Principles of Economics is a leading economics textbook of Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), first published in 1890. Marshall began writing it in 1881 and he spent much of the next decade at work on it. His plan for the work gradually extended to a two-volume compilation on the whole of economic thought.

The first volume was published in 1890 to worldwide acclaim that established him as one of the leading economists of his time. It brought the ideas of supply and demand, of marginal utility and of the costs of production into a coherent whole, and became the dominant economic textbook in England for a long period. The second volume, which was to address foreign trade, money, trade fluctuations, taxation, and collectivism, was never published at all. (Wikipedia)

This reading is based on the eighth edition, published in 1920.

• E-text
• Wikipedia - Alfred Marshall
• Wikipedia - Priniples of Economics
• LibriVox’s Principles of Economics, Book 5: General Relations of Demand, Supply and Value Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (205MB)Total running time: 7:06:55

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
by Ted Sorensen (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: May 6, 2008

The South Beach Diet Supercharged: Faster Weight Loss and Better Health for Life
by Arthur Agatston (Author), Joseph Signorile (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: April 28, 2008

Fearless Fourteen (Stephanie Plum, No. 14)
by Janet Evanovich (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: June 17, 2008

Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs
by Elissa Wall (Author), Lisa Pulitzer (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: May 13, 2008

Ghosts Among Us: Uncovering the Truth About the Other Side
by James Van Praagh (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: May 13, 2008

Marie-France Pochna is the author of the Cristian Dior biography now as an audio book. Joanna Savil has translated the book from French.

First some links to Christian Dior Cruise 2009 Collection and other interesting information about the fashion icon:

StarGazing at the Christian Dior Cruise Collection - The 2009 Christian Dior Cruise Collection preview was the hot place to be in New York City last week. Many fashion heavy hitters showed up including Jennifer Lopez, Charlize Theron, Christina Aguilera and Anna Wintour and Rachel Zoe :

Icons of Design - Christian Dior - Christian Dior began his fashion career in 1947. Realizing the world was ready for something new after the war he delivered his ‘New Look’ which featured soft, rounded shoulders and cinched waists with flowing skirts. :

Christian Dior Resort Part 2 - Model: Sheila Marquez Model: Yana Karpova Model: Linda Vojtova Model: Hye Park Model: Michelle Alves Model: Cecilia Mendez Model: Drielly Oliverira Model: Anna Kuchkina Model: Alek Wek Model: Sasha Pivovrova Model: Siri Tollerød.

Christian Dior unveiling phone this Friday? - We’ve got virtually no background on the rather in-your-face designer handset we see depicted here, but we’re told that it’s a Christian Dior-branded phone (and remote control of some sort, apparently) embedded with Swarovski crystals. :

Cruise 2009 Collection: Christian Dior - Christian Dior’s John Galliano presented a brightly themed Cruise 2009 collection last week. He successfully pulled a colorful show that unites different elements of color, style, detail and fabrics that reflects the 60’s trends with a :

Christian Dior Cruise 2009 Collection - Christian Dior sent the Cruise 2009 Collection down the runway two days ago in New York City, but the event was more about the what celebrities were wearing than the clothes on the models. Continue reading Christian Dior Cruise 2009 :

Christian Dior’s career, a veritable fairy tale, is set in a rich tapestry of Paris cultural life before, during, and after the war. Much of Dior’s daily inspiration emanated from the world of the intellectual and artistic elite, in which he moved with such people as Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, Henry Sauguet.

Born at the end of an era in which luxury seemed reserved only for the happy few, Dior again revolutionized the world of fashion by introducing, in the early 1950s, ‘ready-to-wear’ in his Dior Boutique. Until then, couturiers had worked essentially if not exclusively for the very rich and famous. With his boutique, Dior brought high fashion to the world at large.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the ‘New Look,’ New York’s Metropolitan Museum mounted a major Dior retrospective in the winter of 1996-97.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.

NBCC member fiction finalist David Leavitt’s pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:

Marshall N. Klimasewiski, “Tyrants.”

“Tyrants” is a collection of great range and breadth and imagination. Like Alice Munro, Klimasewiski writes stories on a novelistic scale, encompassing great swaths of history while carrying the reader all over the world–sometimes in a balloon.–David Leavitt

NBCC member Leora Skolkin-Smith reports on the conversations between New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier and Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua during the PEN World Voices Festival:

What happens when one’s deeper cultural identity has been irrevocably scattered, reshaped,and claimed? When a diaspora of the self has occurred in a way,but the pieces exiled have been the victim’s own? To be an Israeli who grew up in a time before the state of Israel, before 1948, in a Palestine divided into border-free neighborhoods of Jews, Muslims and Christians can feel like one has lived only in a
fairytale.In this netherland of memory and being, lost cities and forgotten alliances, few writers have the tools with which to create a lasting fiction. The real experience is unreal enough, perhaps, a story few believe anyway, not grounded in contemporary Israel and Palestine and therefore unimaginable to the majority of
people who know this region only through the images of the here and now. A.B. Yehoshua is one of the few writers who has taken this existential challenge on and it is hard to not speak of his work effusively, with words of awe and admiration.

The evening I spent in the auditorium of the Center of Jewish history on Friday (May 1st 2008), watching and listening to the informal, lively discussion between New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, and his old friend, A.B. Yehoshua was yet another experience of awe at this writer’s capacity for depth and mastery. As is always the case, hung photographs on the walls of the holocaust and the rebuilding of shattered lives in the Center played their central part in defining Jewish collective memory. The Jewish Palestinians of the time before 1948, are marginal to say the least. They have not and continue to not carry any weight in the current spectrum of politics. They are light baggage, easily blown to the winds.

Yehoshua was born in 1936 in Jerusalem. He lived at a time before the major Zionist movements in Europe formed the state of Israel.He lived another Israel/Palestine perhaps.

A friendly, warm-hearted and chubby man with wild curly gray hair, he seemed like an unlikely choice for such a dark load. Like the character in his novel, “A Woman in Jerusalem,” he ‘had not sought such a mission now, in the softly radiant morning, (but) he grasped its unexpected significance…’ In the beginning of the interview, after asked a few general questions, Yehoshua gave the audience his own version of the history of Israel as a nation. He knew Jerusalem intimately. He stressed that immediately after 1948, when statehood was won, he and many Jewish intellectuals wanted his writing to be about a return to the individual as his own center, to surreal and existential realms. To hear his clear description of an earlier Jerusalem was fortifying and confirming.

Ghosts were resurrected but spoke as truths seldom heard. Before 1998, Israel was still a frontier with opened borders, he explained, Arab Israelis and Palestinians sat and smoked in cafes and nightclubs in Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Israelis went
night-clubbing in Rammallah and in the Gaza strip. The ubiquitous use of the word ‘zionism’ these days is like putting ‘catsup’ on everything. What does it mean? He asked. It was only intended to mean there should be a state of Israel, and it only applied to the formation of the State by 1948. After the State was achieved, it stopped meaning anything. It is just some sauce people throw on everything, he said, just the easiest and most convenient condiment.

What has happened in Israel and Palestine now for Yehoshua is a deadening of human empathy. Israel is now a swelling chaos, like the Jerusalem weather in “A Woman in Jerusalem,” which he describes like this: ‘From the overhang of the handsome tiled roof cascaded not one storm but many, each more torrential than the last. It was
as if the earth, having lost all hope of emptying the sky in a single downpour was draining it in stages.’

“Once when a Palestinian boy was killed, all Israelis mourned and felt pain,” he explained, “now they say — well, why don’t they care about the ones we have lost to suicide bombers?’ It’s a different place, he continued, a time of disconnection, historical distortions; the wall between the Israeli and Palestinians is just as metaphorical as it is concrete. And memories of a time when Palestinians and Israelis felt good about each other are rarely conjured up by the new Israelis, a silence around the recent past has been built as strong as that wall. The 1920’s
through the 1940’s in Jerusalem are not alluded except as precursors of the on-going border struggles experienced in Israel today.

Yehoshua calls this deadening of human empathy the ‘black plastic that wraps the dead bodies’.Faceless, nameless except to their own side, victims arrive at the cemetery stripped not only of their lives but of any possibility of re-engaging with the living as individuals, real fellow people.

Critical, too, of how some Americans and Europeans claim the Israeli experience without having lived it, he expressed frustration about the fantasy so many have about Israel here in the States. Paraphasing his own words, he told the audience: “Tell them to come and let them see for themselves what strange and very
wrong ideas they have about Israel…”

When asked by an audience member if Philip Roth’s portrait of the alienated Jew who feels he doesn’t belongs in Israel represents the majority of Americans, Leon Wieseltier, laughing, remarked: ‘No, no not enough of a majority! Look at all the settlers!’ And Yehoshua added, laughing too, ‘Yes, I am hoping many more Americans will start to feel like strangers here, maybe they’ll stopped building settlements!’ No one feels the bitter unfairness of the generalized reproach and impressions that Israel’s innate ‘zionist ggressiveness’ is of the horrendous state of things more than Yehoshua. But no one feels more strongly that Jerusalem belongs to all three religions, too. For him, Jerusalem belongs to the entire world, not to one group, not even just to the Jews. He has been active in the Peace Talks and critical of the new Israel, he says what only a older citizen of Israel/Palestine who has once been filled with sweeter memories could say: ‘We need peace because you see, we are neighbors. These Arabs and Palestinians, they are our neighbors. We are not separated by the ocean as you Americans are from from the people of Iraq you are fighting. After 1948, many families were separated and friends turned against each other…’

In “A Woman in Jerusalem,” the resource manager of the bakery is ordered to investigate the murder of a firstly anonymous cleaning lady. The woman, it turns out is from Russia, and she wasn’t even Jewish. She was killed by a suicide bomber and the company has no kept records of her employment with them. What unravels is a story
about the loss of some ability to love. She is a beautiful woman and the divorced manager falls in love with the idea of her, from pictures he finds in her lost files, and stories about her. His love is a love he can’t have with the living.

Mr. Yehoshua is married to a psychoanalyst and he spoke profoundly about the necessity of the writer to look internally, to write from a personal ‘inclination’. To be driven to write what he must, rather to write from a ‘moral obligation’ to society, even as embattled a society as Israel’s. If the ‘inclination’ isn’t
stronger than the ‘obligation’, he explained, ‘and all that history feels too heavy.’ The depth of that inner look and psychological starting point is vital to the broader sweep from which the novel will grow. The eye of the storm is always personal and begins in the personal, only through that gateway can the writer eventually encompass his surroundings and the society he exists in with all its pressing moral urgencies. Otherwise, we are left only with one-dimensional ideologies in the novel, dogma, the waste products of too many tired minds weighed down by all that history. For Yehoshua, the novel’s purity of vision depends on a
confrontation with and truthfulness about one’s internal, individual life.

No other writer I have read, expresses that purity of the individual self and the cultural collectivity that self must inhabit more poignantly and lucidly than A.B. Yehoshua.–Leora Skolkin-Smith

A quick fyi: Yesterday, Stanford Continuing Studies opened up registration for its summer lineup of online writing courses. Offered in partnership with the Stanford Creative Writing Program (one of the most distinguished writing programs in the country), these online courses give beginning and advanced writers, no matter where they live, the chance to refine their craft with gifted writing instructors.

Registration opened yesterday, and some of the classes are almost full. Classes will start during the last week of June. For more information, click here, or separately check out the FAQ.

Caveat emptor: These classes are not free, and I helped set them up. So while I wholeheartedly believe in these courses, you can take my views with a grain of salt.

Summer Courses:

• Introduction to Creative Writing
• Novel Writing: Making a Great Debut
• Short Story Writing
• Creative Nonfiction: Beginning Your Book
• Creative Nonfiction for Magazines
• Fiction Writing: The Short Story Cycle
• Poetry: Writing the Moment

By the way, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to keep the mind engaged, give some thought to Stanford Continuing Studies. Our full summer catalogue is here.

William Wordsworth

LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 recordings of She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth. This was the weekly poem for the week of May 4th, 2008.

• Bartleby e-text
• Wikipedia - William Wordsworth
• Wikipedia - She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways
• LibriVox’s She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (5.3MB)

Encheiridion, stoische Regeln für ein zufriedenes Leben. Knapp und ausgezeichnet. Geschrieben von Epiktet (ca. 50-138). Übersetzung durch Carl Conz von 1864. (Summary by redaer) This reading is in German.

• e-text
• Wikipedia - Epiktet
• LibriVox’s Handbüchlein der stoischen

These pages record some of the adventures of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first slave regiment mustered into the service of the United States during the late civil war. It was, indeed, the first colored regiment of any kind so mustered, except a portion of the troops raised by Major-General Butler at New Orleans. These scarcely belonged to the same class, however, being recruited from the free colored population of that city, a comparatively self-reliant and educated race. (From the text)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
• LibriVox’s Army Life in a Black Regiment Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (250 MB)Total running time: 8:39:54
  Read by FNH

In The Four Pools Mystery the tyrannical plantation owner is deemed responsible for his own murder because of his mistreatment of the former slaves who continued in his employment after the war.

Jean Webster (pseudonym for Alice Jane Chandler Webster) was born July 24, 1876 and died June 11, 1916. She was an American writer and author of many books including Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. (Wiki)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia - Jean Webster
• LibriVox’s The Four-Pools Mystery Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (203.2M)