The Shape of Water, de Andrea Camilleri

Médio.

Undressed Art: Why We Draw, de Peter Steinhart

Estou lendo esse, devagar. Um pouco hoje, mais um pouco daqui três dias. Tá na pilha da mesa.

Sacred Games, de Vikram Chandra

916 páginas.
Interessante, vai crescendo, os personagens são possíveis, complexos.
Tem um bandidão, tipo Godfather; tem um policial honesto, se comparado com o resto da polícia de Mumbai; tem uma miss Índia que vira atriz, mas sendo prostituta antes. Tem um pouco de tudo. Mas o personagem central é Mumbai, e as pessoas que fazem a cidade. A gente sente até o cheiro da cidade, e esse não é agradável.

8 de setembro, Dia Internacional da Alfabetização

Booker Prize Short List

The judges of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007 have announced this year’s six shortlisted novels.
The six titles shortlisted are:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Oliver Sacks

September 1, 2007

Oliver Sacks Joins Columbia Faculty as ‘Artist’

By MOTOKO RICH

Attracted by his breadth of interests, ranging from schizophrenia to music, Columbia University has appointed Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and writer, as its first Columbia artist, a newly created designation.

Beginning next week, Dr. Sacks, who has been a clinical professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx for the past 42 years, is leaving to become a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, a post he will occupy in addition to the new artist position.

The new appointment will allow Dr. Sacks, the author of 10 books and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, to range freely across Columbia’s departments, teaching, giving public lectures, conducting seminars, seeing patients and collaborating with other faculty members. Many of the details of his appointment have yet to be worked out, but among other things, he will be teaching in the university’s creative writing department as well as at the medical school.

“My first year at Columbia is going to be, to some extent, a year of experiment and exploration,” Dr. Sacks said. “I very much look forward to meeting students and faculty and doing classes that could be about almost anything, from music to psychiatry to whatever.”

Dr. Sacks, 74, was born in London and moved to the United States in the early 1960s. He is perhaps best known as the author of “Awakenings,” which chronicles his treatment of patients with encephalitic lethargica (otherwise known as sleeping sickness) and was made into a 1990 movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Another well-known book is “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” a 1985 collection of essays about various patients with neurological problems. There are more than one million copies of all his books in print in the United States, and his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. His latest book, “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf in October.

Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia, said Dr. Sacks’s appointment exemplified the university’s effort to bridge the gap between the study of neuroscience and other disciplines in which scholars work to understand human behavior, including economics, law and art history.

Dr. Sacks’s appointment is “a commitment both to having one of the great clinical neuroscientists in our midst and one of the great writers about this subject, but also a commitment to try to take that and reach out to other fields and human activities,” Mr. Bollinger said.

The university has committed $20 million to expanding the study of neuroscience to include an interdisciplinary approach, and last year it received a donation worth more than $200 million from Dawn M. Greene and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation to build a new center to house the university’s Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative, which will help apply neuroscience to multiple areas of scholarship.

For his part, Dr. Sacks said he was looking forward to returning to the classroom. At Albert Einstein, he said, he had not taught formally since 1973. “I’ve actually missed it,” he said. He added: “In a way, for me, this is a real entrance into university life such as I’ve never had, rather than a part-time medical appointment. I’m excited, because, in a way, I’ve been a sort of an outsider or freelancer or maverick for the last 40 years, and here I think it will be quite an intense sort of full relationship with Columbia.”

Dr. Sacks said that although he was looking forward to exploring disciplines outside medicine, his clinical work would remain a focus, not least because it inspires so much of his writing.

“The medical part of my life is very, very central,” he said, recalling that his father, also a physician, kept coming out of retirement to go back to work. “When he was 90, we said, ‘Pop, at least stop the house calls,’ and he said, ‘I’ll stop everything else but keep the house calls.’ I want to see patients as long as I am able.”

The appointment grew out of conversations that Dr. Sacks had with several people, including Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate in medicine and a professor at Columbia, and Gregory Mosher, director of the Arts Initiative at Columbia, which aims to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to the arts into the undergraduate experience. Dr. Sacks, Mr. Mosher said, is an exemplar of the “Hey, kids, you can do more than one thing at a time” message.

Dr. Sacks’s appointment at the medical school is being financed by a $1 million donation made over five years by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, one of several foundations financed by the Sainsbury family of Britain, which owns a grocery chain.

On Friday Dr. Sacks will give his first lecture, at Columbia’s psychiatry department, where he will talk about music and neuroscience. He said the move to Columbia capped a gradual transition he has been making over the past decade.

“I used to be more withdrawn or isolated,” he said. “Now I love meeting colleagues and finding out what other people are doing.”