Bloomberg News Book Reviews by Edward Nawotka

Romantic Novel on Muhammad's Young Bride Provokes Rage, Blather

2008-10-08T14:22:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Three young men have already been charged in the Sept. 27 firebomb attack on the London home of Martin Rynja, British publisher of ``The Jewel of Medina.''

Written by American novelist Sherry Jones, the book imagines Muhammad's young bride as a sword-wielding, sexy zealot. It is unlikely the three Muslim firebombers have read a word of this controversial novel, since it goes on sale today in the U.S. and around the world later this month.

That's not to say the book's content hasn't been widely disseminated, thanks to the hardworking Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In phone calls to the book's publisher and a Muslim Web site, she said it was offensive and incendiary.

``I sincerely believe that if Professor Spellberg hadn't described my book as pornography we wouldn't have had this problem,'' Jones said when reached by phone, referring to the attack on her publisher's house.

Spellberg, who was happy to discuss her opinion of ``Jewel of Medina'' before the firebombing, did not answer phone calls and e-mails this week.

Her 1994 scholarly work, ``Politics, Gender and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A'isha bint Abi Bakr,'' was a source for Jones's novel. She got involved in the book's publication when Random House, Jones's original publisher, asked her to write a promotional blurb. What she read struck her as ``turgid,'' Spellberg said in August from her office at the University of Texas.

Virginity Lost

In the book, Aisha bares her breasts to Muhammad and recalls the ``scorpion's sting'' of losing her virginity to him. Later she has a near-adulterous dalliance with another man:

``With our bodies, we brushed each other lightly -- my breasts to his chest, his thigh to my most intimate place, my toes to his shins. An aroma like musk rose from his body. My moan of pleasure surprised me, luxuriant as the purr of a cat stretching in the sunlight.''

``Out of 424 pages there are maybe 12 lines like that,'' Jones said. ``Sure it's steamy, but it's not pornographic.''

Spellberg found the book an ``egregious abuse of Aisha's life,'' citing among other things her use of a sword and call to jihad.

Jones ``distorted, invented, overwrote, and abused the past. As a scholar I see it as problematic,'' Spellberg said. ``At a time when many accept the stereotype that Muslims are violent because of their faith, the image of Aisha wielding a sword she never held in history would seem to promote that.''

Inner Jihad

Jones defended the fictional sword swinging as a ``metaphor for her strength'' and said the meaning of jihad is established in the context of the book as ``an inner struggle'' and not a holy war as it is generally defined today.

Nevertheless, Spellberg decided to sound an alarm, telling Random House that the book could be trouble. The publisher, which had already sent out advance galleys and set up an author tour, canceled the book in May.

A statement from Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at the Random House Publishing Group, cited ``credible and unrelated sources'' who said ``not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.''

Spellberg also alerted Shahed Amanullah, the editor of the website altmuslim.com, about ``Jewel of Medina.'' Amunullah thinks Random House, not Spellberg, should bear the responsibility for canceling the book.

Freaking Out

``It was really the publisher who freaked out,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``They should have been able to take legitimate criticism and derision. They should have also taken what she said as a suggestion and not a clarion call.''

``Professor Spellberg may know the historical context, but she is not in a position to know what the Muslim man on the street is thinking or how they will react,'' Amanullah said.

Spellberg's academic colleagues are conflicted by her actions.

``It puts us all in a tough position,'' Peter Awn, a professor of Islamic religion at Columbia University, said when reached by telephone. Awn sat on Spellberg's dissertation review committee when she was awarded her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1989. ``You may say it's a stupid thing to publish this, but I would still defend the right to publish it. When we get to the point that we're threatened by ideas and words, we're in trouble.''

After Random House's cancellation, interest in the book boomed. By September, Jones's agent had sold rights to 10 foreign publishers. Beaufort Books got the U.S. rights for free in exchange for a profit-sharing arrangement with Jones. Gibson Square Books, whose publisher's house was firebombed, bought the British rights.

O.J.'s Publisher

``If it weren't for the controversy, it's not likely I or many others would have even heard of the book,'' Eric Kampmann, president of Beaufort Books, said in an interview.

Kampmann gained a reputation for courting controversy when he published O.J. Simpson's pseudo-confession, ``If I Did It,'' in 2007, following that book's cancellation by HarperCollins. He says his interest in publishing ``The Jewel of Medina'' is strictly business.

``This is not a free-speech issue; it's a free-market issue,'' Kampmann said. ``Most first novels don't sell that many copies. I'm investing real money in the book and I'm expecting a nice level of sales.''

Kampmann isn't worried about publishing ``Jewel.''

``We have received absolutely zero threats,'' he said. ``I don't expect a problem to happen here. There are proportionally far more Muslims in the U.K. than in the U.S. -- and the ones who are here are most likely citizens who respect our laws governing freedom of speech.''

Jones, too, maintains that Muslims won't take offense.

``If they read the novel they will see I am very respectful of Aisha and Islam,'' she said. ``I just think people should read the book before they judge it.''

Swift-Boat Hack Targets Obama as Commie, Druggie, Maybe Muslim

2008-08-29T08:57:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Having helped trash the candidacy of John Kerry, Jerome Corsi hopes to do it again with ``The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.''

Published on Aug. 1, ``The Obama Nation'' serves up a ludicrous portrait of the Democratic presidential candidate as a likely communist and possible Muslim, ``endorsed by Hamas,'' who ``has yet to answer questions whether he ever dealt drugs, or if he stopped using marijuana and cocaine.''

``Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois,'' Corsi wonders baselessly. ``How about in the U.S. Senate?''

The 364-page polemic has gone back to print five times and now has 475,000 copies in stores.
Even 2004's ``Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,'' which Corsi co-wrote with John O'Neill, didn't find so many eager fans. That book blithely, wrongly claimed that the Vietnam veteran exaggerated his heroism during combat (which, of course, his rival never saw at all). ``Unfit'' sold 814,015 copies in 2004 and was the 11th-best-selling book of the year, according to Publishers Weekly.

On Aug. 10, ``The Obama Nation'' debuted at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, prompting suspicions that the book is being bought in large quantities by people or organizations for the express purpose of putting the book on the list. The book is still No. 1, and the questions remain.

Bulk Buying

Such accusations aren't new. In 2003, Al Franken suggested that Ann Coulter owed her best-seller status to bulk buys, provoking a media catfight between the two.

The perception of multiple bulk purchases has been reinforced by the Times, which has placed a dagger next to ``The Obama Nation'' signifying that ``some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.''

The dagger came into being following the 1995 revelation that authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema spent $250,000 to buy 10,000 copies of their book, ``The Discipline of Market Leaders,'' and arranged the purchase of another 30,000 to 40,000 copies, to land it on the list.
While the dagger may appear to be pejorative, the Times said that is not the intent.

``It does not characterize a sale but simply notes that the title has been a popular bulk buy,'' Abbe Serphos, a Times spokeswoman, said.

Conservative Machine

Chief among those alleging bulk buying is Paul Waldman, a senior fellow at progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America. He's accused a ``conservative machine'' of orchestrating the purchases.

``I don't have any evidence about this specific book,'' Waldman said, ``but in the past, organizations like the Conservative Book Club bought books in bulk for cheap and sold them for nothing.''

Anthony Ziccardi, vice president and deputy publisher of Pocket Books and Threshold Editions, scoffed at the suggestion that orchestrated bulk sales put ``The Obama Nation'' on the best-seller list.

``We are only aware of a single bulk buy,'' he said. ``It was done by a chain retailer in the South, and that constituted less than 2 percent of our overall sales.''

Nor can the Conservative Book Club claim credit.

``We're not selling the book, and even if we did, we do not report our sales to the New York Times,'' said Elizabeth Kantor, the club's editor.

What Is Bulk?

Still, mystery surrounds what exactly constitutes a bulk buy.

Todd Sattersten is vice president of 800-CEO-READ , a specialist business bookseller that reports sales to the Times. He said that though his company gets numerous bulk orders, often from corporations looking to distribute a book to its employees, he has never been told by the Times how many book constitute a bulk sale.

``Twenty-five is a lot of books and would likely constitute a bulk sale for us,'' Sattersten said.
Ziccardi said Simon & Schuster, parent company of Threshold Editions, only considers purchases in the hundreds of copies as bulk.

``The Obama Nation'' is currently No. 2 on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list.

Nothing Unusual

``Based on the reports I got, there was nothing in the unit sales that indicated something unusual about `The Obama Nation,''' said Daisy Maryles, executive editor of Publishers Weekly.
She said sales strongly favored chain booksellers, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. Ziccardi concurred, adding that sales were also at ``best-seller levels'' at big-box retailers such as Costco and Wal-Mart.

``It's sold quite well for us and is currently one of our best-selling nonfiction hardcovers,'' said Matthew Gildea, a senior director of Hastings Entertainment, a chain retailer based in Amarillo, Texas, with 152 stores across the South and West.

Independent bookstores, in red and blue states alike, report modest demand: Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma City has sold five copies; Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington has sold four; the Boulder Book Store in Colorado has sold only two; Brazos Bookstore in Houston doesn't even stock the book.

``We will order it if anyone asks for it,'' Brazos manager Jane Moser said. ``No one has so far.''
Frazer Dobson, co-owner of Park Road Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, wonders if the ambiguity of the title is causing people to mistake it for a pro-Obama book.
Either way, he isn't confident it will sustain buyers' interest for long.

``My customers are just really sick of politics,'' Dobson said.

``The Obama Nation'' is published by Threshold Editions (364 pages, $28).

Mormon Housewife's Vampire Story Drives Fans Wild; New Rowling?

2008-06-05T23:16:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

May 29 (Bloomberg) -- Stephenie Meyer, a 34-year-old Mormon mother of three, is the closest thing the book world has had to a rock star since J.K. Rowling finished writing about Harry Potter.

The author of the ``Twilight'' series, a trio of young adult books about the romantic travails of 17-year-old Bella, her vampire boyfriend, Edward, and her best friend, Jacob, a werewolf, Meyer has just published her first book for adults. Not that the Y.A. label has stopped grown-ups from reading Meyer: The ``Twilight'' series has sold some 5.5 million copies worldwide.

Her new book, ``The Host,'' a sci-fi yarn about alien body snatchers, was published earlier this month with a first printing of 750,000 copies. It has already reached the top of bestseller lists.

Meyer, who lives in Phoenix, says the story of Bella and Edward came to her in a dream in 2003. Within a year she had a book deal valued at $750,000.

She's since taken over the throne of Vampire Queen abandoned by Anne Rice when she devoted herself to writing about the life of Christ. Despite their seeming incompatibility, Meyer sees no conflict between her subject and her faith.

``I'm a religious person,'' Meyer said by telephone from Los Angeles, where she was taping a segment for MTV. ``Real people think about (questions like): Why are we here? What are we doing? A vampire is a character who has to ask similar questions. They have to wonder what state their soul is in and does it even exist.''

No Sex, Please

While Rice titillated her audience with baroque prose and explicit sex, Meyer writes simply and depicts her monsters as moral -- they feed on wild bears instead of people -- and her humans as utterly chaste. There is no underage drinking, no drugs and, much to the relief of millions of adults, no sex. Jana Riess, co-author of ``Mormonism for Dummies'' and religion book review editor of Publishers Weekly, is a Meyer fan and believes the books are heavily influenced by the Book of Mormon.

``Mormon theology places a big emphasis on agency or free will,'' Riess said. ``It establishes a clear difference between immortality, a curse, and eternal life, which is a gift from God.''

Meyer denied that she's writing a religious allegory.

``Any (Latter-day Saints) Church that appears in my books is accidental,'' said Meyer, ``a reflection of the world as it has appeared to me through my life.''

Nevertheless, the fervor of Meyer's fans is akin to that of converts. Her book tour regularly packs thousand-seat venues, with people camping overnight to get tickets. Not all those lining up are teens.

Tribute Band

Sheryl Nash of Arlington, Texas, first read Meyer's books after her 14-year-old daughter formed a ``Twilight'' tribute band with friends.

``They wrote a song called `Sexy Vampire,''' Nash said, ``so I had to find out what the books were about. I started listening to them when I was commuting to work. Now I've got my van pool hooked, even some of the men.''

Not everyone is keen on the books. Sue Corbett, a children's author and journalist in Virginia, is ``disheartened'' at Meyer's popularity.

``Bella is constantly in need of getting rescued. She moves in with her father and immediately starts cooking for him and doing his laundry. She's on track to go to an Ivy League college, but doesn't because of Edward. It's the exact inverse of the values I'm trying to teach my daughter,'' Corbett said.

Questioned about such criticism, Meyer was terse. ``The thing about Bella,'' the author said, ``is her story isn't finished yet.''

Midnight Parties

Indeed, the buzz around ``The Host'' is building anticipation for ``Breaking Dawn,'' the final ``Twilight'' book, which goes on sale Aug. 2 with a first printing of 2.5 million copies. Booksellers are planning midnight parties to launch it, as they did for the release of a new Harry Potter title.

After that, fans can look forward to the film adaptation of ``Twilight,'' to be released on Dec. 12. For her next book, Meyer plans to write ``Midnight Sun,'' the story of ``Twilight'' retold from Edward the vampire's perspective.

Asked when she plans to publish another novel for adults, Meyer said, ```The Host' is a taste of things yet to come.'' She wouldn't commit to anything specific, in part because she doesn't agree with traditional publishing classifications.

``I just don't buy the whole divide between Y.A. and adult lines, or even different genres,'' Meyer said. ``Many of my most ardent fans are adults my age. My books may be about aliens or vampires, but ultimately they're all about what it means to be human.''

``The Host'' is published by Little, Brown (619 pages, $25.99).

Dragon, Vampire Battle Friedman, Gladwell, Bugliosi at BookExpo

2008-06-03T22:11:00.002-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- ``The days of the subprime planet are over,'' Thomas L. Friedman said in his keynote speech at BookExpo America, the publishing industry's annual trade show and convention in Los Angeles. ``We can't charge on our children's credit card much longer.''

Grumps and doomsayers populate any book convention, but everyone seemed moodier and more subdued than usual last weekend.

While the numbers are not in yet, the event clearly failed to match last year's New York showing of 29,000 people. No one book really animated the crowds, though the columnist's ``Hot, Flat and Crowded'' will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Sept. 8 in a million-copy first printing. That's a lot of trees.

Friedman said he hoped to make ``Geo-Greenism'' a national talking point. Here's hoping it might deflect a few nano-seconds of attention from the infernal election campaign which has hogged the presses these last months along with the war and robbed most people of their senses. Publishers are generally reluctant to release headline-making titles into the media vacuum.

Still, the expo is a must for most industry heavies. Markus Dohle, Random House's new 39-year-old chief executive officer, arrived incognito and then stood in his own booth enthusiastically shaking hands. He was later spotted visiting the booths of his biggest rivals.

Too Many Books

The show is, above all, a showcase for forthcoming books. Last year, some 277,000 new titles and editions were published in the U.S., according to preliminary research released by Bowker last week. Many of them were first introduced at BEA.

One much-anticipated title, Malcolm Gladwell's ``Outliers'' (Little, Brown), which examines the nature of success, will reach bookstores on Nov. 18.

``It was a conscious decision to publish after the election, when we thought we could get media for him,'' said Heather Fain, marketing director of Little, Brown.

With President Bush coming to the end of his term, authors who want to take their shots at him need to do so now.

Among those are attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who explains in his just-published ``The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder'' (Vanguard) why he believes the president should be held legally accountable for the deaths of almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. If the long line that formed at his signing is any indication, he's not the only one.

Children are perhaps the only demographic naturally indifferent to politics and, accordingly, are going to have the full attention of booksellers this year.

Vampires, Dragons

Fans of Stephenie Meyer are waiting for ``Breaking Dawn,'' the fourth and final installment of the ``Twilight'' teen vampire series. With a first printing of 3.2 million copies, ``Breaking Dawn'' is expected to be one of the top-selling books of the year. It is being released by Little, Brown on Aug. 2.

Perhaps the only title with a chance to unseat Meyer from the top of the bestseller list is Christopher Paolini's dragon fantasy, ``Brisingr'' (Knopf Books for Young Readers). The 2.5 million copies of ``Brisingr'' will land on shelves Sept. 20.

Perhaps some adults, fatigued by politics and economic news, will retreat to books as a refuge.

``Typically, when the economy goes south, people turn to fiction as an escape,'' said David Poindexter, publisher of San Francisco's MacAdam/Cage.

Wait and See

His company is hoping Scottish writer Iain Banks' 1992 novel ``The Crow Road'' will catch on with readers when they publish the book in the U.S. on July 28.

David Young, chairman and CEO of Hachette Book Group USA, said the overall state of the economy and not politics or even an individual title will likely prove the biggest arbiter of the health of the book business through the end of this year.

``Consumers are already feeling the pinch,'' said Young, who cited slow sales of the backlist -- the evergreen titles booksellers order year in and year out -- as a reliable indicator.

``I've lived through many recessions, and books tend to be recession-proof,'' he said. ``I'm not wildly optimistic this time, but I don't expect things to nosedive. There are some great books coming. We'll just have to wait and see.''

As Books Fill Dumps, Publishers Target 'Insane' Returns Policy

2008-05-06T11:38:00.000-05:00

May 6 (Bloomberg) -- When Robert Miller announced last month that he was leaving Hyperion, the Walt Disney Co. book unit he created, to start a new imprint at HarperCollins, he made headlines.

Miller, who's vowed to revolutionize publishing in his new post, instantly targeted a surreal policy that's been sacrosanct for too long: the practice that allows booksellers to send unsold copies back to publishers for credit.

In his last job, Miller published bestselling books such as Mitch Albom's ``For One More Day'' and ``The Last Lecture'' by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow.

At HarperCollins, Miller said he'll experiment with some nontraditional business practices, like offering authors profit- sharing instead of the typical advance/royalty arrangement, and bundling hardcover, nonfiction books with e-book versions of the same titles.

But it's the returns policy that got everyone excited.

Miller wants to sell his books on a non-returnable basis in a bid to kick the industry's addiction to overprinting and overstocking.

Depression-Era Practice

Returns date back to the Depression, when publishers implemented the practice as a way to ensure that bookstores would continue stocking new books.

Today, publishers have convinced retailers that stacks of books piled high in the aisles will attract customers and spawn bestsellers. It's a leaky theory posing little risk for booksellers. If the books don't sell, they're only out the cost of shipping and handling the returns.

``Let's face it, returns are bad for everyone, and things have to change,'' Miller said in a telephone interview last month. ``The only way to make it happen was to start something entirely from scratch.''

In 2005, roughly 1.5 billion books were shipped in the U.S., according to the Association of American Publishers. Of those, 465 million, or 31 percent, were returned to publishers.

``In the past, when economies of scale made it cost- effective to overprint books, we saw numbers as high as 40 percent,'' said Jim Milliot, an editor at Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine. ``But just-in-time shipping, inventory management and better point-of-sale data have helped the number come down.''

`Insane'

Publishers and booksellers agree it's a costly and wasteful system, and it leaves a big footprint that's no longer defensible for an industry that generates $25 billion a year in retail sales, according to the publishers association.

``In this age of global warming it's insane to be shipping books back and forth across the country for no good reason,'' said Margo Baldwin, president of Chelsea Green Publishing Co. of White River Junction, Vermont. ``It's just a waste of energy and, not only that, it still encourages the overproduction of books -- many of which end up in landfills.''

Baldwin, a publisher of titles about sustainable living, has started a ``green partnership program,'' signing up 30 bookstores that have agreed to take books on a non-returnable basis. In exchange, she gives them extra discounts and priority access to her authors for readings and events.

Allison Hill, president and chief operating officer of Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California, agrees that returns are a big drain on her business.

Excess Production

``We'd like to see them reduced, not only for the environmental impact but for the fact that pulling returns, boxing them and shipping is one of the most time-consuming things our employees do,'' Hill said.

Mark Suchomel, president of Independent Publishers Group, one of the largest small-press distributors in the country, said he's held returns to 20 percent and is convinced that number can be reduced even further.

When authors and agents press for large print runs, he said, publishers, in turn, push the excess production into bookstores, even though they know much of it won't sell.

Ultimately, the market will decide if curtailing returns makes economic sense. For one thing, booksellers will demand a larger discount if they can't return what they don't sell.

Miller, provided he keeps his list of titles to a modest size, might succeed, though the practice has a lot of inertia on its side. Big publishing conglomerates would have to do some heavy rethinking.

``It would require Random House or HarperCollins to develop an entirely new business model,'' said Milliot of Publishers Weekly. ``And that is not going to happen.''

Rice's Lustful Jesus Faces Picoult's Killer Messiah: Book Buzz

2008-03-12T11:35:00.000-05:00

March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Fornicating vampires helped Anne Rice sell more than 100 million copies of her books worldwide. Lately she has been writing about Jesus.

The second in a promised quartet of biographical novels, ``Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana,'' (Knopf, $25.95) is out now. It picks up in the ``lost years,'' -- the period not described in the Bible -- and carries on through the baptism by John, the temptation by Satan, and up to the wedding feast in Cana, where Jesus transforms water into wine.

Rice considers her latest writing a serious attempt to reimagine the life of the biblical Jesus in a way that honors religious faith.

```The Road to Cana' is, in part, a direct repudiation of `The Da Vinci Code,''' Rice says when reached by phone at her home in Rancho Mirage, California. ``In it I show Jesus as celibate and sinless and not married to Mary Magdalene.''

Still, in Rice's version, Jesus is strongly attracted to Avigail, the bride married in Cana, and even spies on her in her wedding chamber before the marriage is consummated.

``Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt'' has a half-million copies in print and outsold the last of her vampire books, 2003's ``Blood Canticle,'' according to Rice's longtime publisher Knopf, which has put an equal number of copies of this second volume into bookstores.

Rice hasn't necessarily closed the coffin on vampires. ``I may yet revisit Lestat,'' she says, referring to her most famous vampire, who drank the blood of Jesus in one book. ``But if I do write another book about him it will be a Christian book. Lestat will consecrate his life to the Lord.''

Picoult's Messiah

Jodi Picoult's 15th novel, ``Change of Heart'' (Atria, $26.95), features another kind of messiah. Shay Bourne, a prisoner on New Hampshire's death row, raises a bird from the dead and changes water into wine -- via the prison plumbing system, to the delight of his fellow inmates. The strange occurrences cause a priest to believe the prisoner may be more than a mere man.

Convicted of killing a policeman and his daughter, Bourne now wants to donate his heart to the slain cop's second, ailing daughter. His scheduled death by lethal injection, however, would render his heart unsuitable for donation.

Thereby hangs the tale, for several conflicted characters -- the priest, an ACLU advocate and the cop's wife -- take a role in trying to convert the mode of execution to hanging. This would allow donation and conform to Bourne's religious wishes.

The plot allows Picoult to transubstantiate her book from an intriguing melodrama into a contrived disquisition on morality, religion and the separation of church and state.

U.S. readers have snapped up 9.5 million copies of Picoult's books out of a total of 13.5 million copies sold across 35 countries.

Picoult currently has two paperbacks on bestseller lists, and Atria, aiming to capitalize on her momentum, has printed a million copies of ``Change of Heart'' to start, by far Picoult's largest first run.

2008-03-06T15:23:00.000-06:00

Embarrassed Publisher Works Fast to Erase Tracks of Fake Memoir
By Edward Nawotka

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- Dishonest memoirists are the publishing industry's equivalent of juiced athletes. Incentives to cheat continue to outweigh the fear of getting caught.

In the latest scandal, Margaret B. Jones, the half-Native American, slum-raised author of the L.A. gang memoir ``Love and Consequences,'' turns out to be Margaret Seltzer, a white product of the upper middle class. And her book, subtitled, ``A Memoir of Hope and Survival,'' is largely make-believe.

``Love and Consequences'' was published just last week to widespread praise. Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group, had printed about 24,000 copies, of which 19,000 were shipped to stores.

Now the deeply embarrassed publisher is moving fast to control the damage. The book's page on the Penguin Web site has been deleted, the author's book tour has been canceled and, most significantly, the books are being recalled from bookstores.

In addition, Riverhead is defending itself from charges of sloppy fact-checking. According to a statement from executive director of publicity Marilyn Ducksworth released yesterday:
``Prior to publication the author provided a great deal of evidence to support her story: photographs, letters; parts of Peggy's (i.e., Seltzer's) life story in another published book; Peggy's story had been supported by one of her former professors; Peggy even introduced the agent to people who misrepresented themselves as her foster siblings.''

Strange System

The cost of recalling a book is tricky to estimate, given that returning unsold merchandise is a linchpin of the book- distribution system.

Since the Depression, bookstores have been able to send unsold books back to publishers for credit, which they then use to purchase new books. The returned books are either sold back to bookstores as cut-priced ``remainders'' or pulped -- as, presumably, all returned copies of ``Love and Consequences'' will be.

Penguin will cover the cost of shipping back the returns, which could be significant. The financial impact on bookstores is likely to be minor. At Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California, promotional director Jennifer Ramos had ordered 37 copies of the book in anticipation of Seltzer's scheduled reading this Thursday.

``Her cancellation is no big deal,'' Ramos says. ``Events get canceled all the time. We'll just return the books as we normally do. It won't have any financial impact on us at all.''
Anyone who bought the book can get a full refund, upon request, by returning the book to the store where it was purchased.

Another Liar

In recent years falsehoods in a number of high-profile memoirs have come to light. Only last week the Belgian author Misha Defonseca confessed that her Holocaust memoir ``Surviving With Wolves'' is ``nothing but pure fiction.'' She did not really sup on fresh kill with a friendly wolf mommy and her cubs.

The most famous instance, of course, is James Frey's Oprah- ordained 2003 bestseller ``A Million Little Pieces.'' After it was revealed in 2006 that significant portions of it had been fabricated, Random House agreed to refund as much as $2.35 million to readers who felt they had been bilked.

As of October 2007, only 1,536 people had filed claims. Both Random and Frey agreed to donate additional monies to charity. (Coincidentally, Frey's editor, Sean McDonald, and Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, are now colleagues at Riverhead.)

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, doesn't see an endemic problem.
``There have been thousands upon thousands of memoirs published in recent years,'' he says, ``and so far only a handful of them have turned out to be demonstrably false.''

`It Makes Me Wonder'

Barbara Hoffert, an NBCC board member and book-review editor of Library Journal, the trade publication that vets books for libraries, is less sanguine.

``I guess we thought that after the James Frey scandal, no one would try this again,'' she says. ``It makes me wonder if I need to tell my reviewers to start double-checking the memoirs they're reading.''

Columbia University Journalism School professor Samuel Freedman charges current book editors with having absorbed too much postmodern literary theory: ``They have been taught that all truth is subjective and contested anyway. They're all too willing to suspend their critical faculties and not do due diligence.''

He adds that editors need to demand more from their writers and themselves.
``Editing is more than just line editing,'' he says. ``It also requires the editor to ask the writer, `Where's the corroborating evidence? Where are the other documentary sources for this?'''

Patricia Cornwell Spends $250,000 Proclaiming Respect for Cops

2008-02-15T12:08:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- A week after donating $1 million to New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice to fund courses in crime-scene investigation, bestselling mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell has spent a further $250,000 on full-page newspaper ads to reassure police officers that she likes them.

Cornwell told the Associated Press last week that she had made the donation after having seen ``cops walk through blood'' and ``leave their own fingerprints on a window.''

The ads, which appeared on Friday in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, read, in part, ``What has been publicized certainly does not accurately reflect my deep respect and admiration for these hardworking law enforcement professionals.''

Cornwell now says her comments to the AP were directed at the general public, not the police.

``What I was appalled by was what I've seen citizens do, not the police,'' Cornwell said when reached by phone. ``I've been riding with the police for 30 years. I care about these people and I'm not criticizing them. Any mistakes investigators make are not their fault. Too often they don't have the training or resources they need, which is what the donation is meant to address.''

Cornwell blames television shows such as ``CSI: Crime Scene Investigation'' for misinforming people about police work. ``You'd think they were flying around on the USS Enterprise and using magic, instead of using Polaroid cameras and paying their own cell-phone bills like some of the investigators I know.''

Meddling With Evidence

She says TV has led people to think they're helping when they meddle with crime scenes, and cites an instance in which robbery victims laid out index cards highlighting evidence for the police to find.

``If it were up to me, some of these people should be brought up on charges for tampering with evidence, if only as a warning,'' Cornwell said. ``It's getting scary. We need to take control of our crime scenes again.''

This is not the first time the author has used newspaper advertisements to defend her reputation. In 2005, she took out full-page ads in British papers the Guardian and the Independent denying that she was obsessed with Jack the Ripper. She had spent more than $6 million funding a new investigation into the Ripper murders, publishing a book about the results, ``Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed,'' in 2002. She has continued to work on the case and plans to publish a new edition.

Yunus Goes Beyond `Microcredit'; Grisham's `Appeal'

2008-02-07T15:12:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- In 1976, Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus took $27 from his own pocket and loaned it to a group of bamboo-stool makers to help them buy materials. Thirty years later he received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in founding the Grameen Bank and spearheading the use of ``microcredit'' to help the needy.

Today, $27 covers the cost of Yunus's new book, ``Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism'' (PublicAffairs, $26). It's a kind of manifesto, arguing that a business model similar to that which built Grameen Bank can develop self-sustaining ``social businesses.''

Such enterprises will provide safe drinking water, housing and affordable medicine for the poor, Yunus says. He recounts the creation of Grameen Danone, a joint venture started in 2005 between Grameen Bank and the French food company Danone that provides nutrient-enriched yogurt to the needy.

Among Yunus's tenets is the notion that an investor in such a company would forgo taking a financial dividend and be content with the moral and spiritual satisfaction provided.

``There are sure to be critics of his ideas, especially among the philanthropic community,'' says Clive Priddle, editorial director at Yunus's publisher, PublicAffairs. ``But Yunus likes to develop his ideas in public so they can be challenged.''

Yunus's previous book, ``Banker to the Poor,'' has sold more than 100,000 copies. PublicAffairs thinks ``Creating a World Without Poverty'' could match that and is printing 100,000 copies to start.

Grisham's Baptists

John Grisham won't be touring to support his first legal thriller in three years, ``The Appeal'' (Doubleday, $27.95), to be published on Jan. 29. Grisham doesn't ``do appearances,'' says his publicist, Alison Rich. It's not like he needs to peddle the product: He has sold about 235 million copies of his books worldwide.

Grisham will be making a rare speech two days after ``The Appeal'' is released, but not to promote the novel. He'll be speaking to ``The Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant,'' a conference for Baptists being held in Atlanta, where he'll appear alongside Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter.

In the past few years, Grisham, who served in the Mississippi House of Representatives, has been increasingly vocal about his political views. He supported the writer James Webb in his successful 2006 Virginia Senate campaign and, more recently, interviewed Hillary Clinton on stage as part of a Clinton fundraiser in Charlottesville, Virginia.

``The Appeal'' tells the story of a billionaire chemical baron as he tries to get elected to the Mississippi Supreme Court to help reverse a damaging judgment against his company. The book reflects the compromises of political campaigning and suggests that high office can be bought.

Stephen King

Grisham's is by far the biggest book of the month in terms of print run, with Doubleday putting out an initial 2.8 million copies. That tops the 1.5 million copies for Stephen King's newest novel, ``Duma Key'' (Scribner, $28), scheduled to go on sale Jan. 22.

King tells the story of a construction worker who survives an accident, moves from Minnesota to Florida and begins painting pictures that have a horrific effect on the real world around him.

School Satire

Finally, fans of Roger Rosenblatt can expect another dose of satire in his second novel, ``Beet'' (Ecco, $23.95), which concerns efforts to save an off-the-rails university, surely one of the few that offers a major in Homeland Security. The writer's debut novel came in 2006 with ``Lapham Rising,'' which dealt with social life in Long Island's Hamptons enclaves and the construction of a 36,000-square-foot house. ``Beet'' sprouts on Jan. 29.

Bhutto's Last Word, X-Rated `Celebutantes' Trailer: Book Buzz

2008-02-07T13:47:00.000-06:00

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Days before she was murdered on Dec. 27, Benazir Bhutto, the problematic two-time prime minister of Pakistan, finished writing ``Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West'' (Harper, $27.95). Rushed into production, the book lands in stores on Feb. 12, with a new afterword by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and their three children.

Political lobbyist Mark Siegel, Bhutto's collaborator, will stand in her place on the book tour. The audience for the book is likely to be strongest in Washington, where Siegel will stop in at the National Press Club on Feb. 20.

A main, well-proven theme of the book is that Islam must resolve internal conflicts before it can accommodate democracy and reconcile its differences with the West.

Outside the Beltway, interest varies. Tariq Rahman, books manager at Halalco, an Islamic supermarket in Falls Church, Virginia, said that while he plans to stock the book, he doesn't anticipate strong sales.

``No one has asked me for any other books by or about her,'' he said.

At Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, customers quickly bought up existing stock of Bhutto's 1989 autobiography, ``Daughter of Destiny,'' prompting purchasing manager Kathy Kirby to put in an order for 200 copies of ``Reconciliation.''

``I think there will be lingering interest in Bhutto for a while,'' Kirby said.

Since rushing production of ``Reconciliation,'' Harper has doubled the announced first printing to 100,000 copies from 50,000 and will republish ``Daughter of Destiny'' in April, with a new epilogue from Siegel.

`The Thing About Life'

One title Kirby is confident will sell at her store is David Shields's ``The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead'' (Knopf, $23.95).

``We had a lot of pre-orders on our Web site,'' said Kirby. ``It's the type of book that really resonates with men of a certain age.''

Prompted, in part, by the realization that his cranky 97- year-old father had a robust sex life well into his 70s, Shields has written a meditation on mortality. He dwells at length on his own aging body, calculates his remaining breaths (he hopes for another 300 million) and offers data about his diminishing erections.

Knopf will likely be standing by to see whether its 30,000- copy first printing will be enough to satisfy demand.

`Celebutantes'

Equally frank and far less earnest is the novel ``Celebutantes'' (St. Martin's Press, $23.95) by Amanda Goldberg and Ruthanna Hopper. The authors, who are both Hollywood princesses (the daughters of producer Leonard Goldberg and actor Dennis Hopper, respectively), have produced a roman a clef about a spoiled director's daughter and her coterie of BFFs (Best Friends Forever) during Oscar week.

In an effort to extend their audience beyond bookstores, the authors enlisted movie director McG (``Charlie's Angels,'' ``We Are Marshall'') to shoot four film ``trailers'' for the novel.

``It's kind of backward,'' agreed Steve Troha, associate director of publicity for St. Martin's Press. ``Usually, you read the book and imagine the characters, then see them visualized in a movie. This time the movie comes first. I think it will definitely change the way people read the book.''

The trailers, available on YouTube, are definitely NSFW (Not Safe for Work): The first features a lithe, bikini-clad starlet faking an orgasm, while another stars a male fashion designer who confesses to having attempted auto-fellatio.

With 100,000 copies of the book going on sale Feb. 5, Troha is hedging his bets.

``We're still planning on running newspaper ads,'' he said.

Six Finalists Shortlisted for New $50,000 Arabic `Booker' Prize

2008-01-30T09:05:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Egyptians Baha Taher and Mekkaoui Said are the best-known of six authors whose books have been shortlisted for the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Modeled on the Man Booker Prize, the new award is being funded by the Emirates Foundation of Abu Dhabi. The winner will receive $50,000 in prize money, with $10,000 going to each of the shortlisted authors.

The Booker Foundation, which administers the Man Booker Prize and the Man Booker International Prize, provided guidance for the award.

Samuel Shimon, an Iraqi writer and chairman of the judging panel for the awards, announced the shortlist yesterday in London. It includes the aforementioned Taher's ``Sunset Oasis'' and Said's ``Swan Song''; the Lebanese Jabbour Douaihy's ``June Rain'' and May Menassa's ``Walking in the Dust''; Jordanian Elias Farkouh's ``The Land of Purgatory''; and Syrian Khaled Khalifa's ``In Praise of Hate.''

``The purpose of the prize is to secure recognition, reward and readership for outstanding Arabic fiction,'' said Jonathan Taylor, chairman of the Booker Foundation and also chairman of the board of trustees of the Arabic prize. ``A further objective is to ensure translation and publication.''

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is part of a boom in new literary awards emanating from Abu Dhabi. Last year the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage launched the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, given in nine categories and worth a total of 7 million dirham ($1.9 million).

Poetry Readers

Though less rich, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction has a prestigious partner in the Booker Foundation, which also has been instrumental in developing both the Russian Booker Prize (first awarded in 1992) and the Caine Prize for African Writing (begun in 2000).

``Both of those prizes now operate fully independently, which is how the International Prize for Arabic Fiction will work,'' said Eve Smith, secretary of the Booker Foundation.

Gaining a wider readership for Arabic novels will be a challenge. Poetry is the dominant literary form in the Arabic- speaking world -- it is widely read (beginning with the Koran), written and published, and is even featured on a wildly popular ``American Idol''-style TV competition, ``Poetry Millions.''

Though various forms of Arabic prose fiction emerged in the 19th century, primarily inspired by the translation of European works into Arabic, the first Arabic book recognizable as a modern novel -- Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal's ``Zaynab'' -- was published only in 1912. Widespread recognition for the form didn't come until 1988, when Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize.

More Publicity

There have been popular novels since then, such as Alaa Al Aswany's 2002 ``The Yacoubian Building,'' which has sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide. Yet they remain few and far between.

Marilyn Booth, a professor at the University of Illinois who has translated many highly regarded Arabic novels, believes the new prize might help.

``The trustees and this year's judges are highly respected cultural figures,'' she said. ``I applaud the fact that the shortlist, as well as the winning novel, is getting financial recognition and publicity.''

Her own latest project has been a translation of Saudi writer Rajaa Alsanea's novel ``The Girls of Riyadh,'' whose depiction of the love lives of a quartet of women has prompted critics to call it the first example of Saudi chick lit.

In all, 131 books were entered from 18 different countries, with 29 entries by women writers. Booth said, ``I'm surprised there weren't more.''

Greenspan, Keynes in Arabic? Abu Dhabi Sets Translation Project

2008-01-02T22:59:00.001-06:00

Jan. 2 (Bloomberg) -- While Abu Dhabi pours $27 billion into building five museums, including a Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry and a Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, another planned project will help expand Arabic libraries.

As part of efforts to transform the emirate into the cultural lodestone of the Middle East, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, or Adach, has chosen 100 books to be translated into Arabic. Among them are Alan Greenspan's memoir, ``The Age of Turbulence,'' John Maynard Keynes's ``The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money'' and Milton Friedman's ``Capitalism and Freedom.'' The goal is to translate 100 titles every year.

Adach has formed a nonprofit organization called Kalima (Arabic for ``word'') to undertake the translations and expand Arabic-language publishing in the United Arab Emirates.

About 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic in the past millennium, according to a 2003 study by the United Nations Development Program. The demand has been small, partly owing to the historical tendency to focus most reading on religious texts and classical poetry. Some 300 new translations appear each year, so Kalima's further 100 titles represents a substantial addition.

Kalima will buy rights, pay translators and enlist established Arabic-language publishers in the Persian Gulf region and North Africa to print and distribute the books.

Karim Nagy, Kalima's chief executive, acknowledges the hurdles. The Arabic-speaking world comprises some 300 million people in more than 20 countries. Censorship laws vary, and often there is no strong bookselling community or distribution channel.

Print Runs

``First, we will worry about getting the books translated,'' Nagy says. ``Then we will work to optimize their distribution.''

The typical print run for a book in the Arab world is often no more than 2,000 copies; Kalima plans to fund a minimum of 5,000 copies for each of its titles, with some earmarked for donation to schools and libraries.

Jumaa Abdulla Alqubaisi, director of the Abu Dhabi National Library and an adviser to Kalima, suggests that ultimately the project is as pragmatic as it is idealistic. ``Good books are like penicillin,'' he says. ``They fight against hate, segregation and misunderstanding.'' Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts -- which itself is funding translations from Arabic into English -- agrees that such a project is ``political in the best sense of the word. A great novel or poem from another culture allows you to look into the common humanity of people you might have otherwise thought foreign. The important thing is that we broaden these literary and human exchanges.''

`Looming Tower'

The first 100 titles draw from history, science and fiction; Kalima is still securing the rights to most of them. More than half are originally in English, with 26 coming from the U.S. Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prizing-winning look at the origins of al-Qaeda, ``The Looming Tower,'' and Khaled Hosseini's bestselling novel ``The Kite Runner'' made the list, as did a variety of classics -- Milton's ``Paradise Regained'' is one.

There are some eccentric choices, including Michael Lewis's 2006 book ``The Blind Side,'' about a family that adopts a homeless African-American football player, and Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 cult novel ``Stranger in a Strange Land.'' A number of works by Jewish writers are on the list, including Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer's ``Collected Stories.'' Abu Dhabi has been pursuing other literary projects, too. Last year Adach formed a partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair to promote publishing and reading in the U.A.E. and the Arab world in general. The joint venture, officially announced this month, has been named Kitab (Arabic for ``the book'').

`Safe Haven'

Kitab's stated mission is ``professionalizing publishing'' in the region, in part by establishing a kind of safe haven for Arabic-language publishing houses in Abu Dhabi and developing a distribution system for books to reach stores and libraries.

The partnership's first project was to transform the annual Abu Dhabi Book Fair. This year the fair moved from a dusty public square into the city's shiny new National Exhibition Center and morphed from a book bazaar for shoppers into a trade show for publishing professionals.

In addition, it featured the first winners of the inaugural Sheikh Zayed Book Awards. Named for the late founder of the U.A.E., the awards in nine categories provided 7 million dirham ($1.9 million) to otherwise cash-strapped Arabic-language publishers and authors. Translation was already a priority, with the prize for Personality of the Year, worth 1 million dirham ($272,230), going to Denys Johnson-Davis, a highly regarded Arabic-to-English translator.

Cramer Family Planning, Government-Censored Science: Book Buzz

2007-12-10T12:26:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- If Jim Cramer, the button-mashing circus barker of the financial world, had his way, preschoolers would be tuning in to his money-management show.

In ``Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life'' ($26), which is just out, Cramer suggests buying your tyke Hasbro, Disney and Gymboree stock: ``I would buy one share of these the moment your child is born.... I don't know a soul who is doing this, and that has to change, right now.''

Later he adds, ``If only baby showers would get registered with E*Trade, TD Ameritrade and Schwab!'' Cramer thinks children can grasp the concept of stock ownership as long as they can get excited about the brand. His subtitle is ``Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer).''

Elsewhere in the book he names ``20 Stocks for the Long Term'' (topped by the heavy-machinery manufacturer Caterpillar) and recommends mutual funds.

Publishing a financial-advice book in December is counterintuitive: Who really wants to be reminded to eliminate credit-card debt in the midst of the holiday shopping frenzy? Cramer, though, likes the appearance of not following the crowd.

And he has an established audience: His two previous books, ``Jim Cramer's Real Money'' (2005) and ``Jim Cramer's Mad Money'' (2006), have sold 476,000 copies and 258,000 copies respectively, according to Nielsen BookScan. Simon & Schuster is confident enough to be delivering 350,000 copies to bookstores for a start.

`Bad Samaritans'

The 44-year-old Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang has also established a reputation as a contrarian. In ``Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism'' ($26.95), he repudiates some of the theories championed by Thomas Friedman and other free marketers.

Chang shows how South Korea, the country of his birth, managed to prosper by going against many of the economic prescriptions that ``bad Samaritan'' rich countries demand in return for aid, such as rapid, large-scale trade liberalization.

``Bad Samaritans'' comes with blurbs from lefty luminaries Noam Chomsky and Bob Geldof. The publisher, Bloomsbury, is printing 40,000 copies and using the book to launch a new line of serious nonfiction books edited by Peter Ginna, formerly of Oxford University Press.

``So many books written about globalization are written in a historical vacuum,'' Ginna says. ``This one isn't, which is what makes it so persuasive.''

Expect to see Chang on the talk shows when Davos begins in January.

`Censoring Science'

Another academic likely to be making the January chat-show circuit is James Hansen. Mark Bowen's ``Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming'' ($25.95) hits the shelves on Dec. 27.

As director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, by 2004 Hansen had compiled some three decades of research underscoring the threat of global warming. The Bush administration stifled the data.

Frustrated, Hansen opened his files to Bowen. The resulting book not only offers a detailed account of the scientist's ordeal; it also shows how an organization like NASA can be reduced to an instrument of partisan politics. Scary stuff -- like climate change itself.

T Is for Timber

The 40,000 copies of ``Censoring Science'' Dutton is publishing will hardly make a dent in the earth's forests -- compared, at least, with the tens of millions of Sue Grafton novels in print. This week, ``T Is for Trespass'' ($26.95), the 20th in Grafton's long-running Kinsey Millhone mystery series, lands in bookstores. Putnam's 724,000 copy first printing ensures it will be stacked high for holiday shoppers.

Also in December fiction, Colleen McCullough's ``Antony and Cleopatra'' ($26.95), the seventh in her ``Masters of Rome'' series, is just out from Simon & Schuster, albeit with a more modest printing of 75,000 copies.

And on Dec. 26, Bloomsbury squeaks 60,000 copies of Walter Mosley's third book this year into stores: ``Diablerie'' ($23.95), an erotic thriller about a philandering computer programmer for a New York City bank. Though Mosley has dropped the ``sexistential'' tag he used for last year's ``Killing Johnny Fry,'' his latest also promises plenty of titillation (and potential big sales).

(Edward Nawotka writes on books and publishing for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Rhett Butler Loves Again, Steve Martin Looks Back: Book Buzz

2007-11-05T10:49:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The much loved cad of ``Gone with the Wind'' is being resurrected tomorrow, when Donald McCaig's novel ``Rhett Butler's People'' lands in bookstores. The novel imagines Rhett's South Carolina childhood, a failed stint at West Point, fortune-hunting in San Francisco and New Orleans and, of course, his love life in and out of Scarlett O'Hara's bed.

This is the second authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel. The first was Alexandra Ripley's rather tawdry 1991 ``Scarlett,'' which critics derided as hackwork; readers didn't give a damn and bought 6 million copies from Warner Books.

In the wake of that enthusiasm, St. Martin's Press paid the Mitchell estate a generous $4.5 million in 1994 for the rights to publish Rhett's story -- which is finally appearing now, with an optimistic first printing of 2 million copies.

The intervening 13 years have been a saga in themselves. The original writer -- Emma Tennant, the well-regarded British author of, among other titles, ``Pemberley,'' a sequel to Jane Austen's ``Pride and Prejudice'' -- was bounced from the project after delivering a manuscript deemed too British. Pat Conroy, a South Carolinian, agreed to take over, calling the sequel the book he was born to write, but he and the estate could never agree on terms, according to St. Martin's Press president and publisher Sally Richardson.

In 2000, McCaig -- then best known as the author of books about dogs -- got the nod after an editor traveling through the South stumbled on his 1999 Civil War novel, ``Jacob's Ladder.''

Not a Sequel

Richardson denies that ``Rhett Butler's People'' is a sequel. ``It's a companion that explores the same material from a different angle,'' she says. ``The Mitchell estate wanted a book with more gravitas, one that is worthy of the original, which is what McCaig has written. And he doesn't overdo it.''

Presumably the Mitchell estate has vetted the book. In the past it has been very protective. Witness its 2001 lawsuit against Alice Randall and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for copyright infringement over ``The Wind Done Gone,'' Randall's thinly veiled version of ``Gone with the Wind'' told from the point of view of a slave named Cynara.

The suit was settled when Houghton Mifflin agreed to sell the book under the label ``unauthorized parody'' and to make a donation, at the Mitchell estate's behest, to Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Martin's Memoir

Steve Martin offers his own backstory in the surprisingly tender ``Born Standing Up,'' which Scribner will publish on Nov. 20. The memoir moves from his childhood in Waco, Texas, through his early gigs at Knott's Berry Farm and his first television appearances, to his final standup engagements in the late 1970s.

Martin, who prided himself on being a comic who didn't rely on punch lines, has established his literary bona fides in essays for the New Yorker magazine, two novellas (``Shopgirl'' and ``The Pleasure of My Company''), plays (``Picasso at the Lapin Agile'') and, last month, his first children's book, ``The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z,'' for which he teamed up with cartoonist Roz Chast.

Independent bookstores in particular are championing Martin's memoir. The 1,200 member stores of the American Booksellers Association Book Sense program have selected it as their top pick to promote in December -- a break that should help Scribner run through its first printing of 500,000 copies.

McCourt's Return

Another holiday item is Frank McCourt's ``Angela and the Baby Jesus,'' which comes out tomorrow. It tells the tale of a 6-year-old Irish girl -- McCourt's mother, the title character of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 memoir ``Angela's Ashes'' -- who takes the holy infant from a church manger and brings it home, convinced it needs warmth and looking after. Simon & Schuster is publishing a total of 300,000 copies in two versions. One, for children, is illustrated with cheerful, optimistic watercolors. The other, for adults, is printed in a smaller format, with drawings in a more ominous palette that evokes the grim setting of ``Angela's Ashes.''

$50,000 Whiting Awards Go to Wyoming Climber, Vermont Farmer

2007-11-04T10:51:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Wyoming climbing guide Jack Turner, Vermont novelist and goat farmer Brad Kessler and tattooed New York memoirist Peter Trachtenberg are among the 10 winners of the 2007 Whiting Writers' Awards, announced yesterday at a ceremony at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.

The seven others are Boston College professor Carlo Rotella, Brooklyn playwright Sheila Callaghan, Georgia poet Paul Guest, Iranian-born novelist and travel writer Dalia Sofer, Dallas short-story writer Ben Fountain, Staten Island poet Cate Marvin and Miami playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.

Established in 1985, the Whiting Awards are given annually by New York's Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to help writers early in their careers, when they are not yet widely known, ``devote themselves fully to writing.'' Each winner receives $50,000.

Approximately 100 candidates are nominated by an anonymous group of literary professionals appointed by the Foundation. Past winners have included Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Cunningham. In all, the program has awarded more than $5 million to 230 different writers.

Some of this year's winners have already been honored by prize committees, including Kessler, whose novel ``Birds in Fall'' won the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Fountain, whose short-story collection ``Brief Encounters with Che Guevara'' won the $10,000 2006 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction.

(Edward Nawotka writes on books and publishing for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Colbert Hawks Colbert, Tries to Top Stewart; Coulter's `Brains'

2007-10-05T16:18:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Stephen Colbert hasn't been shy about using his mock talk show, ``The Colbert Report,'' to plug his own book, ``I Am America (And So Can You!).''

The branding of Colbert is an active industry. The Saginaw Spirit, a minor-league Michigan hockey team, named its mascot after him: Steagle Colbeagle the Eagle. Ben and Jerry's produced the flavor Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream (``a decadent melting pot of vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and a caramel swirl'').

Last month, Colbert auctioned the plaster cast from his broken wrist on eBay Inc., garnering a winning bid of $17,200.

The book begins its exercise in arch right-wing smarm by pandering on the dust jacket: ``Congratulations, just by opening the cover of this book you became 25% more patriotic.'' There are satirical essays on cultural conservatism, a chart comparing the ``Jesus Train'' to the liquor ``Night Train,'' a list of ``things that are trying to turn me gay,'' and a photo of Colbert retching while reading the New York Times.

The big question is whether Colbert's book, which comes out Oct. 9, will outsell ``America (The Book)'' by fellow Comedy Central newscaster Jon Stewart. Grand Central, the publisher of both, thinks it might and is offering a first printing of 1.4 million copies -- just shy of the 1.5 million copies sold by Stewart.

Valerie Plame

Stewart, meanwhile, bagged Valerie Plame Wilson for his show. Her memoir, ``Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,'' comes out on Oct. 22. Why not Colbert? ``This book just seemed better-suited to Jon,'' said Wilson's publicist, Elizabeth Mason, adding ``I don't think Valerie is going to be doing a lot of conservative media.''

With a first printing of 400,000 copies, Wilson's publisher, Simon & Schuster, will need more than Stewart's imprimatur to move books. Michael Persons, a bookseller at the Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, thinks Plame will need to provoke a response from the Bush administration. ``That's the only way the book will last beyond one or two news cycles,'' Persons said.

Coulter's `Brains'

Wilson will want to avoid another high-profile blond author making the media rounds, Ann Coulter. The conservative commentator's new, subtly titled ``If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans'' was released this week. Though Coulter seems to be slipping in popularity, her publisher, Crown, is counting on loyalists to snap up this best-of collection of Coulter quips and recent columns. The first printing is 600,000.

Sebold's Matricide

October also sees the return of novelist Alice Sebold. Her 2002 novel ``The Lovely Bones,'' featured a murdered narrator who observed events on Earth from the afterlife. It became a phenomenon in grieving post-9/11 America and sold 1.5 million copies.

Her new novel, ``The Almost Moon,'' due in stores on Oct. 16, also explores the psychology of murder and features a woman who commits matricide in the first pages. Publisher Little, Brown, confident that the grim story won't repel readers, is printing a whopping 750,000 copies.

How Alan Greenspan Pushed Canadian Skier Off Top of Book Hill

2007-10-04T10:48:00.001-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Alan Greenspan's ``Age of Turbulence,'' the former Fed chairman's memoir and apologia, sold 128,000 copies in its first full week, according to Nielsen BookScan.

In the process, the book grabbed the No. 1 spot among business bestsellers from Vince Poscente's ``Age of Speed,'' a motivational outpouring about our fast-paced lives by a former Olympic speed skier. (Among other things, Poscente asks the reader to mull whether he is a ``bottle rocket'' or a ``jet.'')

The two similarly titled books took different routes to the top.

Behind Greenspan -- and pushing hard after a reported advance of $8.5 million -- was the mighty Penguin Press and a powerful New York editor named Ann Godoff. The Fed's ex-maestro enjoyed a heavily orchestrated media campaign that included TV interviews and print embargoes, almost guaranteeing that the book would be a sales-galvanizing news event.

Poscente began with no advance and got the word out mainly through an e-mail blast to his own distribution list of 10,000 names. His chief asset was Ray Bard, the dynamo behind a one-man publishing operation based in Austin, Texas, called Bard Press.

Since Bard founded the press in 1996, 14 of the 26 books he has published have landed on national lists. These include ``Little Black Book of Connections'' by Jeffrey Gitomer (2006), which has sold about 110,000 copies, and Bard's top-selling title, Gitomer's ``Little Red Book of Selling,'' which has moved in excess of 500,000 copies since it was published in 2004.

Maximum Care and Feeding

Bard says his high ratio of bestsellers is attributable to the fact that he publishes only one or two books a year. That lets him give each manuscript maximum care and feeding, from the writing to aggressively promoting the book to retailers.

``The Age of Speed'' sold a modest 12,000 copies in its first two weeks (and 13,000 to date), according to BookScan, which tracks sales at about 70 percent of retail outlets. Yet Bard had pre-orders for 60,000 copies of his 70,000 first printing. Because the pre-orders are reported to those who compile bestseller lists, they helped create an ``instant bestseller.''

Bard also worked closely with the retail chain Hudson Booksellers because its locations in airports and other travel hubs make it a good platform for sales of business books. Sarah Hinckley, vice president of book buying at Hudson, uses bestseller lists to determine how many of her nearly 500 outlets will stock a title.

Promotional $5,000

Where Hinckley could confidently predict Greenspan's book would appeal to her core demographic -- one she describes as ``older, wealthy, male, well-educated'' -- Poscente's sales potential was harder to call. To help guarantee that ``The Age of Speed'' would be given some consideration at Hudson stores, Bard Press paid a promotional fee of approximately $5,000, which was used to give the book wider distribution and better placement in the stores than it might otherwise have received.

``The Age of Speed'' is not yet a top-10 bestseller at Hudson Booksellers, though it ``is a slow steady seller,'' Hinckley says. ``It's done pretty well at big business hubs, but not even a third of what the Greenspan has done. Greenspan's book is going to be absolutely huge for us.''

Surprise Mailer Book on Religion Will Hit Bookstores Next Month

2007-10-04T10:43:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Books on religion (mostly anti) have been popular this year.

Christopher Hitchens's ``God Is Not Great'' quickly topped the bestseller lists when it was published in May; it has since sold 224,000 copies. Richard Dawkins's ``The God Delusion'' has moved 318,000 copies since its publication last year -- both according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales.

Now the combative octogenarian Norman Mailer is offering his own views on religion with the surprise publication of ``On God: An Uncommon Conversation.'' The final manuscript reached Random House only in July. The publisher rushed it into production, and it will land in bookstores on Oct. 16.

The book comprises 10 interviews with Michael Lennon, Mailer's literary archivist and official biographer. Mailer offers his views on such topics as prayer, intelligent design and proofs of God's existence.

Lennon acknowledged in a phone interview that the market for such books is burgeoning but added that he and Mailer began their conversations in 2003. They were inspired by a charity production of George Bernard Shaw's ``Don Juan in Hell'' in which they had both acted. (Mailer had the title role; Gore Vidal was the Devil.)

Lennon, who is currently editing Mailer's letters for publication next year, noted that religion is not a new subject for Mailer -- ``It has just been in the background.'' He added that Mailer ``believes in a literal God, but one whose power is limited.''

Atomic Devil

Mailer, he said, views the horrors of the 20th century as proof of God's limited influence. He sees the Devil embodied, in part, in technology and atomic science. Unsurprisingly, the book includes a number of rants, in particular against fundamentalism. It also reveals that Mailer believes in a form of reincarnation.

Mailer communicated some of these views in his novel ``The Castle in the Forest,'' which is narrated by an emissary of the Devil who literally whispers into Hitler's ear. Published earlier this year, the book received mixed reviews and sold a modest 40,000 copies, according to BookScan.

Morris Dickstein, a professor at the City University of New York who has written extensively on Mailer, said he's surprised by the literalness of the author's theology. ``I never took his talk about God and the Devil seriously,'' Dickstein said. ``I thought it was a metaphor.''

Still, Dickstein acknowledges, writers do mature and change. ``I always thought Norman was acting out against the idea of being a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. But as people get older, they want to reintegrate with parts of their lives they may have rejected or ignored. That may be what Norman is doing now.''

Greenspan Soaks in Hot Bath, Klein Ambushes Friedman: Book Buzz

2007-09-06T09:24:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- While plenty of businesspeople are holding their breath for the Sept. 17 release of Alan Greenspan's memoir, ``The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,'' a few booksellers aren't. Like me, they can't forget Greenspan's deadly-dull keynote address in June at BookExpo America, the publishing industry's annual confab, in New York.

The former Fed chief's most memorable revelation that night was that he wrote much of the book while soaking in a hot bath.

Amid the unkind remarks afterward (``Now we know why he looks so shriveled''), one bookseller wondered, ``Who's going to be interested in paying $35 for a book about decades-old interest rates?''

Penguin Press, which was interested enough to pay $8.5 million for the memoir, will need to sell out much of the million-copy first printing to make a profit. But can it? Powell's Books, the influential independent bookstore with six locations in and around Portland, Oregon, and a busy Web site, has ordered a total of 94 copies. ``That's a pretty modest amount,'' purchasing manager Gerry Donagahy confirms.

So far Penguin has kept the manuscript carefully under wraps. One of the privileged few to have read it is Dave Hathaway, Barnes & Noble's business-book buyer. ``It's not written in Greenspeak,'' he told me. ``But it is like sitting in a room with someone who has 500 more IQ points than you.''

According to Hathaway, the book has as much to fascinate history buffs as businesspeople. For prediction junkies, Greenspan offers a vision of the world economy in 2030.

``And his account of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks blew me away,'' Hathaway said.

Klein Versus Friedman

Naomi Klein's ``The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism'' reaches stores on Sept. 18, the day after Greenspan's book. It's likely to inspire far more debate.

Klein, a Canadian political activist, made her name in 2000 with ``No Logo,'' a critique of mass-market manufacturing and globalization. Her new book is an almost 600-page assault on the legacy of the late economist Milton Friedman and his acolytes, arguing that prosperity and human rights don't necessarily follow from the implementation of free-market policies: Witness Russia, China and Pinochet's Chile. Klein also reports from the largely failed reconstruction efforts in Iraq and New Orleans.

With such a wide array of evidence in support of liberal platforms, the book should have a place on the bedside tables of the Democratic candidates.

Pretty Plus

Klein's youthful prettiness can tempt adversaries into challenging her authority -- a notion that makes Frances Coady, Klein's editor at Metropolitan, laugh. ``It's very difficult to doubt her,'' Coady says, ``once you read the book and see how she synthesizes some 50 years of recent history in support of her theories.''

In any case, Klein knows how to handle criticism. Being married to the popular Canadian political talking head Avi Lewis, she's learned the tricks of the TV-pundit trade and is no pushover in an interview.

She's also a savvy self-promoter: Actors Tim Robbins and John Cusack have already blurbed the book. And Klein and director Alfonso Cuaron (``Children of Men'') are screening their trailer for it at the Venice and Toronto film festivals.

Draper on Bush

Just published, to much buzz: Robert Draper's ``Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush'' (Free Press).

Draper, a writer for GQ and a former editor at Texas Monthly, landed six mano-a-mano interviews with the president, the last on May 8 of this year. His evenhanded portrait of our ``misunderestimated'' (Bush's word) commander in chief has already drawn protests -- in particular from former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, whose dissolution of the Iraqi army in 2003 is now widely regarded as a catastrophic mistake.

``Well, the policy was to keep the army intact,'' Bush told Draper. ``Didn't happen.''

Big Novels

Fall marks a change from the summer raft of thrillers and soap operas that load down bookstore shelves. Among the month's most anticipated novels are Ann Patchett's ``Run'' (HarperCollins) and Richard Russo's ``Bridge of Sighs'' (Knopf) -- each writer's first novel in six years.

Patchett's ``Bel Canto'' won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award and sold more than a million copies; Russo's ``Empire Falls'' won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and sold just shy of a million.

In ``Run,'' Patchett once again tackles a quasi-political theme in a story about a white Boston mayor grooming his two adopted black sons for political careers. Russo's ``Bridge of Sighs'' deals with a retirement-age couple in upstate New York and a longed-for escape to Venice.

Rove's $900-an-Hour Book-Deal Broker Preps Hillary for Debate

2007-08-31T09:10:00.001-05:00

Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) -- When Alan Greenspan, Tony Blair and Karl Rove decided it was time to write a memoir, each turned to the same broker: Robert Barnett, one of the most powerful players in book publishing, though he operates well outside the New York publishing clique.

Barnett, 61, a partner at the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly, is a rainmaker for high-profile politicians passing from the public to the private sector. Though he's not a headhunter, should you want to land on a corporate board or a university faculty or work as a consultant or a TV talking head, Barnett can help. A particular forte of his is acquiring multimillion-dollar book advances.

Barnett is the man who persuaded Penguin Press to offer Alan Greenspan an $8.5 million advance for ``The Age of Turbulence'' -- one of five books he represents that are likely to land on the September bestseller lists.

The other four are Bill Clinton's ``Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World'' (Knopf); political strategist Mark J. Penn's ``Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes'' (Twelve); novelist James Patterson's ``You've Been Warned'' (Little, Brown); and presidential daughter Jenna Bush's ``Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope'' (HarperCollins).

While Barnett functions on behalf of his book clients much as an agent does -- negotiating contracts, assisting with the editing process, refereeing between writer and publisher -- he firmly rejects the term.

Hourly Rate

``I'm a lawyer and proud of it,'' he insists when reached by phone. ``I bill my clients an hourly rate; I don't agree with taking a percentage for someone's creative output.'' (An agent typically takes a 15 percent to 20 percent commission as payment.)

The bulk of Barnett's legal practice involves corporate clients. Selling books accounts for only 10 percent to 15 percent of his time. An equal amount goes to an A-list of 250 television journalists and producers, including his wife, CBS News correspondent Rita Braver.

At $900 an hour, Barnett's attention doesn't come cheap. Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large of the publisher PublicAffairs, notes that Barnett's fee arrangement isn't right for everybody. It's most advantageous to ``the kind of person who wants to write one magnum opus or two for a great deal of money.''

But when it's a question of a multimillion-dollar contract, Barnett's hourly rate can offer a client a massive savings over an agent's commission. In an example Barnett cited, he billed a client $150,000 for negotiating a $3 million book contract -- a substantial discount from the $450,000-$600,000 an agent would customarily charge.

Clinton's Millions

While authors might save money, publishers don't. Sonny Mehta, chairman of the Knopf Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Random House Inc., paid $12 million for the privilege of publishing Bill Clinton's memoir ``My Life,'' which Barnett represented.

Replying to an e-mail query, Mehta -- who has a reputation as one of the most intimidating publishers in New York -- said that the upside of working with Barnett ``is that when he calls about a client, it's always someone you will want to take a meeting with. The downside is that he's an expert on valuation, and as such I can never quite negotiate the deal I'd like.''

Since 1976, Barnett has honed his negotiating skills prepping Democratic presidential candidates for debates. He has role-played George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney (whose wife, Lynne, is also a client) on multiple occasions.

Supporting Hillary

Among the current crop of Democratic front-runners, he can count Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson as clients. But he says it's no secret he's supporting Hillary. He has served as the Clintons' personal attorney since 1992 (except for a short period when his wife was covering the Clinton White House). ``We've been close friends for a long time,'' he says, ``and I'm on her debate prep team.''

Still, Barnett's Democratic politics haven't scared Republicans away. Bush administration officials who have called him just before or after leaving the White House include, in addition to Rove, Andrew Card, Ari Fleischer and Donald Rumsfeld.

``I've always been bipartisan in that regard,'' Barnett says, adding that he's never lost a client over political differences: ``I enjoy discussing politics with my Republican clients -- I might learn something. And, while I'm not above trying to educate them on a point or two every once in a while, I never argue.''

That kind of agreeableness is important to Bush administration officials -- and their families. Earlier this month, Barnett sold an as yet unnamed second book by Jenna Bush to HarperCollins, this one to be co-written with Laura Bush. With that kind of access to the First Family, can it be more than a matter of time before the president himself calls?

Beaufort to Publish O.J. Simpson Book; Goldman Family to Profit

2007-08-31T09:08:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Aug. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Beaufort Books said late yesterday that it will publish O.J. Simpson's ``If I Did It'' after acquiring the rights to the controversial title.

The book is a supposedly hypothetical account of how Simpson, a former football star, might have murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman in 1994. It was originally backed by editor Judith Regan and scheduled for publication last November by News Corp.'s HarperCollins.

Following a public outcry, publication was canceled, the printed books were destroyed, Regan was fired and her ReganBooks imprint was dropped by HarperCollins.

Beaufort, a small independent publisher in New York, said it expects the book to reach stores by Oct. 3. In the past, it has often operated as a ``vanity'' press, with the author and publisher splitting costs as well as any profit.

Beaufort spokesman Michael Wright said the company had reached a traditional publishing agreement and costs would not be shared. He wouldn't disclose whether or how much money was paid to the Goldmans for the rights.

Both the Goldman and Brown families originally protested publication of ``If I Did It,'' though earlier this year the Goldmans -- frustrated with the slow pace of payment on the $33.5 million owed to both families by Simpson following the 1997 wrongful-death judgment against him in a civil suit -- sued for rights to the book.

On July 30, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Miami awarded most of the potential proceeds from book sales to the Goldmans. The judge added that any publisher of the book ``must promise the court it will maximize the sale of the asset.''

Additional Commentary

Los Angeles literary agent Sharlene Martin of Martin Literary Management sold the rights to Beaufort on behalf of the Goldmans. The manuscript, according to Wright, will ``remain intact, with some additional commentary of a nature that's yet to be determined.''

Denise Brown, Nicole Brown's sister, issued a statement yesterday that derided the book as a step-by-step manual on how Nicole and her friend Ron were murdered, and she called for a boycott. Denise Brown is scheduled to debate Beaufort President Eric Kampmann today on NBC's ``Today'' show.

For his part, Kampmann said in a statement that the company ``will be working diligently to not only publish this book well, but to honor the memory of the victims of this terrible crime: Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.''

The statement said Beaufort, the Goldmans and Martin will contribute an unspecified portion of the proceeds to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice.

Booksellers are divided on whether they will carry ``If I Did It.'' McKenna Jordan, manager and book buyer at Murder by the Book in Houston, is put off by the idea.

``To be blunt, it's tacky,'' she said. ``Our customers would not appreciate seeing it in the store and would be offended.''

Yet Steve Bercu, owner of Book People in Austin, Texas, and a board member of the American Booksellers Association, says he would sell it despite personal reservations: ``The public will decide very quickly whether they're interested in it or not.''

Starbucks Picks Next Book to Sell: Isay's StoryCorps Collection

2007-08-08T08:57:00.001-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Starbucks Corp. has chosen its next book. On Nov. 8, ``Listening Is an Act of Love'' will go on shelves alongside CDs, DVDs and coffee mugs.

The book, edited by Dave Isay and published by Penguin Press, offers a selection of 50 real-life stories from the archives of StoryCorps, the ambitious oral-history project of interviews by and with everyday Americans. Founded by Isay in 2003, it has recorded more than 13,000 conversations.

While bookstores also will sell the title, the Starbucks version is an exclusive boxed edition that includes a CD of 10 additional stories. The book's cover price is $24.95; no price has been set for Starbucks's boxed set.

Reached by phone, Isay praised Starbucks as a ``third place in American life,'' after home and work, ``where people come to talk and listen to each other.'' He added, ``The StoryCorps project is about listening. It's a great match for us.''

In an interview with Bloomberg News last year, Starbucks Entertainment President Kenneth T. Lombard noted that customers trusted the company to filter cultural content. Though the chain offers a wide selection of CDs, some produced by the company itself, so far it has sold only one book at a time.

``Listening Is an Act of Love'' is the third. The first, Mitch Albom's novel ``For One More Day,'' sold 100,000 copies at the chain after it went on sale in October 2006. Last February Ishmael Beah's ``A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier'' proved an even bigger hit there, selling more than 117,000 copies.

Before the Starbucks announcement, Penguin Press had planned to print about 75,000 copies of ``Listening Is an Act of Love.'' Now that number is likely at least to double.

New `Who Moved My Cheese?; Obama, McCain, Vampires: Book Buzz

2007-08-03T13:23:00.000-05:00

Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- ``The Dream Manager'' tells the story of a fictional cleaning company suffering from high turnover and low morale. When the firm institutes a new employee-loyalty program that involves listening to and helping workers achieve their personal aspirations, it undergoes a massive turnaround.

Australian motivational speaker and writer Matthew Kelly's brief new book may sound like another ho-hum business parable. Yet Barnes & Noble's Dave Hathaway says, ``It is going to start a movement.''

Hathaway, who as a buyer assesses thousands of business books every year for B&N (they're one of the bookseller's top five categories), isn't prone to hyperbole. But he maintains, ``This is something unique. It moved me both personally and professionally and changed my own life.'' He's heard that Procter & Gamble plans to test the program. (Calls for comment to Procter & Gamble had not been returned by press time.)

Jack Covert, founder of the online bookseller 800-CEO-READ, is intrigued by the book, but he hesitates to anoint it the next ``Who Moved My Cheese?'' ``Parables,'' he says, ``no matter how good, have the success rate of minor league baseball players.'' (Hyperion, Aug. 21, $19.95, 80,000 first printing.)

Obama Biography

``Obama: From Promise to Power,'' a new biography by Chicago Tribune journalist David Mendell, promises a behind- closed-doors look at Senator's Barack Obama's home life and an assessment of his political agenda.

``There isn't any gotcha revelation,'' James Hornfischer, Mendell's literary agent, admits. ``But you do get a comprehensive, balanced portrait, which is something you can't get from the news.''

There are now more than 1.6 million copies of Obama's ``The Audacity of Hope'' and another 1.1 million of his autobiography ``Dreams From My Father'' in print. But Becky Anderson, owner of Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downers Grove, Illinois, isn't convinced readers will buy something Obama himself didn't write. ``People are waiting for a book that tells us what he would do if elected,'' she says.

``That's never going to happen,'' responds George Shipley, a Democratic political consultant in Austin, Texas. ``Opposition researchers would comb it line by line for ammunition.'' (Amistad, Aug. 1, $25.95, 200,000 first printing.)

New McCain

Shipley can't swallow the title of John McCain's ``Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them.'' ``It's got to be ironic,'' he says, ``because in recent years McCain has failed to make the hard calls. What does he really think about the war? About the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? About the justice department and Alberto Gonzales?''

McCain's new collection of historical studies doesn't say. ``The essay on the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr offers valuable insight into McCain's thinking about Iraq,'' counters Cary Goldstein, publicist for McCain's publisher, Twelve, a fledgling imprint of Hachette Book Group.

McCain may be in better hands with Goldstein than with his campaign managers, who have been failing to boost his poll numbers. Twelve publishes just one book each month (hence its name), and as a consequence McCain will get Goldstein's undivided attention. So far the new imprint's track record is superb, with two of its first three books -- Christopher Buckley's ``Boomsday'' and Christopher Hitchens's ``God Is Not Great'' --hitting the bestseller lists and the latter topping many of them.

McCain's last four books -- written, like the new one, with his longtime chief legislative aide, Mark Salter -- have been popular; his most recent, ``Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember'' (Random House, 2005) sold a respectable 184,000 copies in hardcover. (Aug. 14, $25.99, 200,000 first printing.)

Meyer's `Eclipse'

Among August fiction, Anderson is most excited about children's writer Stephenie Meyer's ``Eclipse,'' the third novel in her young-adult vampire series. ``These books are extremely popular with teens, who find them very romantic,'' Anderson says. ``And since there's no sex and barely any kissing, parents like them as well.''

With 1.6 million copies in print of the first two titles, ``Twilight'' and ``New Moon,'' some booksellers are calling Meyer a possible successor to J.K. Rowling.

``Stephenie isn't comfortable with that kind of talk,'' says Faith Hochhalter, children's book buyer at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona (close to Meyer's home in Phoenix), ``but it's probably the truth. We may even sell more of `Eclipse' than we did of the last `Harry Potter.''' The store has sold more than 3,000 copies of Meyer's previous books and has pre-sold 500 copies of ``Eclipse.''

``The third book is typically the tipping point for children's series,'' she adds.

Meyer's first novel was picked up off the slush pile at the literary agency Writers House; she is now published in 28 countries. When Changing Hands hosted a vampire-themed ``prom'' based on the books in May, fans flew in from as far away as Costa Rica and Germany. (Little, Brown, Aug. 7, $18.99, 1 million first printing.)

(Edward Nawotka writes on books and publishing for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Navy SEAL Recalls the Day His Friends Died

2007-07-27T13:55:00.000-05:00

July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell's worldview has been formed by peering through a sniper scope. He sees only friends and enemies. He cherishes Christianity, bravery, loyalty, self-sacrifice and Texans (especially President George W. Bush). The Taliban, liberal media and lawyers, al-Qaeda and the Geneva Conventions are in his cross hairs.

Luttrell's memoir, ``Lone Survivor,'' recounts the events of June 28, 2005, the deadliest in U.S. Special Forces history, when he voted to free a trio of Afghan goatherds who had stumbled upon his SEAL team's observation post. They subsequently betrayed them to the Taliban, and before the day was over, Luttrell's three teammates and 16 more Americans -- including eight more SEALs --were dead.

We spoke on the phone.

Nawotka: You write that not executing the goatherds was ``the stupidest, most Southern-fried, lamebrained decision I ever made in my life.'' Why?

Luttrell: It led directly to the deaths of my friends. I was more worried about liberal media back home finding out about our executing the goatherds and accusing us of war crimes than I was about making the smart military decision. I've wished I could take it back every day since.

Nawotka: Is it typical for a SEAL team to take votes?

Luttrell: One of the things I try to get across in the book is how SEALs think. In the SEALs we know that one man can't win a war -- when one guy goes it alone, you die -- so we formulate a plan and we use each other's brains.

Bashing Liberals?

Nawotka: Your memoir is a big bestseller. Do you still feel the media are out to get you?

Luttrell: I now almost wish I hadn't put that stuff in there, but I told the story the way it happened. I'm not trying to bash liberals or Democrats and prop up Republicans -- in my heart of hearts I'm not. I want to bring the country back together, not divide it further. If people read the book, they will see it is about trying to protect this country and fighting insurmountable odds.

Nawotka: How is it that you weren't prepared for this kind of battle, yet you still killed more than 50 Taliban?

Luttrell: SEALs move fast and light, like guys going out for a hike or hunting. No, we were not dressed like what you see in Iraq, with body armor or heavy weapons. Two of us were carrying sniper rifles.

Luck and God

Nawotka: You tumbled thousands of feet down a mountainside, cracking three vertebrae, and survived a rocket-propelled grenade, only to be found by a friendly Afghan doctor who took you in and decided to protect you. Was that SEAL training or fate?

Luttrell: Pure luck and God.

Nawotka: Throughout your time in Afghanistan you wore two Texas patches on your uniform. One made it to President Bush. How?

Luttrell: When I was recovering, Admiral Mike Mullin, the chief of Naval Operations, asked me if there was anything he could do for me. I asked if he would give the patch to the president and tell him, ``Your Texas boys are getting it done.''

Later I met the president in the Oval Office when I was awarded the Navy Cross, and the patch was sitting on his desk. I had tried to clean it up, but it was still covered in mud and blood. He said, ``Son, do you remember this?'' and then he told me it was going to end up in his presidential museum.

Nawotka: You were trained as a medic. Now you're planning on attending medical school. Have you decided where?

Luttrell: I don't venture out of my home state of Texas much, but I think Yale appeals to me most.

Nawotka: How comfortable are you with the word ``hero''?

Luttrell: I am not a hero. I am a highly trained elite soldier. I was just doing my job. Those kids in Iraq, the ones who went into the Reserves to pay for college and are now fighting terrorists, going out on patrol and getting blown up by IEDs -- they are heroes.

``Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10,'' by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson, is published by Little, Brown (390 pages, $24.99).

(Edward Nawotka writes on books and publishing for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

`Harry Potter' Cuts Price, Robert Novak Cuts Throats: Book Buzz

2007-07-06T09:02:00.000-05:00

`Harry Potter' Cuts Price, Robert Novak Cuts Throats: Book Buzz

By Edward Nawotka

July 5 (Bloomberg) -- With J.K. Rowling's ``Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' the seventh and final book in the series, set for a July 21 release, Scholastic, its American publisher, is printing 12 million copies. Yet what looks to be a virtually guaranteed bonanza won't necessarily trickle down to booksellers. Amazon.com is offering the book at $17.99 -- a 48.6 percent discount off the cover price of $34.99 -- and has reported almost 1.6 million pre-orders worldwide. With the publisher's discount to Amazon unlikely to go much beyond 50 percent, that leaves a slim profit, though Amazon might still make a little extra on shipping.

Big-box wholesalers like Costco and Sam's Club, as well as regional grocery and drugstore chains, have in the past offered even lower prices, using the book as a loss leader to draw in customers. Barnes & Noble, Borders and other chain bookstores have typically discounted the book by 40 percent.

Many independent booksellers, less willing to go the discount route, are competing by adding value to the purchase with ``Harry Potter''-themed launch parties and other programs. At Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz., Publishers Weekly magazine's 2007 Bookseller of the Year, ``Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'' will sell for the full $34.99, with seven of those dollars going to a local charity of the buyer's choice.

``We've done the same in past years,'' says Faith Hochhalter, the store's children's-book buyer. ``With `Harry Potter,' our priority is as much community development as it is selling books.''

New Film, Too

The booksellers also have to sign a novella-length agreement for the privilege of selling the book.

Among its draconian provisions: They must keep the novel under lock and key prior to the midnight launch, and they may not use trademarked ``Harry Potter'' names to promote it outside the store. (No Diagon Alleys in the parking lot.)

The restrictions stem from Rowling's contract with Warner Bros., which produces the ``Harry Potter'' films and doesn't want any confusion between the new book and its ``Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,'' which opens July 11.

Most booksellers I spoke to were happy to sign Scholastic's agreement and intend to comply -- though they worry that the rules are so complex they might break one without knowing it. (Scholastic, $34.99, 12 million first printing.)

Friedman 3.0

There are already some 2.5 million hardcover copies of Thomas Friedman's 2005 ``The World Is Flat'' in print. The paperback version, which arrives in stores on July 24, represents the book's third revision.

Will two new chapters and updated statistics entice customers into buying yet another copy?

``This is a book that has `tipped' and will continue to sell whether pages are added or not,'' says Todd Sattersten, vice-president of the business bookstore 800-CEO-READ, which has sold 700 copies of the book so far.

Barbara Cave Henricks, a consultant who has worked with Jack Welch and other executives on their books, points out that a paperback edition ``is also more attractive for universities, which prefer to assign paperbacks for supplemental reading.'' Yet she questions Friedman's decision to re-revise rather than write a new book.

``When you have a big hit, publishers want you to follow it up as soon as possible to capitalize on existing fans,'' she says. ``A writer like Friedman might get paid five figures for a revision but would get a multimillion-dollar deal for a new book. Of course, with three Pulitzer Prizes to his name, Friedman is the exception to the rule. He can probably sell just about anything he wants." (Picador, $16, 500,000 first printing.)

Novak's Blade

Given Robert Novak's long career in Washington, surely he wants to be remembered for more than outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

His memoir ``The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington'' should help. Said to have come in at 1,400 pages, it's half that now.

The book is embargoed -- press copies aren't available -- but Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher, author of ``Crunchy Cons,'' has the same publisher and got an early peek. He told me he's been savoring the infighting the book might engender.

``There are some pretty spicy parts in which he unloads on conservative pundits, which will have people on the right talking'' he says. ``He's particularly hard on Kate O'Beirne for what he believes is her failure to defend him when National Review attacked him unfairly. One gets the opinion that their friendship ended over that.''

Among Novak's other targets are National Review's David Frum and MSNBC's Tucker Carlson. (Crown Forum, $29.95, 100,000 first printing.)

(Edward Nawotka writes on books and publishing for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Iraq's Harvard Insider Damns Occupation; Rumsfeld's Arrogance

2007-06-14T12:39:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

June 14 (Bloomberg) -- The disastrous war in Iraq continues to inspire new books. Among the most interesting:

``The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace,'' by Ali A. Allawi, is the first significant volume about the conflict by an Iraqi insider. An MIT- and Harvard-educated banker, Allawi has held several key government posts, including minister of trade, minister of defense and minister of finance.

His book is long and dense but never mealy-mouthed. Allawi regards the war as ``one of America's great strategic blunders'' and calls the Bush administration ``ignorant'' and ``ill- informed'' about conditions in Iraq (most prominently the fragility of the national economy and the ``parlous condition of the machinery of government'') prior to the invasion.

The occupation, Allawi writes, ``broke the thick crust that had accreted over the country and region as a whole and released powerful subterranean forces.'' He isn't talking about oil geysers. He shows, with an authority far surpassing that of other politicos, how a democratically elected Iraqi government runs counter to interests of authoritarian regimes (Saudi Arabia, Egypt) that are key U.S. allies in the region.

``The Occupation of Iraq'' is published by Yale University Press (518 pages, $28).

`Rumsfeld'

``Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy,'' by Andrew Cockburn, is as damning as its title suggests. You get a sense of the pitch at which Cockburn writes from his statement that Sept. 11 transformed the defense secretary from ``a half- forgotten 20th-century political figure to America's 21st- century warlord.''

Cockburn sees Donald Rumsfeld as a shrewd political operator whose ruthlessness and ambition during the Ford administration made an ally of Dick Cheney and a ``lifelong enemy'' of George H.W. Bush. He does a superior job of showing how, as secretary of defense under Gerald Ford, Rumsfeld became a benefactor of the defense industry, into whose coffers he has since funneled hundreds of billions of dollars.

Cockburn's astute analysis of his subject's earlier career makes it seem all but inevitable that Rumsfeld would commit the errors he did in managing the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And though the story has been told repeatedly before, reading again about his hubristic dismissal of the military's request for more invasion and support forces and his long refusal to admit the existence of the insurgency revives that troubling question: Why wasn't he fired sooner?

``Rumsfeld'' is published by Scribner (247 pages, $25).

`Monstering'

In ``Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War,'' Tara McKelvey tracks down many of the principals in the Abu Ghraib photos and posits some theories about how the pictures came into being.

She believes the poverty-stricken home lives of some of the soldiers contributed directly to the abuse. She writes about videos of bored prison guards ``Robotripping'' (getting stoned on a mixture of Robitussin and Vivarin) and simulating sex with one another. Lynndie England, the young army specialist photographed holding a naked prisoner on a leash, worked at a chicken-processing plant where animals were abused (though, surprisingly, she quit in protest) and participated in amateur porn shoots before her tour of duty in Iraq.

Working from interviews with former detainees, McKelvey serves up a dozen case studies of abuse that went beyond what was shown in the photographs; it included sophisticated forms of torture (such as stress positions and ``monstering'' -- the inhibition of diet and sleep) and, purportedly, rape and murder. The worst abuse, she reports, took place at makeshift short- term-detention facilities, such as gyms and trailers, where detainees were held for fewer than 14 days and then released without any record of their imprisonment.

Jail Time

She doggedly tracks down military documents and computer files supporting claims of abuse, including one guard's ``wish list'' of ``alternative interrogation techniques,'' including ``phone book strikes'' and ``low-voltage electrocution.'' Even more disturbing is her revelation that civilian contractors probably participated in the abuse; one translator may have sodomized a male teenager.

Thus far, she reports, of 260 soldiers investigated for detainee-related crimes, only nine have received jail time. (England is currently serving a 36-month sentence.)

McKelvey's research is impressive. Her litany of pain and suffering is equal parts enlightening and exhausting.

``Monstering'' is published by Carroll & Graf (291 pages, $25.95).

2007-06-09T12:55:00.000-05:00

Dueling Hillarys, Tina Brown's Princess Di: Book Buzz

By Edward Nawotka

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- Two new biographies of Hillary Clinton, Tina Brown's long-awaited expose on the late Princess of Wales and the returns of Armistead Maupin and Martin Cruz Smith are all potential June blockbusters.

``A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton'' by Carl Bernstein will be the first of two Hillary Clinton bios to reach readers when it hits the stores on June 5. Bernstein spent eight years on the book, which follows the New York senator from her Illinois childhood up to the moment she announced her presidential bid.

Hagiography or hatchet job? Knopf executive director of publicity Paul Bogaards will only say, ``Bernstein lets his sources do the talking -- and they are very good sources.'' Among the revelations: that in 1989 Hillary refused Bill Clinton's request for a divorce. (Knopf, $28.95; 275,000-copy first printing.)

``Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton'' by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. lands in stores shortly thereafter, on June 8. The authors, investigative reporters for the New York Times, focus on Clinton's political education as it evolved in Wellesley, Little Rock, Washington and Westchester. They train a microscope on her original Senate vote endorsing the war in Iraq.

``They only finished their reporting in May,'' says Little, Brown publicity director Heather Fain, implying that it's the more-up-to-date of the two books. In fact, there's been a pitched battle between the houses over publication date. Little, Brown had originally scheduled ``Her Way'' for Aug. 28 when Knopf blindsided it by announcing a June 19 pub date for ``A Woman in Charge.'' When the dust settled, both houses had moved the dates up even earlier.

1.5 Million

It will be a challenge for either to match the popularity of Clinton's autobiography, ``Living History,'' which -- despite lukewarm reviews when it appeared, in June 2003 -- sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first six months. (Little, Brown, $29.99; 175,000-copy first printing.)

``The Diana Chronicles'' by Tina Brown, to be published on June 12, arrives in time for the 10th anniversary of the princess's death, Aug. 31. Brown, the Brit who rose to the top of the New York media world as editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, offers a revisionist bio of the People's Princess that, word has it, is likely to outrage Diana idolaters.

Brown, who knew the princess, says she's interviewed more than 250 sources. Among the surprises in her unvarnished portrait: her suggestion that at the time of her death Diana may have had her sights on another man, and one just as rich as Dodi Fayed: Theodore Forstmann.

``Teddy Forstmann and the late Princess Di had a very close friendship,'' a spokeswoman for the American financier confirmed today. She declined to comment further. (Doubleday, $27.50; 200,000-copy first printing.)

More Tales

``Michael Tolliver Lives'' by Armistead Maupin is the first appearance of Maupin's HIV-positive gay hero since 1990. ``Tales of the City'' began as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976; when this seventh volume in the series comes out on June 12, the city's mayor, Gavin Newsom, plans to declare it Michael Tolliver Day.

The first of the books written in Tolliver's own voice, the novel is about the 55-year-old's relationship with a younger man. Perhaps not coincidentally, in February the 62-year-old Maupin married his own 30-something lover in Vancouver, Canada. (HarperCollins, $25.95; 150,000-copy first printing.)

``Stalin's Ghost'' by Martin Cruz Smith stars Arkady Renko, the surly, cynical Russian homicide detective readers first met in 1981 in ``Gorky Park.'' That book's dismal take on life in the Soviet Union got it banned there. In the rest of the world it sold 6 million copies.

On June 12 -- after four more books and a further 14 million sales -- Renko returns to Moscow to investigate the Elvis-like sightings of Stalin on subway platforms and the systematic execution of members of an elite Chechnyan army unit. This book is as critical of Vladimir Putin's regime as the first one was of the communists. (Simon & Schuster, $26.95; 250,000- copy first printing.)

Mamet Sells 100 Boxes of His Papers to Texas for Mystery Sum

2007-04-18T14:41:00.001-05:00

Mamet Sells 100 Boxes of His Papers to Texas for Mystery Sum

By Edward Nawotka

April 18 (Bloomberg) -- David Mamet, the playwright, screenwriter and film director, has sold his archive to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mamet, 59, is best known for his dramas about scam artists and unscrupulous businessmen, including ``American Buffalo'' and ``Glengarry Glen Ross,'' which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize.

Mamet's archive joins those of his fellow dramatists Lillian Hellman and Tom Stoppard, as well as more recent acquisitions that include the papers of novelist Don DeLillo and costumes from actor Robert De Niro.

In a prepared statement, Mamet said, ``Having an archive in the care of the Ransom Center, in the care, if I may, of intelligent and dedicated enthusiasts, fulfilled both the fantasy of the parent, and that of the artist, who now, though absent, might envision a cost-free colloquy with a perfect interlocutor.''

The Ransom Center, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, has become known for its deep pockets and aggressive buying. In April 2003 it paid Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein $5 million for their Watergate papers. Two years later the center paid $2.5 million for novelist Norman Mailer's archive.

The money for acquisitions is derived in part from oil- producing land endowed to the university by the state of Texas.

100-Plus Boxes

The Mamet archive, which was purchased for an undisclosed amount, consists of more than 100 boxes of drafts, ephemera and correspondence.

While several unpublished manuscripts are also reported to be in the collection, the plum is some 175 daily journals Mamet kept from 1966 to 2001.

``I started keeping a journal over 40 years ago, and so established the habit of writing longhand,'' Mamet said. ``Virtually everything I've written since -- plays, screenplays, nonfiction and novels -- existed first in hardbound lined notebooks full of black or blue ink.''

Dr. Thomas F. Staley, director of the Harry Ransom Center, added, ``The journals illuminate Mamet's developing views on writing and directing, as well as performance and production. Mamet was a man aware of his times, and the journals reflect not only the evolution of American theater and culture but also the impulses that prompted them.''

Mamet's archive is paltry compared with some others at the center, such as movie mogul David O. Selznick's papers, which when purchased in 1980 filled more than 5,000 boxes and included the original storyboards for ``Gone With the Wind.''

In addition to some 36 million pages of manuscripts, the Harry Ransom Center boasts a Gutenberg Bible, a print of the world's first permanent photograph and the library and the archives of publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

(Edward Nawotka writes about the publishing industry for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Murakami, School Builder Split $30,000; `Carnegie' Wins $50,000

2007-03-27T11:20:00.001-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- A short-story collection by the Japanese surrealist Haruki Murakami and a true tale of adventure and school building in Pakistan and Afghanistan by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin were named winners of the 2007 Kiriyama Prize this morning in San Francisco.

Created in 1996 to honor books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia, the prize is sponsored by Pacific Rim Voices, a division of the San Francisco-based Kiriyama Pacific Rim Institute. Each winning book receives $15,000.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Kiriyama Prize manager Jeannine Stronach said that she took particular pleasure in Mortenson's win.

``While it is already widely acknowledged that Murakami writes extraordinary fiction,'' she said in a telephone interview from San Francisco, ``my hope is that by giving the award to Mortenson it might also in some way bring additional attention his meaningful work at the Central Asia Institute.''

Mortenson and Relin's ``Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time'' (Penguin) is an account of how Mortenson, a nurse, was inspired to found his nonprofit Central Asia Institute after failing to reach the summit of K2 and taking refuge in a remote Pakistani village. Mortenson survived kidnapping and defied death threats while trying to offer education to children, especially girls, in the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan and the Pamir and Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. He built more than 50 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Bizarre Weather

Murakami's ``Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman'' (Knopf), which won in the fiction category, features an ``ice man'' who seduces a lonely woman with ``white clouds'' of words that hang in the air ``like comic book captions.'' The volume's two dozen tales include an assortment of bizarre weather phenomena, nightmares, anthropomorphized animals and a doppelganger.

The book was chosen over four other finalists, including Kiran Desai's ``The Inheritance of Loss'' (Grove), which has already won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.

The New-York Historical Society has awarded its $50,000 American Book Prize to David Nasaw for ``Andrew Carnegie'' (Penguin), an 896-page biography of the Gilded Age steel magnate and philanthropist. Roger Hertog, chairman of the board of the society, called the book ``magisterial'' and said the example set by Carnegie's philanthropy ``is remarkably relevant to us today.''

Dean Koontz Invades Virtual World in Bantam Dell Marketing Ploy

2007-03-15T10:31:00.001-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Today at 9 p.m. New York time, bestselling thriller writer Dean Koontz will give a virtual reading from his forthcoming novel ``The Good Guy'' (scheduled for publication May 29) at the ``Bantam Dell Book Shop and Cafe'' -- a new virtual destination in Second Life for Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.

Second Life is a 3-D online world in which people roam a fictitious but familiar environment in the form of digital avatars -- that is, computer representations that look, walk and misbehave much like real human beings. Since its creation by Linden Lab in 2003, Second Life has attracted more than 4 million users worldwide.

Bantam Dell's virtual bookstore was created by Electric Sheep Co., which has produced Second Life destinations for other companies including AOL, Starwood Hotels and Major League Baseball.

During his reading, Koontz will be represented by an avatar fashioned in his likeness and assisted by a pair of Bantam Dell employee avatars with the literary-sounding names of Beatrice Scintilla and Horatio Ruggles.

Scintilla is actually Betsy Hulsebosch, senior vice president and director of creative marketing for Bantam Dell. She will field audience questions via instant and text messaging and relay them to Koontz, who will answer in his real voice via an audio feed.

Overflow Glitches

Hulsebosch says she hopes that 30 to 40 avatars -- or visitors -- show up, as any more in one Second Life destination can cause computer glitches. To deal with overflow, the event will be simulcast in several other Second Life destinations; an audio feed will be broadcast on Koontz's Web site and on Bantam Dell's.

Those attending will be able to browse almost 100 Bantam Dell titles on shelves, tables and ``dumps'' (those cardboard displays that sit on the floor) in the virtual bookstore. Clicking on a book will take them to a page on Bantam Dell's Web site where they can read an excerpt and, if they wish, buy the book, either from there or from a number of online retailers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Powells.

Publishers have been slow to enter the age of digitized information -- unlike writers and entertainers. The singer- songwriter Suzanne Vega has given a virtual concert in Second Life, and an avatar of Kurt Vonnegut has sat for an interview with a virtual John Hockenberry.

Next Dimension

``We think Second Life represents the next dimension of social networking,'' Hulsebosch says. ``It's three-dimensional. You physically create the world around you. We think the people who are drawn to that sort of experience would also be drawn to books.''

Russ Lawrence, president of the American Booksellers Association and owner of Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton, Montana, is sanguine about the prospect of virtual competition. ``If publishers want growth, they have to look to reach people where they haven't before,'' he says. ``Second Life is itself a fictional environment. Who knows, selling fiction there might be a pretty good match.''

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Capitalism Goes on Trial, Warren Buffett Eats: New Nonfiction

2007-03-13T12:56:00.000-05:00

By Edward Nawotka

March 13 (Bloomberg) -- After 9/11, readers turned to Benjamin R. Barber's 1995 ``Jihad vs. McWorld'' for a better understanding of the world in which they suddenly found themselves. Barber posited a society divided between faith-based tribalists and economic globalists -- opposing forces that both threatened democratic ideals.

Barber's new book, ``Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole'' (Norton, $26.95), offers a scathing critique of late capitalism, blaming run-amok consumerism for the decline of society.

Megacorporations are as much in the business of manufacturing ``needs,'' Barber argues, as of products or services for a population of emotionally stunted consumers.

Why do we buy a raft of inferior and superfluous products? Because these companies have turned us into ``kidults, rejuveniles, twixters, adultescents'' conditioned since birth to buy ``stupid'' brands. The result is a ``civic schizophrenia'' that leaves us vulnerable to megachurches but too disengaged to vote.

``Consumed'' is more vitriolic than admirers of ``Jihad vs. McWorld'' might expect. Some may object to Barber's angry insistence that we, as consumers, have no free will. Although it's great at provoking us to think about our complicity in the phenomenon he describes, a reader may not feel like the total tool of corporate commerce Barber claims we all are.

``Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future'' by Bill McKibben (Times, $25). In a vein similar to Barber's, McKibben offers a clear-eyed reassessment of the meaning of growth, arguing that it's no longer making the world wealthier but instead is ``generating inequality and insecurity'' and ``bumping against physical limits, like climate change and peak oil, so profound that continuing to expand may be impossible or even dangerous.''

``A Weekend With Warren Buffett and Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures'' by Randy Cepuch (Thunder's Mouth, $23.95). Starting with a six-hour marathon Q&A with Buffett in Omaha, Cepuch offers a travelogue of 24 meetings (and free lunches) throughout the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, for such companies as Citigroup, DuPont, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Playboy, Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Walt Disney.

``Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck'' by Richard Hoffer (HarperCollins, $24.95). A Sports Illustrated reporter visits casinos, underground power games and more in a trip through the U.S.'s gaming culture, whose burgeoning condition, he says, is symptomatic of our predilection for get-rich-quick schemes and costs us some $80 billion a year.

``How Countries Compete: Strategy, Structure, and Government in the Global Economy'' by Richard H.K. Vietor (Harvard Business School, $35). A B-school prof examines growth in countries including China, India, Japan, the U.S., Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa and challenges the notion that government oversight hinders economic development.

``The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World'' by Phillip F. Schewe (J. Henry Press, $27.95). The electrical grid is one of the world's great engineering and industrial feats, but one short circuit could leave cities dark for days. Schewe offers an informative look at the grid's history and its increasing vulnerability.

``The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America'' by Allan M. Brandt (Basic, $36). A medical historian examines the role of the tobacco industry in American life, from its contributions to the development of advertising to its role in so many legal and health debates.

``Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders'' by James D. Scurlock (Scribner, $24). The credit industry (Visa, MasterCard et al.) is the villain in this frightening if one-sided expose of ``debt hell.''

``Poor People'' by William T. Vollmann (Ecco, $29.95). The prizewinning novelist and crusading (and sometimes gonzo) journalist traverses the world to ask a cross section of the downtrodden, ``Why are you poor?'' and records their honest and unsettling answers.

Didion's Grief, Wal-Mart, Rome, Oil, Obama: February Paperbacks

2007-02-05T11:37:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Joan Didion's National Book Award- winning memoir, ``The Year of Magical Thinking'' (Vintage, $13.95), describes her grief following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne.

As a hedge against self-pity, Didion chronicles every detail. Hoping to perform a kind of ``magic trick'' to ``bring him back,'' she refuses to allow his body parts to be harvested or to give away his shoes: ``How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?''

The book has proved to be her most popular. Some 625,000 copies were printed in hardcover. A stage adaptation, written by Didion, directed by David Hare and starring Vanessa Redgrave, opens on Broadway in March.

Other highlights this month:

``Wal-Mart: The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America'' by Anthony Bianco (Currency, $14.95). According to the persuasive Bianco, the world's biggest retailer has created a Dickensian workplace culture that turns workers into ``component parts'' as it smashes union activity and violates child-labor laws in pursuit of retail dominance.

``Rome, Inc.: The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation'' by Stanley Bing (Norton, $14.95). Satirist Bing compresses Roman history into an entertaining business parable that portrays the city-state and its empire as a modern corporation vexed by rapacious and incompetent leaders, disastrous in-fighting and hostile takeover attempts.

``The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel'' by Stephen Leeb and Glen Strathy (Back Bay, $16.99). Leeb, the president of Leeb Capital Management, and Strathy, a journalist, view the oil shock and inflation of the 1970s as a template for the future, when growing demand from China and India will force oil prices to skyrocket -- something they think could happen in the next five years.

``New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century'' by Jed Perl (Vintage, $18.95). The New Republic's art critic offers a smart disquisition on the influence of a revolutionary coterie that included Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly.

``Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama'' by Steve Dougherty (Black Dog & Leventhal, $9.95). At 128 pages it's brief, but so is the career of the junior senator from Illinois and Democratic presidential hopeful.

``Falling Through the Earth'' by Danielle Trussoni (Picador, $14). Trussoni's troubled Wisconsin childhood and her attempts to win respect from her alcoholic Vietnam-vet father inform her tough-minded, moving memoir.

``Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer'' by James L. Swanson (HarperPerennial, $15.95). As the latest of myriad authors who have written about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, Swanson distills the surfeit of information into an urgent narrative that offers only the most riveting (and gory) details.

``Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq'' by Stephen Kinzer (Times, $15). How many governments has the U.S. overthrown? Fourteen, answers New York Times foreign correspondent Kinzer in this critical survey of strong-arm American diplomacy. Hawaii was the first, Iraq the last -- for now.

``Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping'' by Judith Levine (Free Press, $14). Levine's can-do attitude buoys her chronicle of a year-long experiment in forgoing luxuries (Q-tips, restaurants, video rentals), which also explores the anti- consumer movement.

``Black Swan Green'' by David Mitchell (Random House, $13.95). The challenging British novelist has set his rough-and- tumble coming-of-age story in Worcestershire, England, in 1982, where his 13-year-old narrator copes with a stammer, confronts bullies and follows the Falklands War.

``Labyrinth'' by Kate Mosse (Berkley, $15). In Mosse's fat page-turner, a pair of women separated by 800 years -- contemporary Alice and medieval Alais -- run from Christian villains eager to thwart their search for the object of desire in several recent thrillers: the Holy Grail.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Smiley's Hollywood, Farah's Somalia, Huck's Pap: New Fiction

2007-02-01T13:06:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- A post-Oscars gathering at a famous director's house turns into a marathon conversation about the ambitions and neuroses of the Hollywood elite in Jane Smiley's loquacious new novel ``Ten Days in the Hills'' (Knopf, $26).

Smiley's 1991 Pulitzer Prize winner, ``A Thousand Acres,'' was a modern reimagining of ``King Lear.'' This time she takes Boccaccio's ``Decameron'' as her template.

Ten voices interweave into a cacophony of self-obsession as the host and his guests -- including a writer, an actor, hangers- on and offspring -- watch movies in the screening room, yack endlessly about Hollywood, debate the just-launched war in Iraq and dream aloud. One even considers making a pornographic version of ``My Dinner With Andre.''

Some readers may find the characters pretentious and exasperating, but Smiley's bracing candor about desire, both personal and professional, is engrossing.

Other highlights this month:

``Knots'' by Nuruddin Farah (Riverhead, $25.95). The latest novel from the acclaimed Somali writer vividly tells the story of Cambara, who has emigrated to Canada but returns to Mogadishu to mourn the death of her son. In her war-ravaged homeland she finds succor among women peace activists, who, paradoxically, help her enlist mercenaries to reclaim her family home from a vicious warlord.

``Finn'' by Jon Clinch (Random House, $23.95). In ``The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,'' when Pap, Huck's father, is found dead he's surrounded by a strange assortment of odds and ends, among them a wooden leg, two black cloth masks and some ``women's underclothes.'' Clinch's intriguing aim in his debut novel is to explain the mystery by imagining the drunken old man's childhood and family.

``Red Cat'' by Peter Spiegelman (Knopf, $22.95). In Spiegelman's newest thriller (after ``Black Maps,'' a Shamus Award winner, and ``Death's Little Helpers''), New York City private investigator John March, the black-sheep scion of a banking family, makes his third appearance. This time he's coming to the aid of his rich, arrogant brother, who's being threatened by a predatory Internet connection he made the mistake of sleeping with. Spiegleman's pointed riffs on banking and investment schemes are part of the pleasure.

``Lost City Radio'' by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins, $24.95). Alarcon's previous book, ``War by Candlelight,'' was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award. His new novel is worthy of comparison to Graham Greene. Its central character is a woman in a fictional South American country who uses her popular radio program to connect people with loved ones ``disappeared'' during a civil war and who gets a tip that sends her on a quest to find her own lost husband.

``The Other Side of You'' by Salley Vickers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24). Vickers, a former psychologist, delivers a graceful, cerebral novel in the form of a ping-pong therapy session. The psychoanalyst has been traumatized by the childhood death of his brother; his suicidal patient has been traumatized by the death of her Caravaggio-obsessed lover.

``Devotion'' by Howard Norman (Houghton Mifflin, $24). In this powerful study of love and marriage by the highly regarded author of ``The Bird Artist,'' a Canadian father and his new son- in-law come to blows outside a London hotel. But is it solely because the young husband has been unfaithful on his honeymoon -- or is there reason for an even deeper distrust between the men?

``Valentine: A Love Story'' by Chet Raymo (Cowley Publications, $19.95). Raymo, best known for his popular science books, returns to fiction for the first time since 1993's ``The Dork of Cork'' with an entrancing life of the martyr St. Valentine, set against the foment of the early Christian church. After the death of his powerful patron's son, Valentine, a Roman doctor, is sent to prison, where he falls in love with the beautiful blind daughter of his jailer.

``The Time It Takes to Fall'' by Margaret Lazarus Dean (Simon & Schuster, $24) Dean's colorful coming-of-age novel views the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster through the eyes of a space-obsessed young girl, who's embroiled in her own parents' complicated lives in the NASA community at Florida's Cape Canaveral.

``Jamestown'' by Matthew Sharpe (Soft Skull Press, $25). With Brooklyn at war and Manhattan inhospitable, refugees flee on buses to Virginia in an ingenious post-apocalyptic satire that pits the natives (whose skin has turned red from their SPF 90 sunblock) against the unprepared interlopers. Much of the book is narrated in hilarious riffs by a trippy Pocahontas.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Oil, Nixon and Mao, Soulful Economists: February Nonfiction

2007-01-31T09:04:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Americans make 16 billion trips to the gas station and pump an average of 1,068 gallons per capita annually. Yet few of us understand the economic, political and cultural ramifications of such rampant consumption, Lisa Margonelli observes in ``Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline'' (Doubleday, $26).

After watching an Alaskan chemist use napalm to clean up an oil slick, Margonelli sets off on a 100,000-mile trek -- burning some 3,000 gallons of gas and jet fuel, she dutifully reports -- to explore ``petroleum culture'' and the global oil-supply chain.

Her chatty combination of reportage and travelogue serves up some fascinating facts: For example, China's booming car sales have resulted in traffic fatalities equivalent to ``a daily 747 crash.''

Other highlights this month:

``Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement'' by Brian Doherty (PublicAffairs, $35). Doherty, an editor at Reason magazine, offers an astute, entertaining history of thinkers as diverse as Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, who both believed that the best government was the one that involved itself least in the life of its citizens.

``The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters'' by Diane Coyle (Princeton, $27.95). Countering Thomas Carlyle's description of economics as the dismal science, Coyle shows how contemporary economists are bringing theory out of the classroom as they adopt a more pragmatic, humanistic approach to such problems as poverty and pollution.

``The Unwritten Laws of Business'' by W.J. King and James G. Skakoon (Currency, $14.95). This revised edition of the 60-year- old business primer ``The Unwritten Laws of Engineering'' (which helped inspire Raytheon CEO William Swanson's popular self- published pamphlet ``Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management'') is full of aphoristic advice -- for example, ``If you have no intention of listening to, considering, and perhaps using, someone's opinion, don't ask for it.''

``Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic'' by Chalmers Johnson (Metropolitan, $25). Following his bestselling ``Blowback'' and ``The Sorrows of Empire,'' Johnson powerfully demonstrates how the United States' costly attempts to install democracy abroad (too often with security as the real goal) have lured it into a permanent war economy that threatens to undermine the Constitution and bankrupt the nation.

``Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' by Margaret MacMillan (Random House, $27.95). The bestselling author of ``Paris 1919'' offers a fascinating look at the events surrounding that historic handshake of February 1972 and the important roles that Henry Kissinger, Pat Nixon, Chou En-lai and Jiang Qing also played.

``Gerald R. Ford'' by Douglas Brinkley (Times Books, $20). Ford, who died on Dec. 26, is largely remembered as the man unwittingly thrust into the presidency. Brinkley recounts key episodes in his brief tenure, most notably the signing of the Helsinki Accords, which, the author maintains, laid the groundwork for the end of the Cold War.

``The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression'' by James Mann (Viking, $19.95). Mann, a former Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times and the author of ``Rise of the Vulcans,'' shows why China's deeply embedded authoritarian culture is likely to persist despite the West's mistaken belief that economic reforms will inevitably lead to a humanistic democracy (``the soothing scenario'') or else revolution (``the upheaval scenario'').

``Planet India: How the Rise of the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World'' by Mira Kamdar. (Scribner, $26). Kamdar, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, weighs in on the Indian companies that have marshaled technology to transform the country into an economic dynamo that now imperils the West's economic and cultural hegemony.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

After Frey Debacle, Oprah Picks Poitier Book for Club

2007-01-26T15:38:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Oprah Winfrey chose Sidney Poitier's ``The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography'' (HarperSanFrancisco, $14.95 paperback) as the next pick for her television book club. The choice is all but certain to turn the memoir into a bestseller.

``Measure'' is the first title Oprah has given her seal of approval to since James Frey's memoir, ``A Million Little Pieces,'' was exposed as partially fabricated and caused Winfrey considerable embarrassment. Oprah's Book Club has been a major boon to the publishing industry; her imprimatur on a title means gold at the checkout counter.

Originally published in September 2000, ``The Measure of a Man'' is Poitier's second memoir and recounts his rise from an impoverished childhood on Cat Island in the Bahamas to his Oscar-winning film career. The book includes meditations on integrity, commitment, faith and forgiveness and finding meaningful pleasures in life. The book sold 125,000 hardcovers and paperbacks in its first run, according to the publisher.

Winfrey was chastened when the Smoking Gun Web site revealed that Frey had faked significant portions of ``A Million Little Pieces,'' a book she heavily promoted through her club and initially defended. That book had gone on to sell some 1.7 million copies following her imprimatur and in excess of three million copies in all.

Despite the scandal, Winfrey still managed to turn a revised edition of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir ``Night'' into a million-copy bestseller.

Inspirational Story

Mark Tauber, vice president and deputy publisher of HarperSanFrancisco, called Poitier's memoir ``a great inspirational story about an authentic life.

``Oprah loves these kinds of stories,'' he added in a telephone interview today, ``and she's never been shy about saying how much he's been important to her career. It makes a lot of sense.''

Until the debacle, Oprah's Book Club had become the nation's premier venue for promoting books. Begun on Sept. 19, 1996, with the selection of Jacquelyn Mitchard's novel ``The Deep End of the Ocean,'' a Winfrey endorsement has nearly always prompted a dramatic boost in a title's sales.

14-Month Hiatus

Tauber anticipates the same will hold for Poitier's book. ``The Measure of a Man'' sold 75,000 copies in hardcover, landing briefly on the New York Times bestseller list in 2000, and an additional 50,000 copies in paperback.

Though Tauber wouldn't reveal specific numbers, he said, ``it's safe to say that we're printing several hundred thousand new paperbacks.'' He reports that pre-sales of the book, which has already been delivered to bookstores and will be on sale today, have been strong.

In 2001, author Jonathan Franzen voiced his discomfort with the ``Oprah's Book Club'' sticker affixed to his novel ``The Corrections.'' Franzen was dropped from Winfrey's show for his perceived snobbery; he later acknowledged her in his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards. She'd probably made him a bestselling author, too.

After a 14-month hiatus from selecting books between April 2002 and June 2003, Oprah shifted the focus of her club from choosing works by contemporary authors to promoting classic novels. The first, John Steinbeck's ``East of Eden,'' sold in excess of 1.6 million copies. Subsequent choices fell off a bit. Yet even missteps can account for significant sales.

The final selection of the classics club, a three-volume, $29.95 box set of William Faulkner's ``As I Lay Dying,'' ``The Sound and the Fury'' and ``Light in August'' was perceived as too daunting for many but still sold in excess of a half million units.

Including today's selection, Winfrey has picked 58 titles in all for her club, making instant millionaires of some the authors.

Children's Book Prizes Go to Small-Town Quest, Surreal Pictures

2007-01-24T09:39:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Susan Patron's children's novel ``The Higher Power of Lucky'' (Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books) won the John Newbery Medal, while David Wiesner's illustrated book ``Flotsam'' (Clarion) took home the Randolph Caldecott Medal at an awards ceremony hosted in Seattle today by the American Library Association.

The prizes, which date from 1922 and 1938 respectively, are among the most prestigious in children's book publishing.

Patron's novel portrays the adventures of Lucky, a motherless 10-year-old who quests for a ``higher power'' among the quirky citizens and 12-step programs of the tiny desert town of Hard Pan, California, where she is looked after by her father's ex-wife, a Frenchwoman seemingly more interested in her on-line restaurant-management course than in caring for Lucky.

Wiesner has twice won the Caldecott Medal, first in 1992 for ``Tuesday'' and again in 2002 for his re-imagining of ``The Three Pigs.'' His ``Flotsam'' is a gorgeous, wordless depiction of a young beachcomber who finds the barnacle-encrusted Melville Underwater Camera. The camera is filled with astonishing photos of a strange undersea world, including a puffer fish rigged as a hot-air balloon and an intricate mechanical sea creature.

Closer examination with a magnifying glass and microscope reveals self-portraits of other children who have stumbled upon the camera, one dating back to the early 20th century.

In addition to the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, the ALA awards various other prizes for children's books. The Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal for nonfiction went to ``Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon'' by Catherine Thimmesh (Houghton Mifflin).

The Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature was given to ``American Born Chinese'' by Gene Luen Yang (Roaring Brook Press), the story of a child's alienation at school and the first graphic novel to be honored with the prize.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Edward Nawotka at ink@edwardn.com .

Eat Everything, Play Golf, Talk to Snails: Lifestyle Books

2007-01-24T09:37:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Dismissing most food experts as cranks, sociologist Barry Glassner reasons that since scientists, nutritionists and dietitians can't make up their minds about what foods are good for you and what foods aren't, you might as well eat what you want.

In his convincing ``The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong'' (Ecco, $25.95), Glassner looks at conflicting myths about food, such as the suggested health benefits of the Atkins diet and the purported deadliness of eggs and hot dogs.

Glassner decries those who preach ``the gospel of naught,'' the idea that ``the worth of a meal lies principally in what it lacks.'' He thinks America's obesity epidemic has been exaggerated, in part by a food industry eager to sell higher- priced ``natural'' products, many of which have no more nutritional value than processed foods.

The right path, he says, is to learn to take genuine pleasure from your meals. You'll be happier, which in and of itself will make you healthier.

Other highlights this month:

``Emerald Fairways and Foam-Flecked Seas: A Golfer's Pilgrimage to the Courses of Ireland'' by James W. Finegan (Simon & Schuster, $14). A golfer's dream book, this revised edition of Finegan's 1996 travelogue and guide covers nearly all the country's famed courses -- from new challenges, such as Druid's Heath (a ``thrilling, scenic, unyielding'' 7,450-yard par 71 outside Dublin) to classics like Ballybunion's outstanding links (one of Bill Clinton's favorite courses).

``Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo With Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts and Other Surprising Turns'' edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell (Doubleday, $24.95). Among the essays in this intriguing anthology are pieces by a Sept. 11 widow who discusses her conflicted feelings about the compensation she received for her husband's death, by an heiress who struggles with ``affluenza'' and by a married couple who nearly divorced over the family finances.

``The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts'' by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins, $22.95). The acclaimed Czech author of ``The Unbearable Lightness of Being'' summarizes his notions of what makes a great novel and addresses the novel's role in Western Civilization -- where, he argues, fiction has helped create a shared experience that transcends languages and nationalities.

``The Lady in the Palazzo'' by Marlena de Blasi (Algonquin, $23.95). The cookbook writer does for Umbria what Frances Mayes did for Tuscany in this memoir about renovating the ballroom of a medieval palazzo in the heart of Orvieto. As prescribed by the genre, the undertaking doesn't go as planned, but eventually she wins over her eccentric, suspicious neighbors with her food and charm.

``Alternadad'' by Neal Pollack (Pantheon, $23.95). If you think being the parent of a young child might cramp your style, think again, says Pollock in this funny and vulgar memoir of trying to mold his toddler, Elijah, into a Ramones-loving little hipster -- a mirror image of himself -- while avoiding the ire of his too tolerant wife.

``Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction'' by Jake Halpern (Houghton Mifflin, $23). This breezy, intriguing book casts a cold eye on the culture of celebrity -- the aspiring stars of reality television shows, the personal assistants and entourages who bask in reflected glory and the kingmakers at celebrity-obsessed magazines like US Weekly.

``Talk to the Snail: Ten Commandments for Understanding the French'' by Stephen Clarke (Bloomsbury, $14.95). A witty, tongue- in-cheek demystification of such enigmas as why French waiters are rude and why French workers are always going on strike. Clarke also offers his hard-won advice on seducing French women and on speaking French, if need be, so as to be polite and cutting at the same time.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Edward Nawotka at ink@edwardn.com .

2007-01-11T11:19:00.001-06:00

Starbucks Follows Albom Bestseller With War Memoir by Soldier

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- After selling more than 92,000 copies of Mitch Albom's bestseller ``For One More Day,'' Starbucks has changed course and chosen an African war memoir by an unknown, 25-year-old writer as its second venture into book sales, the company announced yesterday.

The book is ``A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22) by Ishmael Beah, a onetime child soldier in Sierra Leone. The book is scheduled to go on general sale Feb. 13 and at Starbucks cafes two days later. It chronicles Beah's journey from the drug-ravaged battlefields of West Africa, where he started fighting as a hip-hop happy 13-year-old, to his reintroduction to civilian life with the help of Unicef and his eventual expatriation to the U.S., where he graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.

It's a daring selection for a company that had little to do with the book business before last year, when Starbucks began retailing Albom's frothy novel about a suicidal, alcoholic man seeking reconciliation with the ghost of his dead mother. With some 6,000 U.S. outlets, Starbucks proved an able bookseller, helping to make ``For One More Day'' a bestseller. Of course, that book was virtually a guaranteed hit: Albom already had sold some 6 million copies of his previous novel, ``The Five People You Meet in Heaven,'' and had a well-established audience.

44 Million Customers

Will the 44 million customers who enter a Starbucks store each week want to cozy up to a story full of grim details of African poverty, deprivation and gore while sipping their $4 Grande lattes? Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz thinks so.

``This is one of the most gripping books I have ever read,'' Schultz said in a prepared statement. ``We were all inspired by this tale of determination and hope and knew it was an important book to share with our customers.''

While Beah's memoir may appear to be a departure from Albom's saccharine fare, it does share a theme of redemption and rescue. Moreover, readers are not inured to such tales; ``Beasts of No Nation,'' Uzodinma Iweala's 2005 novel about a similar child soldier, with its brutal depictions of African warfare, won the 2006 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.

The biggest risk in this venture is being taken on by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a modest-size literary publishing house and subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC. Farrar plans a printing far in excess of the typical first run of 10,000 to 15,000 copies of a memoir by an unknown, first-time writer just to deliver adequate stock to every Starbucks outlet. If the book fails, the result may hit them hard.

Nevertheless, Starbucks appears confident. The company plans to donate $2 for every copy of ``A Long Way Gone'' sold at Starbucks to the U.S. fund for Unicef. With the announced minimum donation being $100,000, it would appear the company anticipates it will sell at least 50,000 copies of the book.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Clever Econ, Vonnegut vs. Bush, Hershey Empire: New Paperbacks

2007-01-10T10:22:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Your typical street thug can expect to be shot twice, arrested six times and have a one in four chance of being killed, in exchange for an average wage of less than $10 an hour.

An altogether better idea, writes Tim Harford in his fascinating book ``The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, Why the Poor Are Poor -- and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!'' (Random House), would be to join a crime syndicate. Organized crime tends to eschew casual violence, and by involving itself in legitimate businesses is a more sustainable and, consequently, more profitable proposition.

The ``Dear Economist'' columnist for the Financial Times, Harford applies Economics 101 concepts of supply and demand, and competition and efficiency, to explain the economics of everyday life and, among other things, how buying coffee from Starbucks increases U.S. imports, which consequently affects the trade deficit, potentially leading to long-term interest-rate increases, which may jeopardize economic growth.

Much like Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's popular ``Freakonomics,'' Harford manages to simultaneously entertain as well as edify with a string of ``who knew?'' revelations.

Other highlights this month include:

``Arthur & George'' by Julian Barnes (Vintage). The acclaimed English writer's most recent book is one of his best: The fictionalization of a true-life case in which author Arthur Conan Doyle rose to the defense of George Edalji, a half Scots, half-Indian lawyer wrongfully convicted of terrorizing his local farm community by writing obscene letters and mutilating cattle.

``A Man Without a Country'' by Kurt Vonnegut (Random House). Octogenarian Vonnegut has made no secret of his disdain for the Bush administration and puts his ire on full display in this pithy collection of essays from the past five years, which covers the war in Iraq, creative writing, socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs and myriad other personal enthusiasms and irritants.

``Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams'' by Michael D'Antonio (Simon & Schuster). This page-turning biography of Hershey describes a benevolent corporate dictator who built his chocolate empire, Hershey Co., but found his business triumph tempered by personal tragedy.

``The Flight of the Creative Class'' by Richard Florida (HarperCollins). Florida, an economist and author of the bestseller ``The Rise of the Creative Class'' looks at why skilled workers such as financial managers and software programmers are leaving the U.S. for better paid jobs abroad and what this implies for the future of American business.

``Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead'' by Tamara Draut (Anchor). A bracing look at the economic challenges young professionals face when entering the job market and establishing careers, from paying back crippling student loans to becoming unwilling cannon fodder in generational war against their experienced, entrenched elders.

``At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68'' by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster). The concluding volume in Branch's magisterial trilogy documenting the civil rights movement begins with an account of the 1965 Selma marches, covers the passage of the Voting Rights Act and concludes with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

``The Diviners'' by Rick Moody (Back Bay). This half-baked satire from the author of ``The Ice Storm'' depicts a cadre of ambitious Hollywood hopefuls trying to attach themselves to a treatment for a 13-part miniseries that tracks a group of water dowsers from ancient to modern times, even after it's proven to be merely a piece of authorless, buzz-worthy nonsense.

``Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia'' by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin). Gilbert's charming, if self-indulgent, chronicle of a post- divorce, soul-searching sojourn describes how she got fat, meditated and once again fell in love.

``Apex Hides the Hurt'' by Colson Whitehead (Anchor). One of the country's most talented young novelists, Whitehead offers an engaging, albeit minor, work about a down-on-his-luck brand consultant beckoned to a rural Midwestern town in order to give it a new name: Will it be New Prospera, which reflects the town's ambition to become a hi-tech haven, or something that harks back to its origins as a utopia for freed slaves?

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Mailer's Hitler, Clarke's Thriller, Amis's Gulag: New Fiction

2007-01-04T09:03:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Norman Mailer, the 83-year-old colossus of American letters, returns this month with his first novel in more than a decade: ``The Castle in the Forest'' (Random House, $26.95), a fictional account of Adolf Hitler's youth as filtered through a Freudian lens.

Narrated by Dieter, one of Satan's minions who serves as Hitler's supernatural mentor, it is a bilious journey through the Fuhrer's first 13 years, one that begins with the moment of Hitler's violent conception by his creepy, incestuous parents. It lingers voyeuristically on infant Adolf's bodily functions, his parents' grim relationship and episodes of youthful wickedness.

The book may not be as epic as ``The Executioner's Song'' or ``Harlot's Ghost,'' but it is as provocative and nearly as brilliant -- a perfect bookend to his 1997 ``The Gospel According to the Son,'' which portrayed Jesus as a confused young man guided by voices.

Dieter, who counsels the Fuhrer throughout World War II while disguised as an SS intelligence officer, reminds the reader, ``Saintliness is present in everyone, even among the worst of the worst.'' It's a bit doubtful in this case.

Other highlights this month:

``House of Meetings'' by Martin Amis (Knopf, $23). Amis wrote openly about his disgust with Stalinist Russia in his 2002 memoir ``Koba the Dread.'' He revisits the subject in this novel about a wealthy octogenarian Russian expat touring the Gulags, where he and his brother were imprisoned for 14 years, and reminiscing about their shared love for a once-vivacious Jewish woman.

``Surveillance'' by Jonathan Raban (Pantheon, $24). Raban's timely disquisition on the fragility of truth and identity in the information age stars a Seattle magazine writer who discovers a bestselling memoir is a fake, while, in the background, a frenzied Department of Homeland Security is taking dishonorable, drastic measures to protect the country from terrorism.

``Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name'' by Vendela Vida (Ecco, $23.95). Like Vida's first novel (2003's ``And Now You Can Go'') this is the story of a seemingly insensate young woman whose life becomes unmoored: After the man she believed to be her father dies, 28-year-old Clarissa leaves her fiance and journeys to the Arctic to search for her real father among the Sami people of Lapland.

``Exit A'' by Anthony Swofford (Scribner, $25). The former sniper who penned the superb Desert Storm memoir ``Jarhead'' takes his first shot at fiction in this uneven but compelling thriller about an army brat living at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo and his criminally minded girlfriend -- the daughter of the base commander -- who repeatedly lures him into the Japanese underworld.

``Ice'' by Vladimir Sorokin (New York Review Books, $23.95). This trippy satire from one of Russia's most talented writers depicts the lives of three recruits to a bizarre religious sect: the ``heart speakers'' who beat acolytes with ice-covered hammers and seek spiritual salvation through orgasm.

``Travels in the Scriptorium'' by Paul Auster (Holt, $22). A slim, self-referential meta-fiction -- more a hall of rumors than a novel -- in which a puzzled elderly man sitting in a room discovers a manuscript called ``Travels in the Scriptorium,'' itself the story of a similar elderly man sitting in a room, written by a character who long ago disappeared from Auster's debut work, ``The New York Trilogy.''

``Skylight Confessions'' by Alice Hoffman (Little, Brown, $24.99)) In Hoffman's new magic-realist ghost story, a girl loses both of her parents and vows to marry the first man she meets, who turns out to be a -- a chilly Yalie living in his parents' glass and steel house. She bears him a son and dies when the boy is young, only to return to haunt the callous father.

``Returning to Earth'' by Jim Harrison (Grove, $24). Harrison's meditative novel uses four narrators to recount the death from Lou Gehrig's disease of a 45-year-old Chippewa-Finnish man and its impact on his family, some of whom find solace in the Chippewa belief that his spirit has returned to earth to inhabit a bear.

``Breakpoint'' by Richard A. Clarke (Putnam, $25.95). Former U.S. counterterrorism czar delivers a convoluted techno-thriller set in 2012, portraying terrorist attacks on U.S. communications networks systems to cripple the development of ``Living Software'' -- a self-perpetuating virtual computer program designed to police cyberspace -- and distract from an even more insidious plot.

``Charity Girl'' by Michael Lowenthal (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Lowenthal uses a villainous episode in American history -- the WWI-era internment of some 30,000 women thought to have venereal diseases -- as the basis for this story of a young Jewish girl in Boston who flees an arranged marriage into the arms of an infected soldier, is imprisoned and finds salvation in feminism and rebellion.

$35 Billion Giveaway, Friedman Bio, Pepsi: January Nonfiction

2007-01-03T09:19:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- In 2007 America's 68,000 philanthropic foundations are expected to give away $35 billion. Yet they are among the least accountable institutions at work in the economy and little is known about the decision-making of the trustees responsible for so much cash.

In ``The Foundation: A Great American Secret'' (PublicAffairs, $27.95), subtitled ``How Private Wealth Is Changing the World,'' Duke University professor Joel L. Fleishman penetrates this opaque culture. His central question is: Considering the tremendous tax breaks afforded charitable donations to foundations, amounting to nearly $20 billion in lost tax revenue per year, is the public getting its money's worth?

Fleishman surveys nearly 100 different foundation-funded projects and offers a dozen detailed case studies. He comes away believing foundations represent the best opportunity for creating an ``independent, multi-power-center society.''

Fleishman finds that foundations generally spend their money responsibly, though all too often they lack an adequate strategy to achieve their lofty goals. They also come up short on accountability and don't communicate well and, as a consequence, are viewed as arrogant and aloof.

Other highlights this month include:

``Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business'' by John Newhouse (Knopf, $26.95). A blow-by-blow account of the evolution of the two giants of the modern airliner industry and their seesawing fortunes in the international market after years of mismanagement.

``Milton Friedman: A Biography'' by Lanny Ebenstein (Palgrave Macmillan, $27.95). The first full-length biography of the Nobel Prize winner who died in November is a surprisingly readable, succinct portrait of the combative economist. It tracks his development, from his early years as a Keynes-influenced theorist to his transformation into a champion of laissez-faire capitalism.

``On the Wealth of Nations'' by P.J. O'Rourke (Atlantic Monthly, $21.95). The satirist rereads Adam Smith's thumb sucker on economic theory ``so you don't have to'' and concludes he's still relevant in the age of outsourcing and the service economy. Long stretches, however, read like ``Modern Maturity in Urdu.''

``The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business'' by Stephanie Capparell (Free Press, $25). A chronicle of how in the late 1940s and 50s Pepsi became one of the first major American corporations to hire black executives. The company started recruiting African- American salesmen to push their cola to the African-American market in an effort to outmaneuver Coke, the dominant company with ties to Georgia's racist political machine.

``Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media'' by Eric Klinenberg (Metropolitan Books, $26). As conglomerates subsume the majority of local radio and television stations, stockholders may cheer but the general public suffers, says Klinenberg, in this argumentative examination of the aftermath of media deregulation and the subsequent consolidation.

``Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die'' by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Random House, $24.95). Fans of counterintuitive business books, such as ``Freakonomics'' and ``The Tipping Point,'' will enjoy this entertaining new volume that uses urban legends and bogus public health scares to explain why some stories and ideas are more memorable than others, especially when used in advertising, sales and employee development.

``A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder; How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place'' by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. (Little, Brown, $25.99). Another counterintuitive tome in which a Columbia University B-school professor and a journalist argue against the organization gurus who assert that tight governance makes for best practice. Instead, they encourage a freewheeling approach they assert will result in more creativity and serendipitous innovation.

``The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America'' by Jeffrey Rosen (Times Books, $25.95). The legal affairs editor at the New Republic examines how four pairs of men -- sometimes working at cross-purposes -- transformed the law of the land: John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson; Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Marshall Harlan; Hugo Black and William O. Douglas; and Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist.

``Halsey's Typhoon: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm, and an Untold Rescue'' by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (Atlantic Monthly, $35). This harrowing disaster tale describes how Admiral ``Bull'' Halsey and the U.S. Pacific fleet lost three destroyers and nearly 800 men in 1944, not to Japanese dive bombers but to Typhoon Cobra, a storm that produced 90-foot waves and 150-mph winds.

Former Top Trader Fossett an Adventurer But Not a Daredevil

2006-12-26T12:32:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- What's your New Year's resolution? Steve Fossett says he intends to break the absolute land-speed record in 2007.

The 62-year-old, who made his fortune trading options and securities, is already the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in an airplane and the first to circumnavigate the globe alone in a balloon. He has swum the English Channel, finished the Iditarod, sailed across the Pacific Ocean single- handedly and holds 115 world records in five different sports.

Despite all this, he still refuses to bungee-jump.

``When people do that, they want to free-fall and have the living daylights scared out of them,'' Fossett says. ``I'm not a thrill seeker. I don't enjoy getting scared.''

On Dec. 15, the National Aviation Hall of Fame announced that it would induct Fossett, along with four others, including Frederick W. Smith, the founder of FedEx, and space shuttle astronaut Sally Ride, first American woman in space.

Fossett's personal philosophy of risk and reward is elaborated in his recent memoir, ``Chasing the Wind: The Autobiography of Steve Fossett'' (Virgin Books).

I spoke with Fossett by phone from his home in Monterey, California.

Nawotka: How does becoming an author rate in difficulty against your other achievements?

Fossett: People have been asking me to write a book for a long time. It was a daunting task that took two years and covers the most important projects that I've been involved in and recounts some of the best stories. I accomplished an awful lot in business, but it's not polite to talk about how much money you make, so the story is not as interesting to tell. It's a lot more fun to share an experience, which is what I do here.

Dangerous Projects

Nawotka: Do you see any corollary between your business career and pursuit of world records?

Fossett: The management skills I developed in trading have enabled me to accomplish what I have. It was a logical progression. I came from a business where I was managing people and trying to control risk. The kinds of projects I undertake are dangerous and require a strong team. I haven't done these things with any extraordinary talent or ability. I'm very well organized and know how to set goals. What really differentiates me is aspiration. I'm surprised we don't see more businessmen taking more high-risk adventures -- they have all the necessary skills.

Around Ireland

Nawotka: You describe your first record, the speed record for circumnavigating Ireland in a sailboat, as almost accidental.

Fossett: In 1993, I just happened to have one of the fastest sailboats in the world at the time. I was there to participate in another race, but then I saw an ideal weather pattern where I could follow the winds circulating around the coast of Ireland and challenge the record. So I went for it. The previous record was 75 hours, but I was able to do the entire 704-mile circumference in 44 hours.

Nawotka: A relatively small number of people fly planes or balloons, but the absolute world land-speed record is set by driving, something nearly everyone knows how to do. Do you anticipate this record attempt will generate even more interest, especially in America, where people take pride in big, fast cars?

Auto Love

Fossett: True, this record reflects on our American love for driving cars fast, and while I think it's wonderful that the public follows what I'm doing -- and I hope they receive some motivation -- I'm not doing it for publicity. The absolute land speed record is one of the most prominent of all world records and goes back to the start of the car. The British have held the record since 1983 and have been more important to the sport, but it would be very good for an American to come back and capture this record.

Nawotka: The record is 763 miles per hour, and you're shooting for 800. What's the fastest you've ever driven?

Fossett: I went 298 miles per hour out on the Bonneville Salt Flats in a car with a four cylinder Saturn engine.

Nawotka: Surely, you'll need something with a little more muscle to break the record?

Fighter-Jet Engine

Fossett: I have seven people working on a car with me, including Craig Breedlove, who originally drove 600 miles per hour, and an aerodynamicist. The car utilizes a fighter-jet engine and relies on something between airplane aerodynamics and ground effects to cope with moving through the transonic speed range. It takes some very good technology to break that record and live to talk about it.

Sony Reader, Nude Tourists, Machiavelli, Football: Gift Books

2006-12-20T13:53:00.001-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- If you're anything like me, you still have a few people left on your holiday gift list. These suggestions should make last-minute shopping less stressful.

One of the most exciting book gifts of the year isn't a book at all: it's the Sony Reader, a device for reading digital books that resembles a slim, leather-bound paperback. It is the same size and weight as a small book, has a surprisingly bright and easy-to-read screen, and holds hundreds of books in its memory. At $350 it's not cheap, but it's the first digital reader that actually feels like a book.

Nick Hornby's ``Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt'' (McSweeney's, $14) is the second collection -- after 2004's ``The Polysyllabic Spree'' -- of the popular novelist's columns from the Believer magazine on the subject of his leisure reading. Each brief, humorous essay starts off with a list of ``Books Bought'' and ``Books Read,'' of which the former almost always exceeds the latter.

Lawrence Osborne's ``The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall'' (North Point Press, $24) is perfect for the jetsetter afflicted with wanderlust. An acerbic, witty account of the author's journey from opulent Dubai through Asia to visit a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea, the book tries to answer the question: ``What does tourism, the world's single largest business, have to sell?''

Know someone actually looking forward to Windows Vista? Then ``The Best of Technology Writing 2006,'' edited by Brendan I. Koerner (DigitalCultureBooks, $17.95) is for them. The book offers two dozen entertaining articles about computers and digital culture culled from various geek bibles, including Wired magazine and Technology Review.

One contributor to that volume is Steven Johnson, whose latest book is the compulsively readable ``The Ghost Map'' (Riverhead, $26.95). Subtitled, ``The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World,'' the book makes the story of a cholera epidemic in 1854 and the English physician who sought to contain it a page- turning thriller, sprinkled with a heady dose of insight into the evolution of modern urban design and public health.

Another engrossing read comes from David Edmonds and John Eidinow, whose ``Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment'' (Ecco, $25.95) documents the feud between two of the 18th century's intellectual giants: the Scotsman David Hume, who believed in the apotheosis of reason, and Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fought for the exaltation of emotion.

Eggheads also populate Ken Jennings's ``Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs'' (Villard, $25.95). Jennings is best known as the competitor who spent more than two years on ``Jeopardy!'' where he won more than $2.5 million. He proves to be an able writer, zestfully delving into the subculture of the information-obsessed and offering dozens of brain teasers along the way.

For physical rather than intellectual gamesmanship, try Mark St. Amant's ``Just Kick It: Tales of an Underdog, Over-Age, Out- of-Place Semi-Pro Football Player'' (Scribner, $23), in which St. Amant, a 37-year-old former advertising executive and fantasy- football fanatic, joins a real, semi-pro football team and experiences equal amounts of pleasure and pain by donning the pads and taking the hits.

In ``The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style'' (Collins, $18.95), Nicholas Antongiavanni -- the nom-de-plume of political speechwriter Michael Anton -- uses ``The Prince'' as a blueprint for men to dress for success and get almost anything they want, from a promotion to a date.

A woman's handbag can say as much if not more about her than a man's suit, or so argues Winifred Gallagher in ``It's in the Bag: What Purses Reveal -- and Conceal'' (HarperCollins, $19.95). Her brief, delightful book covers the history of the handbag, the politics of the luxury-bag design business, and what the contents of a woman's handbag divulge about her inner life.

Finally, for those who insist the holidays have something to do with matters of the spirit, the excellent anthology ``This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women,'' edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman (Holt, $23), is especially appropriate for the season. Based on the National Public Radio series of the same name, ``This I Believe'' includes 80 personal essays from famous individuals, such as John McCain and Eleanor Roosevelt, and ordinary Americans, about their beliefs.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Classic Ferraris and Private Islands: Holiday Lifestyle Books

2006-12-14T10:03:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The ferociously sexy cover of ``Ferrari: The Road from Maranello'' by Dennis Adler (Random House, $45) is enough to make a grown man consider a mid-life crisis: a brilliant red Ferrari 250 GTO, the twin slashes in its flanks suggesting flight even at rest.

This beautifully illustrated history of the Italian automaker started by Enzo Ferrari in 1945 offers more than 350 archival photographs of the great Ferrari racers and road cars, as well as interviews with legendary designers, such as Sergio Pininfarina, and drivers, including Dan Gurney and Carroll Shelby.

``Luxury Private Islands'' edited by Vladi Private Islands (teNeues, $45). Who hasn't dreamed of escaping to a tropical paradise all your own? This dreamy book features more than 300 photos of some of world's most exclusive and expensive private properties, including Marlon Brando's South Pacific atoll, Sir Richard Branson's island in the British Virgin Islands and Mel Gibson's hideaway in Fiji.

``Destination Art'' by Amy Dempsey (University of California Press, $39.95). This new travel guide for the international art tourist surveys 200 modern and contemporary art destinations, offering a critique of the most important large-scale, public works of this and the last century, and covering a wide variety environmental pieces, sculpture parks, architecture and art towns.

``A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry'' by R. Howard Block (Random House, $25.95). The head of Yale's humanities department recounts the story of the Battle of Hastings and the immense effort that went into embroidering it onto the Bayeux Tapestry, perhaps the most memorable 230 feet of fabric in the world.

``Legacy of Honor: The Values and Influence of America's Eagle Scouts'' by Alvin Townley (Thomas Dunne, $24.95). Townley considers how famous Eagle Scouts -- Microsoft founder Bill Gates, astronaut Jim Lovell and hotelier J.W. Marriott, among them -- have applied the Scouts' lessons of service, virtue and leadership in their professional and personal lives.

Townley interviews Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as well as everyday citizens, among them a Vietnam War POW and a Hurricane Katrina relief worker. These are the true role models in an era when celebrity so often trumps heroism.

``The Art of Being a Woman: A Simple Guide to Everyday Love and Laughter'' by Veronique Vienne (Clarkson Potter, $18). Vienne, who wrote the bestseller ``The Art of Doing Nothing'' is yet another Frenchwoman who purports to know how American women can create more joie de vivre. She includes the predictable entreaties to accessorize wisely and not take men too seriously, but also tosses in some retro advice: Do housework in a nice dress and heels, and treat your home as if it were ``a lover.''

``Dave Barry's Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?'' by Dave Barry (Three Rivers, $24.95). This new collection of essays is an antidote to sanctimonious self-help guides and tries to answer age-old questions, such as ``Why it is not a good idea to use squirrels for money'' and ``Why good colleges cost so much, and how to make sure your child does not get into one.''

``The Zurau Aphorisms'' by Franz Kafka (Schocken, $15.95). These philosophical musings, recently rediscovered by the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, were written while the enigmatic Czech author was suffering from tuberculosis. They provide unique insight into Kafka's beguiling writing -- work that he says is akin to shedding light ``on a rapidly fleeing grimace.''

``An Orgy of Playboy's Eldon Dedini'' by Eldon Dedini (Fantagraphics, $39.95). Eldon Dedini's colorful cartoons about the vagaries of sex and love were a staple of Playboy magazine from 1959 to 2005. This collection brings together 200 of Dedini's signature panels of men, women and satyrs. Risque, sexist and definitely politically incorrect, they are also frequently funny and have a sharp satirical bite.

``Sex, Lies and Handwriting: A Top Expert Reveals the Secrets Hidden in Your Handwriting'' by Michelle Dresbold (Free Press, $24). The author argues that penmanship is a window into the soul. Here she analyzes the writing of politicians, re- examines written evidence in a number of unsolved criminal cases, and offers tips on reading love letters to see what they might be revealing -- or hiding.

Iraq Diagnosis, Putin's Russia, Women and Money: New Paperbacks

2006-12-07T09:07:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Readers looking to cut through the White House and media spin of the Iraq Study Group report released yesterday can now read the document themselves and draw their own conclusions.

A tone of urgency pervades ``The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward -- A New Approach,'' by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton (Vintage). It states, ``Current U.S. policy is not working, as the level of violence in Iraq is rising and the government is not advancing national reconciliation,'' and the $2 billion a week being spent in Iraq is ``not sustainable over an extended period, especially when progress is not being made.'' Baker and his team offer President Bush 79 recommendations for moving forward.

If 2004's ``9/11 Commission Report'' is any guide, expect to see the study-group manifesto heat up the bestseller lists. It is likely to attract a similarly broad swath of readers -- many of whom will be looking for answers to the question, ``Now what?''

Other highlights this month include:

``Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy'' by Anna Politkovskaya (Owl). Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist who was murdered in October, wrote this highly critical account of life in the New Russia, a dismal virtual dictatorship, where corruption ensures high offices go to the highest bidder, extra- judicial murders go unpunished and starving soldiers fight an endless, pointless war against terror in Chechnya. And this all before outspoken critics began expiring in exotic ways.

``Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash'' by Liz Perle (Picador). Reflecting on her own transition from well-off wife to nearly bankrupt divorcee, Perle examines the complicated relationship women have with money -- from the financial sacrifices that can factor into the decision to marry and have children, to some women's seemingly irrational need for costly handbags, cosmetics and shoes.

``President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination'' by Richard Reeves (Simon & Schuster). One of nearly 900 books on the late president, Reeve's biography focuses on Reagan as ``The Great Communicator'' -- of ideas rather than facts -- and demonstrates how Reagan's seemingly low-key demeanor masked a sharp, intuitive intellect that charmed everyone from Joe Public to Mikhail Gorbachev.

``A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History'' by Thomas Bender (Hill & Wang). A revisionist survey of American history that places U.S. development in the context of global history. Bender argues that the Civil War was but one conflict in a larger wave of revolutions taking place around the world at the same time, and that our financial influence is not solely of our making, but the result of broader capitalist movement across centuries and continents.

``Heroes: A History of Hero Worship'' by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Anchor). Since Sept. 11, 2001, the word ``hero'' has been tossed around like confetti. Here, a British historian contemplates the meaning of heroism and tries to find it in the lives of Alcibiades, El Cid, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Cato, Sir Francis Drake and Garibaldi, all of whom she measures against archetypes including Achilles the soldier and Odysseus the adventurer.

``Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change'' by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bloomsbury). The New Yorker magazine writer's account of climate change and degradation examines sites in Alaska, the Netherlands and elsewhere and argues that changing weather patterns will threaten agriculture and food supplies while warmer seas will spawn more storms of greater intensity and flood more coastal areas.

``The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca'' by Tahir Shah (Bantam). A British journalist's spirited memoir of moving his young family from rainy London to mystifying Morocco, where he purchases Dar Khalifa, a ruined mansion by the sea, and much like Peter Mayle in ``A Year in Provence,'' finds that renovating his new home in the midst of a foreign culture is far more trouble than he anticipated.

``Gentlemen and Players'' by Joanne Harris (HarperCollins). In this entertaining novel by the author of ``Chocolat,'' a veteran Latin teacher and a young newcomer -- one with access to dangerous secrets -- vie for control over the future of the revered St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, itself struggling to adapt to the new, fast-moving information age while trying to maintain the school's traditional, buttoned-down manner.

``Everybody Loves Somebody'' by Joanna Scott (Back Bay). This absorbing collection of 10 short stories considers the vagaries of love and marriage in a wide variety of contexts, from Europe in the wake of World War I, where a young couple's wedding takes on unexpected layers of meaning, to contemporary New York, where a Madison Avenue ad exec crashes his car in the Catskills while traveling home and is forced reconsider the definition of family.

Hannibal's Youth, Holy Shroud, Mosley's Sex Spree: New Novels

2006-12-05T07:54:00.000-06:00

By Edward Nawotka

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Hannibal ``The Cannibal'' Lecter returns after a seven-year hiatus in ``Hannibal Rising'' (Delacorte), Thomas Harris's prequel to ``Silence of the Lambs'' and ``Hannibal.'' In this serial killer coming-of-age story, Harris gives Lecter a back story, attributing his unusual appetite to a childhood spent amid the horrors of World War II's Eastern Front, where he's discovered wandering in the snow, mute and chained.

When his uncle rescues him from a Russian orphanage and sends him to France, he finds succor with an exotic aunt, the Lady Murasaki. After becoming the youngest student ever admitted to medical school, Lecter's transformation into a monster ensues. Like Harris's previous novels, ``Hannibal Rising'' isn't for the queasy.

Other highlights this month include:

``Paula Spencer'' by Roddy Doyle (Viking). Doyle's sequel to the superb ``The Woman Who Walked Into Doors'' (1996) is equally worthy and now finds working-class Irish housewife Paula Spencer widowed, sober, coping with her grown children and struggling to make a new life for herself.

``Arlington Park'' by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this suburban novel of manners, the members of an ensemble of upper-class London women are subsumed with ennui, regret and anxiety about their social standing during a single day that leads up to a tense, alcohol-fueled dinner party with their self- satisfied husbands.

``The Teahouse Fire'' by Ellis Avery (Riverhead). Fans of ``Memoirs of a Geisha'' will like this vivid historical novel set in 19th-century Kyoto about a young orphaned American girl who is taken in as a servant at a teahouse, where she serves a difficult mistress, witnesses the advent of modern Japan and undergoes her own Geisha-like rebirth.

``Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel'' by Walter Mosley (Bloomsbury). Mosley is more than a mystery writer. He's written science fiction, quasi-political thrillers and now his first erotic novel, which stars Cordel Carmel, a 45-year-old man who goes on a soul-searching sex spree after finding his longtime girlfriend in bed with a well-endowed white man.

``The Alchemy of Desire'' by Tarun J. Tejpal (Ecco). Well- known Indian newsman Tejpal serves up a fat, Henry Miller-esqe novel about literary inspiration and sex, in which a writer renovating a house in the Himalayas uncovers the diary of a glamorous American woman's adventures in the subcontinent. He soon falls for this dead, idealized woman, spurning his own very real, very desirable wife.

``The End as I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety'' by Kevin Shay (Doubleday). Shay, contributor to the hipster literary journal ``McSweeney's,'' revisits the Y2K scare in this quirky story featuring a neurotic puppeteer and children's entertainer who embarks on a cross-country road trip to warn that the end is nigh.

``Spinning Dixie'' by Eric Dezenhall (Thomas Dunne). The author, CEO of an eponymous Washington crisis-management firm, applies his expertise in this broad farce about a disgraced presidential press secretary who tries to help a high-school girlfriend save her Tennessee plantation from her nefarious ex- husband who intends to use it as a toxic waste dump. The solution involves creating a media storm that involves an army of Civil War re-enactors, the National Guard and the promise of Confederate gold.

``The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud'' by Julia Navarro (Bantam). A bestseller abroad, Navarro's entry in the post-``Da Vinci Code'' horse race of religious-themed thrillers starts with a fire at the Turin Cathedral, where Jesus' burial cloth is housed. When the Italian Art Crimes Department investigates, they uncover a pattern of similar suspicious fires, leading to evidence of a longstanding war between the Knights Templar and other secret societies.

``The Black Sun'' by James Twining (HarperCollins). The second in a budding series about former CIA agent and art thief Tom Kirk, who, after an Auschwitz survivor is murdered and his tattooed arm disappears, is recruited to thwart an extremist neo- Nazi group called Kristall Blade from recovering Adolf Eichmann's infamous Hungarian ``gold train'' and uncovering the Russian Amber Room.

Corporate Culture, Silent Cal, Loud Jim: December Nonfiction

2006-12-04T10:35:00.000-06:00

Corporate Culture, Silent Cal, Loud Jim: December Nonfiction

By Edward Nawotka

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- A company's culture may be invisible, but it pervades every aspect of a business environment, writes Jerome Want in ``Corporate Culture: Illuminating the Black Hole'' (St. Martin's).

Want, a former director of Organization Design and Development with Motorola, examines the strategies and orthodoxies at a variety of companies, from Cisco to Harley- Davidson, and defines the predominant corporate cultures, from predatory to bureaucratic to what he dubs ``high-performing New Age.''

He explains how the forward-thinking, environmentally savvy and employee-sensitive corporate culture at Vermont's Green Mountain Coffee Roasters helped transform it from a small regional operation to a nationally recognized brand.

Mature companies such as Xerox and Polaroid, once at the pinnacle of their industries, have suffered from their intransigent corporate cultures. Internal dynamics can have a serious effect on a company's bottom line and may be an elusive but very real indicator of a company's future success or failure.

Other highlights this month include:

``Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich'' by James J. Cramer (Simon & Schuster). Cramer, the ``Booyah''-bellowing host of CNBC's ``Mad Money,'' distills his investment wisdom in this new book, which promises to explain how he judges a stock in mere seconds during the show's infamous ``Lightning Round,'' what to look out for in CEO and CFO interviews, and why he's so manic on- air.

``About Alice'' by Calvin Trillin (Random House). Trillin's wife, Alice, who often starred as a comic figure in his writing, died on Sept. 11, 2001, at age 63 from complications of lung cancer. Here she gets a moving yet funny homage from her eloquent husband.

``Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything'' by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio). Based on a $9 million research project, this book examines how the Internet has empowered the masses to produce, edit and distribute their own content and what this means for companies that are the traditional gatekeepers of information.

``Age Shock and Pension Power: How Finance Is Failing Us'' by Robin Blackburn (Verso). An academic argues that despite the proliferation of investment products, greed and mismanagement in the financial-service industry have undermined the ability of savings and pension funds to support our graying population.

``Calvin Coolidge'' by David Greenberg (Times Books). Greenberg offers a brief biography of the 30th U.S. president, who served from 1923 to 1929 and made business development a platform of his administration, laying the groundwork for future generations of conservative, fiscally minded politicians. It is Coolidge who declared: ``The chief business of the American people is business.''

``Natural Causes: Death, Lies and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry'' by Dan Hurley (Broadway Books). Hurley's examination of this $20 billion industry reveals how the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act left the business of vitamins virtually unregulated and, as a consequence, given it free rein to prey on uninformed consumers.

``It's Called Work for a Reason! Your Success Is Your Own Damn Fault'' by Larry Winget (Gotham). Another bullying TV talking head, Winget, the host of A&E's ``Big Spender,'' delves into what he sees as right and wrong with businesses. With frequent reminders that companies stress making money, he offers advice on how to take best advantage of a variety of workplace scenarios.

``Next Now: Trends for the Future'' by Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia (Palgrave Macmillan). Salzman, executive vice president at ad agency JWT, and co-author Matathia, a brand consultant, collate trends from across the globe in an attempt to forecast what's coming. Their conclusions aren't likely to wow you. They say, for example, that ``Chindia'' is going to be an economic force. But they can be entertaining.

``The Judges: A Penetrating Exploration of American Courts and of the New Decisions -- Hard Decisions -- They Must Make for a New Millennium'' by Martin Mayer (Truman Talley Books). Mayer took six years to write this expose of the judicial system, which covers everything from the Supreme Court on down to local criminal courts. He concludes that cronyism put many of our 30,000 judges on the bench and a significant percentage needs specialized training.

``Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue'' by Stephanie Mencimer (Free Press). A Washington Monthly reporter tackles the issue of tort reform, rehashing arguments for and against, and comes away with the belief that the biggest beneficiaries of reform are politically conservative corporations in danger of being sued (think of McDonald's and its once scalding hot coffee), while mostly liberal trial lawyers and Joe Citizen lose out.

``American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work'' by Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster). This gossipy group portrait of the Transcendentalists of Concord, Massachusetts, delves into their personal rivalries, speculates about their love lives and examines their early form of activism during the period 1840 to 1868.

``Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work'' by Martin Geck (Harcourt). Lucidly written in a style that is accessible to non- musicologists, this biography by an acclaimed German academic devotes lengthy passages to analyzing Bach's renowned technique and why his music so moves listeners.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Crichton's `Next': Profiteers, Chatty Chimps in the Gene Pool

2006-11-28T19:48:00.000-06:00

Crichton's `Next': Profiteers, Chatty Chimps in the Gene Pool

By Edward Nawotka

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- In Michael Crichton's ``Next,'' universities forge billion-dollar deals with Big Pharma, humans are mined for their genetic code, animals are bred to emulate the higher functions of humans, venture capitalists conspire to ensure the success of their investments and lawyers make fortunes litigating the whole resulting mess.

The story revolves around a legal battle over the ownership of a sample of cancer-fighting cells taken from Frank Burnett, a 51-year-old construction worker battling leukemia. Burnett unsuccessfully sues to prevent the sale of the cells by the University of California to a biogenetics startup called BioGen for $3 billion.

Soon after, however, the startup discovers that the cells have been contaminated, rendering them worthless. A Hummer- driving bounty hunter is dispatched to procure new tissue samples from Burnett, his daughter and her young son with a big, scary needle. Then it's back to court to litigate whether BioGen has a right to pursue its ``property.''

Elsewhere, genetic oddities are manifesting themselves. An Indonesian orangutan is heard swearing at tourists in French and Dutch and is soon hounded by reporters; a chatty African gray parrot helps a Parisian boy do his math homework; and a San Diego researcher sires a human-chimp crossbreed that he brings home and sends to grade school in baseball cap and jeans. At school, the ``humanzee,'' named Dave, defends his human half-brother from a group of bullying skater punks, bombarding them with his own feces.

Silvio Soap

Crichton's 2004 polemical novel, ``State of Fear,'' sought to debunk evidence of global warming. Crichton again has an agenda and again goes to great lengths to indoctrinate his audience. He collates recent genetic research, loads the story with statistics and cuts down the most hyperbolic conclusions, such as the widespread report that blondes are genetically predetermined to go extinct in 200 years.

He also sprinkles the text with ``News of the Weird'' stories, some false, such as the swearing ape, and some merely dubious, such as one about the artist who turned former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's liposuctioned fat into a bar of soap and sold it for $18,000.

When the villainous evangelical Christian in charge of genetics at the National Institutes of Health is gunned down after co-opting another researcher's project, and a wealthy investor contracts a rare form of cancer and is told that no cure is available because the potential for profiting from it wasn't there, Crichton's slant becomes all too obvious: He wants to convince us that the genetic research industry is run exclusively for profit and needs reform. (If you miss this point in the novel, Crichton spells it out in an epilogue.)

A Little Sex

Though ``Next'' is informative, it's also a tepid read. The straw characters flit in and out of the action, have a little sex and serve mostly as mouthpieces. Certain plot lines, including a potentially provocative one about a researcher who administers a drug in the hope it will cure drug addiction, never truly resolve -- a death sentence for a thriller.

``Jurassic Park'' was also set in a world of genetic engineering run amok, but that book was rooted much more in fantasy than in reality. In ``Next,'' Crichton has mounted a bully pulpit and seems loath to give it up. That's placed him a long way from the smart, high-octane stories we expect from him.

``Next'' by Michael Crichton is published by HarperCollins (431 pages, $27.95).

Gallic Tips, Art Thugs, Jefferson's Bubbly: Lifestyle Books

2006-11-14T09:55:00.000-06:00

Gallic Tips, Art Thugs, Jefferson's Bubbly: Lifestyle Books

By Edward Nawotka

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- In ``French Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes, and Pleasure'' (Knopf), Mireille Guiliano serves up a second helping of Gallic ``sagesse.''

The long-time executive at the luxury firm LVMH and public face of Champagne Veuve Clicquot expands on the ideas outlined in her surprise 2004 bestseller ``French Women Don't Get Fat,'' a philosophy that can be summarized as: embrace quality, shop according to the season, eat in moderation and feel free to indulge in a croissant, a little chocolate and a glass of wine whenever desired.

No, it may not be groundbreaking advice, but it's still news to many Americans that living ``comme les francaises'' is healthier and more satisfying than everyday supersizing.

Also new this month:

``The Power of Art'' by Simon Schama (Ecco). The cultural historian believes ``great art has dreadful manners'' and here meditates on the question of ``what's art really for.'' He critiques eight masterpieces, one each by an artist he dubs a ``thug,'' including Bernini, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko.

``Schott's Almanac 2007'' by Ben Schott (Bloomsbury). This quirky twist on the annual almanac, written by a British humorist known for his bestselling books of miscellany, covers such need- to-know cocktail party trivia as who won ``American Idol,'' the finalists for the Bad Sex in Fiction award and the number of reported shark attacks.

``The Smart Money: How the World's Best Sports Bettors Beat the Bookies Out of Millions: A Memoir'' by Michael Konik (Simon & Schuster). Konik recounts his harrowing experiences working for Rick ``Big Daddy'' Matthews, the mastermind behind ``The Brain Trust,'' the biggest sport-gambling syndicate in America, which routinely wagered huge sums of money on a single game and consistently beat the Vegas odds.

``Thomas Jefferson on Wine'' by John Hailman (The University Press of Mississippi). Hailman looks at the oenophile president through his lifelong passion for wine and offers a unique insight into his character, his effort to steer compatriots away from hard liquor and his savvy execution of ``Champagne diplomacy'' while hosting White House dinners.

``The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles'' by Martin Gayford (Little, Brown). A psychoanalytic portrait (by Bloomberg's London art critic) of the fertile period when the two artists shared a house in the south of France and painted the same subjects, ending with Van Gogh cutting off his ear and giving it to a prostitute.

``A Star Is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood's Biggest Movies'' by Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins. A dishy look into the lives of casting directors from two of the top star makers in the business, credited with discovering Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio and Meg Ryan, among many others.

``Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game -- and How It Got That Way'' by Philip E. Orbanes (Da Capo). Monopoly started out as a teaching tool for economics class and now has sold more than 200 million copies. Orbanes outlines how this American game, inspired by J.P. Morgan, has had pervasive influence on our culture and the world's understanding of wealth creation.

``Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected and Health- Inspected Cartoons by Roz Chast, 1978-2006'' by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury). More than 400 pages of cartoons, many in color, from the New Yorker magazine mainstay whose anxiety-prone subjects are plagued by a catalog of modern neuroses.

``Dunhill by Design'' by Nick Foulkes (Flammarion). A GQ writer's beautifully illustrated history of Alfred Dunhill's influence on men's fashion, from 1890 to the present day, spans his early innovative products for Edwardian motorists, the move into specialized accessories such as watches and writing instruments, and the company's recent foray into leather goods and clothing.

Lives of Mao, Rubirosa, Novels by Turow, Marquez: Paperbacks

2006-11-08T14:55:00.000-06:00

Lives of Mao, Rubirosa, Novels by Turow, Marquez: Paperbacks

By Edward Nawotka

Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Caravaggio, Osama bin Laden, Chairman Mao and Porfirio Rubirosa feature in new paperbacks this month, as do characters in novels by Scott Turow and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden before 9/11 and in the early days of the war in Afghanistan gets firsthand treatment in ``Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander'' (Three Rivers Press). The author, Gary Berntsen, notes the unusual degree of cooperation among U.S. forces and their allies as they destroyed much of the Taliban and cornered bin Laden along the Pakistan border. Berntsen recounts the beleaguered al-Qaeda fighters' attempts to negotiate after bombardment by B-52s and vents his ire over the failure of American military leaders to order U.S. ground forces to strike the killing blow and the decision to rely on undisciplined Afghan militias to block bin Laden's retreat.

``The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece'' by Jonathan Harr (Random House). Harr's follow-up to his award-winning legal saga ``A Civil Action'' is an academic detective story chronicling a young Italian art scholar's search for one of the mercurial master's missing canvases, ``The Taking of Christ.''

``Memories of My Melancholy Whores'' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Vintage).ÿIn this slim novel, the Nobel laureate's first fiction in a decade, an elderly bachelor meditates on youthful passion and re-experiences the rush of romance when he confronts the innocence of a 14-year-old virgin while celebrating his 90th birthday.

``Mao: The Unknown Story'' by Jung Chang and John Halliday (Anchor). This stunning, unforgiving portrait emphasizes the brutality of the tyrant who engineered the Cultural Revolution that brought pain and suffering to millions of Chinese.

``The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa'' by Shawn Levy (HarperCollins). A lively account of a man who in the mid-20th century was the epitome of Rat Pack celebrity: He befriended Frank Sinatra, married Doris Duke, became renowned for his physical endowments, and died at age 56 after crashing his Ferrari in Paris's Bois de Boulogne.

``Limitations'' by Scott Turow (Picador). This tepid effort by Turow originally appeared as a serial novel in the New York Times Magazine and revives familiar characters from his previous books -- Rusty Sabich of ``Presumed Innocent'' and George Mason from ``Personal Injuries'' -- now working a sexual-assault case.

``Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution'' by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). A fast-paced journalistic account of the explosion in the video-game business that some predict eventually will rival Hollywood in annual receipts.

``World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men'' by Rebecca Lemov (Hill & Wang). This intriguing study of the mid-20th-century development of the field of ``human engineering'' describes the use of human guinea pigs in efforts to develop techniques for brainwashing, interrogation and remote- control behavior.

``The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth'' by Tim Flannery (Grove). An Australian scientist delivers a dense survey of global warming theory and research that offers persuasive evidence that carbon emissions into the atmosphere are indeed transforming our environment.

Pynchon's Big `Day,' Crichton's Future, Godfather: New Fiction

2006-11-03T07:48:00.000-06:00

Pynchon's Big `Day,' Crichton's Future, Godfather: New Fiction

By Edward Nawotka

Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- A new book by Thomas Pynchon is only slightly less rare than sightings of the man himself. ``Against the Day'' (Penguin Press) is the reclusive genius's first novel in a decade and, at 1,085 pages, easily his fattest. The extravagant plot moves from the 1883 Chicago World's Fair to early Hollywood, and the prose is jammed with the funny names, silly songs, unhinged fantasy, encyclopedic learning and, not least, excruciating beauty that are his trademarks.

Pynchon has clearly been keeping up with the national news, and his hatred of the power structure hasn't abated: Part of the novel deals with the anarchist dynamiters who plagued Colorado's mining barons, and there's no question as to where his sympathies lie.

Also new this month:

``Next'' by Michael Crichton (HarperCollins). The provocateur futurist is back with a novel tackling the widely debated topic of genetic engineering. The book is embargoed until Nov. 28, but its publisher promises it will change ``everything you think you know.''

``The Godfather's Revenge'' by Mark Winegardner (Putnam). Winegardner is becoming a worthy successor to Mario Puzo, who died in 1999. This second sequel to ``The Godfather'' finds the Corleone clan embroiled in the political machinations of the early 1960s and culminates in a plot to assassinate the U.S. president.

``The Hidden Assassins'' by Robert Wilson (Harcourt) Spanish police inspector Javier Falcon investigates an explosion at a Seville mosque and tries to thwart a terrorist conspiracy in the latest brainy mystery from the author of the acclaimed ``A Small Death in Lisbon.''

``The View from Castle Rock'' by Alice Munro (Knopf). The renowned Canadian's 11th story collection comprises 12 masterful tales inspired by her ancestors' immigration from Scotland's Ettrick Valley to the shores of Lake Huron.

``The Handmaid and the Carpenter'' by Elizabeth Berg (Random House). A rewrite of the Christmas story that fleshes out the doubts and fears of the 13-year-old virgin Mary who, miraculously pregnant, marries 16-year-old Joseph and travels to Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus.

``The Aeneid'' by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles (Viking). This new book by the heralded translator of ``The Odyssey'' and ``The Iliad'' offers a fresh interpretation of the third pinnacle of the classic epics: the story of Aeneas, the wandering Trojan who eventually founded Rome.

``The Phony Marine'' by Jim Lehrer (Random House). The PBS newsman's 16th novel may be his best yet and explains the unexpected consequences that unfold after an unremarkable clothing salesman buys a Silver Star on EBay Inc. and begins posing as a war hero.

``The Book of Samson'' by David Maine (St. Martin's). Maine's third brilliant re-imagining of a Bible story -- after ``The Preservationist'' (about Noah) and ``Fallen'' (about Adam and Eve) -- is filled with murder and mayhem, as the strongman Samson recounts how he became a blood-thirsty killer hellbent on slaughter in the name of God.

``The Book of Dave'' by Will Self (Bloomsbury). An ambitious satire from the controversial British writer portrays a post- apocalyptic society hundreds of years in the future that takes a bitter manifesto by a 21st-century cockney cab driver as its sacred text.

``The Crimson Portrait'' by Jody Shields (Little, Brown). Working from a true story, the author of the highly regarded ``The Fig Eater'' tells of a World War I widow who decides to salvage her life by refashioning a disfigured soldier into her husband's image.

``The Rising Tide'' by Jeff Shaara (Ballantine). In the first volume of a planned World War II trilogy, Shaara channels Rommel, Eisenhower and Patton while vividly describing the early days of the U.S.'s involvement in the war, especially the desert tank battles of the North African front and the Allied invasion of Italy.

``Ines of My Soul'' by Isabel Allende (HarperCollins). The latest historical saga from the Chilean bestseller depicts the life of the iron-willed 16th-century heroine Ines Suarez, who together with her lover, the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, helped conquer Chile.

``Last Seen Leaving'' by Kelly Braffet (Houghton Mifflin). A tense thriller inspired by the Elizabeth Smart abduction in which a girl crashes her car and is picked up by an enigmatic stranger who helps her start a new life in a Virginia town beset by a serial killer.

``A Christmas Caroline'' by Kyle Smith (Morrow). Charles Dickens meets ``The Devil Wears Prada'' in this comic romp that delves into the love life of a haunted, high-maintenance editor of a women's shopping magazine who bah-humbugs her way through the holidays.

Walt's World, Paris, Andy Grove, Jimmy Carter: New Nonfiction

2006-11-02T10:52:00.000-06:00

Walt's World, Paris, Andy Grove, Jimmy Carter: New Nonfiction

By Edward Nawotka

Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- ``Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination'' by Neal Gabler (Knopf) is a detailed biography of the ``imagineer'' who died of lung cancer in 1966 and, contrary to legend, was not frozen in stasis to await resurrection but was cremated. He presents Disney as a flawed genius, an obsessive micromanager and a terrible businessman, who relied on his brother Roy to manage the company's often shaky finances in the early days.

Gabler credits Disney with a massive cultural legacy akin to that of Picasso. Unlike Pablo, of course, Walt was no friend of the left and supported the red-baiting Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization also perceived as anti-Semitic.

Also new this month:

``Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American'' by Richard Tedlow (Portfolio). A sunny biography of the Hungarian immigrant and former Intel chief executive officer who is credited with helping Intel dominate the computer-processor industry just as PCs were becoming ubiquitous.

``Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir'' by Gore Vidal (Doubleday). The suavely combative octogenarian, in a sequel to 1995's ``Palimpsest,'' portrays himself as the star of his own life's movie, a recurring motif in this free-flowing, celebrity- studded chronicle of his later years.

``Palestine Peace Not Apartheid'' by Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster). The prolific ex-president outlines a peace plan for Israel and Palestine that hinges on Israel's removing itself from occupied Arab lands and the Palestinians' respecting Israel's pre-1967 borders.

``The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy'' by Will Hutton (Free Press). The British Hutton counters the prevailing theory that China's apotheosis as the world's greatest economic power is all but guaranteed and argues that its dysfunctional internal politics and policies may derail its progress, leading to an inevitable global economic meltdown. In his view, it is in our own self- interest to help them, rather than treat them as a rival.

``The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power'' by James Traub (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A balanced portrait of the United Nations, focusing on Annan's leadership, starting in 1992 when he served as assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations and through his two terms as secretary-general, a period that includes the oil-for- food scandal, the Iraq War and stalled efforts at reforming the beleaguered institution.

``House of Hilton: From Conrad to Paris: A Drama of Wealth, Power, and Privilege'' by Jerry Oppenheimer (Crown). Oppenheimer's gossipy family biography portrays the Hiltons as a clan of vulgar and spoiled ignoramuses -- starting with Conrad, the larger-than-life founder of the hotel chain who married Zsa Zsa Gabor, and ending with the advent of his omnipresent great granddaughter, the sub-socialite, singer and inadvertent Web- video star Paris.

``The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God'' by Carl Sagan (Penguin Press). The 10th anniversary of the scientist's death is being marked with the publication of these 1985 lectures on the relationship between religion and science, which describes Sagan's own concept of ``informed worship'' and the potential for chemically induced transcendence.

``Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration'' by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Norton). A history buff's ultimate armchair- travel companion, this book depicts everything from the moment homo erectus migrated out of East Africa to the mythic 19th- century explorations of the polar ice caps, the Americas and other remote corners of the world.

``The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market'' by Lindsay Pollock (PublicAffairs). A forgotten pioneer of the New York art scene, Halpert opened her Greenwich Village gallery in 1926 and proceeded to sell, sell, sell, establishing the reputations of Stuart Davis and Georgia O'Keeffe, among others. The author writes on the art market for Bloomberg News.

``Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality'' by Ronald Mallett (Thunder's Mouth). The University of Connecticut physics professor explains his ideas for how space and time can be manipulated and his personal effort to build a time machine so he can visit his dead father.

``Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors'' by naval historian James D. Hornfischer (Bantam). An account of the Houston's sinking by the Japanese in the Java Sea in 1942 that includes an unvarnished depiction of the building of the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, romanticized by the movie ``Bridge on the River Kwai.''

``The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat'' by Charles Clover (New Press). The London Telegraph editor offers a disturbing report on how modern, technologically advanced industrial fishing has radically depleted wild fish stocks, leaving certain species on the brink of extinction.

``William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism'' by Robert D. Richardson (Houghton Mifflin). Richardson, the award- winning biographer of Emerson and Thoreau, delivers an engaging account of the life of the Harvard psychologist and philosopher who gave us the classic ``The Varieties of Religious Experience.''

``Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw'' by Maryanne Vollers (HarperCollins). Vollers, the only reporter in communication with Rudolph, draws an insightful portrait of the homegrown terrorist who bombed the Olympic Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, fled into the woods and eluded capture for five years.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Historian of Tigers Recalls Impact of World Series on Detroit

2006-10-21T14:36:00.000-05:00

Historian of Tigers Recalls Impact of World Series on Detroit

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Just three years after losing 119 games and narrowly missing the record for single-season losses in modern Major League Baseball history, the Detroit Tigers are appearing in their tenth World Series, which begins tomorrow night against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Baseball historian Tom Stanton brings together stories from the team's 105-year history in his 2005 book, ``The Detroit Tigers Reader,'' and describes how the Tigers' infrequent appearances in the series have lifted the mood of the city in otherwise dire times.

Stanton's book ``Ty & the Babe,'' about the rivalry between Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, will be published in the spring of 2007 by St. Martin's Press. He spoke with me this week by phone from Michigan.

Nawotka: How has the Tigers appearance in this World Series changed things in Detroit?

Stanton: It comes at a time when nobody expected great things from the Tigers and when Detroit has had a lot of grim economic news. We've had tens of thousands of people laid off by the car companies. There's a gubernatorial race going on at the moment and, it's kind of odd, but some people think the Tigers' success might actually make voters feel better about the incumbent.

Nawotka: Several of Detroit's past baseball championships have had significance beyond the game. I'm thinking, in particular, of the 1968 World Series.

Stanton: True. In 1967, we had race riots. The next year, the Tigers helped heal some of those wounds by bringing blacks and whites together in Tiger Stadium to watch our stars -- guys like Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich and Al Kaline -- play together in the World Series.

Depression-Era Win

Nawotka: Was the 1935 championship, which came in the midst of the Great Depression, as important?

Stanton: It gave the city a phenomenal boost. That was the first time the Tigers won the series and my father, who lived through that time, can still remember the starting line-up. In the ``Reader,'' Grantland Rice has a piece about the win that begins: ``The Leaning Tower can now crumble and find its level with the Pisan plain. The Hanging Gardens can grow up in weeds.'' It's incredibly purple prose, but shows just how much it meant. I don't think we attach that much significance to our win in 1945, but it did mark the end of World War II and a victory for Hank Greenberg.

Nawotka: Why Greenberg in particular?

Stanton: Hank Greenberg was the first Jewish baseball star. He came out of the Bronx and, because the Yankees had Lou Gehrig, he ended up with the Tigers. People would have known a lot more about Hank Greenberg if there wasn't the war. In 1938, he almost knocked off Babe Ruth's single-season home-run record. Then in 1941, Greenberg was the first (baseball) star to enlist and he left the team for four years.

Great Satan

Nawotka: Speaking of Babe Ruth, the Tigers were the team of his main rival, Ty Cobb, who is now largely regarded as the Great Satan of baseball. How much are Cobb's vilification and Ruth's beatification a consequence of geography?

Stanton: I think New York does a better job of celebrating its heroes. Reporters didn't try to be nonpartisan. I have no doubt that a lot of New York reporters portrayed Cobb in an unfavorable light.

Nawotka: Is it true Cobb sharpened his spikes to gouge people?

Stanton: He was an extremely competitive person who could be brutal, but that's a myth. There's a piece in my book from 1916 called ``A Day with Cobb'' which shows another side of him: an articulate man, a man who was passionate about reading and loves music. A fan from Cobb's era wouldn't recognize him today. In his time, he was admired. Cobb, Greenberg and Kaline were all big stars and if you put them in New York they'd have been even bigger.

``The Detroit Tigers Reader,'' edited by Tom Stanton, is published by the University of Michigan Press (206 pages, $18.95).

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Google's Rivals, Rushdie's Clown, Dowd, Vlad: New Paperbacks

2006-10-03T08:24:00.000-05:00

Google's Rivals, Rushdie's Clown, Dowd, Vlad: New Paperbacks

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Vlad the Impaler is still alive and sucking in Elizabeth Kostova's novel ``The Historian,'' one of October's paperback releases.

Also this month: books on porn, Google, Teddy Roosevelt.

In ``Shalimar the Clown'' (Random House), Salman Rushdie explores the origins and mind-set of a Muslim assassin. Rushdie, who himself remains under a fatwa, argues that terrorism originates not with religion and politics but with personal grudges. The story in this impassioned novel centers on a Jewish U.S. diplomat slain by a Kashmiri Muslim. The novelist, whose recent work has slipped of late, benefits from the return to the subcontinental settings of his powerful early novels ``Midnight's Children'' and ``Shame'' and portrays the mountainous region of Kashmir as a lost Eden corrupted by its collision with modernity.

``The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture'' by John Battelle (Portfolio). Google has a huge slab of the market in finding out what the world wants and so an edge in leveraging that knowledge into real dollars and cents, argues this highly regarded Silicon Valley journalist.

``Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide'' by Maureen Dowd (Berkley). The New York Times columnist offers her gloss on the age-old question of boys-versus-girls and applies a provocative smear of high-heeled, lipsticked pragmatism to the face of 21st- century feminism.

``The Historian'' by Elizabeth Kostova (Back Bay). A fat page turner in which an American living in Europe is led on a dangerous quest across Europe to find evidence that the 15th- century villain Vlad the Impaler, aka Dracula, is still alive.

``The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy'' by Charles Morris (Owl). A hagiographical portrait of the four men who embodied the Gilded Age and amassed vast fortunes in oil, gold and steel in the years following the Civil War.

``The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey'' by Candice Millard (Broadway). Millard, a former National Geographic editor, recounts the 1914 exploration of a remote section of the Amazon River in Brazil where the plump ex- president was tracked by cannibals, contracted malaria and nearly died.

``Mission to America'' by Walter Kirn (Anchor). A young member of a dwindling matriarchal cult in Montana is sent forth to locate and convert a mate and finds himself irreversibly transformed by the uninhibited sexuality, self-obsession and vapidity he encounters in a Colorado resort town.

``Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy'' by Moises Naim (Anchor). The editor of Foreign Policy looks at a side effect of globalization: the booming underground trade in drugs, weapons, laundered money, counterfeit goods and human beings.

``How to Make Money Like a Porn Star'' by Neil Strauss and Bernard Chang (Regan Books). The author of porn star Jenna Jameson's biography ``How to Make Love Like a Porn Star'' depicts the behind-the-scenes reality of the skin-flick industry in this unnerving graphic novel, equal parts titillation and morality tale.

``Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife'' by Mary Roach (Norton). A frequently funny chronicle of Roach's encounters with researchers looking for evidence that life continues beyond the grave, including a man trying to weigh the consciousness of a leech.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

2006-10-02T17:25:00.000-05:00

Woodward Gets Bush, Plus Weill, Fiorina, Mellon: New Nonfiction

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- October's new nonfiction brings John Grisham's first venture outside the fictional world (the story of a man wrongly sent to death row) and Bob Woodward's third look at the Bush White House. Former Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill serves up his life's story and Lou Dobbs mulls the American dream.

``State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III'' by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster) is the month's big ``Iraq is a mess'' book, one of a growing list. The Washington Post writer's first two chronicles of the Bush White House were too soft on the president, depicting Bush mainly as a resolute leader and the White House as a cohesive unit. Time moves on. Many bodies later, and many billions too, the ace reporter comes up with evidence that Bush and his advisers, particularly Donald Rumsfeld, are stubborn and arrogant and deaf to dissent.

``The Real Deal: My Life in Business'' by Sandy Weill (Warner). The ex-Citigroup boss recounts how he rose from the streets of Depression-era Brooklyn and parlayed a job as a $35-a- week runner for Bear Stearns into a seat atop one of the biggest financial institutions in the world.

``The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game'' by Michael Lewis (Norton). Lewis does for football what he did for baseball in his bestselling ``Moneyball,'' showing how a variety of less-than- obvious factors, from evolving defensive strategies to conditioning, can affect a player's career and the outcome on the gridiron.

``Tough Choices: A Memoir'' by Carly Fiorina (Portfolio). The ousted chairwoman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, who oversaw the company's merger with Compaq, delivers a tell-all on her troubled six-year tenure and offers words of wisdom for women executives. Maybe she feels less troubled given the current H-P turmoil.

``War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back'' by Lou Dobbs (Viking). The CNN newscaster has been using his anchor's desk as a bully pulpit to rant against corporate outsourcing, illegal immigration and the federal deficit, the sum of which he claims amounts to ``class war'' on middle-class America.

``Thunderstruck'' by Erik Larson (Crown). Learn how in 1910 Dr. H.H. Crippen poisoned and skinned his wife, then fled England with his mistress on a cruise ship to North America. The authorities pursued in a transatlantic chase that featured shipboard reports sent via Guglielmo Marconi's new wireless telegraph. Larson's ``Devil in the White City'' has sold more than a million copies, so expect the new one to be piled high in stores.

``The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town'' by John Grisham (Doubleday). A cautionary tale about a mentally ill former minor-league baseball player sent to death row for the rape and murder of an Oklahoma cocktail waitress in 1981 -- and eventually exonerated by DNA evidence.

``Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor'' by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (Harvard University Press). A sociologist ventures into a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side and finds a world where nearly everyone, from clergy to prostitutes, relies on unregulated, unreported and untaxed work to survive.

``Mellon: An American Life'' by David Cannadine (Knopf). A huge biography (800 pages) of the legendary financier, politician and philanthropist Andrew Mellon, who served as secretary of the treasury under presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, was blamed for the Depression, and founded the National Gallery of Art.

``Andrew Carnegie'' by David Nasaw (Penguin Press). Another masterly and long (896 pages) biography of a controversial Gilded Age titan: the Scotsman Carnegie, who evolved from a cotton- factory bobbin boy into a ruthless steel magnate and the world's richest man.

``Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery'' by Alex Kuczynski (Doubleday). Entertaining, sobering survey taking in everything from South African ``surgery safaris'' to ``foot face lifts'' -- by a New York Times reporter who says she has had a few things done herself.

``The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir'' by Bill Bryson (Broadway). The author of ``A Short History of Nearly Everything'' is nostalgic and sarcastic about his all-American 1950s Iowa childhood as he depicts an ennui lurking beneath the surface of that seemingly happy-go-lucky era.

``The Architecture of Happiness'' by Alain de Botton (Pantheon). The English polymath and author of ``How Proust Can Change Your Life'' returns with another breezy, brainy philosophical meditation, this time describing how public and private architecture influence emotion.

``Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies, and the Buying of Washington'' by Peter Stone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). How the lobbyist in the black fedora went about peddling power, allegedly bilking four Indian tribes of tens of millions of dollars and schmoozing with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

``Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell'' by Karen DeYoung (Knopf). The retired general and former secretary of state sat for six interviews with DeYoung in which he explained how his military career shaped him, why he declined to run for president and his strained term at the White House.

``The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream'' by Barack Obama (Crown). The junior senator from Illinois, who is being touted as the future of the Democratic Party, delivers his first political manifesto, just in time for the midterm elections.

``Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York'' by Adam Gopnik (Knopf). The Francophile New Yorker magazine writer's charming sequel to his memoir ``Paris to the Moon'' follows the Gopnik clan as it relocates to New York, and the author describes the wonders and challenges of being a parent and child in the big, magical city.

``Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer'' by Maureen Ogle (Harcourt). A history of America's favorite ballpark libation, from the heady years of early European immigration through World War I and the anti-German sentiment that declared ``the worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller,'' to the advent of ``lite'' beer and microbrews.

``Violin Dreams'' by Arnold Steinhardt (Houghton Mifflin). A memoir by the Guarneri String Quartet's first violinist, in which he recounts that he hated to practice but was slowly consumed by a passion to master the music, in particular the difficult violin solos of Bach. (Includes a CD of Steinhardt performing.)

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

`Cold Mountain' Frazier Returns; King, Ford, Eggers: New Novels

2006-10-02T17:23:00.000-05:00

`Cold Mountain' Frazier Returns; King, Ford, Eggers: New Novels

By Edward Nawotka

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Nine years after the blockbuster Civil War story ``Cold Mountain,'' Charles Frazier returns with ``Thirteen Moons'' (Random House), which again features a man searching for his long lost love, this time a squaw he won in a card game. The ponderous white-person-meets-red-person tale depicts a man mulling his role in the fate of the Cherokee as they oppose the belligerent Andrew Jackson and America's greedy western expansion.

October is crammed with big name authors from Dave Eggers to Stephen King.

``The Lay of the Land'' by Richard Ford (Knopf). The third novel featuring real-estate agent Frank Bascombe (the first was ``The Sportswriter,'' the second the Pulitzer Prize-winning ``Independence Day'') finds Frank, now 55, remarried, battling prostate cancer and hosting a bittersweet Thanksgiving dinner as the disputed 2000 presidential election rages in the background.

``Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette'' by Sena Jeter Naslund (Morrow). The author of the well-received ``Ahab's Wife'' creates a lush fictionalization of the life of the notorious French queen, the court of Louis XVI and the machine that made their crowns superfluous, the guillotine.

``What Is the What'' by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's). Eggers's novel, based on the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, depicts the perilous 1,000-mile trek across East Africa of one of Sudan's ``lost boys,'' driven from his home and confronting starvation, violent militants and wild animals before finding sanctuary in the U.S.

``The Echo Maker'' by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The difficult, often brilliant author of ``The Time of Our Singing'' weaves a mystery with the story of Nebraskan Mark Schluter, who wakes up from a coma confused about the identity of his loved ones. An anonymous note sends him on a quest to find the truth behind the strange auto accident that put him in the coma.

``Restless'' by William Boyd (Bloomsbury). In this atmospheric espionage-meets-domesticity tale from the author of ``Any Human Heart,'' a frustrated Oxford academic's mother reveals she's a former World War II spy and recruits her daughter to help settle an old score.

``The Light of Evening'' by Edna O'Brien (Houghton Mifflin). A fraught reunion between 78-year-old Dilly, dying in a Dublin hospital and reminiscing over her youth as an immigrant in 1920s New York, and her estranged daughter Eleanora, a controversial novelist living in England, sets up the fiery Irish novelist's meditation on mother/daughter relationships.

``The Uses of Enchantment'' by Heidi Julavits (Doubleday). The year is 1985 and 16-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her New England prep school only to return a month later claiming she was abducted and abused. The aftermath leads to trouble and soul searching in this captivating third novel by the editor of the literary magazine the Believer.

``Lisey's Story'' by Stephen King (Scribner). A revealing tale that depicts the trials of a writer's widow who ventures to the source of her dead husband's inspiration for his award- winning novels, a bizarre place called Boo'ya Moon, where the real and the imagined commingle.

``One Good Turn'' by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown). Atkinson's ingenious new comedy-thriller brings back ex-cop and millionaire Jackson Brodie, first seen in the author's ``Case Histories,'' who is plunged into the lives of a motley crew of Edinburgh denizens -- including a crime novelist and a Russian dominatrix -- and deep into the city's underbelly during its Fringe Festival.

``Black Girl/White Girl'' by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco). In 1975 Minette Swift, a black student at a seemingly tolerant Pennsylvania liberal arts college, dies after a series of racist incidents. Her roommate Genna, the white daughter of a hippie mother and activist father, reconstructs the events.

``Rescue Missions'' by Frederick Busch (Norton). A powerful, final collection of short stories from the late, esteemed author of more than two dozen books, including 1999's memorable ``The Night Inspector,'' spans territory from the war in Iraq to Upstate New York.

``Farewell Summer'' by Ray Bradbury (Morrow). A slender sequel to Bradbury's beloved 1957 young-adult novel ``Dandelion Wine'' revisits Doug and Tom in Green Town, Illinois, in 1928, and finds the boys feuding with the town's old men, believing if they win they will never grow old.

``The End: Book the Thirteenth -- A Series of Unfortunate Events'' by Lemony Snicket (HarperCollins). A secret is revealed in this final volume of the wildly popular children's book series starring the three Baudelaire orphans and their nemesis, Count Olaf.

``The Collectors'' by David Baldacci (Warner). Top thriller writer Baldacci reconvenes his ``Camel Club'' of quirky conspiracy buffs, first seen in the 2005 novel of the same name, to investigate the sudden deaths of the speaker of the House and a scholar in the Library of Congress. The trail leads through Atlantic City to a rogue CIA assassin.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Edward Nawotka at ink@edwardn.com .
Last Updated: October 2, 2006 10:11 EDT

Goodwin Revisits Lincoln, Doctorow Follows Sherman: Paperbacks

2006-09-28T12:45:00.000-05:00

Goodwin Revisits Lincoln, Doctorow Follows Sherman: Paperbacks

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Doris Kearns Goodwin's look at Lincoln's political circle, E.L. Doctorow's powerful novel about Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and John Berendt's adventures among Venice's eccentrics highlight this month's crop of new paperbacks.

``Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln'' by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster). In this penetrating look at Lincoln's presidency, the popular historian argues that Abe's savviest move was to load his cabinet with political opponents, including William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase and Edward Bates.

``The March'' by E.L. Doctorow (Random House). This recreation of Sherman's fiery march through the South at the end of the Civil War is told from the multiple perspectives of a pampered Southern lady, a sadistic surgeon, a freed slave and the grizzled general himself.

``Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street'' by William Poundstone (Hill & Wang). The story of how Ed Thorp applied the ``Kelly criterion,'' developed by Bell Labs scientist John Kelly, to compute optimal bets while playing blackjack and, later, the securities markets.

``The City of Falling Angels'' by John Berendt (Penguin). The author's picaresque adventures during his on-again, off-again eight-year residency in Venice, where he was ostensibly investigating the fire that destroyed the historic Fenice opera house in 1996 but spent most of his time mingling with the city's eccentric aristocrats and artists.

``Melville: His World and Work'' by Andrew Delbanco (Vintage). Combining history and criticism, this compact, engaging biography shows how the writer's life and work reflected a rich era in the U.S.

``Teacher Man'' by Frank McCourt (Scribner). The Irishman continues the memoir mining he began with ``Angela's Ashes'' in this third outing that covers the nearly 30 years he spent teaching in New York City public schools.

``The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq'' by George Packer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Packer, a self-described liberal hawk who initially favored invading Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, documents his growing dismay as he witnesses mismanagement, incompetence and ignorance at home and abroad.

``Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945'' by Tony Judt (Penguin). An encyclopedic and readable survey covering six decades of history across 34 countries, from Europe's painful postwar recovery to the expansion of the European Union into formerly communist countries in 2004.

``A History of the Jews in the Modern World'' by Howard M. Sachar (Vintage). This tome of more than 800 pages by an eminent scholar covers the past 400 years and chronicles the many roles Jews played in the development of modern civilization.

``Four Quarters of Light: An Alaskan Journey'' by Brian Keenan (Broadway). Irishman Keenan, who spent more than 1,500 days as hostage in Beirut from 1986 to 1990, takes his family to live in Alaska for a summer and revels in the freedom of its wide-open spaces.

``Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay'' by Corinne Maier (Vintage). Frenchwoman Maier became a cult hero after writing this little Gallic shrug of a book that warns against selling your soul to the corporation and suggests cultivating ``active disengagement'' at work, which is both practical and subversive.

Le Carre Stages Coup, Albom's Froth at Starbucks: New Novels

2006-09-28T12:44:00.000-05:00

Le Carre Stages Coup, Albom's Froth at Starbucks: New Novels

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Books by some big names in fiction head into stores this month, including John le Carre, Alice McDermott, Cormac McCarthy, Claire Messud, Sebastian Faulks, Mark Haddon, Mark Z. Danielewski, Bruce Wagner and Ward Just. Here are some of the month's highlights.

``The Mission Song'' by John le Carre (Little, Brown). The author's 20th novel returns to Africa, the setting of ``The Constant Gardener,'' and the Congo, where a mixed-race Congolese interpreter married to a famous British tabloid journalist becomes embroiled in a possible coup.

``The Road'' by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf). McCarthy channels Samuel Beckett in this story of a father and son who traverse a blasted landscape of post-apocalyptic America in search of the sea. They dodge gangs of murderous thugs and scavenge for food, while the father reminisces about a civilization the son has never known.

``World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War'' by Max Brooks (Crown). Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio got into a bidding war over the film rights to this entertaining, tongue-in- cheek chronicle -- by the son of Mel Brooks -- of the decimation of the world by a plague of zombies.

``The Emperor's Children'' by Claire Messud (Knopf). This group portrait shows a trio of spoiled, over-educated, 30-year- old New Yorkers living in the orbit of their friend's famous father -- a celebrated journalist -- whose reputation is threatened when a malicious Australian magazine publisher plans to take him down.

``Human Traces'' by Sebastian Faulks (Random House). The British master of high-toned historical fiction depicts the Victorian-era birth of psychiatry through a pair of globe- trotting doctors who travel from academe to insane asylums and from Gold Rush California to unexplored regions of Africa.

``A Spot of Bother'' by Mark Haddon (Doubleday). Haddon's ``The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,'' about an autistic boy, was a surprise hit. His new novel, an English social comedy, delivers more dysfunction in the form of a retired family patriarch who is mistakenly convinced he's dying of cancer and ignores his wife and adult children's pleas for attention.

``After This'' by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author of ``Charming Billy,'' which won a National Book Award, tells of Irish-Catholic Long Islanders Mary and John Keane as they contend with the changing social mores of post-WWII America and grapple with their four children in the cultural ferment of the Vietnam War era.

``When Madeline Was Young'' by Jane Hamilton (Doubleday). The Oprah-blessed author returns with another affecting family saga, in which a young husband copes with caring for his brain- damaged first wife while trying to raise two children with his second.

``For One More Day'' by Mitch Albom (Hyperion). The Detroit sportswriter-turned-sensitive-scribe agreed to sell this novel in Starbucks, where he hopes coffee addicts will imbibe the tall, frothy tale of a drunk getting a second chance to bond with his dead mother as she haunts his childhood home.

``Paint It Black'' by Janet Fitch (Little, Brown). Another Oprah anointee, Fitch took seven years to write this doleful novel about a druggy Los Angeles punk rocker whose artist boyfriend kills himself and then finds her life intertwined with that of the man's mother, a world-class concert pianist with her own issues.

``Only Revolutions'' by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon). The fall's most inventive novel, Danielewski's typographically tricky tale -- half the book is printed upside-down -- portrays a pair of lovers on a time-traveling road trip across America in which they literally try to outrun history in a progression of ever- faster autos.

``Memorial'' by Bruce Wagner (Simon & Schuster). This latest outing from a maestro of the Hollywood satire tells of a shattered Angelino family that includes an architect daughter designing a memorial to the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, a mother lured into a wicked confidence scheme and a father who has sued the LAPD for shooting his dog.

``Forgetfulness'' by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin). In this elegant thriller, a retired CIA spy who has turned to portrait painting realizes he can't outrun his past when his wife is killed by Moroccan terrorists as payback for an earlier job and he's forced to seek revenge.

``The Last Town on Earth'' by Thomas Mullen (Random House). Part history, part horror, this debut novel describes the tumult that ensues in the utopian logging community of Commonwealth, Washington, after it enacts a self-imposed quarantine during the 1918 influenza pandemic and a sick soldier is shot dead at the town's gates.

``The Book of Fate'' by Brad Meltzer (Warner). ``The Da Vinci Code'' meets ``The West Wing'' and the Masons in Meltzer's latest, which requires the hero, a Washington politico, to decipher a 200-year-old code written by Thomas Jefferson to solve the mystery of what really happened during a failed presidential assassination eight years earlier.

``The Meaning of Night'' by Michael Cox (Norton). A Victorian-era page-turner starring an ambitious, blood-thirsty bibliophile, Edward Glyver, who murders an anonymous ``red-haired man'' as prelude to dispatching his despised literary rival, a man who threatens to inherit wealth intended for Glyver. Unfortunately, an unseen witness has complicated Glyver's plans and must be confronted first.

``The Interpretation of Murder'' by Jed Rubenfeld (Holt). In the latest worthwhile mystery to feature historical heroes, the year is 1909 and Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are enlisted to assist in the investigation of the torture and murder of a young Manhattan heiress. Only the master himself has the skills to coax the clues from the memory of one hysterical near-victim and help catch the culprit.

``The Thirteenth Tale'' by Diane Setterfield (Atria). In this sprawling modern gothic tale, intentionally echoing the Bronte sisters, a young author is summoned to a creepy mansion to write the death-bed biography of a world-famous writer and discovers her own secret history in the process.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Wozniak Revisits Apple, O'Reilly Rants Again: September Nonfiction

2006-09-28T08:58:00.000-05:00

Wozniak Revisits Apple, O'Reilly Rants Again: New Nonfiction

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's autobiography, Bill O'Reilly's latest screed and a look at Bush's ``propaganda presidency'' by Frank Rich are among the highlights of new September nonfiction.

``iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It'' by Steve Wozniak (Norton). Steve Jobs may get much of the credit for Apple Computer's nearly decade-long revival, but Wozniak's maverick vision continues to have an imprint on the brand.

``Making Globalization Work'' by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Norton). The 2001 Nobel Prize-winner's sequel to his best-seller ``Globalization and Its Discontents'' prescribes practical solutions for sustaining global economic growth while limiting the negative impact on people and the environment.

``Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers'' by Gus Russo (Bloomsbury). A fascinating chronicle of the rise to power of the enigmatic and influential Korshak, who helped negotiate the collaboration between labor unions and organized crime and counted Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio among his clients.

``Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships'' by Daniel Goleman (Bantam). In a sequel to the best-selling ``Emotional Intelligence,'' Goleman looks at the social propensities of humans and how they can be nurtured or stymied.

``The Price of Admission'' by Daniel Golden (Crown). In this investigative work by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter, the subtitle says it all: ``How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.''

``The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall'' by Ian Bremmer (Simon & Schuster). Bremmer theorizes that all nations fall along a ``J'' curve, with the left side representing stability because of economic and political isolation (Cuba, North Korea) and the right stability because of openness (the U.S., Japan). To shift from left to right, countries face ``dangerous instability'' at the curve's bottom.

``Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance'' by Ian Buruma (Penguin Press). Buruma, an insightful Anglo-Dutch writer, examines an unusual incident for the culturally diverse and tolerant Netherlands, where an Islamic extremist killed the Dutch filmmaker Van Gogh (great-grandnephew of the painter) after he made a film depicting Muslim women as victims of abuse.

``The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million'' by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins). In this powerful and real-life take on the plot of ``Everything Is Illuminated,'' Mendelsohn visits a dozen countries in search of evidence of six Ukrainian forebears killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

``The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West'' by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press). The Harvard and Oxford historian asserts that three factors -- ``ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline'' -- caused most conflicts in the 20th century, whether global, such as the world wars, or local, such as the genocides in Armenia and Rwanda.

``There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children'' by Melissa Fay Greene (Bloomsbury). In a narrative that combines history, reporting and personal experience (Greene has adopted two Ethiopian children), this book tells of a woman who started an orphanage for AIDS babies in Addis Ababa.

``Culture Warrior'' by Bill O'Reilly (Broadway). The Fox News personality vents some familiar peeves: the decline in personal responsibility, the shortcomings of media rivals like Al Franken, and the sins of what he dubs the ``secular-progressive'' movement embodied by George Soros.

``China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America'' by James Kynge (Houghton Mifflin). The former Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times writes that China's growing hunger for raw materials and oil may cost us, but the country's systemic fraud, corrupt banks and spineless government institutions are an even greater threat to global economic stability.

``Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation'' by Michael Zielenziger (Doubleday). The former Knight-Ridder Tokyo bureau chief uses profiles of socially withdrawn youths know as ``hikikomori'' to show how Japan's rigid, tradition-steeped society has stifled economic revival, political reform and social evolution, abetting its eclipse by China.

``The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina'' by Frank Rich (Penguin Press). The New York Times editorialist delivers a full-on assault of the Bush administration and its PR-savvy cronies, accusing them of running a ``propaganda presidency'' and reducing truth to collateral damage in the war on terrorism.

``How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime'' by Sidney Blumenthal (Princeton University Press). A politically astute collection of columns from the former Clinton staffer analyzing George W. Bush's use of executive privilege and power to stifle debate and push through his agenda, whether it's cutting taxes or invading Iraq.

``Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir'' by Robert Hughes (Knopf). The bombastic art and culture critic offers a rich and irreverent reminiscence of his Australian childhood, one that included a truculent father, Catholic boarding school and, later, a period of formative, far-out years in England during the swinging '60s.

``The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups'' by Ron Rosenbaum (Random House). Rosenbaum's personal and passionate guide to the contemporary battles being fought over how to interpret the life and work of the Bard, whether on stage, on film or in the academy.

``Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006'' by E.L. Doctorow (Random House). This noteworthy collection of 16 essays from the award-winning novelist considers the work of dozens of writers, artists and visionaries -- from Twain and Hemingway to Harpo Marx and Albert Einstein -- and in the process offers a one-volume master class on creativity.

``The Immortal Game: A History of Chess or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain'' by David Shenk (Doubleday). Shenk tracks the game of chess from its origin in India about 500 A.D. to the beginning of modernism, arguing that it has had a pervasive influence on intellectual development.

``The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris'' by Alicia Drake (Little, Brown). This gossipy recreation of the high-chic fashion wars of the era features Warhol, Jerry Hall and a host of others behaving badly.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Edward Nawotka at ink@edwardn.com .

Zadie's Beauty, Ellis's Satire, Banville's Sea: New Paperbacks

2006-08-03T09:58:00.000-05:00

Zadie's Beauty, Ellis's Satire, Banville's Sea: New Paperbacks

Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Zadie Smith's magnificent ``On Beauty,'' Bret Easton Ellis's kooky satire of confessional autobiography, ``Lunar Park'' and John Banville's cerebral Booker Prize-winning ``The Sea'' are among some of the choice paperback releases in August.

``On Beauty'' by Zadie Smith (Penguin). Smith is considered by many critics to be one of the finest novelists writing in English, and rightly so. Her latest is a superb 21st-century riff on E.M. Forster's ``Howard's End'' that transplants the action to a thinly disguised Harvard, where two families, each headed by a rival Rembrandt scholar, find their lives and children intertwined.

``Lunar Park'' by Bret Easton Ellis (Vintage). The aging bad boy of American letters --- Ellis wrote the controversial ``American Psycho'' --- is back with an edgy satire about a middle-aged novelist named Bret Easton Ellis who, despite his marriage to a Hollywood starlet and fatherhood, still loves drugs and is wracked with phantasmagoric visions that threaten to destroy his sanity and family.

``End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation'' by Barry C. Lynn (Currency). Relying on examples from General Electric, Dell and Microsoft, Lynn argues that the outsourcing of production to developing nations has put the U.S. economy at risk by leaving it vulnerable to any breakdown in the already fragile global supply chain.

``The Tender Bar'' by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion). The L.A. Times reporter recalls his 1970s childhood on Long Island and the days he spent at the local tavern, where his Uncle Charlie and his Sinatra-loving sidekicks -- Colt, Bobo and Joey D -- schooled him in the manly arts and looked after him while he matured.

``The Sea'' by John Banville (Vintage). Last year's Man Booker Prize-winning novel portrays a middle-aged Irishman, mourning the loss of his wife, who returns to his seaside childhood home to brood and reminisce. It's literature with a capital ``L'': dense and demanding, but ultimately rewarding.

``The Story of a Life'' by Aharon Appelfeld (Schocken). The treasured septuagenarian writer's memoir of growing up in Romania and then surviving the Holocaust in the Ukraine by escaping from a prison camp and passing himself off as an orphaned gentile, until he emigrated as a refugee to Palestine.

``Mining California: An Ecological History'' by Andrew C. Isenberg (Hill & Wang). If you think California is heaven on earth, you should have seen it before the 19th-century gold rush felled ancient redwood forests, washed away mountains and poisoned rivers with mercury, all vividly depicted in this unsettling history of environmental pillage and its aftermath.

``The Scent of Your Breath'' by Melissa P. (Black Cat). P's first book, the autobiographical erotic coming-of-age story ``100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed,'' has sold 2 million copies worldwide. In this sequel, Sicilian Melissa is now 19 and living in Rome, where she abandons one lover, finds another, miscarries and carries on.

``Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future'' by Eric Dregni and John Dregni (Speck Press). Whatever happened to the personal jet packs we were promised by the hyperbolic prognosticators of the last century? This intriguing illustrated book looks back at a world that might have been, but never was.

``A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing'' edited by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach (Akashic Books). Howard Zinn has met his match in this wry and winking account of these United States in 17 chapters, each by a different writer, that starts with the Chinese discovery of America in 1426 and ending with the war to end all wars in 2011.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Iraq `Fiasco': New Books Target Stupid Policies, Corporate Greed

2006-08-02T16:16:00.000-05:00

Iraq `Fiasco': New Books Target Dumb Ideas, Corporate Greed

Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Publishers are releasing an unprecedented number of books that cast a critical eye on the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq.

The most scathing critique yet comes from Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. In ``Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq'' (Penguin Press, 482 pages, $27.95), he writes that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ``ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy.'' Not only was it ``based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history,'' but it ``confused removing Iraq's regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.''

Though Ricks covers some of the same ground as earlier books, notably ``Cobra II'' by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor (his counterparts at the New York Times), this account -- based on hundreds of interviews and the review of 37,000 documents -- is insightful on the origins of the deadly insurgency and failure of the reconstruction.

Ricks argues that U.S. policies and tactics, especially Paul Bremer's de-Baathification order and disbanding of the Iraqi army -- which put half a million armed and skilled men out of work -- provided the insurgency with all the capable recruits it would ever need.

Few are spared the author's criticism. Congress is rebuked for being too passive: ``In previous wars, Congress had been populated by hawks and doves,'' Ricks writes. Now ``it seemed to consist mainly of lambs who hardly made a peep.'' In a chapter entitled ``The Corrections,'' journalists, including former Times correspondent Judith Miller, are held equally accountable.

`Blind Into Baghdad'

One of the few journalists Ricks praises is James Fallows of the Atlantic magazine, a publication, Ricks says, that did an ``exemplary job in posing the right questions about Iraq both before and after the invasion.''

Five of Fallows's essays on the war have been collected in ``Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq'' (Vintage; coming Aug. 15; 229 pages, $13.95).

Fallows's work is notable for its prescience. He counters then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's assertion that Saddam Hussein's regime was equal to that of Hitler's during the Holocaust, and thus necessitated intervention. Instead, Fallows posits World War I as the better analogy, because it is ``relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination, specifically, imagination about the long-term consequences of war.''

`Blood Money'

Wolfowitz also argued that invasion would be cheap. In ``Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq'' (Little, Brown, coming Aug. 29; 352 pages, $24.95), author T. Christian Miller, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, points out that just a week after the March 2003 invasion, Wolfowitz told a group of congressmen, ``There's a lot of money to pay for this. We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.''

Initially in 2003, the Bush administration budgeted $2.3 billion for the reconstruction. Since the invasion, the U.S. has spent more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq. Still, writes Miller, all that cash ``did not spark an economic renewal. It did not win the trust of a shattered people. And it has not made Iraq more peaceful.''

A dogged reporter, Miller follows the money trail and uncovers escalating tales of thievery: U.S. officials and soldiers who pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars that they used to buy Cadillac Escalades and Breitling watches; a private security company guilty of $3 million in fraud; and, in the most egregious plot of all, an Iraqi arms broker's scheme to skim as much as $2 billion intended to buy new weapons for the Iraqi security forces.

`Prince of the Marshes'

The young British diplomat Rory Stewart experienced the frustration of working in the postwar reconstruction firsthand. In ``The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq'' (Harcourt, 397 pages, $25) he offers a vivid, unflinching chronicle of the 11 months in 2003 and 2004 during which he served as provisional and deputy governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces in the marshland of southern Iraq.

Just 30 years old when he went to Iraq, Stewart already had plenty of experience in the Muslim world: in 2002, he hiked across war-torn Afghanistan (an experience he documented in the best-selling ``The Places in Between'' published in April). In Iraq, he finds the system is broken. Stewart mocks Paul Bremer's seven-point plan for Iraq as ``seven steps to heaven.''

Despite this cynicism, he maintains a stiff-upper-lip resolve to re-establish a political system representing every Iraqi affiliation, Islamist and insurgent alike. Like a contemporary George Orwell, Stewart delivers a harrowing series of episodes, starting with the threats by local tribal strongman -- the prince of the title -- and ending with the fear of being blown to pieces by an unappreciative populace.

`Babylon by Bus'

In contrast, ``Babylon by Bus'' by Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann (Penguin Press, 316 pages, $24.95) is decidedly less serious. Its obnoxious subtitle tells much of what you need to know: ``Or, the True Story of Two Friends Who Gave Up Their Valuable Franchise Selling Yankees Suck T-Shirts at Fenway to Find Meaning and Adventure in Iraq, Where They Became Employed by the Occupation in Jobs for Which They Lacked Qualification and Witnessed Much That Amazed and Disturbed Them.''

The slacker frat-boys serve up a string of picaresque misadventures while working for the Coalition Provisional Authority coordinating NGOs from the Green Zone in Baghdad, and later distributing clothes in the Sadr City slum.

``If we were the good news from Iraq, the CPA had a problem,'' they write. ``Here we were, two penniless idiots running a rag-tag program with zero funding and experience, and there was nothing better than us going on under the CPA?''

They came, they helped, they partied. And when it looked like they faced kidnapping or death, they left.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Quindlen's NYC, Surreal Murakami, Israeli Novelist: New Fiction

2006-08-01T08:50:00.000-05:00

Quindlen's NYC, Surreal Murakami, Israeli Novelist: New Fiction

Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Anna Quindlen's portrait of a media star's fall from grace, the return of Michael Tolkin's murderous Hollywood studio exec and short-story collections from Edward P. Jones, Haruki Murakami and Dennis Lehane -- these are some of August's fiction highlights.

``Rise and Shine'' by Anna Quindlen (Random House). A pair of sisters --- Meghan, a hot Manhattan talk-show host, and Bridget, who works at a Bronx women's shelter -- cope with the fallout from Meghan's divorce and career implosion.

``All Aunt Hagar's Children'' by Edward P. Jones (Amistad). Fourteen short stories set among striving African-Americans in Washington, D.C., by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ``The Known World.''

``Return of the Player'' by Michael Tolkin (Grove). The acerbic sequel to the novel Robert Altman adapted into ``The Player'': Hollywood studio exec Griffin Mill, now 52, tries to parlay his pathetic $6 million fortune into the billions he needs to buy a private island.

``The Dissident'' by Nell Freudenberger (Ecco): The second book from the author of the much-lauded ``Lucky Girls'' depicts the culture clash when a Chinese performance artist and political activist takes up residence in the home of a wealthy Beverly Hills family.

``A Woman in Jerusalem'' by A.B. Yehoshua (Harcourt). In this brief, beguiling new work by one of Israel's top novelists, a beautiful, anonymous Russian woman is killed in a suicide bombing and the man hired to identify her finds he's falling in love with who she once was.

``Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman'' by Haruki Murakami (Knopf). This entertaining volume of stories from the Japanese master of the surreal was recently short-listed for Ireland's Frank O'Connor Award, the world's richest prize for short stories.

``The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs'' by Irvine Welch (Norton). The Scottish author of ``Trainspotting'' offers not a sex manual but a portrait of a rivalry pitting two Edinburgh restaurant inspectors -- one a fatherless lout, the other a meek model-train enthusiast -- against an egotistical celebrity chef.

``Coronado'' by Dennis Lehane (William Morrow). Lehane's first book since the triumphant film of his novel ``Mystic River'' packages four previously published short stories, one new one and a play.

``The Night Gardener'' by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown). The latest from the superb D.C.-based mystery novelist features a cop and his disgraced ex-partner who come together to investigate the murder of a teen and find a connection to an unsolved 20- year-old case that has given them nightmares.

``Golden Country'' by Jennifer Gilmore (Scribner). Gilmore's exceptional debut novel is an intricate saga portraying the lives of immigrant Jews in Brooklyn -- entrepreneurs, mobsters and Broadway producers -- from Prohibition through the advent of television.

``Smonk'' by Tom Franklin (William Morrow). A Southern gothic set in 1911 and written in the style of Cormac McCarthy -- i.e., lots of blood and poetry -- in which a small Alabama town goes to war with the hideous, mule-riding rapist who has been terrorizing them for years.

``Special Topics in Calamity Physics'' by Marisha Pessl (Viking). Written in chapters reflecting a Great Books syllabus, Pessl's clever, brainy novel tells the story of Blue van Meer, a student at an elite prep school, who discovers that when a classmate and a teacher die, books don't hold all the answers to life's quandaries.

``Pound for Pound'' by F.X. Toole (Ecco). The only novel by the late author -- on whose short stories the film ``Million Dollar Baby'' was based -- offers the gritty, redemptive tale of an elderly L.A. fight trainer and a talented Hispanic boxer from Texas who comes under his tutelage.

``The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters'' by Gordon Dahlquist (Bantam). A sprawling, bawdy beach tome, featuring a Victorian- era Caribbean maiden who ventures to a nameless European city to search for her fiance who disappeared and finds herself subsumed into a puzzling world of hedonism and intrigue.

``The Expected One'' by Kathleen McGowan (Touchstone). Originally self-published, this thriller picks up where ``The Da Vinci Code'' left off. It stars journalist Maureen Pascal, who goes in search of a gospel written by her ancestor, Mary Magdalene and, ta-da, uncovers a mystery involving historical figures, from Leonardo to, improbably, Jean Cocteau.

``Knights of the Black and White: Book One of the Templar Trilogy'' by Jack Whyte (Putnam). The first of a series set in the 11th century that follows the rise and fall of the Knights Templar, focusing on Sir Hugh de Payens, a Crusader who in this volume fights for control of Jerusalem and secretly pursues the mysteries buried under the Temple Mount.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Adam Smith, Female Brains, Hearst's Camels: August Nonfiction

2006-07-31T10:38:00.000-05:00

Adam Smith, Female Brains, Hearst's Camels: August Nonfiction

July 31 (Bloomberg) -- A trio of 9/11 books, a new biography of Adam Smith, a history of fly fishing and a feisty study of the female brain are among the highlights of new August nonfiction.

``The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,'' by Lawrence Wright (Knopf). A New Yorker writer's well-wrought group portrait of four men -- terrorists Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, FBI counterterrorism czar John O'Neill and ex-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal -- and how each influenced the events preceding and culminating in Sept. 11, 2001.

``Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11'' by David Friend (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A study of how 50 pictures associated with the terrorist attacks -- whether the grim specter of falling bodies, the now-iconic ruin at Ground Zero or prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- continue to influence our personal and public politics.

``Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission'' by Thomas H. Kean & Lee H. Hamilton (Knopf). The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission describe how it managed to deliver an estimable account of the terrorist attacks despite limited resources, divisive politics and a suspicious American public.

``Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror'' by Robert Young Pelton (Crown). Fear junkie and proprietor of ``The World's Most Dangerous Places'' franchise of travel books, Pelton reveals the clandestine, often lawless world of mercenaries, private armies and independent military contractors, and how they've influenced the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other flashpoints around the globe.

``Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children'' by John Wood (HarperBusiness). A former banker and executive in Microsoft's China division explains how he found fulfillment by giving up his corporate career to start the nonprofit Room to Read, which has built 2,500 schools and libraries in rural Asia.

``The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million -- and Bucked the Medical Establishment -- in a Quest to Save His Children'' by Geeta Anand (Regan Books). The extraordinary story of John Crowley, who founded Novazyme Pharmaceuticals Inc. to seek a cure for rare, degenerative Pompe disease, which was killing his young son and daughter. Starting with an endowment of $37,000, Crowley was able to sell the firm within two years to Genzyme Corp. for $137.5 million, virtually ensuring that research for a cure would continue.

``The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas'' by James Buchan (Norton). Buchan notes that the 18th-century philosopher wrote far more than ``An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'' and shows that his ``invisible hand'' was influenced as much by his religious beliefs as by his Scottish pragmatism.

``Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security'' by Christopher Cooper and Robert Block (Times Books). The two reporters explain how the post-Katrina fiasco revealed the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security is unprepared to handle any grand catastrophe, be it natural or man-made.

``The Female Brain'' by Louann Brizendine (Morgan Road Books). A University of California neuropsychologist offers a scientific examination into why women appear more intuitive, remember arguments that a man forgets, use 13,000 more words a day than men, and other sobering differences between the sexes.

``Casting a Spell: The Bamboo Fly Rod and the American Pursuit of Perfection,'' by George Black (Random House). An eloquent history of American fly fishing and the manufacturing of bamboo fly rods -- an erstwhile cottage industry that has morphed into a multimillion-dollar market.

``The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home'' by Karrie Jacobs (Viking). The architecture critic and founding editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine takes a 14,000-mile road trip in search of a house that is attractive, well built and affordable. Surely any real-estate agents worth their fee would have told her she can have two, but not all three.

``Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death'' by Deborah Blum (Penguin). The story of how a group of brilliant 19th-century and early 20th-century scientists and thinkers became obsessed with discovering empirical evidence of the afterlife and found a few supernatural phenomena they couldn't quite explain.

``The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids'' by Alexandra Robbins (Hyperion). Robbins, who coined the term ``Quarterlife Crisis,'' chronicles the lives of a group of Bethesda, Maryland, high-schoolers as they try to mold themselves into desirable college applicants -- with perfect grades, stellar test scores and a well-rounded mix of extracurricular activities.

``The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa'' by Adam Roberts (PublicAffairs). The far-fetched story of how in March 2004 a mercenary army partially funded by Margaret Thatcher's son tried to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and get rich by seizing the country's oil -- a scenario straight out of Frederick Forsyth's 1972 novel ``The Dogs of War.''

``The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power'' by Marina Belozerskaya (Little, Brown). Why did William Randolph Hearst keep kangaroos, camels and yaks at San Simeon? Why did the Medicis import lions to roam Florence's Piazza della Signoria? These are just two of the questions answered by this compelling history of how exotic pets bestow prestige and glory on their rich and powerful owners.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Profits From Christian Books Make Believers of Top Publishers

2006-07-25T11:54:00.000-05:00

Profits From Christian Books Make Believers of Top Publishers

July 25 (Bloomberg) -- As the International Christian Retail Show wrapped up in Denver earlier this month, the hot topic was not the lackluster box office of ``The Da Vinci Code.'' Instead, it was the news that Multnomah Publishers, a modest-size Oregon- based evangelical Christian publishing house, had been put up for sale.

Multnomah is notable for being the publisher that started a renaissance in Christian publishing in 2001, when its book, Bruce Wilkinson's ``The Prayer of Jabez'' -- a self-help book that implies the promise of riches to those who daily repeat a prayer from the Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament -- sold more than 8 million copies and became the best-selling book that year.

Not the best-selling religious-themed book, but the best- selling book, period.

Trade magazine Publishers Weekly speculated that Random House, the U.S. subsidiary of Bertelsmann AG, is the most likely buyer for Multnomah's 600 titles.

``We've long been committed to the Christian book market and are interested in growing in this area,'' said Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House Inc. He would not otherwise lend credence to the rumor, but pointed out that the company already owns a Christian publishing subsidiary, WaterBrook Press, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The purchase of Multnomah would be the second high-profile deal this year: On June 8, shareholders of Thomas Nelson Publishers of Nashville, Tennessee, approved the sale of that company to private equity firm InterMedia Partners for $473 million, or $29.85 per share.

That's within shouting distance of the $537.5 million that Lagardere SCA paid in February for the far better-known Time Warner Book Group.

Healthy Sales

In fiscal 2005 ended March 31, Thomas Nelson reported sales of $253 million and earnings of $21 million. The company had eight books on the New York Times best-seller list in fiscal 2005 and reported that 49 trade titles (i.e., not Bibles) sold more than 100,000 copies.

``From a cultural standpoint, people are not as afraid of books of faith as they were before,'' said Michael Hyatt, president of Thomas Nelson. ``People don't mind reading a book of faith and taking what they want out of it.''

Clearly, investors have faith this is one area of the publishing business that will continue to grow, and rightly so. Part of Time Warner's appeal to Lagardere may have been the inclusion of Warner Faith (recently renamed FaithWords), publisher of the blockbuster ``Your Best Life Now,'' by Houston preacher Joel Osteen. That book has sold more than 3.8 million copies.

Gold Standard

The gold standard in Christian publishing remains Rick Warren's ``The Purpose Driven Life,'' which has sold 25 million copies since first appearing in October 2002. The book's publisher, Zondervan -- a subsidiary of HarperCollins, the book- publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- is one of the largest Bible publishers in the U.S. Zondervan is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

These tremendous sales figures have not gone unnoticed by booksellers as well. Walk into any book retailer today, from Barnes & Noble to Wal-Mart, and you'll find a more generous selection of Christian books for sale than in years past.

That said, you'll still have to look carefully to distinguish them from other books vying for your attention. Christian publishers have become savvy about how to market their books to mass-market shoppers.

Implicitly Evangelical

The books are implicitly, rather than explicitly, evangelical. The titles don't sound religious, the colophon (the publisher's logo printed on a book's spine) has no obvious religious significance, and the only clues to the author's Christian bona-fides, such as an affiliation with a church, are likely to be buried in the jacket copy, if they appear at all.

``In the past, they could only find the sorts of books they wanted in Christian bookstores, some of which were small with limited stock,'' said Janet Grant, a literary agent who represents numerous Christian authors. ``But the buyers now enjoy a wealth of options, not only shopping at the local Christian bookstore but also going to Barnes & Noble, where they can pick up a book on home decorating and a book on exploring the spiritual side of their lives -- one-stop shopping at its best.''

Recent best-sellers such as ``America: The Last Best Hope,'' by William Bennett; ``Aruba: The Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Holloway and Corruption in Paradise,'' by Dave Holloway,'' and business guru John Maxwell's ``The 360 Degree Leader,'' aren't easily identifiable as Christian books, though all three are published by Thomas Nelson.

New-Look Bibles

These days, even some Bibles don't look like Bibles. One of Thomas Nelson's most successful products is called a ``BibleZine,'' which is a Bible published to look like a glossy magazine. Each is tailored to a specific niche, such as ``Real,'' which is directed at the hip-hop market, and ``Becoming,'' aimed at women in their 20s and early 30s.

One publisher changed its name to play down its provenance. On June 1, Broadman & Holman, the publishing wing of LifeWay Christian Resources and a subsidiary of the Southern Baptist Convention, changed its name to B&H Publishing Group. The original name is closely associated with the company's Bible- publishing business and harks back to the company's origin in 1743, when Christopher Saur began printing Bibles in Pennsylvania.

At the same time, one of the company's recent publishing strategies has been to convince bold-faced-names, such as Oliver North, model Jennifer O'Neill, and television and film personalities Chuck Norris and Stephen Baldwin, to publish books with the company and trumpet their faith.

Mega-Churches

Some of the burgeoning success of Christian publishing is simply a matter of numbers. Approximately 133 million Americans, or just under half the total U.S. population, are Christians, according to the most recent Statistical Abstract published by the U.S. Census Bureau.

``Three factors are contributing to the growth of the market,'' Hyatt said. ``The first is demographics: As baby boomers grow older and confront their mortality, they are returning to their faith. Next is globalization, which is bringing new religions to our shores and causing people to reconsider how they worship. The third is the mega-church trend.''

Rick Warren and Joel Osteen are the most obvious beneficiaries of this trend. Each weekend, approximately 35,000 people attend Osteen's ministry at Lakewood Church in Houston -- now housed in an arena formerly used by the Rockets, Houston's NBA franchise. Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, counts more than 20,000 in its ministry, while its outreach program has trained a further 200,000 people. These ministries provide a ready pool of consumers.

Women of Faith

Thomas Nelson has even invested in its own form of the mega- church. In 2000, the company bought the Women of Faith franchise. Based in Plano, Texas, this self-described ``spiritual spa'' offers music and a roster of speakers -- often Thomas Nelson authors -- over two days in an arena setting. Last year, an average of 15,000 people attended each event, and 422,000 people in all bought tickets.

Not unexpectedly, Thomas Nelson's books are sold in the concourses off the arena. Women of Faith now accounts for 12 percent of Nelson's revenue. In an understatement of near- biblical proportions, Hyatt said, ``Any typical bookstore signing we could do wouldn't get close to those kinds of numbers.''

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Rowling's Harry, Noir McCarthy, Shadid's Iraq: July Paperbacks

2006-07-05T09:28:00.000-05:00

Rowling's Harry, Noir McCarthy, Shadid's Iraq: July Paperbacks

July 5 (Bloomberg) -- J.K. Rowling's second-to-last Harry Potter, Cormac McCarthy's bloody road novel, and Anthony Shadid's superb look at the war in Iraq -- these are among the July paperback highlights.

``Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'' by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic). Here's the penultimate installment of the boy wizard's boarding-school adventures -- and Rowling has forecast the demise of two main characters in the finale.

``No Country for Old Men'' by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage). The novelist's most accessible book yet is a bloody noir thriller about a Texas man who stumbles across a pickup full of heroin, cash and dead bodies and then tries to outrun a trio of relentless pursuers.

``Espresso Tales: The New 44 Scotland Street Novel'' by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor). This is the second volume in the Scottish author's soap-operatic series about the residents of a Georgian townhouse in Edinburgh.

``No Direction Home'' by Marisa Silver (Norton). Much like the film ``Crash,'' this debut novel depicts the intersecting stories of families who converge on Los Angeles and struggle to stay emotionally and physically connected.

``Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War'' by Anthony Shadid (Picador). In one of the best books to come out of the war so far, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter offers an Iraqi man-on-the street perspective on the invasion and occupation.

``Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of America's Power'' by David Rothkopf (PublicAffairs). Drawing on interviews with notable insiders, including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger, the former Clinton staffer delivers a history of one of the most powerful and enigmatic organizations in the U.S. government.

``Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping'' by Patrick Radden Keefe. (Random House). A young journalist visits clandestine ``listening stations'' and talks with shadowy surveillance experts while trying to discover the methods used by governments to spy on their citizens.

``Happiness: Lessons from a New Science'' by Richard Layard (Penguin). An economist marshals insights from psychology, neuroscience, sociology and applied economics to offer a definition of happiness and advice on how we can achieve it.

``Confessions from the Velvet Ropes: The Glamorous, Grueling Life of Thomas Onorato, New York's Top Club Doorman'' by Glenn Belverio (St. Martin's Griffin). Gossip and anecdotes reflect a decade manning the door at some of Manhattan's hip nightclubs, fashion shows and celebrity parties.

``Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!'' by Mark Binelli (Dalkey Archive). This cerebral black comedy recasts the doomed anarchists as a comedy duo on the vaudeville circuit who work their way up to starring in slapstick movies and opening for Bob Hope on USO tours.

``Epileptic'' by David B. (Pantheon). The true story of a French boy, his epileptic brother and their parents' desperate efforts to find a cure is featured in this exceptional graphic- novel

``Istanbul: Memories and the City'' by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage). Turkey's best-known writer delivers a memoir of life in the city and an eloquent meditation on Istanbul's almost palpable air of melancholy.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Minot's Yuppies, McGuane's Montana, Scary Cancun: July Fiction

2006-07-03T23:12:00.000-05:00

Minot's Yuppies, McGuane's Montana, Scary Cancun: July Fiction

July 3 (Bloomberg) -- Eliza Minot's troubled yuppies, Thomas McGuane's first collection of stories in 20 years, and Scott Smith's terrifying tale about a Cancun vacation gone wrong -- these are some of the fiction highlights for July.

``The Brambles'' by Eliza Minot (Knopf). In Minot's touching portrayal of familial love, three yuppie siblings grapple with personal problems like bulimia and sudden unemployment while mourning their mother's death and caring for their father, who is dying from cancer and harboring a potentially destructive secret.

``Lost Hearts in Italy'' by Andrea Lee (Random House). Elegant, elegiac novel about the vagaries of passion, in which a married American couple living in Rome -- Mira, a black woman, and Nick, a blue-blooded banker -- are torn apart when Mira starts a globe-trotting affair with Zenin, a billionaire Italian playboy.

``The City Is a Rising Tide'' by Rebecca Lee (Simon & Schuster). More globe-trotting: Justine Laxness, an exec at a dubious Manhattan nonprofit called the Aquinas Foundation, is trying to raise money for a New Age center in China whose future is threatened by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, demanding celebrity donors and her desire to seduce the foundation's founder.

``The Ruins'' by Scott Smith (Knopf): The author of ``A Simple Plan'' returns with what may well be the summer's must- read beach book: a terrifying novel about a group of young vacationers in Cancun who find themselves lost in the Mexican jungle while searching for a friend who never returned from a trip to a Mayan ruin.

``Gallatin Canyon: Stories'' by Thomas McGuane (Knopf). This collection of stories -- the first in 20 years from the Montana writer -- revisits Big Sky country, Michigan and Florida, milieus also common to Hemingway and Richard Ford, two short-story masters with whom McGuane stands comparison.

``Errors and Omissions'' by Paul Goldstein (Doubleday). A whip-smart legal mystery from a Stanford law professor featuring Michael Seely, a lawyer on the verge of self-destruction who, when asked by a Hollywood studio to verify ownership of its ``Spykiller'' franchise, discovers a mystery linked to the Hollywood blacklisting scandal.

``Half Life'' by Shelley Jackson (HarperCollins). Jackson -- who achieved a small degree of fame by tattooing her short story ``Skin'' word by word on almost 3,000 willing participants -- offers up this edgy, provocative first novel about conjoined twins, one of whom is willing to kill the other to achieve her independence.

``54'' by Wu Ming (Harcourt). A wildly inventive epic in which Cary Grant, Lucky Luciano and a Bolognese bartender named Robespierre converge on Yugoslavia to produce a biopic of dictator Tito, thwart a KGB assassination and find the bartender's lost father -- from the pens of five anonymous Italian writers writing in collaboration as Wu Ming, the Chinese for ``no name.''

``The Worthy: A Ghost's Story'' by Will Clarke (Simon & Schuster). A black comedy about a Porsche-driving Louisiana State college student, Conrad Avery Sutton III, who dies during a fraternity hazing and returns to the scene to haunt his killer.

``Secret Society Girl: An Ivy League Novel'' by Diana Peterfreund (Delacorte). Amy Haskel is a studious junior at elite Eli University (read Yale) when she's tapped for Rose & Grave (read Skull & Bones) and finds herself anointed as one of the social elite -- a frothy summer read for anyone interested in the collegiate antics of the secret rulers of the world.

``The Burning'' by Thomas Legendre (Little, Brown). In this entertaining debut novel, a curious amalgam of an academic novel- of-ideas and a romance, a young economist impulsively weds a gorgeous Vegas croupier and settles with her in Arizona, where he soon finds his marriage wilting under the desert sun and his radical new economic theory being tested by an aggressive colleague.

``Turing's Delirium'' by Edmundo Paz Soldan (Houghton Mifflin). Bolivian Paz Soldan has been hailed as one of the best of the new South American novelists. His latest novel to be translated into English is a visionary cyberpunk thriller about a fictional Bolivian city, Rio Fugitivo, where the Black Chamber, a secret government cryptography agency, wages a digital war against a group of revolutionary hackers.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Michael `Slave' Jordan, Old German Plot, Guantanamo: July Books

2006-06-30T07:38:00.000-05:00

Michael `Slave' Jordan, Old German Plot, Guantanamo: July Books

June 30 (Bloomberg) -- Are black professional athletes merely ``forty million dollar slaves''? Does the world need another Bible-sized biography of LBJ? Are kids born to wealth bound to be unhappy? These are some of the questions raised by new July nonfiction books.

``The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More'' by Chris Anderson (Hyperion). In one of the most talked about business books this year, Wired magazine editor Anderson argues that the relationship between seller and buyer has changed: Only companies that can offer a surfeit of choice and cater to niche markets will survive.

``Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete'' by William C. Rhoden (Crown). This New York Times journalist says professional sports are like a pre-Civil War plantation, where the white owners reap the benefit of black labor. He then lambastes the athletes for spineless acquiescence.

``The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice'' by Chad Millman (Little, Brown): The nearly unbelievable account of how German saboteurs set off an explosion in New York Harbor that destroyed a chunk of lower Manhattan and Jersey City during WWI.

``Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq'' by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin). The Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner describes the disenfranchisement of many military officers who are infuriated with the Bush administration for mismanaging the invasion of Iraq.

``The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq'' by Fouad Ajami (Free Press). In a surprisingly optimistic book, Johns Hopkins professor and author of ``The Dream Palace of the Arabs'' offers a lucid assessment of Iraqi history, how the current chaos may not be as dire as it appears, and why the future holds promise for the now unstable nation.

``The President's Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales'' by Bill Minutaglio (Rayo). A biography of the controversial U.S. attorney general whose support of his friend George W. extends even to the torture of suspected foreign terrorists.

``Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power'' by Joseph Margulies (Simon & Schuster). Margulies, the attorney who won the privilege of judicial review for some of the roughly 800 prisoners who have been held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, looks at the history of U.S. prisoner detention and offers evidence that the Guantanamo project has been a human-rights debacle from the very start.

``Friendship: An Expose'' by Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin). One of the finest essayists in the U.S. turns his pen to the topic of friendship, examining his own friendships and how they have been irrevocably altered by changing social mores.

``LBJ: Architect of American Ambition'' by Randall Woods (Free Press). Another worthy and whopping -- this one is 1,024 pages -- biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson hits the groaning shelves, saying, among other things, that the drawling Texas rancher-turned-president was motivated as much by idealism as by a Machiavellian will to power.

``Conservatives Without Conscience'' by John Dean (Viking). The former Nixon White House lawyer vents his ire at neoconservative and far-right Republicans who have maligned the party by demonstrating no regard for anyone but themselves and not living up to their holier-than-thou platitudes.

``The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Deeply Unhappy Kids'' by Madeline Levine (HarperCollins). This psychologist, trying to explain what's wrong with doing everything right, says that by giving your child every material advantage, you may be creating a time bomb of emotional trauma and setting yourself up for some unpleasant Thanksgiving dinners.

``Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke'' by Dean Kuipers (Bloomsbury). The forgotten story of a pair of homosexual hippies who built a pot-friendly paradise in southern Michigan. After being arrested in 2001, they torched their plants rather than forfeit them to authorities and, after a five-day standoff, were shot to death by FBI agents days before 9/11.

``Grayson'' by Lynne Cox (Knopf). This short, sweet memoir by the world-champion distance swimmer recalls the life-changing moment when, just 17 years old, she encountered a lost baby gray whale while training off the California coast.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story:
Edward Nawotka at ink@edwardn.com.

World Cup, Beer, Pirates, New York Real Estate: June Paperbacks

2006-06-11T16:25:00.000-05:00

World Cup, Beer, Pirates, New York Real Estate: June Paperbacks

(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)

By Edward Nawotka

June 7 (Bloomberg) -- General George Washington, posh Manhattan real estate, the World Cup and pirates are among the topics in June's new paperbacks. Here are some highlights:

Nonfiction

``1776'' by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster). The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer's masterful overview of the Revolutionary War's pivotal first year, including biographical sketches of George Washington and the generals he cajoled into fighting with the Continental Army.

``The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan'' by Steven Gaines (Back Bay). Supercharged New York City realtors show off the apartments of the financial elite. You'll get to meet Betty Sherrill, the decorating doyenne who lords over One Sutton Place South, and Linda Stein, the colorful ``broker to the stars.''

``The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805'' by Richard Zacks (Hyperion). A page- turner on how a mercenary army crossed the Sahara to free 300 U.S. sailors from Barbary pirates.

``The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat'' by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster). The contributions to the Watergate investigation of Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, as told by the reporter who kept his identity hidden for almost 33 years.

``The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine'' by Rudolph Chelminski (Gotham). A look behind the 2003 suicide of Chef Bernard Loiseau, who became undone trying to stay at the top of France's fiercely competitive food world.

``Mark Twain: A Life'' by Ron Powers (Free Press). One of the best literary biographies of recent years, this captures the mercurial writer in all phases of his variegated life, from youthful humorous hack to his golden years of global celebrity.

``The Gift of Valor: A War Story'' by Michael M. Phillips (Broadway). A detailed portrait of the life and death of U.S. Marine Corporal Jason Dunham, who threw himself on an Iraqi grenade to save his fellow soldiers.

``A History of the World in Six Glasses'' by Tom Standage (Walker). An Economist writer's history as conveyed by the evolution and consumption of coffee, tea, cola, beer, wine and spirits.

``Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullsh**'' by Laura Penny (Three Rivers). A dissection of the way advertisers, politicians, publicists, investment professionals, salesmen and many others obfuscate the truth.

``The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time'' by Michael Craig (Warner). This is an engrossing account of a 2001 poker battle between a self-made Texas billionaire and some of the world's greatest players in a series of matches where the total stakes eventually topped $20 million.

``A Matter of Opinion'' by Victor S. Navasky (Picador). The former editor of the Nation magazine assembles 30 years of anecdotes and opinions to mount a passionate defense of the importance of journalism to a functioning democracy.

``An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It'' by Al Gore (Rodale). This is the paperback companion to Gore's compelling documentary film of the same name on global warming.

``The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain's Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Swordfight, Mutiny, Shipwreck, Gold, War, Hurricane, and Discovery'' by Martin Dugard (Back Bay). An eventful life's final episodes, from Columbus's fourth attempt in 1502 to find a western passage to India through wild adventures on the high seas that land him in Jamaica.

``Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans'' by Thomas Lynch (Norton). This affecting travelogue traces the author's journey to County Clare, Ireland, and his changing relationship with his Irish relatives since Sept. 11, 2001.

``Comrade Rockstar: The Life and Mystery of Dean Reed, the All-American Boy Who Brought Rock 'n' Roll to the Soviet Union'' by Reggie Nadelson (Walker). Reed was a most unlikely superstar whose popularity in Russia in the 1960s and '70s earned him the nickname ``Red Elvis.''

``Hollywood Jock: 365 Days, Four Screenplays, Three TV Pitches, Two Kids, and One Wife Who's Ready to Pull the Plug'' by Rob Ryder (Harper). The diary of a desperate man whose long- suffering wife grants him one more year to fulfill his dream of making it in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

Fiction

``The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana'' by Umberto Eco (Harvest). The latest cerebral Eco novel tells of a Milanese antiquarian book dealer who, after losing his memory, finds he can recall only phrases from things he's read and so tries to recover his past by rereading his childhood collection of comics, books and other artifacts.

``Until I Find You'' by John Irving (Ballantine). At 848 pages, this doorstop narrates the autobiographical story of a sexually abused actor searching Europe for his father, a tattoo artist/organist who abandoned him as a boy.

``Death's Little Helpers'' by Peter Spiegelman (Vintage). A corporate-crime novel in which private investigator John March, a retired cop, recovering alcoholic and black-sheep scion of a rich banking family, works his Wall Street connections to investigate the disappearance of a famous stock analyst.

``13 Steps Down'' by Ruth Rendell (Vintage). This is a creepy story that focuses on the nefarious alliance of an exercise-equipment repairman living in a rotting Notting Hill mansion and his octogenarian landlord.

``Rules for Old Men Waiting'' by Peter Pouncey (Random House). A small masterpiece about an elderly war historian living on Cape Cod who creates 10 commandments by which to live out the remainder of his days as he struggles to finish a final story about soldiers gassed during the First World War.

``And the Word Was'' by Bruce Bauman (Other Press). In this portrait of expatriate life in contemporary India, an American doctor falls for the rebellious niece of a powerful industrialist.

``Alibi'' by Joseph Kanon (Picador): A thriller featuring Adam Miller, an American Nazi hunter who stumbles upon murder and political intrigue in postwar Venice (Kanon's ``The Good German'' has just been filmed by Steven Soderbergh and should hit theaters later this year).

``The Pirates!'' by Gideon Defoe (Vintage). Yaaaar! A brace of light, allusive comedies in which a bored pirate captain in Victorian times attacks Charles Darwin's HMS Beagle and then goes hunting for Moby Dick with

Updike Terrorist, McMurtry's West, Ali's Portugal: June Fiction

2006-06-02T10:40:00.000-05:00

Updike Terrorist, McMurtry's West, Ali's Portugal: June Fiction

(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)

By Edward Nawotka

June 2 (Bloomberg) -- John Updike's New Jersey terrorist, Larry McMurtry's latest jaunt in the Old West, Monica Ali in Portugal and a comic look at the future from a Young & Rubicam veteran -- these are some of the fiction highlights this month.

``Terrorist'' by John Updike (Knopf). New Jersey high- school student Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy -- the son of an Irish- American mother and an Egyptian father who abandoned him -- finds the fiery rhetoric of militant Islam soothes his angst- ridden teenage soul and leads him down a nefarious path. While Updike's mostly sympathetic portrayal of the young terrorist isn't wholly convincing, the book's ambitious attempt to embody the past five years of homeland insecurity is gripping nonetheless.

``Lost and Found'' by Carolyn Parkhurst (Little, Brown). Parkhurst's follow-up to her bestselling debut, ``The Dogs of Babel,'' portrays the behind-the-scenes antics at a fictional reality show featuring a coterie of emotionally befuddled contestants in a global scavenger hunt.

``There Will Never Be Another You'' by Carolyn See (Random House). In the near future, the U.S. wages war with an unseen enemy and UCLA dermatologist Phil Fuchs joins a top-secret biological-emergency-response team. His marriage is breaking up while other couples fall in love in this poignant portrait of people who continue to seek happiness despite deep anxiety about the future.

``Telegraph Days'' by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster). The Texan's latest novel depicts the rise and fall of the Old West through the eyes of Marie Antoinette Courtright, an orphan who becomes Buffalo Bill's lover, witnesses the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and, eventually, writes screenplays about it all for MGM.

``Alentejo Blue'' by Monica Ali (Scribner). The Booker Prize-nominated author of ``Brick Lane'' leaves behind London's East End and heads to Portugal for this series of vignettes about the residents of a rural village in decline. They struggle with falling demand for cork, unwelcome tourists and their own apathy.

``Blow the House Down'' by Robert Baer (Crown). Baer, a former CIA agent (the film ``Syriana'' was based on his life), delivers this thriller in which a CIA operative discovers evidence that Iran is cooperating with al-Qaeda to plan a massive terrorist attack against the U.S. -- namely, 9/11.

``Cellophane'' by Marie Arana (Dial). Fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Latin American fiction will enjoy this vivid, bawdy first novel from the editor of the Washington Post Book World, in which Don Victor Sobrevilla starts a paper factory in the Peruvian rain forest and later discovers the formula for cellophane, setting off a series of magical events.

``Londonstani'' by Gautam Malkani (Penguin). This first novel from a Financial Times editor is a raw, foul-mouthed group portrait of four ambitious South Asian ``rudeboys,'' petty criminals who banter in a hip, urban shorthand (``Dey shud save up their aggro 4 Paki bashers, u get me?'') and cruise the streets of London looking for action.

``The Futurist'' by James Othmer (Doubleday). A very funny business satire from a former Young & Rubicam creative director, in which a famous prognosticator founds ``The Coalition of the Clueless'' after he mistakes a deadly riot at a Johannesburg soccer match for a celebration. When a shady organization sends him on a round-the-world trip to find out why much of the world hates America, his eyes open even wider.

``Water for Elephants'' by Sara Gruen (Algonquin). In what may be the sleeper hit of the summer, a young man joins a ragtag traveling circus -- the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth -- during the Great Depression and falls prey to a maniacal ringmaster, a horse-riding ingenue and the charms of a hapless pachyderm.

``A Disorder Peculiar to the Country'' by Ken Kalfus (Ecco). Kalfus, best known for penetrating fiction mostly set in Russia, has written a domestic drama about divorcing Brooklynites who go to war with each other just as the Twin Towers fall. Each thinks the other died in the attack and rejoices -- then the escalation begins.

``The Abortionist's Daughter'' by Elisabeth Hyde (Knopf). A polemical whodunit about the murder of a vocal Colorado abortion doctor. Suspects include the doctor's husband (who is a district attorney), her teenage daughter and a local pro-life minister. Meanwhile, few of the town's residents want to help with the investigation, which is attracting unwelcome national publicity.

``Academy X'' by Andrew Trees (Bloomsbury). In this novel about academic and class one-upmanship in New York City, an English teacher at an elite Manhattan prep school is caught up in a plot to get a rich donor's daughter admitted into Princeton (she's only wait-listed), while at the same time trying to romance the new, not-so-innocent librarian.

``Winkie'' by Clifford Chase (Grove). A quirky political black comedy about an animate teddy bear arrested by the FBI for his association -- i.e., being the much-loved possession of a mad professor with a close resemblance to the Unabomber. An overzealous government prosecutor takes the bear to trial, accusing him of terrorism and calls witnesses to testify against him from the trials of Galileo, Socrates and Oscar Wilde.

``The Whistling Season'' by Ivan Doig (Harcourt). An early- 20th-century saga about how a rural Montana farming community is changed by the presence of the new schoolteacher who blows in from the big city of Minneapolis wielding brass knuckles, and how he adapts to the rugged land he finds there.

June Books: Berlusconi's Ego, Bronfmans' Seagram, Coulter Screed

2006-06-01T10:26:00.000-05:00

Berlusconi Ego, Bronfmans' Seagram, Coulter Screed

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- A biography of Italy's sore-losing, forever-preening Silvio Berlusconi, a history of the Seagram liquor empire and a survey of erotica hoarders -- these are some of the highlights among new June nonfiction books.

``The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11'' by Ron Suskind (Simon & Schuster). To keep the suspense high, the publishers have not put out any advance galleys before the June 20 publication date. Suskind promises to unveil how American spies have pursued and apprehended would-be terrorists, preventing further attacks on the U.S.

``Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War'' by Greg Palast (Dutton). The muckraking BBC reporter claims that John Kerry won in 2004 and there really are secret rulers of the world. He has 50 classified documents from the Pentagon, the World Bank and elsewhere as proof.

``Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America'' by Josef Joffe (Norton). ``Die Zeit'' publisher-editor Joffe meditates on America's role as world leader -- one he says is more benign and comforting than aggressive -- and offers a perceptive analysis of global anti-Americanism.

``Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public'' by Helen Thomas (Scribner). Thomas, age 85 and the most recognizable face in the White House briefing room, recounts her 60-year career, during which she covered nine presidents. She argues that journalists have a responsibility to demand answers to tough questions -- something she says the current press corps is really bad at.

``Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea'' by George Lakoff (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Berkeley linguistics professor and liberal strategist who wrote the bestseller ``Don't Think of an Elephant!'' argues that conservatives have ruined the word ``freedom'' by using it to justify their bad behavior.

``Godless: The Church of Liberalism'' by Ann Coulter (Crown). In her latest screed, Coulter proposes that liberalism isn't merely a political stance but a religion, complete with a cosmology, miracles, high priests, martyrs and more -- but apparently no deity.

``Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism'' by Michelle Goldberg (Norton). Goldberg looks into the culture war between secular America and the growing religious mainstream, where certain Christians profess it is their God-given right to govern nonbelievers and are striving mightily to elect their own priestly politicians.

``The Pursuit of Happyness'' by Chris Gardner (Amistad). Horatio Alger would admire Gardner, who recalls how he transformed himself from a homeless single parent eating in San Francisco soup kitchens into a wealthy stockbroker who founded his own firm, Chicago's Gardner Rich.

``The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram'' by Nicholas Faith (St. Martin's). This history of the Bronfman family, whose name means ``liquor man'' in Yiddish, shows how the Bronfmans started as bootleggers during Prohibition and built a business empire that Vivendi eventually paid $34.4 billion to acquire in 2000.

``Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld'' by Sharon Weinberger (Nation Books). This look at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency examines the government's efforts to create a weapon that would end the War on Terror, including an experimental nuclear device called a ``hafnium bomb.''

``The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina -- The Inside Story From One Louisiana Scientist'' by Ivor van Heerden (Viking). In this enlightening treatise the author calls the flooding of New Orleans ``man-made'' and outlines the chain of human failure that enabled the disaster to happen so fast.

``The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi'' by Alexander Stille (Penguin). Stille explains Berlusconi's trajectory from Milan real-estate developer with Machiavellian impulses to media baron and one of Europe's most resilient right-wing politicians.

``Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice'' by David Feige (Little, Brown). A former public defender, Feige documents a single day in the South Bronx criminal-justice system, where he meets a 16-year-old supermodel accused of murder, a judge obsessed with ``Soldier of Fortune'' magazine, and the motley assortment of life that gets sucked into the legal system on a daily basis.

``Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting'' by T.R. Pearson (Crown). William Willis was 60 when he improbably piloted a homemade balsa-wood raft across the Pacific, from Peru to American Samoa, enduring shark attacks, dehydration and encroaching madness.

``Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of 'Erotica''' by Geoff Nicholson (Simon & Schuster). Nicholson takes a bizarre grand tour of people who have amassed piles of sex-related artifacts, such as the woman with a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix's penis and a rock impresario with a stash of thousands of skin mags.

``Sheetrock & Shellac: A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement'' by David Owen (Simon & Schuster). Owen, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, documents his growing confidence as he renovates his 200-year-old Connecticut farmhouse. No mere weekend warrior, he eventually tries building a home from the ground up.

``The Afterlife'' by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This acclaimed experimental novelist's chilling meditation about his alcoholic mother's death from lung cancer is being compared to Joan Didion's ``Year of Magical Thinking.''

``The General and the Jaguar: Pershing's Hunt for Pancho Villa -- A True Story of Revolution and Revenge'' by Eileen Welsome (Little, Brown). On March 9, 1916, Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 Americans. General John J. ``Black Jack'' Pershing and a young George Patton chased Villa into Mexico, where they found a country nearly as hostile and dangerous as modern-day Iraq.

``The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen'' by Michael Ruhlman (Viking). In his third book on chefs, after ``The Making of a Chef'' and ``The Soul of a Chef,'' Ruhlman peeks into the kitchen at Manhattan's pricey Per Se restaurant, visits the food temples in Las Vegas and talks to the folks at Food Network, among other adventures in culinary America.

``Every Second Counts: The Race to Transplant the First Human Heart'' by Donald McRae (Putnam). How four surgeons --three Americans and the vainglorious South African Christiaan Barnard - - competed in 1967 to pioneer human-heart transplants.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Bush's War in Iraq Is Boon for Memoirs, Odes, Ads, Jeremiads

2006-05-22T22:41:00.000-05:00

Bush's War in Iraq Is Boon for Memoirs, Odes, Ads, Jeremiads

(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)

By Edward Nawotka

May 22 (Bloomberg) -- With its inimitable mix of murderous mismanagement and high-falutin' rhetoric, the Bush White House is a boon to publishers. Here are the highlights so far:

``The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq'' by George Packer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Packer, a self-described liberal hawk, was initially in favor of invading Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. His award-winning book is a visceral chronicle of his four trips to Iraq for the New Yorker magazine and his growing dismay as he witnesses neocon mismanagement, incompetence and ignorance at home and abroad.

``Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq'' by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor (Pantheon). Gordon, a correspondent for the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, had face-to- face access to General Tommy Franks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others during the planning and execution of the war. They demonstrate how the administration's overconfidence undermined the mission from the very start.

``Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War'' by Anthony Shadid (Henry Holt). Shadid, an Arabic-speaking Lebanese American, captures the elusive man-in- the-Iraqi-street perspective of the invasion. He offers wrenching profiles of everyday Iraqis from families cowering in bombed-out apartments to raw, terrified police recruits.

Common Hatred

``In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq'' by Nir Rosen (Free Press). Another Arabic- speaking journalist, Rosen considers the war from the point of view of the violent Sunni and Shia insurgents as they fight for control of the country. Rosen discovers the one thing these ancient enemies have in common is a hatred of the American occupation.

``The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End'' by Peter W. Galbraith (Simon & Schuster). The former U.S. ambassador to Croatia knows something about civil war. As the title makes clear, he's expecting Kurds, Shia and Sunnis to pull the place apart. It's our moral obligation to stop them, he thinks, but if we can't, then we need to find a way to give each group its own autonomy. (To be published in July).

``My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope'' by L. Paul Bremer III (Simon & Schuster). Following the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, Bremer became the U.S. administrator of Iraq for 13 months. It was his shortsighted decision to disband the Iraqi army (and create marauding bands of malcontents). Still, given his thankless task of filling the power vacuum, one finishes what amounts to his diary feeling a degree of sympathy.

Woodward Trio

``Plan of Attack'' and ``Bush at War'' by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster). Of all the reporters squeezing into the notoriously impenetrable Bush White House, Woodward may have the best access. These two books dissected Bush's leadership throughout the planning and execution of the Iraq invasion. A third as yet untitled book, to be published this September, covers the occupation thus far, and Bush's struggle to deal with an increasingly unsupportive American public.

``Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush'' by Fred Barnes (Crown). This hagiographical assessment from an editor of the Weekly Standard and Fox News host co-opts the language of critics and argues that Bush's faith-based, agenda-driven politics has made him an ``insurgent force'' in business-as-usual D.C.

Constant Whine

``Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush'' by Eric Boehlert (Free Press). Despite the administration's obvious disdain for the press and its near constant whine about bias, Boehlert says the mainstream media have repeatedly gone ``soft'' on Bush, failing to push stories that would damage the White House's reputation, such as the missing WMDs in Iraq and NSA wiretapping scandal.

``Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media'' by Bill Sammon (Regnery). The unironically titled book is unabashedly pro-W, and gives him a high five for being an effective politician and commander-in-chief.

``Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy'' by Bruce R. Bartlett (Doubleday). The former Reagan White House staffer attacks Bush II for short- term political opportunism that has led to ``finger in the wind'' economic leadership. Never mind the tremendous financial cost of the war, he's bankrupted the Republican Party of its political capital.

``American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror'' by Con Coughlin (Ecco). Bush isn't the only leader suffering from low poll numbers. This inside-Downing-Street account of Tony Blair's political career tries to answer the question of why Blair risked his political clout with the British people to support Bush's unpopular war in Iraq.

Candid Pictures

``This Is Our War: Servicemen's Photographs of Life in Iraq'' by Devin Friedman (Artisan). This arresting collection of 256 photos snapped by soldiers fighting in Iraq is as moving as any memoir. Originally published by GQ magazine, the shots include candid pictures of military action, day-to-day drudgery and moments of poignancy.

``The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time'' by Antonia Juhasz (Regan Books). Juhasz examines the role of multinational companies, such as Bechtel Group Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp., and Halliburton Co., in influencing U.S. foreign policy over the last 25 years and their role in the invasion, occupation and rebuilding of Iraq.

Phone Tapping

``State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration'' by James Risen (Free Press). Not only does Risen reveal the Bush administration has been tapping our phones, he also suggests the president authorized the use of torture in interrogating terrorism suspects and the C.I.A. may have inadvertently given Iran plans for a nuclear weapon.

``America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy'' by Francis Fukuyama (Yale University). The author of the influential 1992 book ``The End of History and the Last Man,'' says the neoconservative urge to spread democracy through ``preventative warfare'' has become a ``benevolent hegemony'' and may have gone too far.

``Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways'' by Alan M. Dershowitz (Norton). The Harvard law professor also weighs in on why a foreign policy based on ``shoot first, ask questions later'' is doing more harm than good, emphasizing that it contrasts with the policy of deterrence that won the Cold War and has troubling ramifications for civil liberties.

``American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century'' by Kevin Phillips (Viking). This former Republican strategist argues that the United States under the Bush administration shares four unenviable traits with every other now defunct world power throughout history: militant religion, resource problems, ballooning debt and globe-spanning ambition.

``A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme'' by Calvin Trillin (Random House). A send-up of our leading men. Here's an example taken from ``A Summary of Remarks by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the Third Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq'': ``Our strategy for peace there/Is really working well/It's just that all the killing/Can make that hard to tell.''

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg news. Any opinions expressed are his own).

Medicis, Oppenheimer, Alien Lizard Star in Latest Paperbacks

2006-05-11T10:12:00.000-05:00

Medicis, Oppenheimer, Alien Lizard Star in Latest Paperbacks

(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)

By Edward Nawotka

May 9 (Bloomberg) -- Lorenzo de Medici, physicist Richard Feynman, actor Eli Wallach and a talking alien lizard are just some of the characters featured in the latest paperback releases.

Nonfiction

``American Mania: When More Is Not Enough'' by Peter Whybrow (Norton): Psychiatrist Whybrow suggests that our brain chemistry and natural risk-and-reward system may prevent many of us from taking satisfaction in our extreme affluence.

``The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage'' by Eli Wallach (Harcourt): This memoir by a first-class raconteur collects Hollywood stories from his 50-year career, starting with the Actors Studio and ranging through roles from ``The Magnificent Seven'' to ``Mystic River.''

``The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation'' by George Gilder (Norton): The story of Foveon, a maker of chips for digital cameras, as it fights to gain a share of the $2 billion market with a new product.

``American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer'' by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin (Vintage): This year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography is a magisterial portrait of the physicist who built the atom bomb and struggled with the consequences for the rest of his life.

``Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard Feynman'' edited by Michelle Feynman (Basic Books): The late bongo-playing physicist who solved the riddle of why the Challenger shuttle exploded displays wit, smarts and charm in these letters selected by his daughter.

``Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, From Baghdad to Timbuktu'' by Yaroslav Trofimov (Picador): A Wall Street Journal reporter describes his three-year, post-9/11 journey crisscrossing of the Muslim world, with its array of Islamic cultures and much open hostility to the U.S.

``Embroideries'' by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon): The third graphic novel from the Iranian emigre reveals the surprising sex lives of Iranian women in simple yet provocative black-and-white drawings.

``Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth- Century Florence'' by Tim Parks (Norton): Parks, best known for his novels set in Italy, shows how Cosimo and Lorenzo ``The Magnificent'' de Medici built a fortune while trying to avoid arrest by the Catholic Church for usury.

``The Decline of the West'' by Oswald Spengler (Vintage): This reprint abridges Spengler's original edition, first published in Germany in 1918, of his influential survey of world history, among the first books to suggest that civilizations rise and fall in cycles.

``Chasing the Rodeo: On Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Broken Bones, and One Man's Search for the West'' by W.K. Stratton (Harcourt): This vivid memoir of the author's search of his ``rodeo bum'' father takes Stratton to tiny cow towns across the West and along a sports circuit pungent with leather, dung and adrenaline.

``Oh the Glory of It All'' by Sean Wilsey (Penguin): The son of a San Francisco butter magnate and a gossip columnist serves up this portrait of the artist as a young, rich misfit, from skateboarding punk to reform-school reject.

``De Kooning: An American Master'' by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Knopf): The authors won a Pulitzer for this page- turning biography of the Dutch-born painter who pioneered abstract expressionism.

``Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit'' by Ryan Nerz (St. Martin's Griffin): Nerz documents the year he spent gorging on everything from Nathan's hot dogs to matzo balls as a competitor in the most revolting sport on the planet.

``Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra'' by Jordan Fisher Smith (Mariner): Smith takes the romance out of the forest idyll in relating his 14 years working a 48-mile stretch of Sierra Nevada river canyons frequented by as many dope fiends and armed miners as bird watchers and campers.

``Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite'' by Paul Arden (Portfolio): Arden, a former creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, offers this sequel to his best-selling ``It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be'' -- more visual jokes, aphorisms and self-help platitudes meant to provoke lateral thinking.

Fiction

``A Long Way Down'' by Nick Hornby (Riverhead): Hip British author Hornby returned after his lighthearted hits ``High Fidelity'' and ``How to Be Good'' with a novel about four Londoners who accidentally meet on New Year's Eve when all four plan to commit suicide by jumping off the same building.

``Acts of Faith'' by Philip Caputo (Vintage): The author of ``A Rumor of War'' sets his new novel amid the aid workers, missionaries and mercenaries involved in the ongoing war in the Sudan, where an American pilot changes from flying food to smuggling arms and an evangelical Christian falls in love with a rebel leader.

``The Ha-Ha'' by Dave King (Back Bay): The story of how brain-damaged Vietnam vet Howard Kapostash, who hasn't spoken in the 30 years since the war, finds his voice when his ex- girlfriend Sylvia, heading into rehab, dumps her 9-year-old son on him.

``The Club Dumas'' by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Harcourt): Demonology and swashbuckling action are part of this intricate, international bestseller about a 19th-century bibliophile- detective.

``The History of Love'' by Nicole Krauss (Norton): One of the finest novels of last year, this tells of the intersecting lives of octogenarian locksmith Leo Gursky as he tries to stave off loneliness in his dotage and 14-year-old Alma Singer, who reminds him that love lasts.

``Specimen Days'' by Michael Cunningham (Picador): The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ``The Hours'' returned with three interconnected novellas that track a man, a woman and a boy across three centuries of New York history and on into the future, where one morphs into a talking alien lizard.

``Haunted'' by Chuck Palahniuk (Anchor): This collection of 23 horror stories by the author of ``Fight Club'' and other perverse novels of adolescent fantasy is often so sick and twisted that some listeners passed out when he read them on his book tour.

``Indecision'' by Benjamin Kunkel (Random House): The much- hyped debut novel stars Dwight B. Wilmerding, a 28-year-old with a crummy job at Pfizer and an anemic love life. His malaise prompts him to use some of his employer's products and leads him into drugs and self-discovery in Ecuador.

``Trance'' by Christopher Sorrentino (Picador): This experimental novel, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award, fictionalizes the day-to-day lives of members of the 1972 Symbionese Liberation Army as they shoplift socks, fret over sunglasses, and abduct and assimilate Patty Hearst.

``The Third Brother'' by Nick McDonell (Grove): A thriller about a Columbia University student working in Hong Kong who is sent to Bangkok to write about drug tourism and hunt down a missing journalist. The trail brings him back to New York just as it is engulfed in the horror of 9/11.

``Visigoth'' by Gary Amdahl (Milkweed): A gritty collection of eight short stories, set mostly in Minnesota and Alaska, about modern men -- middle managers, politicians, athletes and bad husbands -- who covet power, sex and success and aren't afraid to use violence to get it.

Oh, the story behind it all, Q&A with Sean Wilsey

2006-05-02T11:23:00.000-05:00

Oh, the story behind it all
Sean Wilsey gives an inside look into his memoir, talks about his Texas ties.

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, April 30, 2006

I had the type of childhood — one that included eight years of Catholic military school — that prompts people to say after too much wine at dinner parties, "You should write about that!" I think, recklessly, "Yeah!"

Then I read a book like Sean Wilsey's "Oh the Glory of It All," a voluminous tell-all about growing up the scion of a San Francisco butter magnate who tooled around in helicopters and a narcissistic gossip-columnist mother. And it sobers me.

Wilsey's book is, in a word, Joycean. Generation X Joycean: Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Rich Screw-up. Just like Joyce's coming-of-age masterpiece, Wilsey's book features a long, harrowing stint at an elitist boarding school, St. Mark's in Southborough, Mass., and a God-like figure of dread: his wicked stepmother Dede, whom he finds himself fantasizing about sexually.

It's creepy and compelling and oh so tantalizing.

An editor-at-large for McSweeney's literary magazine, Wilsey is also co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup" (which includes a contribution about Ecuador from Austin's Jake Silverstein). He comes to town this week as part of the publicity tour for the paperback edition of "Oh the Glory of It All."

Wilsey spoke with us by phone from his home in New York City.

Austin American-Statesman: Your memoir is mostly about San Francisco, but don't you also have some strong Texas connections?

Sean Wilsey: My mom was born in Texas, but grew up over the border in Waurika, Okla. As a teenager she wanted to get out, and her brother-in-law, who had all the concessions for jukeboxes and peanut machines in Waurika, emptied them out and gave her the change. She used the money and ran away to Dallas, where she modeled for Neiman Marcus, until her mother came and got her and then moved the family to California.

Didn't you also live in Marfa for a time?

Yes. My writing career kind of started in Marfa when I wrote about a conference of architects that was being held at the Chinati Foundation. Herzog and de Meuron were there, Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg. I wrote it as a Talk of the Town piece for the New Yorker, but they killed it. Then I met Dave Eggers in a bar, and he told me to write it for McSweeney's, which was originally founded to publish stories that were killed by other magazines.

How old were you when you started writing this memoir?

I started in 1998 when I was 28. I'd been working on a novel for six years, but hadn't been able to get anybody to take an interest in it, and was doing some book reviewing. Actually, the first book I reviewed was Duncan McLean's "Lone Star Swing" — I just loved the book, it was so lighthearted, Scottish, funny, well-researched and he really knew his stuff. But my wife had heard me talking endlessly about these weird reform-style schools I had gone to and she suggested writing about them. I started interviewing people who I'd gone to school with and my agent David McCormick . . .

There's another Texas connection...

Yes, he's a former editor at Texas Monthly. He sold the book as a memoir. I did a lot of interviewing for this book, including a couple of people who worked for my dad and ended up in Seguin. If I think about it, this is a perfectly legitimate Texas book.

Was it awkward to interview people you knew in high school?

It's weird because you're not really friends with them anymore. That said, people really do like to talk about their past. Most of the people I write about from that time don't come across very well, but a lot of people have gotten in touch with me and said they really liked the book. People are endlessly surprising.

Your father died, but your mother and stepmother are alive and well-known in San Francisco. How did they react to the book?

The newspapers in San Francisco had a field day. It was as if it were the sauciest thing that anybody has written in years. That provoked everyone to start behaving badly. I weirdly thought that my stepmother Dede would enjoy it and revel in the image I portrayed of her. But she gave an interview to The New York Times that couldn't have been more like the way she was portrayed in the book. If you want to take the high road, that isn't the way to do it at all. My mom, who was in some ways (ticked) off about the things that I wrote, was very stateswomanly about it.

You now have a 2-year-old son. How does your crazy childhood affect your parenting style?

I try to take more cues from him. I was buffeted around a lot as a child. For example, Mom would take me out to a fashion show. While that was a fun day for her, and somewhat for me, it was totally part of her program.

Last year, some critics compared your memoir to James Frey's. This was before his downfall. As it turns out, you actually spent more time in jail than Frey did. He only spent three hours in jail.

Yes, I spent two whole nights in jail, though that first night started at 4 in the morning. Actually, you may not find it surprising, but I think there are a lot of writers out there who've spent more time in jail than James Frey did.

Batali's Clogs, Couch Potatoes Hit Shelves: May Book Preview

2006-05-02T09:48:00.000-05:00

Batali's Clogs, Couch Potatoes Hit Shelves: May Book Preview

May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Orange clogs, lazy loafers and places named Absurdistan and Kutar vie with Philip Roth and Anne Tyler for a spot near your reading lamp in May. Here's a selection of new books this month.

Nonfiction

``The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast'' by Douglas Brinkley (Morrow): The Tulane University professor assesses the aftermath of the hurricane that devastated 150 miles of Gulf Coast in just five hours.

``The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities -- From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums'' by Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini (PublicAffairs): The story of Giacomo Medici, the head of a crime syndicate that brokered hundreds of millions of dollars of illicit Italian antiquities, many of which ended up at Sotheby's and some of the world's top museums.

``Confessions of a Municipal Bond Salesman'' by Jim Lebenthal (Wiley): The chairman emeritus and former president of Lebenthal & Co. reflects on his long career, which saw him morph from Hollywood reporter to Wall Street legend. He offers tips on how to make it big in municipal-bond sales and life.

``Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates's Plan to Win the Road Ahead'' by Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang (Simon & Schuster): A behind-the-scenes look into Microsoft's Asian Research Center in Beijing and how globalization has affected the world's biggest software manufacturer.

``Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present'' by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins): Vignettes by the New Yorker's Beijing correspondent and author of ``River Town'' eloquently depict the rapid social changes taking place among China's 1.2 billion budding capitalists.

``Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker'' by David Remnick (Knopf): The editor-in-chief of the New Yorker collects some of profiles he has written for the magazine in the past 15 years, many focusing on Russian and Israeli politicians and fellow writers.

``The Mighty & the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs'' by Madeleine Albright. (HarperCollins): President Clinton's secretary of state argues that religion has now become the single most important issue threatening global stability.

``Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder -- and Solve the Riddle of Myself'' by Terri Jentz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): In this chilling true-crime story, Jentz recalls how in 1977 an unknown man tried to kill her and a friend while they were camping in Oregon, driving a truck over their tent and then assaulting them with an ax. Years later she tries to find out why.

``Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home'' by Nando Parrado (Crown): A survivor of the 1972 plane crash made infamous by the book ``Alive'' recounts how he has coped with the memory of the crash and the decision to resort to cannibalism, which kept him and other survivors alive.

``Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America'' by Tom Lutz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): A discussion of the work ethic or lack thereof throughout U.S. history, including the couch potato, New York bohemians and Lutz's own good-for-nothing son.

``Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War'' by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking): The National Book Award-winning author of ``In the Heart of the Sea'' revisits the pilgrims' uncertain sea voyage and the vulnerable early days of the Plymouth colony.

``Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different'' by Gordon S. Wood (Penguin): In eight profiles, the respected Brown University historian tries to distill the qualities that made the founding fathers, including Washington, Paine and Burr, such effective leaders.

``Possible Side Effects: True Stories'' by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's): These essayistic flights of fancy, from the author of the bestseller ``Running With Scissors,'' cover topics from incontinent pets to eBay addiction.

``The One That Got Away: A Memoir'' by Howell Raines (Scribner): The ousted executive editor of the New York Times blamed for the Jayson Blair scandal follows up his bestseller ``Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis'' with this disquisition on life lessons learned at the Times and at the end of a fishing pole.

``Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany'' by Bill Buford (Knopf): The former New Yorker fiction editor documents his three-year stint in the kitchen with chef Mario Batali of the orange clogs.

``What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating'' by Marion Nestle (North Point Press): The popular food-industry analyst and New York University professor provides an authoritative guide on how to avoid getting duped into stuffing your supermarket cart with junk food masquerading as nutritious edibles.

Fiction

``Absurdistan'' by Gary Shteyngart (Random House): The author of ``The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' returns with a hilarious farce about 21st-century greed in which a would-be Russian rap impresario finds himself appointed minister of multicultural affairs in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan.

``Everyman'' by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin): The unnamed, self-reflective, thrice-divorced septuagenarian male narrator looks back on his life and finds it wanting. He won't please the new readers Roth won with 2004's alt-history thriller ``The Plot Against America,'' but he is the latest in a long line of Roth's bitter, all-too-human, sex-obsessed antiheroes that extends from Portnoy to Zuckerman.

``Digging to America'' by Anne Tyler (Knopf): Two couples, the white-bread suburban Donaldsons and the Iranian Yazdans, meet at the Baltimore airport while waiting to pick up the Korean babies each family will adopt. The two families soon grow intertwined in this passionate meditation on what it means to be and to become American.

``Theft: A Love Story'' by Peter Carey (Knopf): A two-time winner of the Booker Prize, Carey remains in top form with this tale of two Australians seduced into running an art-world scam by the sexy, beguiling daughter-in-law of a famous 20th-century painter.

``The Whole World Over'' by Julia Glass (Pantheon): Characters from Glass's National Book Award-winning ``Three Junes'' reappear in this multilayered romantic saga, in which a Manhattan pastry chef in a troubled marriage moves her 4-year-old son to New Mexico to cook for the charismatic, conservative governor.

``The Foreign Correspondent'' by Alan Furst (Random House): Furst continues his exceptional series of World War II-era thrillers with this yarn about Carlo Weisz, a Reuters reporter who takes control of an underground newspaper in Paris and becomes a target of Mussolini's secret police, Stalin's NKVD and Hitler's Gestapo.

``The Stolen Child'' by Keith Donohue (Doubleday): In this virtuosic debut novel inspired by a Yeats poem of the same name, Henry Day is 7 years old when fairies switch him with the son of a German piano teacher. If the two children can find each other, they might get their lives back.

``Killer Instinct'' by Joseph Finder (St. Martin's): Thirty- year-old salesman Jason Steadman has stalled in his career at a Boston consumer-electronics company, when his new best friend, a troubled Iraqi war vet working in security, starts offering unwelcome assistance up the corporate ladder.

``Moonlight Hotel'' by Scott Anderson (Doubleday): U.S. diplomat David Richards has what he thinks is a cushy job in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar. When rebels try to overthrow of the government, he is soon trapped in a dilapidated resort hotel with the few remaining expatriates and forced to fight for his life.

``The Possibility of an Island'' by Michel Houellebecq (Knopf): The provocative French writer's nihilistic magnum opus concerns a Parisian shock-jock who, after his marriage disintegrates, joins a cult promoting free love and cloning as a path to immortality. The chorus of soulless ``neohuman'' descendants narrating the novel proves his plan worked, at least somewhat.