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We’ve heard the grumbles about the standards of English declining in schools. We’ve read the amusing anecdotes about grammar vigilantes who correct signposts by night, and the furore sparked by some UK councils banning the use of apostrophes in road signs “to avoid confusion”. Is this pesky pedantry or a growing problem that needs addressing? Bernard Lamb, president of the Queen’s English Society, and a geneticist at Imperial College London, believes the latter. The QES exists to protect what it calls the Queen’s English. The Queen's English is not elitist or overly complex, it is simply “authoritative, correct, clear English”, says Mr Lamb. Though he has been known to take a marker pen to a public sign, he is also active in the society’s aim to promote use of the Queen’s English where needed, such as in business, education and the public arena. His latest effort is the unashamedly finicky handbook “The Queen’s English: And How to Use It”, out now.  read more »

"On entering the waiting area," writes Michelle Williams of her interview to become a mortuary technician, "I saw a woman dressed from head to toe in black gothic clothing with very long curly straw-like red hair, who was one of the other applicants. She greeted me cautiously; I smiled faintly at her and decided to sit on the other side of the room."

The plucky Williams, a former health-care assistant who worked with learning-disabled patients, impulsively decided to take up work in a hospital morgue in Gloucestershire. "Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician" is a memoir of her first year on the job. Not surprisingly, the scenarios range from ghastly to extremely ghastly. During her first weeks of training, the 36-year-old Williams encounters maggot-eaten bodies, severed limbs and a 560-pound dead man whose cadaver, too large to fit inside a refrigerated compartment, slowly decomposes in the laboratory while technicians wait desperately for the sign-off authorising a postmortem. There's also the motorcycle rider, decapitated in an accident, who arrives on a gurney with his head riding shotgun. Her reaction to such sights is often to murmur a curse and fetch a cup of instant coffee. Williams is a cool customer, and her writing style is correspondingly concise and sportive. More Intelligent Life has extracted a few bits of underworld knowledge from this engaging memoir.

On avoiding mistakes:

Checking the identification on a body—via tags affixed to the big toe and wrist—is a technician's most important responsibility. "Every so often the wrong body gets eviscerated," Williams is told by her supervisors, "and what follows is a tidal wave of trouble."  read more »

Reading about intrepid reporters never gets old. Intrepid people in general, really, though as often as not they come to us in the form of journalists like Jessica Mitford, an English aristocrat and, per Time magazine, “Queen of the Muckrakers”. Mitford’s “Poison Penmanship” was originally published in 1979 but fell out of print soon after. Its current reissue by New York Review Books is a welcome reminder of the author’s reporting ingenuity. The book includes 17 pieces of journalism—a mere slice of the work that Mitford produced over the course of a 40-year career in letters, but a choice one.

Jane Smiley contributes a brief but admiring preface to the collection, noting that “Above all things, Mitford liked a worthy opponent, and her weapons of choice were factual accuracy and a tone of amazement.”  She goes on to describe Mitford as “a toiler in the muck who cared about facts and believed in the idea that her fellow citizens were generally honest and expected the same of business and government.”  read more »

Libyans sing along to Lionel Richie’s “Hello”, Iranians jam to Django Reinhardt, and Indonesian teenagers favour the post-punk stylings of British cult classic Wire. Who knew? Richard Poplak, for one. Poplak is the author of “The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World”, a tour through 17 Muslim countries in search of local interpretations of American culture, from cheesy reality television to Metallica. The chapters are organised by country—Libya, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, etc—with each section prefaced by religious statistics and venerated local pop-culture icons. The result is packed with surprises, five of which More Intelligent Life has chosen to highlight.

On heavy metal:

Egyptian heavy-metal fans call themselves Metaliens and, like America’s native metalheads, they prefer long hair and black T-shirts. On January 22nd 1997, Egyptian police conducted a series of raids on the homes of Metaliens, confiscating metal posters, CDs and instruments, interrogating about 100 suspects (“Do you participate in pagan rituals?” “Do you spit on graves?”) and jailing many of them for weeks. “Metal is far from an anomaly in the Muslim world,” Poplak points out, citing the massive Dubai Desert Rock Festival.

On video games as propaganda:  read more »

This week Barnes & Noble announced that it will be closing its Manhattan bookstore at 66th Street and Broadway at the end of January. The space is huge—four storeys right across from Lincoln Centre, and a neighbourhood landmark for nearly 15 years. But the store's lease is ending, and a rise in rent makes it "economically impossible" for the company to stay, according to a spokesperson. A recent story in the New York Times took the temperature of the store's customers, all of whom seemed sad that it would be shuttering despite the fact that they rarely bought books there. "It’s hard to find a place where you can sit down and have a cup of coffee," explained one chap, who often haunts the Starbucks upstairs (and buys audio books online). “Oh, I really am sad,” said another women, a 70-year-old retiree who visits the store at least twice a week, usually heading upstairs to read magazines with a sandwich and a coffee. “I love buying my greeting cards here.” 

It's no wonder that the world's largest bookseller, with 720 stores around the country, has been wobbling. As we've reported, bricks-and-mortar bookstores are on the outs, except as spots for leisurely coffee and book signings. Online retailers, with their serious discounts and 24-hour availability, have hurt the hegemony of even the grandest bookstores, and more than half of book sales in America take place at big discount retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target. In August Barnes & Noble announced it was putting itself up for sale.   read more »

Even by the standards of Man Booker prize winners, “Wolf Hall” is a phenomenon. By Christmas last year, it had become the fastest-selling winner ever. By July it had sold 215,000 copies in hardback, making it Britain’s seventh-highest-selling hardback novel of the decade. When the paperback appeared in the spring, it shot to the top of the general fiction chart—a Man Booker first. Translation rights have been sold in 30 countries, and “Wolf Hall” has been a bestseller in both Canada and America, where it won the National Book Critics Circle award and had a print run of 200,000 copies. In Britain, along with the £50,000 Man Booker, it scooped the new £25,000 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction, as well as being shortlisted for both the Orange and the Costa fiction prizes.  read more »

Though history tells us that Islam and Christianity were both borne out of a small sliver of the middle east, the world's largest population of Muslims today is in Indonesia. In her new book, "The Tenth Parallel", Eliza Griswold, an award-winning journalist and poet, turns her eye towards Indonesia, as well as Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Malaysia and the Philippines, countries where the war between Islam and Christianity is being waged in full force. These countries all lie along the titular tenth parallel, a latitudinal line 700 miles north of the equator. More than half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live along this line, as well as 60% of the world's 2 billion Christians.

Griswold spent seven years travelling through the war-torn cities, drought-ravaged fields and the near-empty deserts between the tenth parallel and the equator, encountering poverty, inequality and violent conflict at nearly every turn (indeed, from what she recounts, it seems a miracle she lived to tell the tale). The book is a compilation of painstaking interviews as she parsed, person by person, the conflicts over land, resources and souls. The daughter of a prominent liberal Episcopalian Bishop, Griswold brings to her story a remarkable humility and a deep understanding of the power of faith. Despite the audaciousness of her exploits, Griswold is careful to train the lens of her book on the amazing people she meets along the way. Ultimately, each country presents its own set of tangled problems and predicaments, with no easy answers.  read more »

"Like most photographers, I’m fascinated by people in everyday situations,” said Steve McCurry, a photojournalist, to Publishing Perspectives. “The work I do is mostly wandering and observing human nature and human activity, working and playing and leisure time. As you’re walking around the streets of China, India, New York, wherever—it is fun to photograph people simply doing things.”

One of his long-term projects has been photographing people as they are reading. This week he published these images on his blog (Part I and Part II), and they are beautiful, quietly powerful for their cumulative heft. Mr McCurry captures hushed, personal moments—an old woman hunched over a little black book, some lovers on a park bench gazing at the same page, a man reading amid wreckage in Kuwait in 1991—revealing a universal intimacy. Reading "is a common link in our shared humanity," Mr McCurry observed, "a thing we all do that is regardless of where we are economically or socially.”

On Mr McCurry's own blog, he quotes Susan Sontag: "'The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality…' The same can be said for reading books."

Steve McCurry’s next book, "The Iconic Photographs", will be published in America by Phaidon in November

Tom McCarthy's 2005 debut, "Remainder", managed what the jackets of so many first novels promise: a fresh and—in this case—unsettling take on contemporary life. It is about a brain-damaged man who marshals millions of pounds and a troupe of actors, consiglieres and forensic experts to reconstruct a memory. It is an intentionally confusing and difficult book that manages to draw on both Proust and Beckett, yet remain intoxicatingly readable.

McCarthy's subsequent monograph on Hergé's beloved comic cartoon journalist, "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", his avant-garde collective—The International Necronautical Society—and his second novel, "Men in Space" (2007), have been no less divisive. He has received accolades and abuse, and has squabbled with critics, once declaring that a prominent publication needed a "Semtex enema".

Still, he has been eking out a place in the canon. In her essay "Two Paths for the Novel", Zadie Smith anoints McCarthy's "Remainder" as one of the paths. His latest novel, "C", has been selected for the 2010 Man Booker longlist. Over e-mail, McCarthy spoke with us about authenticity, politics, "Remainder" and "C", a book that is as strange and powerful as anything McCarthy has done before.  read more »