Albert Kahn, the French banker and philanthropist who decided to photograph the entire globe in 1909 using the latest autochrome technology, is endlessly fascinating for many reasons… including the incredible color photographs that still exist from the project. David Okuefuna’s THE DAWN OF THE COLOR PHOTOGRAPH presents these beautiful images as well as some of the story behind Kahn. Richard B. Woodward writes about Kahn in the Wall Street Journal, and the article includes an incredible slideshow of images. Check out the article and slideshow here. James F. X. O’Gara writes a very interesting review of the book and the darker side of the project in The Weekly Standard.

Princeton University Press’s esteemed author and professor Perez Zagorin has passed away following complications following open-heart surgery.  He was 88.   You can read his obituary in the Washington Post.  His Princeton books include the highly-regarded FRANCIS BACON, the Los Angeles TImes Book Review’s Twenty Best Books of 2003 HOW THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION CAME TO THE WEST, the well-reviewed THUCYDIDES: An Introduction for the Common Reader, and the forthcoming intellectually-powerful HOBBES AND THE LAW OF NATURE (February 2010).

Cormac Ó Gráda, author of FAMINE: A Short History, discusses the history and a possible future for famine in Forbes.com. Read the article here.

Also check out Karen Long’s thoughtful review of the book in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In case you missed this wonderful event with Andrei Codrescu and Ooana Sanziana Marian at the LA Public Library, here is video provided by fora.tv.

Tonight, Andrei will present on the subject of his book The Posthuman Dada Guide at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ. Join us if you can!

Enjoy these high-profile celebrity “endorsements” for The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu:

“Synthesizing seemingly unrelated phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and even optics was revolutionary in its time, but we have vastly expanded our inquiries into kinship to account for the most abstract materials, such as language. This Guide reveals with elegant simplicity the marriages of opposites conducted by artists and reformers in the social arena of the past century.”
—James Clerk Maxwell, author of A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

“To the Shasta daisy, the Fire poppy, the July Elberta peach, the Santa Rosa plum, the Flaming Gold nectarine, the Wickson plum, the Freestone peach, the Burbank potato, the spineless cactus, and the plumcot, you can now add The Posthuman Dada Guide. What I did with plants and seeds, this Guide does with ideas.”
— Luther Burbank, author of The Training of the Human Plant

“If I weren’t on an astral plane busy with the production of Angel Salt (a substance indispensable for the correct functioning of angel wings), I would draw on my previous work with ur-language to praise this Guide for keeping open the tunnel beneath the post-Babel pandemonium in order to allow a few lucid adventurers to travel unimpeded.”
— Aleister Crowley, painter, astrologer, hedonist, bisexual, drug experimenter, and social critic

“This book made me feel naked, and that’s one thing I know. I’m naked even now in a place I can’t describe. I’m so glad this book got to me somehow. Congratulations!”
— Josephine Baker, “Bronze Venus,” “Créole Goddess,” “The Black Pearl”

“I will tell you what really happened if after you read this scurrilous book you let me punch you hard. I read myself all the time but I rarely get this worked up. Bring it on, mother! It’s no great feat to blow your nose in the handkerchief of eternity. Keeping us alive is the only crime, and this book does it.”
— Arthur Cravan, author of The Surf on Q Beach at Night

**Taken from the front matter of THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE.

Vanity Fair notes that Andrei Codrescu’s The Posthuman Dada Guide “prescribes the [Dada] movement as an antidote to the soul-sucking tyranny of the 21 Century,” in Elissa Schappell’s Hot Type column in the April issue. Brief, but accurate!

Publishing today, there are also features about the bookin the Village Voice (”A pleasing secret history”) and the New Orleans Times-Picayune (”A guidebook to a strange new era”).

John Garrard is professor of Russian studies at the University of Arizona. Carol Garrard is an independent scholar. Together they are the authors of three books including Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent.

Whoever will occupy the “throne” that Aleksy II’s death has vacated will set his personal stamp upon the Patriarchate, but there is little doubt that the union of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian patriotism which Aleksy initiated will continue.  This relationship has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.  Consider but one small example of Aleksy’s remarkable achievements vís a vís the Russian military and its need to staff isolated listening posts in the Far North.

Russia still has universal conscription for young men, all of whom are eligible—including those who wish to become monks.  The Russian military also had a problem staffing the isolated and forbidding radar listening posts in the Far North.  These posts are located within what used to be monasteries, but had over time been outfitted with the infrastructure of the Soviet military.  No one in the Russian military has spoken on the record about the problem of morale at these posts, but it is easy to imagine that young men, without anything else to do but listen for up to ten hours a day in the frozen north would turn to making home made vodka on their off hours.