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Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out (press release) *** 1/2
New book asks: 'For how long will Americans tolerate these Islamic incursions into everyday life?'
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William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (Shaviro review) **** 1/2
William Gibson's new novel Pattern Recognition (which I have finally finished reading) is very likely the first work of literature to use "Google" as a verb (as in: "If you Google him, you'll find...). What's important, however, is not that Gibson is savvy enough to note how everyone's favourite search engine has entered the vocabulary, but rather the absolute ordinariness, or taken-for-grantedness, of this usage: it's a detail, precisely, that doesn't stand out in any way in the novel. And that is what makes it significant...
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Getting even is healthy, says author *
In his new book, Life's Little Annoyances, New York Times reporter Ian Urbina offers a compendium of the molehills we turn into mountains and our inventive strategies for coping with them.
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