Authors Electric

Humans: How We F*cked It All Up - Phillips Tom Phillips published this book, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up in 2018. Then and now it could hardly be more relevant. Everywhere in the 'western world' or 'the developed world' people with half a brain are asking themselves: How the f*ck did we get to this? What the hell happened? In this book you will find part of the answer. It begins with a prologue about Lucy, the famous Australopithecus , and how she ended up as one of our most noteable museum exhibits by falling out of a tree and dying. The fractures to her bones suggest that's what happened to her -- in fact, that we were f*#king up even before we were fully human. Except that, this being a history of bungles and failures, another group of experts claim that the fractures were all post-mortem. Take your pick. There are plenty more undoubtable examples of what the cartoonist Martin Rowson calls 'fur-cups' and, indeed, wor...

Blogging early this month, if you're wondering why it's me today... The New York Times recently ran an article online about the morality of paying for a book review. It's generated quite a bit of interest in the online writing communities and in the comments following the article. In fact I'm surprised our own Guardian online hasn't jumped on the bandwagon as it generally has a lot to say about ebook publishing. In a nutshell, the article concerns a man who made a lot of money matching up authors who wanted "favourable" online reviews for their books with people who were happy to write such reviews - for a fee. Note that I make no mention of books actually being read here - in many cases that seems to be an irrelevant and completely unnecessary part of writing a book review. Most of the online debate seems to concentrate on the author of the book paying for a review. But nobody has really discussed the other side of the coin - whether it's ri...