Saturday, April 26, 2008

Chernobil, 22nd anniversary-brave Elena

End of april 1986 one region of Ukraina died...or at least got lethal dose. People moved out for few hundred years, and it became a monument of human...stupidity or reason? We can discuss it, but from safe distance, as it is not good idea to put Academy in Chernobil.

The best warning I found online is blog
Elena
Lots of good text and pictures. Lady is crazily brave, biking through the Death Zone. Fast. My bow, Elena.

If you are green, you will become blue, watching this. Rest of us can only...grow gray. It is old blog, few years ago...but do not worry, it will not be outdated for few centuries more.

Show this to kids, think it yourself. I am a physicist, and know well we do not have third choice, except atomic and, hopefully soon, nuclear energy. Windpower is nice thing, but more to remind us we are in NEED, urge for energy.
For producing food, in the end of the chain...

22 years passed. In 578, by some moderate estimates (300-900 years) real estates prices in the region will move from zero, where they are now.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Peter Nadas' Family Story

Nadas is, after I read his "A book of Memories", which is a work unusually thick in feeling, not only paper, one of most pleasant european writers for me. This booklet, on the contrary to the 1st book, is a thin one, but language is the same, peculiar, and reading often has to be back and forth, to understand what's up. From the very beginning when it is not clear at all who is mother, who father and how to hell the change occurs... Nadas is a master of word, and plays, sometimes, a kind of game with a reader.

Imre Goldstein's translation from Hungarian transfers, I feel, the taste of Nadas' language.

For a book "The End of a Family Story", to enclose Jewish family history of last 10 or so generations in 250 pages of small "Penguin" is a formidable achievemnent. And not to tell ther stories all the time, just follow the boy's story and what his grandpa told him...

Highly reccomendable reading, albeit for connesseur's palate only, I am afraid, as many could be repelled by non-transparent language of Nadas. He is, in English rendition, somewhat similar to Salman Rushdie, probably it is because of Middle East air of the jewish stories inside, which are so pregnant with desert sands and winds, anciet cities and people.

If you want to touch today's Literature of Europe, Nadas is for sure one of its most pleasant eminences.