The Washington Mall is the site of the Library of Congress ninth annual National Book Festival, held this year on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 in Washington D.C.Scores of authors, illustrators and poets will be making presentations throughout the day in pavilions for Children, Teens & Children, Fiction, Mysteries & Thrillers, History & Biography, and Poetry & Prose.The popular Pavilion of the States site is back. Festival visitors can learn about the reading and literacy promotion projects as well as the literary traditions of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories. Representatives from throughout the nation will...
The Lowest Entry-Level Job In Journalism
Late summer through early December of 1969 was frightening to those of us up in Bel Air, the gated Los Angeles community for the financially fabulous. It was the dark season of the Manson Family homicides and paranoia ran high; the “Acid Is Groovy” murderers were still on the loose and appeared to be attracted to upper income neighborhoods.I would often drive, all alone in the middle of the night, on upper Bellagio, Somera, Mulholland, Sarbonne, Roscomare, Stradella, Linda Flora or any of the other narrow, serpentine roads I routinely traversed, through gothic fog so thick I crawled rather than...
New Book On Weird Words Is An Enchiridion
Those with an attraction to the ostrobogulous, who are sometimes plagued by onomatomania, offended by blatteroons, and aim to be a deipnosophist, will be pleased to learn that a new book is an exennium that won’t have to wait for the New Year.To those who suspect me a jobbernowl with a kangaroo loose in the top paddock, I can only aver in my defense, “dymsassenach!"Or, that I’ve been pouring through The Wonder of Whiffling And Other Extraordinary Words in the English Language, a new addition to the canon of books on wild, weird and wow-inspiring words, presented as a gift...
Solzhenitsyn Now Required Reading In Russian Schools
Excerpts from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 epic The Gulag Archipelago, once banned by Soviet censors, have now been added to the curriculum for high-school students in Russia.The decision by he Education Ministry, announced today, was taken due to "the vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history" contained in Mr. Solzhenitsyn's work, the ministry said.It is believed that over a million Russians perished in the Gulag, created by Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin and expanded by Josef Stalin as a clandestine network of prison and labor camps.The Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1973, has secretly circulated...
New Online Dictionary For Word Mavens
In the beginning there was the Word.But without a dictionary no one knew how to spell it, pronounce it, how to use it in a sentence, if there was another word that was its opposite or meant the same thing, or where the word came from. In short, the whole story of the word was unavailable to the speaker. For the writer, fugetaboutit; tough enough to carve out those cuneiforms, you had to wing it on spelling and all the rest.Thence wrote Samuel Johnson his dictionary. Then Noah Webster. The Oxford English Dictionary followed. (Yes, I know I’m leaving out...