a word. The attraction is "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other," written by the Australian playwright Peter Handke in 1992. The script has 60 pages of stage directions and no dialogue, although there are bangs, crashes, screams, and laughter. Handke said that the idea came to in him in the 1980s when he found dramatic meaning in the comings and goings in a town square near Trieste, Italy. "Is there much to discover in it?" he said of his play? "I don't know." Source: IHT 13/02/08

A Place in the Auvergne

Auvergnats always ask why you chose their ‘pays’, can’t understand how you could leave yours.

You don’t want to disappoint with the prosaic truth.

That you were searching for anywhere with a little land, south of an east-west axis traversing Lyon (the weather); more than 100 km from any airport that can take a Ryanair jet (to avoid their passengers).

Somewhere to hide from people talking about property prices, private schools and ‘plans for the weekend’.

That you were searching for a place where you could still smell the soil and the ‘fumier’ and the ‘cave’ on the clothes of your friends.

That you saw a house on the internet in a region called the Auvergne, a region you had never visited; that this house was too close to a RN, but the contours rolled well over the map, distant from the blue lines of autoroutes – you’d pass by this place on your way back to Paris from the south one day.

And we did.

People think they can find good houses, places, people. But you can’t. They find you. You set out, drift around, and wash up on a friendly shore.

Most people are scared of the open sea, the great expanse of the Auvergne, so they take the TGV to places they know, places where they have friends and acquaintances, places where they drop anchor with their urban determination to self-associate.

The Auvergne has no TGV, it’s poor. That’s why the people are so welcoming and hospitable, says my neighbor, Jean-Baptiste.

He’s 86 now, a retired ‘menusier’, the missing fingers to prove it. He speaks Oc, at the market – when it’s not too hot, too cold, too wet, too snowy, too foggy - when the ‘troisieme generation’ go down the mountain early in the morning to talk a lot and buy a little.

Rich people, rich places, they’re not so welcoming, they don’t give so much. Arms are held wide to greet you but the embrace never tightens.

My wife didn’t want to go too far south, to the land of two seasons and burnt, aching, brown grass. In the Auvergne, winter is long, but spring and autumn explode and implode in shades of colours too fleeting to paint; the summer is hot and languid, deserved by the trials of winter, not an easy given.

The Auvergnats like to think of themselves as reserved, cautious, private. They can’t show their endless curiosity about you, because here privacy is hallowed, so their questions are absurdly roundabout or so direct so as to appear unlike a question at all - more a statement of fact that you may wish to confirm or not. (I do, they don’t.)

But they do open up, and quicker than they like to acknowledge. They are a kind, warm people with a brusque façade but one which is easily chipped in the cold, melted in the heat of shared seasons.

How would you describe Auvergnats, Jean-Baptiste?
‘There aren’t many of us left.’
He pauses, sitting on a bench in his ‘potagère’, made of a piece of wood rested on two old oil drums, in the shade of June apple tree, green and hopeful. Reflecting. ‘Amoureuse,’ he smiles.
And their faults?
‘We have none. No, one mustn’t exaggerate. Of course, I’m sure we do.’
‘Such as?’
He doesn’t like to say.

They’re not to be shared lightly, not with the readers of a magazine that Jean-Baptiste has only vaguely heard of, and certainly never read.

So this ‘foreigner’ (and here that word doesn’t mean coming from another nation) will tell you things you know but do not understand.

That ‘radinerie’ is a virtue, nothing is wasted. And you dare to speak of reducing consumption, of recycling and saving this planet.

That for the Auvergnats, land is an obsession: their willingness to argue over a 20 cm strip of useless ground; the story of a family picnic where two brothers end up fighting over who would sit under the shade of which of two trees.

So how did we get here? We stumbled, that’s the answer. Emotional refugees from a land of loss to the Auvergne, a place of endless discovery.

The EU and one arm of the government pours millions into the region to attract incomers like us, while another Minister closed the maternity ward and threatens Ambert hospital that brought us near this town, where our third child was born.

I asked Brice Hortefeux (when he was sent last year from a place called Paris to win over the bourgeoisie in the valley) why this was, why one hand could give so much while the other took away life, our future.

That’s a good question, he said.

(His suit looked very expensive in our marketplace, positively gleaming, his tie so fat and silky, his hair coiffured like a woman’s: that must be what they call ‘French flair’.)

So what’s the answer then?

His bodyguards hustled him away. He didn’t stay long.

The Auvergne: apparently a part of a country, ‘une et indivisible’. But I see no proof.

A place where the poor own their homes and their land, and have done for generations.

Where everyone has the right to build their own home on their own land, however ugly-pink and destructive to the Auvergne’s greatest asset – the ‘patrimoine’ that serves the tourists – and turn the roads leading to its towns into messy, elongated stains.

A place where Jean-Baptiste, the third generation of his family to live in his house, who has had three neighbouring families in his family’s life here, his place, greets an Anglo-Australian couple with two children and a removal fan from Brussels without missing a beat (nor when his dog kills our cat two days later, nor when our dog kills his chickens). Curious. Calm.

It was close to misery here; people got by on 3 or 4 cows. They ate beef only once a year, even the rich who could live well off 10-15 cows. The Fete du Pays, August 10th, a beef pot-au-feu.

We eat more beef now. There is little misery, not much money. But life in the Auvergne is a life apart: simple, straightforward, our table the farm food of ‘petits producteurs’ (still); clean air and cold water that slide off and out of primordial mountains; stories old and new, jokes, a small universe, an immense space of freedom.

Do we live in France? I’ve no idea.

About this Blog

Information is taken from the first edition of the European print edition of the International Herald Tribune.

Information from the newspaper edition dated 2nd January, 2008, can be found in the blog posting for 1st January, 2008 (and so on), given the nature of
newsprint news cycles.

Where possible links to quoted articles are provided and can be found at either http://www.iht.com/ or http://www.nyt.com/ .

News is not news analysis, news analysis is not editorial, editorial is not commentary (columnists) and commentary is not views (contributors' views). All are differentiated accordingly.

The views, editorials and commentary quoted do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher of this blog.

How to find your way around this place.

This blog started in a free form manner, but over time it has adopted some basic structure.

Since May (and before; I must check exactly when I worked out the world's metathemes) the following issues and themes are placed under the following pictures, every day.

Picture 1:
Agriculture/Food/Water
Picture 2:
The Environment
Picture 3:
Energy

France and the UK are the only two countries I follow, simply because I live in one and am from another.

Picture 4:
France
The Last Picture:
U.K

Labels

The labels are a useful way of finding the themes and issues that additionally are currently most holding my attention.

NB: the label Book will mean there will be a reference to a book in the blog, by way of a photo of one I have read, a book review from the IHT or an author of a book who has contributed to the IHT's pages.

It does not however mean I recommend any of them.

(There is a Recommend section on the right hand column of the blog.)

How to know when this blog has been updated.

According to a blogger friend of mine, there is a simple way to be alerted when my blog is updated. This is what she writes:

"Bloglines instructions: go to http://www.bloglines.com
and click on Creating An Account. Next you will be able to start adding "feeds" to your account, by clicking on the FEEDS menu, and then ADD.
Simply copy and paste the URL of your favourite blogs or websites into the box marked SUBSCRIBE. A list of Available Feeds will appear (some blogs have more than one feed to choose from. I have no idea how to choose between them and have always clicked hopefully on the first in the list. Perhaps this means my computer will self-destruct one day...). So check a box, and then scroll right down to the bottom of the page and click on SUBSCRIBE.
The blog will then appear in the window listing your feeds (on the left). The updated feeds will disappear from the list once you have read them. If you click on SHOW ALL, you get a complete list of your feeds, with the unread updates displayed in bold, which is very handy."

The World Outside the Valley 2008

More than two and a half billion people in the world live in the most abysmal standards of hygiene and sanitation.

There are 46 countries, home to 2.7 billion people, where climate change and water-related crises create a high risk of violent conflict.

A further 56 countries, representing another 1.2 billion people, are at high risk of political instability. That's more than half the world.

James Cayne, chairman and former chief executive of the collapsed bank Bear Stearns was paid some $40 million in cash between 2004 and 2006, the last year on record, as well as stocks and options. In the past few years, he has sold shares worth millions more. He won't have to return the money he made in the good days when his bank betted itself into oblvion.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is estimated to have holdings of as much as $900 billion, making it the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world.

For the first time ever, the number of billionaires Forbes could identify crossed into four figures, reaching 1,125. The total net worth of the group is $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from last year.

In 2004, American credit card debt grew at a rate of $6.25 billion a quarter. In just the fourth quarter of 2007, it grew by $20 billion. Total credit card debt stands today at about $950 billion. That is still not close to the $11 trillion in mortgages, but it’s within spitting distance of auto loans.

The pension fund of the Turkish Army (the Ordu Yardimlasma Kurumu fund) is $25 billion.

An inescapable cycle of debt is fueling one of the worst agrarian crises facing India, a crisis that has seen some 150,000 farmers commit suicide since 1997.

Worldwide, water bottlers sold 47 billion gallons, or 178 billion liters, in 2006, up from 43 billion gallons in 2005.

Globally, the bottling industry uses the equivalent of nearly 100 million barrels of oil each year, excluding transportation.

Bottled water is often 1,000 times more expensive than tap water.

In "Dandy of the Underworld" Horsley, who is notorious in Britain, writes of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parents and bouncing through several schools. He details a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes. He also chronicles his trip to the Philippines to be hung from a cross, an event that was recorded by a photographer and videographer and formed part of an art exhibition that was extensively covered by the news media in his home country.
Carrie Kania, publisher of Harper Perennial, said Horsley's party, which was scheduled for Wednesday in Manhattan, would go on without him. "I believe this book is very important," Kania said. "It certainly moved me, and we're going to continue to back it 100 percent."

The production of one kilogram of beef requires 16,000 liters of water, according to to the Unesco-IHE Institute for Water Education. That compares with 1,500 liters for a kilogram of grain.

China...has a fifth of the world's population buy just 7 percent of the water.

A collapase of the Indian summer monsoon from as early as next year is one of the world's most immediate, serious climate risks.

An average European uses 150 to 400 liters, or 40 to 106 gallons, of water daily for personal requirements. Consumption in the United States is almost twice as high, but in China the figure is only 90 liters per day on average, while in many developing countries it is below the "critical threshold" of 50 liters a day set by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

"People want more toys to play with. That's something that drives it," said Wim Koersvelt, director of Icon Yachts in the Netherlands. "Gyms were unusual 20 years ago, and no yacht is being built now without a gym. They're buying two- to four-person submarines, have four Jet Skis and little sailboats stored on board, as well as helicopter landing pads."

The firearms-homicide rate of about 3.42 per 100,000 citizens is the highest of any industrialized country. It is about 100-fold the gun-homicide rate in Britain or Japan; only violence-prone developing nations like Colombia have a higher rate.

Last year, more children died from gunfire than from cancer and HIV/AIDS combined; the firearms death rate for kids under 15 is 12 times more than the 25 other largest industrialized countries combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The United States has the highest concentration of gun ownership in the world, 283 million guns - a third of them handguns - owned by about a third of the citizenry.

"There are 300 million people in China poised to buy their very first car. In Russia there are 70 million. And in Asia, 250 million people aspire to motorized mobility," the VW chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, said at VW's annual news conference.

Steve Randy Waldman, who writes at interfluidity.powerblogs.com, estimates that after the most recent $200 billion is exhausted, the Fed will have $300 billion to $400 billion left, unless it finds a way to expand its balance sheet. (14/03/08)

According to a 2005 World Bank study, a whopping 47 percent of college-educated Ghanaians live abroad.

The problem is especially acute in medicine, where 54 percent of physicians who trained here between 1999 and 2004 left to work elsewhere.

That's in a country with just 2,000 doctors, or one for every 11,000 inhabitants. By comparison, the United States has one doctor for every 2,000 people. Some hospitals here have no doctor at all, while others hire a single physician to care for thousands of patients.

Two-thirds of Americans cannot name the three branches of government or come up with the name of a single Supreme Court justice.

One survey finds that American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of those from 29 countries in mathematical literacy, and another indicating that only 57 percent of adult Americans had read a nonfiction book in a year.

Carlyle Group, the U.S. private equity firm run by David Rubenstein, said Wednesday that losses at its $16 billion mortgage-bond fund would not hurt the company's 59 other private equity and venture capital funds."The challenges facing CCC will have no measurable impact on any other fund, " Carlyle said. (12/03/08)

The United States has a population of 300 million. Thirty-seven million, many of them children, live in poverty. Close to 60 million are just one notch above the official poverty line. These near-poor Americans live in households with annual incomes that range from $20,000 to $40,000 for a family of four.

While natural gas provides 22 percent of the world's energy, compared with 23 percent for coal and 40 percent for oil, the world's known gas reserves may last about 63 years, compared with 41 for oil, the BP statistics show.

"Who is this guy Margin that keeps calling me?"

When did character morph into celebrity, making the fame game the focus of magazine photography?

Brazil, a large agricultural exporter, says rich nations want to keep triple-digit tariffs on some farm products, including a 1,720 percent tariff on one Japanes product.

Last month, a team of American, British and Canadian researchers concluded that not a single square foot of ocean had been left untouched by modern society, and that humans had fouled 41 percent of the seas with polluted runoff, overfishing and other abuses.

As the newly urbanized and newly affluent seek more protein and more calories, a phenomenon called "diet globalization" is playing out around the world. Demand is growing for pork in Russia, beef in Indonesia and dairy products in Mexico. Rice is giving way to noodles, home-cooked food to fast food.Though racked with upheaval for years and with many millions still rooted in poverty, Nigeria has a growing middle class. Median income per person doubled in the first half of this decade, to $560 in 2005. Much of this increase is being spent on food.Nigeria grows little wheat, but its people have developed a taste for bread, in part because of marketing by American exporters. Between 1995 and 2005, per capita wheat consumption in Nigeria more than tripled, to 45 pounds, a year. Bread has been displacing traditional foods like eba, dumplings made from cassava root.

More than 25,000 people die from hunger or a related illness every day across the world.

The United Nations, having recorded more disappearances in Sri Lanka last year than in any other country, pressed to send human rights monitors, a proposal that the United States and many other countries supported. Rajapaksa's administration refused.

In 2005, 184,400 Americans admitted to drug treatment programs - roughly 10 percent of the total - were over 50, up from 143,000, or 8 percent of the total, in 2001.The same report, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, foresees 4.4 million older substance abusers by 2020, compared with 1.7 million in 2001 - numbers that are "likely to swamp the current system," says Deborah Trunzo, who coordinates research for the agency.

Paul Virilio, the philosopher who revealed that speed is a phenomenon of modern life, said that quick movers will dominate slow movers.It is nature's law that if something can go fast it will. If we can do something faster, we will. In fact, we are.

The minimum wage in Britain will rise 3.8 percent to £5.73, or $11.34, an hour starting in October.

Christoph Büchel's legal battle becomes fodder for his art. A major underlying theme for Büchel is what he called "the creative economy," the way that, in his view, museums - particularly American ones - seem to care less about the art than they do about their image, budget, attendance and expansionist visions as they become ever more a part of an entertainment culture.

The number of children who die worldwide each year before the age of 5 has dropped below 10 million for the first time in recorded history - compared with 20 million annually in 1960 - Unicef noted in a report last month, "Child Survival." Now the goal is to cut the death toll to 4 million by 2015.Think about that accomplishment: The lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.To put it another way, the late James P. Grant, a little-known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 to 1995 and launched the child survival revolution with vaccinations and diarrhea treatments, probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.Paul Virilio, the philosopher who revealed that speed is a phenomenon of modern life, said that quick movers will dominate slow movers.

It is nature's law that if something can go fast it will. If we can do something faster, we will. In fact, we are.The minimum wage in Britain will rise 3.8 percent to £5.73, or $11.34, an hour starting in October.

Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe in recent months, as word spreads of India's combination of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

As late as 1980 the U.S. Agency for International Development was still devoting 25 percent of its official development assistance to the modernization of farming, but today it is just 1 percent. Nearly 30 percent of World Bank lending once went to agricultural modernization, but now it is just 8 percent.

In Tuscany's poorer areas, whole towns are becoming depopulated and thousands of acres of agricultural land falling into disuse. The trend is particularly severe in the hilly land surronding the Monte Amita.

Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.
The firm that includes Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.

The fact that 1 percent of the people in the world have 40 percent of the wealth, and 1 percent in the United States have about one-fifth, renders arguments about what "we" can afford absurd.

My husband and my children are my universe, but my parents are my North Star. I have lived abroad for a decade, moving to a new country as if it were a new state. "Home" for me remains the house that my grandfather built, which my mother and father still live in. My brothers and I know that even in the middle of the night we can come home and let ourselves in.

Of course the idealized vision of the incorruptible giRl-woman, which has been sampled add nauseam throughout the years, should surprise no one.And isn't innocence the ultimate fleeting moment - in other words, catnip for an industry perennially in search of the, well, moment? Needless to say, transgressive designers are most likely drawn to virtue because of the possibility of its being defiled. After all, even those most above suspicion can turn out to be as sweet as sour milk.

The model Liya Kebede has made great strides for racial diversity in fashion. Now, she's starting Lemlem, a mostly hand-woven line of children's clothes made in Africa, in the hope that a younger crowd will embrace her multi-culti ideas. The outfits have an Ethiopian vibe with a New World ease. Finicky tots will approve.

One of her (Lane Crawford's Sarah Rutson) favorite accessories is invisible. Yu, a limited-edition perfume from Mane, costs $5,000 and "contains rare, sustainably harvested plant essences like Indonesian champak and Mysore sandalwood."

Undercover video taken at the Westland/Hallmark Meat of Chino, California, shows workers shocking, kicking and shoving debilitated cattle with forklifts, prompting the government to pull 143 million pounds, or 65 million kilograms, of the company's beef.

A survey released this year by Defra, the British environment agency, found that 80 percent of people were concerned about climate change, and three quarters would be prepared to change their behavior "in some way" to limit climate change.But not in the ways that count most: Only 5 percent of car drivers said that they had driven less because of environmental concerns. Only 10 percent of people who had flown in the past year said that they would fly less this year because of climate-change concerns.

The Iraq Interior Ministry has ordered the police to round up beggars, vagabonds and mentally disabled people from the streets of Baghdad to prevent them from being used by insurgents as suicide bombers, The Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing a ministry spokesman.

A new report issued by the World Health Organization offers the first comprehensive analysis of tobacco use and control efforts in 179 countries. It notes that tobacco will kill more people this year than tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria combined. It warns that unless governments do more to slow the epidemic, tobacco could kill a billion people by the end of the century, the vast majority in poor and middle-income countries.

I have grown used to the idea that nearly everything around me in nature happens unobserved and unrecorded. A snowy winter sometimes retains a transcript, but even those are rare. The bills of animal mortality are almost completely invisible otherwise. Who thrives, who dies, there is no accounting at all, only the fact of thriving and dying.

Banerjee estimates, conservatively, that $15 billion a year out of roughly $100 billion in annual development aid worldwide could be spent on programs that have been proven to work. Unfortunately, the actual figure is much closer to zero than to $15 billion.

The top supermarket chains in the European Union are potentially "abusing" their market clout to drive down prices to suppliers and should be investigated, the European Parliament said on Monday.
A small number of the largest supermarket chains including Tesco of Britain and Carrefour of France, were becoming "gatekeepers", controllling the access of farmers and other suppliers to consumers, the declaration said.
It said evidence from accross the 27 EU member countries suggested that big supermarkets were abusing their buying power to force down prices paid to suppliers to "unsustainable" levels and impose unfair conditions on them."

I want my children and students to learn about a past with causes and effects. I do not want to send them forth armed only with emotion and confusion. I want them equipped with a secure and serene identity that permits them to recognize cruelty, injustice and falsehood and gives them the strength and patience to study, tolerate and defend the identities of others. They should know the difference between what has happened to them and what has happened to others.

In Tanzania alone, malaria kills about 100,000 people a year.

Most people in Shanghai seem to want the glory that comes with showing off a real iPhone to friends."My friends envy me a lot," said Pang, the Web designer. "They say, 'Wow, you can get an iPhone.' "

England's enduring class system can be aptly summed up in two words: public school. Those who attend English public schools - in reality expensive private schools - inherit a kind of right to rule. They learn how to survive in a world no less riven by competition and cruelty than society itself. After graduating, they can forever recognize one another. Even those who rebel are shaped by the experience. To be an English public schoolboy - yes, most are still boys - is to belong to a caste.

“We recognize tolerance as a basic component of democracy,” he said. “God has not created all of us alike — we are different — human society is a pluralistic society. In the Koran, God is telling us that man is created to be free. So we are free to think, and think different. So the aim of democracy is to recognize the pluralistic nature of human society. The second item is tolerance, I have to tolerate my opponent. With tolerance comes compromise; without compromise democracy doesn’t exist.”

"I had no idea about kidney transplants, but when they made me lie down on the stretcher, I was terrified," he said. "I knew that these people meant to do evil to me. When I woke up a doctor said my kidney had been removed. He said I would be shot if I ever told anyone what happened."

"I miss Yugoslavia," said Toha, a 33-year old Slovene entrepeneur.."We didn't have anything," he said. "Neighbours baked each other cakes; we had a leader we trusted. I remember my mother crying when Tito died. I was only 5, but I knew the world was about to change."

In the last five months alone, the [Brazilain] government says, 1,250 square miles, or 320,000 hectares, were lost.

The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the past 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, a projection that one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, said was resulting in a "relentless growth in livestock production."...

Though some 800 million people now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This is the case in spite of the inherent inefficiencies: About two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University.

Under the stewardship of Dow Kim and Thomas Maheras, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup built positions in subprime-related securities that led to $34 billion in write-downs last year. The debacle cost chief executives their jobs and brought two of the world's premier financial institutions to their knees.In any other industry, Kim and Maheras would be pariahs. But in the looking-glass world of Wall Street, they — and others like them — are hot properties. The two executives are well on their way to reviving their careers, even as global markets shudder at the prospect that Merrill and Citigroup may report further subprime losses in the coming months. Maheras, who left his job as co-president of Citigroup's investment bank this fall after being demoted, has had serious discussions with several investment banks, including Bear Stearns, about taking on a top management position, people who have been briefed on the situation said. And he has also been approached by investment firms willing to back him to the tune of $1 billion or more if he decides to start his own hedge fund, these people said. Kim, who until last spring was a co-president at Merrill Lynch with oversight of the firm's trading and market operations, has been crisscrossing the globe in recent months raising money for his new hedge fund, Diamond Lake Capital.

On his blog, JSMineSet, Sinclair has told his readers that as much as $450 trillion worth of derivatives could disintegrate, leading to a far greater, and in some ways unpredictable, calamity...While the views of Sinclair , a gold bug who expects the price of gold to go up to $1,650, up from about $870 now, might be taken with a grain of salt, other experts have also begun to warn of the dire consequences of the credit market collapse.

Poverty in Britain doubled under Thatcher, and this figure has become permanent under New Labor. The share of the wealth, excluding housing, enjoyed by the bottom half of the population has fallen from 12 percent in 1976 to just 1 percent now. Thirteen million people now live in relative poverty.

Social mobility has declined to pre-war levels.The least able children from the richest 20 percent of the population now overtake the most able children from the bottom 20 percent by the age of seven.

Nearly half of the richest group go on to get university degrees while only 10 percent of the poorest manage to graduate.

Across Europe, politicians try to be culturally sensitive to Muslim citizens, who total 16 million, or 3 percent, of the 495 million people in the 27-member European Union, according to Central Institute Islam-Archives in Germany. In France, one in 10 inhabitants is Muslim, the highest proportion in the EU.

The average German or Japanese uses little more than half the energy consumed by an average American. In Germany and Japan, per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide spewed by cars, power plants and other sources of energy are half those in the United States. In France, they are a third.

The average price of regular gasoline in the United States has shot up to a record $3.28 a gallon...In Britain, gas at the pump costs around $7.70 a gallon, of which about $4.90 is taxes. In France, taxes account for about $4.60 of the retail price of $7.50 a gallon. (25/03/08)

Soaring prices for rice, a staple for nearly half the world's population, are already causing hardship across the developing world, particularly for urban workers.

Naeem Akhtar has an improbable role in the Indian government's drive to revitalize Kashmir after 18 years of militant violence. His task: rebrand this heavily militarized Himalayan region as a global golfing destination.

In 2001, scrap metal sold for $77 a ton; at the end of 2004, it was $300 per ton, and today it's approaching $480. Behind the rise, say the analysts, is China's voracious demand for steel.

The Pet Inn Royal hotel will unpack and microwave every packet of food that the master has carefully prepared - a common practice in Japan, where it is considered déclassé to serve pet food to a pet."Customers may ask, for example, to sprinkle cheese on top of the cooked rice meal, prepare milk at certain temperatures or give dessert," said Chiyo Sakurai, general manager of the hotel.

"It's a principle of art," Gnedovsky said. "The worse the conditions, the better the art." He sighed. "Artists should be hungry."What then to make of Gnedovsky's design for the company's new seven-story theater, open since January on the banks of the Moscow River? Do its marble lobby, spectacular views and large hall that seats 450 pose an artistic hazard for the scrappy company?Not to worry, Gnedovsky said. Before he drew up the plans, he studied everything that was wrong with the old theater. Then he reproduced it in the new one.

Each month, more than half of [the Somali] government's revenue, mostly from port taxes, disappears - stolen by "our people," the prime minister said.That leaves Nur with about $18 million a year in government money to run a failed state of nine million of some of the world's neediest, most collectively traumatized people.

Could a drug store sell two identical tubes of toothpaste, and charge 50 cents more for one of them? Of course not.But, in effect, exactly that has been happening - repeatedly and mysteriously - in markets that set prices in the United States for corn, soybeans and wheat. And even economists who have been studying this phenomenon say they are at a loss to explain it.Whatever the reason, the price for a bushel of grain established in the public derivatives markets has been substantially higher than the price of the same bushel of the same grain at the same moment in the cash market.

In February, India's ambassador to Bahrain, Balkrishna Shetty, sought a minimum monthly wage of $265 for all unskilled Indian workers, who are paid $160 to $225 a month there.

More than half of the water in China - the world's fourth-largest economy after the United States, Japan and Germany - is unfit to drink. Last year, around 48 million people living there lacked sufficient drinking water.

A virus called infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, is killing millions of salmon destined for export to Japan, Europe and the United States. The spreading plague has sent shivers through Chile's third-largest industry.

"All these problems are related to an underlying lack of sanitary controls," said Felipe Cabello, a microbiologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla that has studied Chile's fishing industry. "Parasitic infections, viral infections, fungal infections are all disseminated when the fish are stressed and the centers are too close together.""It is simply not possible to produce fish on an industrial scale in a sustainable way," said Wolfram Heise, director of the marine conservation program at the Pumalin Project, a private conservation initiative in Chile. "You will never get it into ecological balance."

In October 2006, Dr. Claudia Henschke of Weill Cornell Medical College jolted the cancer world with a study saying that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through widespread use of CT scans.Small print at the end of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, noted that it had been financed in part by a little-known charity called the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention & Treatment. But a review of tax records by The New York Times shows that the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, maker of Liggett Select, Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid cigarette brands.

In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

If the world is going to sharply reduce the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by midcentury, then many businesses will have to go carbon neutral, bringing their net emissions of the greenhouse gas to zero.But some could go even further by removing more CO2 than they produce. Instead of carbon neutral, how about carbon negative?

Outside Nha Trang, the beach town and port where my cruise ship is due after Danang, the Ana Mandara Six Senses Spa offers what its Web site calls "the ultimate seclusion," because it is only accessible by boat. The cost for a two-story villa, the only kind of accommodation, is in the neighborhood of $800 a night. My guidebook describes it as a magical place where dirt tracks between buildings give the illusion of a jungle village. But, clearly, it's an ersatz jungle. It's not Vietnam.

Botswana, one of Africa's wealthiest countries per capita thanks to diamonds, tourism and sensible management, has enjoyed more than four decades of honest, practical government under three popular presidents. On Monday, Mogae will give way to Vice President Ian Khama.Guided by Mogae and two other democratic presidents, the small country has flourished and become the envy of all of Africa. Despite high HIV numbers, its hospitals and clinics provide retroviral drugs to all sufferers. Its schools and universities provide increasing numbers of local and neighboring peoples with instruction.Rule of law is observed and corruption hardly exists. Botswana's secret is high quality leadership, broad levels of political participation, and extensive accountability.

"The foreign tourists don't go to the theater as much," she [Faith Hope Consolo, a chairwoman of the retail leasing and sles division of the New York estate company Prudential Douglas Elliman] said. "Their No. 1 pastime is shopping."

That's the condition of the small nation. It's a defense for everyone in the globalized world.""I think the goal of Czech mystification is to show us that we live in a world continually mystifying to us - the politicians, the advertisers."

"I had a certain fear of exposing myself too much in my work for a long time," he [Patrick Stewart] said. "A lot of what performing to me had been was elaborate, and at times quite clever, concealment. Someone once said of acting that it is 'telling beautiful lies,' and well, it became just no longer satisfactory to work that way."

Though some 800 million people now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens.

[In 2002] Saleh hit on an idea that he hoped would satisfy both his American and Islamist partners: "al hiwar al fikri," or intellectual dialogue. This was an effort to inculcate the idea that Islam, properly understood, does not condone terrorism.

[Paola Antonelli of MoMa] also believes that the yearning for privacy - or Existenzmaximum, as she calls it - will be an increasingly important issue for designers in the future.

The mainstream music industry is coming to recognize a price for a digital song that might be good enough to compete with the underground exchange of tunes on the Internet: free.

The reader's suggestions included "Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco"; "One Mighty Empire, Slightly Used"; "We Apologize for the Inconvenience"; and - the choice favoured by 20.9 percent of the readers - "No Motto, Please, We're British."

Eric Kastner, believed to have been Germany's last World War I veteran, died Jan. 1 in a nursing home in Cologne at the age of 107, his son, Peter Kastner, said.

Federal agents raided the Silk Roads Gallery in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Bowers Museum in Santa Anna and Mingei International Museum in San Diego as part of a five-year investigation into the smuggling of looted antiquities from Thailand, Myanmar, China and Native American sites.

National Priorities Project, a research group that analyzes federal data, found that nearly 71 percent of army recruits graduated from high school in the 2007 budget year.The army's goal is 90 percent high school graduates, which it has not met since 2004.

Saudi Arabia supplies the United States with about 1.4 million barrels of crude oil a day, one-seventh of U.S. imports and second only to the 1.9 million barrels from Canada.

26,000 children still die every day from mostly preventable causes, Unicef noted. Four million infants die in their first month of life and up to half of these in their first day.

On his blog, JSMineSet, Sinclair has told his readers that as much as $450 trillion worth of derivatives could disintegrate, leading to a far greater, and in some ways unpredictable, calamity...

Social mobility has declined to pre-war levels.The least able children from the richest 20 percent of the population now overtake the most able children from the bottom 20 percent by the age of seven. Nearly half of the richest group go on to get university degrees while only 10 percent of the poorest manage to graduate.

Around 300,000 Afghan children cannot attend school because of violence in the country's other provinces, President Hamid Karzai told Parliament on its opening day Monday.The number of children unable to go to school is up by 50% from a year ago...

Iran has the second-largest natural gas reservoir in the world.

Earth's basic problem is that the Sun will gradually get larger and more luminous as it goes through life, according to widely held theories of stellar evolution. In its first 4.5 billion years, according to the models, the Sun has already grown about 40 percent brighter.Over the coming eons, life on Earth will become muggier and more uncomfortable and finally impossible.

Q.The world seems to be at some form of inflection point with a big shift in demand?
A. Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell: The basic drivers are pretty easy and they are two fold. You go from six billion people to nine billion people, basically, in 2050. This combination of many more people climbing the energy ladder, which is basically welfare for a lot of people who live in poverty, creates that enormous demand for energy.

None of the 23 countries whose economies are dominated by ... "the exceptional curse of oil" are democracies.

Gotz Aly is the author of "Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State" in which he argued that ordinary Germans supported the Nazi regime not because they were inherently anti-Semitic, or blinded by Hitler's charisma, but for the relatively mundane reason that the Reich's policies raised their standard of living.

The most telling statistic in the World Economic Forum's latest Global Competitiveness Report is that not a single Arab state made the top 25.

In a survey of 55 hospitals financed by a World Bank project in Orissa, investigators "observed problems in 93 percent of them...India is the bank's largest borrower with 75 active projects worth a total commitment of $15.2 billion.

In only 80 years, Kenya's population had jumped from 2.9 million to 37 million. Had America grown at the same rate since 1928, when it had 120 million people, it would now have 1.56 billion citizens.

Kenya belongs to a group of some 40 countries that have extremely high population growth - rates of increase that I call "demographic armament." In a typical nation of this group, every 1000 males aged 40-44 are succeeded by at least 2,500 boys aged 0 to 4. In Kenya there are 4,190 boys.
By contrast...Britain with just 677 boys between 0 and 4 replacing every 1,0000 males 40 to 44, in the category of "demographic capitulation."

Amongst the poorest 20 percent of the population, half are illiterate and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to [Indian] government data. By contrast, among the richest 20% of the population, nearly half are high school graduates and only 2 percent illiterate.

In a first, the majority of births in France last year were out of wedlock, the national statistics agency announced Tuesday..."What's led the rise in out-of-wedlock births is that a lifestyle that was once confined in Paris is now the norm even in rural areas. Marriage is no longer considered indispensable to form a family."

"What we need is a new narrative, a new 'we'. a multicolored, multicultural European identity," [Tariq Ramadan] said. "Immigration is a fact whether you like it or not. Europeans need to psychologically integrate that into their world view."

"Can you imagine Jesus ignoring the plight of the disenfranchised and downtrodden while going after the abortionist?" Scarborough wrote on the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.

What do banks call it when a troubled borrower abandons her home, sending them the keys?
"Jingle mail."

The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago. Already, scientists say, the sea's ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus - now the most valuable species - is four-fifths of what it should be. A 2002 study found that the most marketable fish off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse, essentially, sliding toward extinction."The sea is being emptied," said Moctar Ba, a consultant who formerly headed scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa. "The situation is very grave."

There are more than 2 million inmates in American prisons and jails, and some studies estimate that as many as 5 percent may be innocent.

An individual's life is itself a narrative with a beginning, a middle and at least the intimations of an end.

Sudan has seen war for all but 11 years since independence in 1956, with over two million dead; Somalia remains a failed state, too lawless for most aid agencies to work in; Congo's war has left five million dead; and northern Uganda was, until last year, ravaged by a millenarian cult known as the Lords Resistance Army, best known for mutilating villagers and abducting children as soldiers and sex slaves.

An annual income of $100,000 is enough for a comfortable life in Des Moines but barely enough to get by in New York City.

Eric Rognot, a longtime student of ice sheets at both poles for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said he hoped that the public and policymakers did not interpret the uncertainty in the 21st-century forecast as reason for complacency on the need to to limit risks by cutting emissions.Rignot recently proposed that unabated warming could result in three feet of global sea rise just from water flowing off Greenland, three feet from Antarctica and 18 inches as the remaining alpine glaciers shrivel away.

"We believe in a world where more than two billion people are entering the industrial age."
BHP Billiton's CEO, Marius Kloppers, speaking to analysts when unveiling his bid for mining titan Rio Tinto in November, 2007.

"Status Despair"....the feeling when, say, the owner of a puny Gulfstream private jet takes in the sight of Prince Alaweed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia barrelling down the the runway in his flying palace, the customized double-decker A380 he had ordered from Airbus.
Because the consumption stakes have been raised so high, more people in 2008 are likely to feel status despair, Evers said.
Some, particularly in developed countries, will divert from the consumption-as-status pattern and seek consumer gratification in new ways - by counting the number of views on their page on the photo-sharing site Flickr, for instance.

The books we get to read … and why..

I’m not a journalist or a writer, and I don’t want to be. I didn’t last month and after a slow and illuminating journey up & over my latest learning curve I definitely don’t want to be this month or any other month. So I’m just Mrs Average who probably reads a lot. Recently I read a wonderful book, not an unusual experience but believe me this one was genuinely and unusually excellent; “A Place in my Country” by Ian Walthew. I can recommend it to you – warm, funny, insightful, informative, sad, thought provoking and enlightening. I could go on but read it for yourself…

Occasionally when I have read a particularly good book I track down the author’s website and drop them a note of thanks and encouragement to continue. When I wrote to Ian Walthew he wrote back – a first I think for me. He began by saying he had had a very difficult time with his publisher, so difficult in fact he was thinking of “not writing another book”. How could this crazy state of affairs come about? This is a précised version of some of the things he told me plus some additional bits and pieces I have subsequently established for myself, all of which are a total revelation, and probably would be to any of the British reading public – so why don’t we know this, and why aren’t the newspapers telling us?

I think all of us who read regularly recognise how hard it is for a first time non-celebrity author to break through into ‘the big time’ unless they somehow get picked up by Richard & Judy or get ‘scaled out’ in a large retail or well known internet outlet. But this is where it gets interesting – ‘scaled out’ means the publisher actually pays to have the authors’ book on the 3 for 2 tables. They do this by giving the retailers a discount – so leaving even less money for the authors – and by paying what some retailers call an ‘administrative charge’. For example, to be in a large book retailers window in London can, I understand, cost the publishers as much as £25,000 each week.

So, how does the 3 for 2 pile work – and, perhaps almost as important, have we ever thought about it before? Two thirds, more or less, of the table is devoted to big name or well known authors we are likely to buy anyway. The 3rd ‘third’ is then used for books that the publishers need to have there but which the retailer might not under normal circumstances have taken in large volume, perhaps because the book is by an unknown or relatively unknown author. According to a recent article in The Author being on the 3 for 2 pile can increase sales by a staggering 5,000%.

We, the book buyers go into the store, buy our two books from authors we like to follow and are then “teased” [that’s the polite word for it] into taking a browse through the books we don’t know because that third book will be, effectively, ‘free’.

But who do the publishers want to get on the 3 for 2 tables? Firstly good, big name, big selling authors but surprisingly [although perhaps not when you think about it] secondly, books they have paid a lot of money to acquire in the first place - in order to earn back the big advance. So the publishers aren’t necessarily, or even at all, pushing the books that have received the best reader reaction and the best reviews. In fact sometimes quite the opposite; they are pushing and paying the retailers to push, the books they need to earn their money back on, even if the book sold badly in paperback and was terribly reviewed.

For first time, or even second and third time authors who are paid very modest advances [which generally publishers earn back from hardback sales], it is virtually impossible to ‘get out there’ and so come to the attention of the book buying public like you and I.

If we condone this we are effectively allowing publishers and the big companies to control the books that get read by us, the wider public.

Are we are being spoon fed by the corporate publishing world without even knowing it… And, if so, what can we do about it?

By the way, on the subject of Richard & Judy’s Book Club there was a very informative article by Ciar Byrne in the Home section of the Independent on 7th June which you can still read on line at www.independent.co.uk/arts It goes into some detail about how the list is compiled, how influential the list has become and the problems this is creating for independent publishers and authors. The headline “Winners of the Literary Lottery..” says it all.

Having established how the 3 for 2 pile works, plus the internet equivalent and learnt a bit more about Richard & Judy’s list, it set me thinking – what else, where else, can we find out about ‘new’ books and ‘new’ authors. How about the review section of the weekend papers, a favourite place of mine..

More research later I now realise how incredibly difficult it is for authors to get reviewed in the national papers without some sort of personal contact with the literary editors or at least knowing a journalist on one of the papers who may bring their book to the right persons attention. So the books you see reviewed are not necessarily based on the quality or importance of the book but a whole range of other factors that are possibly at play; the quid pro quo, the friend of a friend, the old boy network or even perhaps, horror of horrors ‘revenge’ – the author of book X is also a reviewer who did a particularly critical review of the reviewers own book [are you still with me here..] and they want to get their own back!

If we relate this back to the 3 for 2 table and the relevance of the ‘big advance’, the first time non-celeb author, without a big advance bidding war behind them and therefore with limited publisher support and with no friends of friends contacts, has next to no chance of getting reviewed. However good the book…

And please bear in mind I am not even talking about how difficult it is for an author to find an agent or a publisher as a first time author in the current celeb driven memoir market – Katie Price, Jordan’s first piece of possibly ghost written fiction was the best selling fiction book in the UK in 2007. What does that say about us, the book buying public?

The final blow to my previously naive assumption that the review sections of the weekend nationals would be full of genuine attempts by the literary editors to bring to our attention worthwhile good books came when I realised the increasing power of The Famous.

Say publisher X has paid a fortune for the new book by a Very Famous Y – and, at roughly the same time, the features editors of all the Nationals will be dying to get an exclusive interview with him/her. So what the publishing PR people effectively say, in the nicest most subtle way, is ‘Look, if we give you an exclusive interview with Y this week then next week the quid pro quo is you give a big review to this first time author who we paid a fortune to because of a bidding war and we need to earn our money back’.

Add to this the limitations of space within which all literary editors are working, the obligations they have to review big name authors and the remaining space being used up by unspoken understandings and obligations to the PR people you can see how little genuine space there must be for first time authors.

Disillusioning isn’t it. Are we being spoon fed reviews based on the publishers commercial imperatives in return for the commercial imperatives of the national newspapers?

It seems to me that the entire book review infrastructure is profoundly flawed. Could it even be interpreted as intellectually bereft and perhaps lacking in integrity – and, surely, there is a better way?

Could ‘the better way’ be via one of the big online retailers? More research, more concerns, more disillusion later - did I know that one of the big .co.uk retailers is currently applying pressure on some large publishing groups to give them even better commercial terms than they currently receive – and how do they do this? By removing the Buy Button from some of the publisher’s books and removing some of their titles from promotions such as ‘Perfect Partners’ and ‘Recommendations for You’. And this when we have already established that large British book retailers, high street or web based, receive generous terms from publishers giving them already a large percentage of the available profit.

These sorts of sanctions are unlikely to hurt the publishers but they should surely effect reputations built on choice and recommendations to customers when their current actions represent reduced choice and distorted recommendations. But only if we know about their actions in the first place, only if we can read it or hear it for ourselves, only if we are told about it by the newspapers and other media can we make informed considered decisions.

And so to my conclusions – serious book lovers have to be very clever and very resourceful to find the best new books out there, and once we have chanced upon a brilliant new book, a new author like Ian Walthew, the single most important thing we can do, knowing everything we now know about the system and its potential to manipulate us, is tell everyone – use the power of the internet and the power of personal recommendation. Get clever in finding different, unbiased sources of new books and authors and recommend them to your friends, your family and even that bloke you see on the 7.45 train to work each morning. We need to be informed – and we need to use the power that information gives us.

In that spirit of recommendation my personal favourite source at the moment is a website run by two woman in Yorkshire & Devon; they aren’t part of the literary scene, have no features or exclusives to organise, no actual or metaphysical debts to pay and aren’t authors themselves. The reviews are written by book lovers and readers like you and I, who aren’t paid and have no vested interests in any specific book. Have a look at www.thebookbag.co.uk and when you’ve done that in return let me know your favourite places for unbiased, interesting, informed and intelligent recommendations or reviews.

Debbie Frost
June/July 2008

The old soldier in the hospital

By Ian Walthew
Thursday, April 17, 2008

PUY-DE-DÔME, France: The world has turned, the markets have dropped, panic is in the air. I suppose.
Here, in our mountain home, we are sick with flu, first me, then my wife. The weather is closed in.
Down the mountain, at the hospital in town for my monthly treatment - because of a medical condition, they need to top up my gamma globulins every month - I sleep so deeply that two of my bottles are changed without Pascale, the nurse, stirring me.
When I awake, I have a roommate. The Auvergnat is old, frail. I am English and 42 years old. Normally I have a room to myself.
When I lived in Brussels, the day treatment ward was shiny and new - 16 reclining seats, facing each other. I used to take the same chair by the window, with its view of the power station.
If you shared the same treatment rhythm as someone, you could see their steady improvement, or more often their gradual decline. Four hours, once a month, watching the person opposite fade. Never did we speak.
Here they closed the maternity ward, but the hospital remains open; two beds a room, a view of the church and the hills above. And people speak to each other.
We strike up a conversation and I discover that my roommate shares the family name of one of the masons working at our house.
In these parts it is a common name. Despite this, he knows the mason, and his father and mother, and where he lives and how their families are related.
Monsieur Beal has had six operations in as many years. He used to weigh 86 kilograms, now he weighs just 48 kilograms, 106 pounds. He has had a kidney removed, and half his pancreas, if I hear him right, and more, too.
When I ask if I might take his picture he stands tall, like the soldier he was. He did his military service in the elite para commandos under the command of an infamous colonel.
Monsieur Beal did 26 combat drops in Algeria, mostly intercepting rebels on the Tunisian and Moroccan borders.
When not fighting, he was the colonel's driver: "It was like that. At base we were drivers or cooks, but when we jumped we were all the same."
The colonel? "He was a great man. For his 40th birthday, he gave the entire regiment leave and we drank so much beer, we purged our bodies of the desert through every orifice."
What happened to the colonel? "He was captured at Dien Bien Phu, but he escaped, pretending to collapse,

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