Tolstoy

As a blogger who once listed 10 reasons to Hate the Kindle -- you can't get it autographed by authors, for example -- I've tempered my emotions on e-readers. I now do a fair amount of reading on my iPad and have started to review books on a Kindle Fire. Still, I'm rethinking my rethinking, based on a bizarre episode in e-editing. According to arstechnica, a Barnes & Noble Nook version of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" replaced the word "kindled" with "Nookd. "  Here's more from that site: "It appears to be a case of Ctrl-F gone wrong.

As a blogger who once listed 10 reasons to Hate the Kindle -- you can't get it autographed by authors, for example -- I've tempered my emotions on e-readers. I now do a fair amount of reading on my iPad and have started to review books on a Kindle Fire. Still, I'm rethinking my rethinking, based on a bizarre episode in e-editing. According to arstechnica, a Barnes & Noble Nook version of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" replaced the word "kindled" with "Nookd. "  Here's more from that site: "It appears to be a case of Ctrl-F gone wrong.

Leo Tolstoy is most quoted in America for one of the least accurate passages he wrote:"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Poor Tolstoy never knew enough happy families to realize that happiness takes many forms. But he sure was an expert on misery.For 48 years, Leo and Sonya Tolstoy lived one of the best-documented bad marriages in history. In the end, their anguish drove him to his death.He was 82 when he snapped. Sick and exhausted, with early winter snows blowing, he sneaked off their estate during the night and spent the next few days fleeing his wife on an unheated, smoke-filled train.

The National Endowment for the Arts has good news for authors, at least those who write fiction. For the first time in 26 years, the number of Americans who read literature for pleasure has risen, according to its latest survey. More young adults are reading than ever, even if they're now getting their fiction and poetry online. Call it an astonishing reversal of decades-old cultural decline or just good old-fashioned escapism - the survey counts supermarket pulp fiction as well as classics like War and Peace - but the fact that recreational reading is growing again offers hope for the continued life of the mind.

It's infrequent enough that you can say the movie is better than the book, but it's a positive rarity when you can say it of a book not by John Grisham or Michael Crichton, but by Leo Tolstoy.Yet such feels like an absolute truth: Sergei Bodrov's "Prisoner of the Mountains," which opens Friday at the Charles and has just been nominated for an Academy Award, is in every way superior to the mid-19th-century text on which it is based, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" by the then young cavalry officer who would later become one of the world's great novelists.

Reading War and Peace, the classic 19th-century novel by Leo Tolstoy about life in Russian society during the Napoleonic era, has been described by some as an arduous undertaking. Turning the nearly 1,500-page epic into an hourlong water ballet, though? No problemski. If you go War and Fleas will premiere at a hot dog and beer benefit at Riverside Park's pool at 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $20. All other performances are $8. They will be at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday at Riverside and at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. July 28 and 29 at Patterson Park's pool.

MOSCOW -- Five years after Soviet censorship ended, Russian cities have well-stocked bookstores that are constantly mobbed. Street-corner book vendors do a brisk business from portable card tables, even in remotest Siberia.But the Russian reading renaissance isn't what would be expected in a nation where everyone from the president to the elevator operator can quote from memory Dostoevski, Tolstoy and Pushkin.Instead, millions of Russian are buying "Russky Trillers," a new pulp fiction genre vying with with bodice-rippers by Western romance writers.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes. The title of this Romanian heartbreaker echoes "The Death of Ivan Illyich," Leo Tolstoy's great short story. "Ivan Illyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible," wrote Tolstoy. The same goes for Lazarescu Dante Remus (Ioan Fiscuteanu), a solitary 63-year-old in a Bucharest suburb, occupying an apartment filled with dusty newspapers and hairy cats.

Brock Speer, 78, patriarch of the singing Speer Family and former president, chairman and permanent board member of the Gospel Music Association, died Monday in Nashville.Leonard Mountain Chief, 59, a tribal elder of the Blackfeet Indian tribe, movie actor and champion fiddler, died Monday of a heart attack in Heart Butte, Mont.Michel Crepeau, 68, a longtime French lawmaker known for his incisive questions and lyrical orations before the French Parliament, died Tuesday in Paris.Angelo LaPietra, 80, a former high-ranking Chicago mobster who ran the so-called "26th Street Crew," died Sunday in Chicago.

We are sliding into the final third of summer. From here, we push on to the finish line at Labor Day. The wish lists we made in June weigh on us: the outings, the visitors, trips, chores, projects - and for many, the pile of books we promised we'd read this summer. Each friend's recommendation and each review adds another book to our pile. Our motivations are good; we want to grow and better understand ourselves and the world around us. The books stack up on the coffee table and the bed stand, and our library list is dog-eared and scribbled.

We are sliding into the final third of summer. From here, we push on to the finish line at Labor Day. The wish lists we made in June weigh on us: the outings, the visitors, trips, chores, projects - and for many, the pile of books we promised we'd read this summer. Each friend's recommendation and each review adds another book to our pile. Our motivations are good; we want to grow and better understand ourselves and the world around us. The books stack up on the coffee table and the bed stand, and our library list is dog-eared and scribbled.

Reading War and Peace, the classic 19th-century novel by Leo Tolstoy about life in Russian society during the Napoleonic era, has been described by some as an arduous undertaking. Turning the nearly 1,500-page epic into an hourlong water ballet, though? No problemski. If you go War and Fleas will premiere at a hot dog and beer benefit at Riverside Park's pool at 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $20. All other performances are $8. They will be at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday at Riverside and at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. July 28 and 29 at Patterson Park's pool.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes. The title of this Romanian heartbreaker echoes "The Death of Ivan Illyich," Leo Tolstoy's great short story. "Ivan Illyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible," wrote Tolstoy. The same goes for Lazarescu Dante Remus (Ioan Fiscuteanu), a solitary 63-year-old in a Bucharest suburb, occupying an apartment filled with dusty newspapers and hairy cats.

Many an intimidating copy of Tolstoy's War and Peace sits unread on a shelf, though people always mean to read it sometime, all 1,500 pages of it. At least everyone knows the novel is a masterpiece. Prokofiev's War and Peace goes largely unheard and unseen. Although some folks occasionally express an interest in the opera, all four hours of it, the word "masterpiece" doesn't always work its way into the conversation. The Metropolitan Opera's new production, in conjunction with the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, successfully challenges the conventional wisdom that Prokofiev wasn't the right man to distill Tolstoy.

MOSCOW -- Leo Tolstoy told the story best, 130 years ago. "It was a time of war in the Caucasus," he wrote. "The roads were not safe by night or day. If ever a Russian ventured to ride or walk any distance away from his fort, the Tartars killed him or carried him off to the hills. So it had been arranged that twice every week a body of soldiers should march from one fortress to the next to convoy travelers from point to point." The Russian writer called his short story "A Prisoner in the Caucasus" and told of two Russian officers seized as they rode home through the treacherous mountains.

Brock Speer, 78, patriarch of the singing Speer Family and former president, chairman and permanent board member of the Gospel Music Association, died Monday in Nashville.Leonard Mountain Chief, 59, a tribal elder of the Blackfeet Indian tribe, movie actor and champion fiddler, died Monday of a heart attack in Heart Butte, Mont.Michel Crepeau, 68, a longtime French lawmaker known for his incisive questions and lyrical orations before the French Parliament, died Tuesday in Paris.Angelo LaPietra, 80, a former high-ranking Chicago mobster who ran the so-called "26th Street Crew," died Sunday in Chicago.

MOSCOW -- Russia is turning to the people it once scorned -- the millions of emigrants who now live around the world -- for help in restoring the finest traditions of Russian culture."

Many an intimidating copy of Tolstoy's War and Peace sits unread on a shelf, though people always mean to read it sometime, all 1,500 pages of it. At least everyone knows the novel is a masterpiece. Prokofiev's War and Peace goes largely unheard and unseen. Although some folks occasionally express an interest in the opera, all four hours of it, the word "masterpiece" doesn't always work its way into the conversation. The Metropolitan Opera's new production, in conjunction with the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, successfully challenges the conventional wisdom that Prokofiev wasn't the right man to distill Tolstoy.

MOSCOW -- Once, Russians were willing to risk everything to read a blurry, typed carbon of anything written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissident, Nobel-prize winner, national hero.Now, when they can read him as freely as they like, hardly anyone wants to. Yesterday, Solzhenitsyn's latest book went on sale in Moscow. The great voice of an earlier age was diminished: His book had a press run of only 5,000 copies."Solzhenitsyn used to be extremely popular," says Gennady Kuzmin, deputy editor of the journal Book Review.

In the fall of 1950, the 21-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., then a theology student at Crozer Seminary in Chester, Pa., heard a lecture on Mohandas K. Gandhi by Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University. The message, King later wrote, "was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi's life and works."King had been troubled: The Christian pacifism that appealed to him spiritually might be too weak to contend in the rough everyday world.