Looks like the Clinton memoir was somehow purged of “offensive” material before its publication in China:
Nearly everything Mrs. Clinton had to say about China, including descriptions of her own visits here, former President Bill Clinton’s meetings with Chinese leaders and her criticisms of Communist Party social controls and human rights policies, has been shortened or selectively excerpted to remove commentary deemed offensive by Beijing.
Link via Publishers’ Lunch.
The beast bites its own head.
Al here… just thought I’d share an email I just received:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch sdtuy at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht odrer the lterets in a wrod are, the olny iprmnoett tihng is taht the frist and lsat lteetr be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pormbels . Tihs is bcuseae the haumn mnid deos not raed ervey lteetr by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
The psycholinguist in me is fascinated… I wonder if this was a real study at Cmabrgde?
Last week I went to the reading that Monica Ali gave at Dutton’s in Brentwood. Ali read an excerpt from further along in the book, when her character Nazneen, a Bengali village girl transplanted to Tower Hamlets in London, goes with her husband Chanu and her daughters sightseeing around the city. After the reading was over, the hostess, in a white dentelle shirt, red flower in her hair, was the first to ask a question. “Please,” she said, “tell us about yourself.” Her interest in the author, if not the book, was apparent. An old man at the front wanted to know “Did you grow up in Tower Hamlets?” and so on. I thought when a book makes the bestseller list, it meant that people were actually reading it. Silly me. They’re just interested in the pretty girl on the cover. But it got worse. Someone else asked, “Were you raised black or white?” If she was stunned, Ali didn’t let on. She explained that she was in fact half Bengali and half British, that she was born in Dhaka and bred in London, etc. The man persisted, “Which parent were you closer to?” “Who did you talk to more?” he demanded. Welcome to the melting pot.
Since the Booker seems to like ’em younger these days, a bunch of people put together a prize for writers over the age of 50. It’s called the Saga Award for Wit and the winner is Alexander McCall Smith.
Bernard-Henry Levy’s book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, published in the U.S. by Melville House, is reviewed here and here.