Byron buys the TLS

This picture is the proof (courtesy of our commercial director, Jo Cogan, left) of the great TLS Boston Book festival subscription drive.

(Or it would be if I could upload it from my machine: full picture-service may have to wait; for the time being just imagine the picture, big TLS banner, Copley Square grass, hundreds of enthusiasts at a wonderful free festival of books)

With the help of our  T-shirted team (thanks everyone) we handed out copies, met current subscribers and signed up new ones. 

The editor will forever have a special thought for the new lady subscriber who accepted our offer of a free signed copy of my Spartacus Road on condition that I inscribed it to her accompanying dog, Byron, who, it seems, normally prefers science fiction but was prepared to make an exception on Saturday for the TLS.

Almost as surprising was the promotional picture in the back of the cab from the airport which showed the face of my old friend and former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, as a star writer of Boston.

The face on the screen was very clearly the man from faraway Scotland who resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet over the Iraq War and died shortly afterwards although, as in the case of the TLS-selling team, you will have to take my word for it.

There is, however. a Boston writer called Robin Cook who writes novels about reassembling body parts. His most famous is called Coma. I wonder if he knows how reassembled he has become this week in the back of Boston cabs. 

   

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter Stothard is just the man to sort out the case of the Boston (now New York) woman Jennifer Schuessler, of the New York Times Book Review, now much maligned (and "impugned") by a certain collection of American and Canadian scientists.

What is it all about? Can we make any sense out of what these scientists are saying? Why are they attempting to bully Jennifer?

Let's start with my comment at Paper Cuts:

The fall of Woody is a sad case, especially when you trip over a
comma. Even more sensational is the final fall and utter collapse of
JENNIFER SCHUESSLER of the NY Times Book Review, as based on her
monkey house meditations.

Somehow, the scientists who signed (apparently without reading) the
letter bringing Jennifer's activities at the Book Review to a final end thought that the essay writer was linking Marc Hauser to the work of the Great Ape Trust, even though there is not a whisper of evidence that she was doing so. Not a vanishingly tiny trace.

It is my theory that scientists in reading a text are even worse off
than Woody or a copulating monkey. They just can't see for the steam:

[October 15, 2010 Tarred by the Same Brush: To the Editor: In her
essay “Trouble in the Monkey House” (Sept. 12), Jennifer Schuessler
concocts a peculiar mash-up... But lest readers be led astray, we wish
to clarify that the Great Ape Trust is in no way connected with Marc
Hauser, the Harvard scientist mentioned in the essay who has been
accused of falsifying data in his primate studies... We teach and
write about the work impugned in the Book Review — because we respect
its scientific integrity, because it has powerfully transformed our
understanding of what apes are capable of, and because, through it, we grasp more fully what it means to share our world with other sentient creatures.

BARBARA J. KING Williamsburg, Va.

Chancellor professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary and the author, most recently, of “Being With Animals.”]

(AND A HOST OF OTHER EMMADDENED ILLITERATE SCIENTISTS.)

[September 8, 2010 Trouble in the Monkey House By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

When Harvard announced last month that it had found the psychologist
Marc Hauser “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific
misconduct, the news generated front-page headlines and streams of
schadenfreude-laced commentary in the blogosphere....]

If you read Jennifer's engaging, funny, and fair essay minutely, you
will see that only a scientist could imagine, in the heat of his
illiterate musings, that she had "impugned" the Great Ape Trust's
contributions to humanity.

One wonders what drives the letters editors at The Times to publish such trash.

Woody, your collapse has been a model for all the others. They are all going down now, like the Berlin Wall in slow motion.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

About the two Robin Cooks: the late British Foreign Secretary and the Boston writer. When I had occasion to refer to John Wain, poet, novelist, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, my American students had a smile on their faces because the name conjured up for them the only John Wayne they had heard of, the laconic larger-than-life Hollywood actor of another time. Transatlantic matters can always be counted on to deliver surprises.