Steven Levy's classic book explains why the misuse of the word "hackers" to describe computer criminals does a terrible disservice to many important shapers of the digital revolution. Levy follows members of an MIT model railroad club--a group of brilliant budding electrical engineers and computer innovators--from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. These eccentric characters used the term "hack" to describe a clever way of improving the electronic system that ran their massive railroad.
A former sheriff's deputy in Sarasota, Fla., Dixie Hemingway now earns a living as a pet sitter, a career that once again turns perilous when her charge, a dachshund, digs up a dead body at the start of Clement's fast-paced sophomore effort (after 2005's Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter). Dixie identifies the victim as Conrad Ferrelli, whose Doberman pinscher she once walked. A wealthy, eccentric son of a famous Ringling Brothers clown, Conrad and his wife, Stevie, were funding the creation of a retirement home for circus performers.
The pseudonymous D'Urso's bleak and promising debut is based on a true incident first covered by Jack London in 1906. August 1898 finds 23-year old Hannah Butler accompanying her stuffy British employer on holiday in the American West. Bored stiff, Hannah soon elopes with Hans Nelson, and the two head to Alaska in search of quick riches. En route, they partner with ex-Confederate soldier Harky, eccentric prospector/guide Dutch, and boat captain Michael Severts. They all end up in remote Lituya Bay, in southeast Alaska, where they establish a camp and catch a gold fever that runs nearly as hot as Hannah's clandestine lust for Michael.
In the discussion of architecture, the prevailing sentiment of the past three decades has been that cultural production can no longer be understood to arise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but is constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical procedures. The development of interpretive modes of various stripes—poststructuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric—has given scholars a range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields and for reasserting architecture's general importance in intellectual discourse.
Have you ever made a bet ? a big bet? In the 1850s, a young American finds himself in London by chance. He is penniless, and yet he leads the luxurious life of a millionaire. How can he do this? It's all thanks to a bizarre bet, made by two eccentric gentlemen.
