Richard Stern - Böcker

In midcentury America, the golden age of television, a man named Golk is wreaking havoc with the medium. Through a devastating series of exposures—"You're on Camera"—Golk manipulates the high and mighty, the lowdown and dirty, and the outrageous weird; all are within the compass of Richard Stern in this early novel, a comedy with as many inspired maneuvers as its rambunctious protagonist has for taking the measure of a profligate world. "Golk is a rich and marvelously detailed novel by a man with a cultivated intelligence; it is also the first really good book I have read about television."—Norman Mailer "An original: sharp, funny, intelligent, rare. . . . Working in a clean, oblique style reminiscent of Nathanael West, Mr. Stern has written in Golk a first-rate comic novel, a piece of fiction that is at once about and loaded with that kind of recognition that junkies call the flash."—Joan Didion, National Review "Golk is fantastic, funny, bitter, intelligent without weariness. Best of all Golk is pure—that is to say necessary. Without hokum."—Saul Bellow "Golk (like Golk himself) is a wonderous conception. Its world responds to personification, not analysis, and personify it Mr. Stern has done. A book in a thousand."—Hugh Kenner "What I like about Mr. Stern's fantasy is that it has been conceived and written with so much gaiety. Far from a political melodrama, it reminds me of a René Clair movie, and even the surrealist touches needed to bring out the power and pretense of the television industry are funny rather than symbolically grim."—Alfred Kazin, Reporter "A mighty good book, altogether alive, full of beans and none of them spilled."—Flannery O'Connor

Cy Riemer—fifty-ish, divorced, and father of four—surveys the dispersal of his family with a mixture of anxiety, humor, sadness, and pride. In this wry, moving, and wise novel, Richard Stern offers his masterful portrait of Cy as the quintessential caring yet controlling parent, a relentless seeker of self-knowledge whose search is intensified through conflicts with his brilliant, ne'er-do-well son Jack. The "manipulation of a smart, sane, self-justifying narrator . . . is not the least of Stern's achievements in this delicate fabrication of tough prose and tender adjustment of sentiment."—Geoffrey Wolff, Los Angeles Times "Richard Stern's novels are robustly intelligent, very funny, and beguilingly humane. He knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose."—Philip Roth "A delectable rhetorical display. . . . "—The New Yorker "Anyone who has read Richard Stern's previous novels won't need to be told he is an unusually crisp and intelligent writer, with a sharp edge to his wit; and in A Father's Words he runs true to form. Many of the book's pleasures are incidental: jokes, intellectual cadenzas, agile turns of phrase . . . The author's powers of farcical invention climax in a brilliant, bitter episode where . . . the younger man proclaims his final failure . . . Mr. Stern has written an excellent novel."—John Gross, New York Times "Richard Stern is American letters' unsung comic writer about serious matters . . . [A Father's Words] produced in this reviewer an apostolic desire to convince a wider audience to try Stern, especially the vintage Stern."—Doris Grumbach, Chicago Tribune

"What Is What Was", Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany", is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and non-fiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher", appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praise as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W.C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer. The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write).There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, "What Is What Was" is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders - and about writing American prose".

A group of Americans in Venice encounter an Ezra Pound-like sculptor.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have developed rapidly and provide powerful tools for the capture, manipulation, integration, interrogation, modelling, analysis and visualisation of data - tools that are used for policy support in a wide range of areas at almost all geographic and administrative levels. This holds especially for emergency preparedness and health risk reduction, which are all essentially spatial problems. However, many initiatives have remained disconnected and uncoordinated, leading to less powerful, less compatible and less widely implemented systems than might otherwise have been the case. The matters discussed here include the probabilistic nature of most environmental hazards and the semi-random factors that influence interactions between these and human exposures; the effects of temporal and spatial scales on hazard assessment and imputed risk; the effects of measurement error in risk estimation and the stratification of risks and their impacts according to socioeconomic characteristics; and the quantification of socioeconomic differences in vulnerability and susceptibility to environmental hazards.GIS are powerful analytical tools in their own right, but what is needed is much more effective communication between the many disciplines, professions and stakeholders concerned - something which this book aims to help to achieve.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have developed rapidly and provide powerful tools for the capture, manipulation, integration, interrogation, modelling, analysis and visualisation of data - tools that are used for policy support in a wide range of areas at almost all geographic and administrative levels. This holds especially for emergency preparedness and health risk reduction, which are all essentially spatial problems. However, many initiatives have remained disconnected and uncoordinated, leading to less powerful, less compatible and less widely implemented systems than might otherwise have been the case. The matters discussed here include the probabilistic nature of most environmental hazards and the semi-random factors that influence interactions between these and human exposures; the effects of temporal and spatial scales on hazard assessment and imputed risk; the effects of measurement error in risk estimation and the stratification of risks and their impacts according to socioeconomic characteristics; and the quantification of socioeconomic differences in vulnerability and susceptibility to environmental hazards.GIS are powerful analytical tools in their own right, but what is needed is much more effective communication between the many disciplines, professions and stakeholders concerned - something which this book aims to help to achieve.

Unlocking Commercial Financing for Clean Energy in East Asia was written for government decision makers in middle and high-income countries, members of international financing communities, and practitioners. In East Asia, all middle-income countries have national targets for energy efficiency and renewable energy, and some even have targets for carbon reduction. However, a major hurdle to achieving a sustainable energy path is mobilising the required financing. Policy makers must determine how to unlock commercial financing to scale up clean energy investments. This title builds on recent experience in applying public financing instruments and attempts to address the following issues: when and under what circumstances to use public financing instruments, which instrument to select, and how to design and implement them most effectively. First and foremost, effective and conducive policies are essential to catalysing commercial investment in clean energy. Once the right policy regime has been put in place, public financing mechanisms designed to mitigate risks and close financing gaps have proven to play a major catalytic role in kick-starting substantial investments in clean energy. Public financing mechanisms for energy efficiency are particularly important to mitigating financiers' risk perceptions, to aggregating small deals, and to enhancing the interest and capacity of domestic banks. Public financing for renewable energy can provide long-term loan tenure to match the long payback period, mitigate technology risks, and increase access to financing for small and medium enterprises. The selection of public financing instruments should be tailored to the market barriers, the targeted market segments, the regulatory environment, and the maturity of the financial market. Engaging domestic banks through credit lines and guarantees has had the greatest impact in unlocking private financing. Dedicated funds and mezzanine and equity funds can effectively increase access to financing for small and medium enterprises and clean energy start-ups. Finally, the impact of public financing instruments can be substantially increased if they are packaged with technical assistance.