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.)
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Monday, October 02, 2006
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.)
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
`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
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
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Goodwin Revisits Lincoln, Doctorow Follows Sherman: Paperbacks
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.
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
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.)
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
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 .
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 .
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Zadie's Beauty, Ellis's Satire, Banville's Sea: New Paperbacks
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Iraq `Fiasco': New Books Target Stupid Policies, Corporate Greed
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.)
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.)
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Quindlen's NYC, Surreal Murakami, Israeli Novelist: New Fiction
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.)
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.)
Monday, July 31, 2006
Adam Smith, Female Brains, Hearst's Camels: August Nonfiction
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.)
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.)
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Profits From Christian Books Make Believers of Top Publishers
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Rowling's Harry, Noir McCarthy, Shadid's Iraq: July Paperbacks
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.)
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.)
Monday, July 03, 2006
Minot's Yuppies, McGuane's Montana, Scary Cancun: July Fiction
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.)
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.)
Friday, June 30, 2006
Michael `Slave' Jordan, Old German Plot, Guantanamo: July Books
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.
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.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
World Cup, Beer, Pirates, New York Real Estate: June Paperbacks
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
(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
Friday, June 02, 2006
Updike Terrorist, McMurtry's West, Ali's Portugal: June Fiction
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.
(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.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
June Books: Berlusconi's Ego, Bronfmans' Seagram, Coulter Screed
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.)
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.)
Monday, May 22, 2006
Bush's War in Iraq Is Boon for Memoirs, Odes, Ads, Jeremiads
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).
(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).
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