Bloody Old Britain by Kitty Hauser

Current Archaeology, in reviewing a new book on O.G.S. (Osbert Guy Stanhope) Crawford, known as "Ogs", titled Bloody Old Britain by Kitty Hauser, calls Crawford "one of the greatest figures of 20th century Archaeology" and writes next to a photo of Crawford as follows:

"Crawford on his bike. Note the roll of 6 inch Ordnance Survey maps across the handlebars. In the background is the garage at his lodgings where during the war he stored most of the archaeological records, thus preserving them from the bombing which destroyed the OS offices. These records now form the basis of Sites and Monuments Records throughout the country." (emphasis added)

Crawford was a controversial figure, who, among other things, served as the first field archaeologist at the Ordnance Survey, who was one of the inventors of aerial archaeology, and who in 1927 founded the well-known and still influential periodical Antiquity .

The book has also been reviewed by Tom Fort at the Telegraph in Mapping Britain's Archaeology, Simon Heffer at the Literary Review in No Ordinary Surveyor, and by Simon Garfield at the Guardian in A real backwards man.

A mention is found at the blog Carolyn Trant & Parvenu Press.

Tom Fort writes about Crawford in Hauser's book in this text, excerpted from his review :

"Crawford's supreme attribute was his eye; in Hauser's words, 'he saw things where others saw nothing.' With it, he was able, as he himself put it, to decipher the palimpsest: to make out the burial mounds, abandoned settlements, Celtic fields, Roman causeways, Iron Age tracks and other vestiges of the remote past.

Having served as a mapper and aerial reconnaissance officer during the First World War, Crawford was aware of the extraordinary way in which photographs taken from the air could reveal whatHauser calls 'the ancient text' of the landscape.

Most famously, he used negatives stored by the RAF to identify the avenue leading from Stonehenge to the river Avon.

Until Crawford came along, field archaeology was pretty much left to gentleman amateurs interested in ley lines, morris dancing, obscure fertility rites and other aspects of imaginary Old England. As Hauser demonstrates, Crawford turned it into a professional discipline, both through his work for the OS, and his editorship of Antiquity, the journal he founded to promote his version of the search for the past.

He was a visionary, in a limited way, and prodigiously hard-working."

Book Review : Wordgloss : A Cultural Lexicon

The following is our book review of Jim O'Donnell's book, Wordgloss : A Cultural Lexicon , which we have reviewed at Amazon.co.uk:

"Was this the wish of the Demiurge? Boston to Washington DC is a conurbation! Cui bono?! Do we live in a lexical dystopia awaiting a thaumaturgic gloss revival? Who today knows that "pleonasms are tautologous and should be avoided"? Errata need not be repetitive - a verisimilitude!

Do you need this book? Do you know the words?

Author Jim O'Donnell (book Foreword by John Banville) writes in his preface that "the extraordinary expansion of modern knowledge and its fission into micro-specialties" has created "a niagara of words and concepts flowing from a wide range of disciplines that we have never explored."

The everyday result is that our increasingly sophisticated modern world of communications is confronted by the Hydra-headed cultural stumbling block of a classics-based "verbal universe" manifesting an erstwhile lexical heritage to which most readers no longer have any personal or educational connection.

Wordgloss is not a quintessential corrective panacea for this problem, but O'Donnell writes that "Wordgloss is full of the words and concepts you always meant to look up. It tells you where they came from and how they acquired the meaning or meanings they now have."

The book is written "associatively", which is "pedagogically" more effective than the "linear" scientific style of dictionaries.

Definitely a fun and educating vade-mecum read.

Fons et origo!"

Science a Go Go : Evolution, Astronomy, Cosmology

Science a Go Go (http://www.scienceagogo.com/) has a zippy website from down under devoted to "the latest science news, research tidbits and science discussion".

What caught my attention were their science book reviews. See:
Science a Go Go Book Reviews 2005
Science a Go Go Book Reviews 2006
for a good overview of what is going on in science,
through the medium of books.

Online book reviews, still fairly rare outside of e.g. Amazon,
or involving the payment of online fees for viewing, as at Antiquity magazine,
will surely play an increasingly greater role in science and literature,
and we were gratified to see Science a Go Go review our book Stars Stones and Scholars
on the same page as their review of Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory
by legal expert and Pulitzer Prize winning author Edward J. Larson (2006).

Tim Radford in an interview with Larson in the Guardian titled A Life in Writing: A Voyage to the Origin of Species, writes:

"Larson won the Pulitzer Prize for his Summer for the Gods, a book on the Scopes trial, in which American anti-evolutionists challenged science in the 1920s. He followed with Trial and Error, once again about the creation-evolution controversy. Right now, he is contemplating one book on the coming of telegraphy, another on Antarctica. Evolution's Workshop grew out of a preoccupation with the history of ideas, rather than of kings and presidents. In the course of looking at the progress of the great Darwinian idea, it seemed to him that the Galapagos were the Clapham Junction of biology: all sorts of people passed through.

"I believed that ideas in general are the most powerful thing in the world. An idea was more powerful than an army. In the western world it seemed to me that science was the criterion for truth," [Larson] says. "Darwin wrote his Origin of Species in 1859. At that time Queen Victoria was on the throne in England and James Buchanan was president of the United States. Now who has a greater impact on us today? How we think, how we live, who we are?" "

We agree.

New 13-Character ISBN Numbers required as of January 1, 2007

Are You Ready for ISBN-13?
and the fact that:
"Beginning January 1, 2007, all books will be published with ISBN-13s."

Click this link to go the ISBN-13 Online Converter.

Not everyone needs this, but every reader of books should know about it, and most authors and readers out there probably are not yet aware of what is going on, so we alert to it here.

The reason for this posting is that a monumental change which affects the entire world of books on our planet started January 1, 2007 (actually, the sunrise period began in 2005). It is a change in ISBN numbers. ISBN numbers are the unique numbers given to books by publishers and used to order books wherever you order them as a user. The reason for this change was that ISBN was running out of numbers.

Take a look at the following numbers for our book Stars, Stones and Scholars where the ISBN-10 numbers (the ISBN-10's) have been converted by our publisher to ISBN-13 numbers (the ISBN-13's). These will be called ISBN-10s and ISBN-13s.

Stars Stones Scholars (softcover)
# ISBN-10: 1412013445
# ISBN-13: 978-1412013444

Stars Stones Scholars (hardcover)
# ISBN-10: 1412201357
# ISBN-13: 978-1412201353

ISBN-10 Numbers

Prior to January 1, 2007, ISBN numbers had 10 characters.
Those are the ISBN-10 numbers.

ISBN-13 Numbers

Beginning on January 1, 2007, ISBN numbers are 13 characters.
Those are the ISBN-13 numbers.

"Beginning January 1, 2007, all books will be published with ISBN-13s."

Important Links

Below are important links from ISBN for authors, retailers, publishers and everyone interested in books and the book trade:

"Are You Ready for ISBN-13?

• An overview for publishers with the critical do's and don't and the recommended implementation timeline. Why is this transition taking place and how does it impact your copyright page, your book covers and your bar codes? Find out now.

Pubnet EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) 13-Digit Conversion News

• If you receive EDI orders via Pubnet, be sure to learn more about changes needed to support EDI transactions.

BISG Resources on ISBN-13

• The Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG) ISBN-13 Task Force maintains this site as a source of authoritative information and recommended implementation guidelines for ISBN-13.

ISBN-13 Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)

• Brochure from Bowker, the US ISBN Agency

Guidelines for the Implementation of 13-Digit ISBNs (PDF)

• Information from the International ISBN Agency.

A BISAC Briefing on How to Manage the Transition (PDF)

• Information from BISG on operations planning.

_________________
The readability score for this posting:
Gunning-Fog Index: 20
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 41

Wikipedia - The Faith-Based Encyclopedia

Wikipedia - The Faith-Based Encyclopedia

Tech Central Station (TCS) runs an article entitled The Faith-Based Encyclopedia by Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief, of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and author of How to Know .

The Wikipedia does not fare that well in his analysis and there are certainly some reliability problems, but we have found the Wikipedia to be quite useful, even though we have two complete sets of the Britannica and one digital version at our fingertips. To put it bluntly, the Wikipedia is simply more up to date.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Campbell Armstrong and George Lucas

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Campbell Armstrong and George Lucas

In the end, is it always about money?

The sundaymail has an article by Charles Lavery entitled RAIDER OF THE LOST FORTUNE involving a suit by author Cambell Black (who writes as Campbell Armstrong) against George Lucas for unpaid royalties on his book which was filmed as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Read the article for the full story.

BookBlog by Adina Levin

BookBlog by Adina Levin

BookBlog is

"Adina Levin's weblog. For conversation about books I've been reading, social software, and other stuff too."

Adina has some excellently written book reviews on the BookBlog:

What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
by Bernard Lewis

Adina writes e.g.:

"Contemporary Sharia systems in places like Iran and Afghanistan are
often mocked for being medieval and backward, legislating repression of
women and brutal corporal punshment (no, I'm not in favor of the Texas
death penalty, either). But there is no empirical reason that a system
of Muslim jurisprudence needs to be backward. After all, European laws
once featured trial by ordeal, and prevented women from owning property.
A living tradition of Muslim law might be able to adapt to current
economic and social conditions. How did the Sharia change from a system
that had once reflected the standards of justice of its time to one that
insisted on avoiding change?"

The Mapmakers
by John Noble Wilford

This book is of particular interest to me because of my own book,
Stars Stones and Scholars, which claims that the megaliths are remnants of ancient surveys, i.e. that they are Stone Age geodetic mapping systems triangulated by means of the astronomy, using stars much as in ocean navigation.

Adina writes, inter alia:

"The Mapmakers purports to be world history, but it has a strong European focus. Wilford does include few pages about sophisticated early mapmaking practices in China. But he almost completely ignores Muslim and Indian geography. The book contains just one brief reference to ibn Khaldun, the medieval Muslim traveler and geographer, and nothing on Al Idrisi, who was commissioned by Roger II, the Christian king of Sicily, to update navigational records, and created the famous early atlas called "The Book of Roger." The Mapmakers briefly mentions that one Francis Wilford, a member of India Survey, was a student of ancient Hindu geography. Given early Indian sophistication in astronomy, math, and government administration, one wonders what earlier sources of geographic knowledge he drew on. According to an Indian friend of mine, many early maps were destroyed to keep them out of the hands of British colonial rulers.

Wilford writes about the dire level of geographic ignorance of Medieval Europeans, whose maps routinely placed Paradise at the Eastern border of China, without noting that during the same period, there was a longstanding, ongoing system of travel and trade from Arabia through India and Southeast Asia to China (see books by Abu Lughod and KN Chaudhuri, among others), conducted by Arabs, Jews, Indians, and sometimes Chinese. I don't know what sorts of maps were used by these travelling merchants, but they must have used something, because they got from place to place regularly and routinely."

(crossposted to LawPundit)