A Little Girl's Love of Reading Lives On After Her

Do you have time for a nice Christmas story? This one is about a little girl and the parents who miss her; it's about books and book people; and it's about making a difference.

Joe and Carole Hemmelgarn, of Colorado, lost their almost-10-year-old daughter to acute lymphoma leukemia about three years ago. Alyssa, a fourth-grader was an avid reader, sometimes going through two or three books a week. Her great love of books was one of the things that made her a special little girl, and her parents honor Alyssa's passion today by handing out thousands of free books in her memory.

From the Denver Post:

Her parents grieved hard for more than a year. And in recalling their daughter, they shared stories of her love of books, how she devoured them often at a rate of two or three a week.

They soon started the Alyssa Cares Foundation, registered alyssacares.org and began soliciting donations to purchase books. A year and a half later, the Highlands Ranch couple has distributed for free close to 8,000 children's books to low-income students at four schools in Aurora and Denver.

They gave a book to each of the 408 children at Paris Elementary, where 94 percent are eligible for reduced-fee or free school meals. The couple now has at least 50 copies of 103 different titles.

"It is a way to keep Alyssa alive in a lot of ways," Carole Hemmelgarn, 45, said. "We want to pass along a gift she was given, her love of reading."

[...]

Many of the kids hug her (Carole). She hugs them back. It is why the foundation is just the two of them. The point, she said, is that they be at the schools, telling their story. After each child makes a selection, she slides the book and an orange bookmark into an orange bag, Alyssa's favorite color. She then asks each child to share the story with her when she returns, blinking hard to keep her tears at bay. "As long as there are tears and emotions," Carole Hemmelgarn explains later, "I feel like Alyssa is not slipping away, you know? "I don't care if I cry. I still love her so much."

Book people are special people. They prove it to me almost every day.

If you would like to help, please go to this link for the Alyssa Cares Foundation. Thanks.

"Sony Plots Death of Amazon Kindle"

In other words, "Hope springs eternal" over at Sony Corp. headquarters.

Sony was probably first out of the chute with an e-book reader but Amazon had such a huge built-in market advantage when it later launched the Kindle that the company almost immediately became the market leader. And it still dominates that market.

The Sony Reader has something strong going for it, however - its books can be read on other e-book readers and books bought, or acquired, in places other than the Sony Reader store can be read on a Sony Reader. Amazon, on the other hand, makes sure that its e-books can only be read on the Kindle device (or with a software installation, on your PC or smart phone) and that, without jumping through all kind of hoops, books from other sources can't be read on the Kindle. For me, that's a huge red flag and deal killer.

Matthew Graven has this to say in The Register:

Some of Sony’s confidence must come from having a certain world power Gin its corner. Sony has worked closely with Google to offer hundreds of thousands of free titles in the Sony’s ebook store. And now Google, another supporter of the ePub format, is getting close to launching its own store, dubbed Google Editions.

[...]

In a mocking tone, Haber (president of Sony’s digital reading business division) gibes at publishing companies who have delayed the release of ebook titles. Simon & Schuster, for instance, recently said it may not make digital versions of books available until the hardcover copies have been on shelves for four months. This is similar to the delayed release of paperback versions. "f you don’t allow the content out there, people will find a way to get that content," Haber says. He adds that publishers cause piracy by delaying the release of books in digital formats and that their businesses will prosper if they embrace ebooks.

When asked what writers and publishers can do to help promote the growth of an ebook market and their own books, he suggests that they "spend time using the devices out there, experience them, and then think about what you can do differently with digital content that you couldn’t do with physical content." He tells authors they should "think through, perhaps, how you could make your content more interactive.

And the plot thickens.

Pursuit of Honor

I am arriving way late to the Vince Flynn/Mitch Rapp party because, if I count correctly, Pursuit of Honor is Flynn’s tenth book in the Mitch Rapp series. It is my first exposure to the character – and I only wish I had arrived earlier. But the good news is that, although I have a lot of catching up to do, getting there should be quite a ride.

Pursuit of Honor starts just a few days after a terrorist attack on Washington D.C. has killed 185 people, including several members of Congress and other government officials. The terrorists even had the audacity to strike directly at the country’s counterterrorism nerve center where they managed to slaughter a good number of people before Mitch Rapp and his partner, Mike Nash, stop them with an audacious counterattack of their own.

When the smoke clears, three terrorists are still on the run, including the two responsible for planning the attacks, and Mitch Rapp wants them. More tellingly, he is willing to do whatever it takes to get them. Rapp is a realist, not a politician. He is not concerned with being politically correct, only with keeping his country and its citizens safe from the religious fanatics that are so willing to slaughter innocents in the name of their god. Rapp believes that assassination is a legitimate tool in a war in which the other side judges its victories in terms of civilian body count imposed and he is as ready to kill American traitors as he is Muslim terrorists. This does not, of course, make him popular with certain members of Congress.

Unfortunately for Rapp, and even more unfortunately for America, a handful of Congressmen have become so obsessed with his methods that they seem to be more concerned with seeing Rapp in prison than with protecting the country. They hold Mitch Rapp in contempt – and he returns the favor. Readers more aligned with Rapp’s way of thinking will particularly relish his confrontation with a female California senator during which the senator demands that Rapp address her as “Senator” rather than as “Ma’am.” What Mitch Rapp says at this meeting is typical of his politics and, as offensive as his views will be to some readers, what he expresses fits his character perfectly. This is who Mitch Rapp is, after all.

Vince Flynn keeps the tension in Pursuit of Honor at a high level by alternating chapters about Rapp and his team with those about the three terrorists trying to make their way unnoticed across Middle America. And, because Rapp has to spend so much of his time working the political side of the search, the chapters about the three terrorists, particularly those concerning the conflicts within that small group, are the book’s most tense ones. Flynn slowly brings the two groups closer and closer to each other until they finally clash in the book’s wild ending.

What Mitch Rapp’s congressional critics fail to recognize is that he is a moral man. His moral code may not be theirs but Rapp knows the difference between good and evil and he has dedicated his life to evil’s defeat, something that does not always seem to be the goal of his most vocal critics. Whether the real world would be a safer – or a more dangerous – place if there were more Mitch Rapps in it is subject to debate. But Pursuit of Honor does make one wonder.

Rated at: 5.0

Borders Hopes Its "Better Late Than Never" Approach Will Work

Borders might be missing out on e-book sales during the 2009 Christmas buying season but the company hopes that will not be the case next year. The bookstore chain has just announced a partnership with Canadian company Kobo Inc. to produce an e-book application and a new e-book store of its own by the second quarter of next year. However, unlike its competitors, Borders will not be marketing its own branded e-book reader.


(Photo of the Sony Reader (Touch) sold in Borders bookstores)


From Ann Arbor.com:

The announcement comes as investors and book industry analysts have criticized Borders for lacking a defined e-reader strategy during the 2009 holiday shopping season, broadly considered a critical period for the struggling retailer.

The move means that Borders, which sells the Sony e-reader in its stores, is opting against developing its own e-reader.

[...]

Instead, Borders plans to allow its new e-book application to be downloaded on smart phones - including Apple's iPhone, the BlackBerry and Android - and other digital devices for use by anyone.

There is little doubt anymore that e-books will become a significant percentage of all books sold by the largest book retailers in the country. The Borders approach is a much cheaper one than the one Barnes & Noble chose and, considering the early reviews of the Barnes & Noble Nook, maybe even a wiser one. 2010 promises to be an interesting chapter in the development of the e-book market and I can't wait to see how all this turns out.

By the way, I've used Kobo's Shortcovers software to upload a classic or two on my Palm Pre smart phone and have read most of Edith Wharton's Summer on my phone. It works well, so I have to believe the Borders/Kobo partnership will be a good thing for both companies.

"U" Is for Undertow

I have been a fan of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series ever since “A” Is for Alibi. Unfortunately, I did not discover this first volume of the series until it hit my local bookstore in paperback format. If I had been able to afford the price of a hardcover book back in 1982, today I might be the proud owner of a little book that sells to collectors for about $1200 in the right condition and edition. Now, with “U” Is for Undertow, I have come full cycle – this one I read in e-book format.

It is 1988 and 39-year-old Kinsey Millhone, survivor of two failed marriages, is still living alone and running her one-woman detective agency in Santa Teresa, California when a young man walks into her office one afternoon looking for help. Michael Sutton is haunted by something he saw twenty years earlier, when he was six, and he wants Kinsey to find out exactly what he witnessed on the day he wandered away by himself from his neighbor’s yard. Did he, as he now believes, actually see two men in the process of burying the little girl they had kidnapped several days earlier? Kinsey might doubt Michael’s story but she has bills to pay – and Michael’s $500 for one day’s work is not something she can afford to pass up.

Thus begins a complicated investigation so intriguing to Kinsey Millhone that she finds herself working on it for many more hours than the ones for which she has been paid. Little Mary Claire Fitzhugh was kidnapped in July 1967 and, when her parents went to the police despite being warned by the kidnappers not to do so, she disappeared forever. Despite the best efforts of the Santa Teresa police and the FBI, no one was ever arrested for the crime and the little girl’s body was never found. Kinsey, who was in high school when the little girl was snatched, begins to believe that Michael really might have stumbled upon the killers that long ago day - and the chase is on.

“U” Is for Undertow is a fun reminder of just how primitive 1988 technology was when compared to all the gadgets available to us today. Kinsey does not own a fax machine or a cell phone; when she is in the field, she really is out there on her own. When she needs to research old addresses, business locations, or phone numbers she heads to her local library to use the cross-references and old phone books housed there. The microfilm reader is her friend and she uses index cards to capture her thoughts in a portable format. The reader will wonder if Kinsey, who is now 61 years old in 2009, much misses those old days.

Longtime Kinsey Millhone fans will be pleased, too, to find that “U” Is for Undertow opens a treasure trove full of details about her childhood and the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins Kinsey never learned of after the death of her parents. The chapters dealing with Kinsey’s family and the flashbacks to 1967 and its “Summer of Love” give the book a depth it would otherwise not have had. This is another fine addition to the series and it is hard to believe there are only five to go. It has been a fun ride.

Rated at: 5.0

Random House Strikes First

Random House has taken the aggressive approach of informing literary agents that the publishing house is claiming "digital rights" to all books it published before the existence of such a thing as digital rights. Needless to say, this will be a somewhat controversial claim and literary agents and the authors they represent will almost certainly disagree with Random House's interpretation of all those old contracts.

(Photo: Markus Dohle, the man who signed the notification to literary agents)



From The Wall Street Journal:

In the letter, dated Dec. 11, Markus Dohle, CEO of the Bertelsmann AG publishing arm, writes that the "vast majority of our backlist contracts grant us the exclusive right to publish books in electronic formats." Mr. Dohle writes that many of the older agreements "often give the exclusive right to publish 'in book form' or 'in any and all editions.' "

He argues that, much as the understanding of publishing rights has evolved to include various forms of hardcovers and paperbacks, so too does it now include digital rights, since "the product is used and experienced in the same manner, serves the same function, and satisfies the same fundamental urge to discover stories, ideas and information through the process of reading."

[...]

Nat Sobel, a literary agent whose clients include James Ellroy and Richard Russo, both of whom are published by Random House's Alfred Knopf imprint, disagreed with Mr. Dohle's assertions.

Mr. Sobel said that prior to the September publication of Mr. Ellroy's novel "Blood's a Rover," the third volume in the Underworld USA trilogy, he received a letter from Random House asking for the release of electronic rights associated with the trilogy. He said he ignored the request because he has other plans for those rights.

"I don't accept Random House's position, and I don't think anybody else will either," Mr. Sobel said. "You are entitled to the rights stated in your contract. And contracts 20 years ago didn't cover electronic rights. And the courts have already agreed with this position."

Click on the Wall Street Journal link for all the details in what promises to be an interesting legal battle.

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

Are there better ways to meet our energy needs than the ever more frantic search for the world’s rapidly decreasing oil reserves? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is both “yes” and “no” because, while there certainly are cleaner ways to generate the energy that makes the world go around, the transition from oil to those cleaner sources might just bankrupt the planet during the transition process.

In Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, Peter Maass explains the impact of our oil addiction on those supposedly lucky countries having enough oil to export it to the rest of us. Most of the world’s remaining oil reserves will be discovered in, and exported from, third world countries. Unfortunately, the governments of those countries are most often manned by thugs and thieves who claim the oil riches for themselves and their families. These criminals might be quick to loot their country’s oil reserves but they are slow to plow any of the oil proceeds back into the country’s infrastructure in ways that would improve the lives of their fellow citizens.

Peter Maass devotes chapters to Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ecuador, Russia, Iraq and Venezuela. Maass finds that these countries have one thing in common other than their vast supplies of crude oil. Each of them suffers from the “resource curse,” which states that countries whose economies are too closely tied to the exportation of a natural resource, such as oil, are doomed to “lower growth, higher corruption, less freedom and more warfare.” Doubters only need review the list of countries at the beginning of this paragraph to judge the accuracy of this “curse.”

Maass effectively argues that none of the petty dictators, thieves and kings could have looted their countries on their own. Without the enablement of Big Oil, it simply could not have happened. Oil companies have always shown a willingness to work with anyone able to guarantee them the contracts needed to extract oil, turning a blind eye to what happens in the producing country despite the billions of dollars the companies pump into government hands. Seeking an edge, oil companies have been known to bribe government officials with huge amounts of cash, high-paying “consulting” jobs, building rents, and “charities.” “Whatever it takes” seems to be the motto of many who spend their lives in search of the next huge oil field.

But all of this is overshadowed by the brutal wars fought by consuming nations to gain or guarantee access to the steady supply of reasonably priced crude oil so critical to the world’s economy. While Maass admits that the United States invaded Iraq for reasons in addition to oil acquisition, he correctly points out that the protection and control of Iraq’s oil fields quickly became a top priority of America’s occupying forces. Keeping the huge Iraqi oil reserves in friendly hands, even if not directly in the hands of American oil companies, clearly impacts America’s national security. Because the job of America’s military is to protect the country’s national security, and because every other major power feels the same way, fighting over the oil of producing countries is not likely to end before the oil runs dry.

The picture Peter Maass paints might not be pretty, but it is realistic. He knows that the world’s dependence on petroleum is likely to last another several decades but he urges us to make oil’s twilight as “short as possible.” Sadly, until reasonable alternatives to oil are found, we remain “complicit in the forms of violence – physical, environmental and cultural – that are the consequences of its extraction.”

(I write this as someone who has worked in the oil industry, and in several different oil producing countries, for the last 37 years.)

Rated at: 4.0

(Review copy provided by Knopf)

Any Tweeters Out There?

I am wondering (out loud) how many of my fellow book bloggers and visitors are active on Twitter. I was reluctant to get involved over there but I am finding it to be a fairly effective way to keep up with what's going on in the book/publishing world in real time. An amazing amount of information gets shared on Twitter (along with lots of trash and spam) in those 140-word blips and links used to communicate with like-minded souls.

So, if any of you are on Twitter and are interested in spreading the word about your activity, please leave a comment here about what it is you do there. I would love to link up with others in the book world that way (readers, writers, publishers, bookstores, libraries, etc.) but, frankly, I am finding it difficult to build much of a network so far. I have grown frustrated with the Twitter "search function" and I hope this might be both a quicker and a more productive way to make some meaningful connections. So holler at me it you tweet.

The Nook - The Not Ready for Prime Time Reader?

Working models of the new Barnes & Noble Nook have finally made their way into the hands of reviewers and the reaction is not what Barnes & Noble hoped for - not even close.

I have taken a look at the dummy version that most B&N stores have been displaying for a while now, and my experience made me wonder how in the world so many people were willing to spend almost $300 on an e-book reader before first seeing it actually work. The display models don't even include a battery (or the equivalent weight of a battery), making them deceptively lighter than they will be when functional and, until one sees the actual display of the reader, there is no way to judge what the experience of reading a book on it will be like. Is it easy on your particular eyes - or not? Is the contrast right for you? I don't think I would have gambled $300 to find out but, according to Barnes & Noble, thousands of folks did just that.

There is "Not much love for Barnes & Noble Nook" according to The Christian Science Monitor:

The experts have finally gotten their hands on the device and the consensus among the media technorati seems to be: too little, too soon.

[...]

The color touch screen, writes David Pogue in the New York Times, “is actually just a horizontal strip beneath the regular Kindle-style gray screen.” Too often, he says, “the color strip feels completely, awkwardly disconnected from what it’s supposed to control on the big screen above.” Worse, he finds the screen to be “balky and nonresponsive.”

Reviewing the Nook for USA Today, Edward C. Baig (who overall finds the device to be “unfinished and sluggish”) notes although Barnes & Noble advertises that “a million titles are available for the Nook compared with more than 390,000 in the Kindle Store,” the comparison is “somewhat misleading, because Barnes & Noble includes a boatload of free public domain books, most from Google.”

And as for loaning books to your friends, Pogue says that the feature comes with a number of “buzz kill footnotes.”

He details: “You can’t lend a book unless its publisher has O.K.’ed this feature. And so far, B&N says, only half of its books are available for lending — only one-third of the current best sellers. (A LendMe icon on the B&N Web site lets you know when a book is lendable.) Furthermore, the book is gone from your own Nook during the loan period (a maximum of two weeks). And each book can be lent only once, ever.”

These reviews, and other comments I've seen make me wonder if Barnes & Noble has made a big mistake by rushing their e-book reader into this year's Christmas market. As a matter of fact, they have largely missed even that market as many thousands of the readers already sold will not be delivered until sometime in January, at best. Now it seems that they might be hurt by early word-of-mouth about the product because they have pushed it out into the real world before it is quite ready.

I don't doubt that the Nook will get a whole lot better than it appears to be right now. Firmware updates will likely solve most of the "sluggishness" issues this first version of the reader appears to have, for instance. But the company does risk irritating a large segment of the exact market it so desperately wants to capture. Today's market is one in which word-of-mouth can make or break a new product in record time or, at the very least, damage an already shaky one. I hope the Nook does not turn out to be the case of a good product killed by poor marketing decisions. Time will tell.

Rainwater

From what I understand (not having read her before), Rainwater is a change-of-pace novel for its author, Sandra Brown. Already well known for her bestselling novels of the romantic thriller type, this time around Brown has written a more serious novel about a woman struggling to raise her autistic son in rural Texas during the Great Depression.

Ella Barron’s life has not been an easy one. Her only child has increasingly withdrawn into his own little world, to the point that at age ten he is unable to communicate with anyone, including his mother. Her husband, apparently unable to cope with the responsibilities of a son like his, walked away one day and Ella has not seen him in several years. She supports herself and Solly by working around the clock to keep her four long-term boarders satisfied enough to stay with her. Ella and Solly have fallen into a comfortable routine by the time that new boarder David Rainwater moves into the house.

Despite her conscious effort to keep her relationship with Mr. Rainwater on a strictly professional basis, Ella finds herself strangely drawn to the man almost from the beginning. Ella Barron is a proper lady of her day and she knows the damage that gossip can do to a woman’s reputation in a town the size of the one she has lived in all her life. Consequently, she works hard to hide her feelings for Rainwater and, luckily for her, the elderly spinster sisters and the traveling salesman who also board with her remain blind to the couple’s slowly budding romance.

David Rainwater, though, is a man with a secret and he has come to live in Ella’s boarding house for reasons of his own. As Ella learns, Rainwater is a man with little to lose and that makes him willing to take chances few men would be inclined to take otherwise. He will play an important role in the conflict that will soon tear the little community apart, a fight pitting the local sheriff and the town bully against townspeople, farmers, and the starving population of a nearby shantytown.

Rainwater is the story of a man that badly wants to do some good. And he does exactly that. The countless hours Rainwater devotes to little Solly pay off when the boy demonstrates an unexpected talent that encourages his mother to turn to medical specialists for advice about his condition. When he recognizes the utter brutality and wastefulness of what the sheriff is allowing to happen to local farmers and dairy ranchers, he organizes the locals in a way he hopes will limit the damage. Perhaps just as importantly, he brings love back into the life of a woman that had given up on it ever happening to her again.

Rainwater has a lot going for it but I did find it difficult to get very emotionally involved in a story that has so many one-dimensional characters. The town bully, for instance, is the stereotypical version of a bully most readers will be familiar with, right down to the rich parents who never bothered to tell him “no.” The cowardly sheriff is not developed at all and readers will have to wonder what motivates this man to remain in the shadows while so much evil is happening in his town. And the local doctor and a charismatic black preacher, admirable as they are, do not move far beyond being clichés. All of these characters are interesting and I wanted to know more about them.

Rated at: 3.0

(Review Copy provided by Simon & Schuster)

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

I suspect that most Americans are still confused about Pat Tillman’s death because of how that tragic event was reported. Early reports stated that Tillman had been killed in an enemy ambush and that his heroic actions during the firefight earned him a posthumous Silver Star. A few weeks later, the truth about Pat Tillman’s death began to trickle out and the public learned that he had actually been killed by friendly fire. Conspiracy theories became common and now, more than five years later, some people still believe that Tillman was murdered by one of his fellow soldiers.

Those who still wonder how something like this could happen, how the truth about Tillman’s death could have been withheld from his family for five weeks, can finally find their answers by turning to the new Jon Krakauer book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. What Krakauer describes in the book is as understandable as it is disheartening. Human nature being what it is, almost from the moment Tillman’s body was recovered, some on the ground seem to have been more concerned with covering up the poor tactical decisions that contributed to his death than they were about reporting the truth. Others, much higher up in the chain-of-command, saw an opportunity to use Pat Tillman’s image as a morale booster for the entire country and, for that to happen, his death had to be a heroic one. This perfect storm of a cover-up would ultimately mean that Tillman’s family would have to challenge both the Army and the U.S. government if they were ever to know how their son, brother and husband really died.

Pat Tillman, a California native, was a complicated young man whose ability to play football at the highest level provided him with a measure of fame and a comfortable life. Tillman had a passionate love for his family, especially for his mother and his wife, and he was as close to Kevin Tillman as any two brothers could possibly be. But Tillman always envisioned himself as a defender of those incapable of defending themselves and, in May 2002, he decided to walk away from his $3.6 million NFL contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army. He believed it to be his duty to help defeat those responsible for the 9-11 murders. Kevin Tillman, who felt the same obligation, enlisted at Pat’s side and the two served together right up to the moment of Pat’s death.

The manner of Pat Tillman’s death does not make him less a hero than if he had died at the hand of the enemy. The way he died is, beyond a doubt, a tragedy but American soldiers know that fratricide, death at the hand of a brother-in-arms, is nothing new in the heat of battle. Krakauer, in fact, points out that “21 percent of the casualties (both wounded and killed) in World War II were attributable to friendly fire, 39 percent of the casualties in Viet Nam, and 52 percent of the casualties in the first Gulf War.” To date of the book’s publication, Iraq and Iran casualties from friendly fire are 41% and 13%, respectively.

Where Men Win Glory uses an excellent group of simple maps to illustrate exactly what Tillman’s unit was trying to accomplish on the day he was killed and exactly how things went so wrong. Pat Tillman’s story is legend – Jon Krakauer shows us just how extraordinary the real man was.




Rated at: 5.0

Book Giveaway

Christopher Meeks sends word that Backward Books is giving away a copy of his most recent book, The Brightest Moon of the Century. All it takes to put your name in the hat for the random drawing is a visit to Backward Books. Just leave a comment to the Meeks interview you will find there and you are automatically entered.

Book Chase readers might recall that I gave high marks to The Brightest Moon of the Century last Feburary and I know now that it will finish somewhere in my top 10 favorites of 2009. So here's your chance to pick up a nice freebie.

If we get a winner via Book Chase, please let me know. That would make my day.

The Puppet Masters (1951)

The Puppet Masters was first published in 1951 as a manuscript of approximately 60,000 words, eliminating some 36,000 words from Heinlein’s original story. The cuts were made because of concerns about the book’s length and the controversial (sexual) nature of some of the passages eliminated. Of course, what was risqué in 1951 is extremely tame by today’s standards and in 1990, two years after his death, Heinlein’s original version was finally published. I read the shorter version of The Puppet Masters sometime in the early 1960s but this review is based on my just completed reading of the long version.

When a flying saucer lands in isolated Grinnell, Iowa, it appears to be business-as-usual, just another hoax put together by a couple of Iowa farm boys with nothing better to do. Or is it? All the “Old Man” knows for sure is that he sent several agents to Iowa to investigate the landing and that none of them have been seen or heard from since. That is why he decides to go to Iowa along with two of his best agents, “Sam” and “Mary,” posing as a family of tourists in Grinnell to get a firsthand look at the flying saucer. What they see is an obvious hoax, a ship that would fool no one for long. What they learn before barely escaping Grinnell, however, is shocking.

The citizens of Grinnell, Iowa, are being controlled by alien parasites that have attached themselves to the spinal columns of their victims. Since the parasites are hidden by the clothing of those they control, all appears normal to unsuspecting humans until they, too, are saddled with a Puppet Master of their very own.

The “Old Man” and his two agents return to Washington D.C. where they face the difficult task of convincing the President and his staff that the threat from Iowa is real. Seeking evidence that will finally convince government authorities that the U.S. has been invaded by an alien culture, Sam returns to Iowa with two agents and a live camera capable of broadcasting “stereo” images back to Washington. Needless to say, things do not go well for Sam and his crew but he accidentally returns with the proof he needs to make his case: an agent who has been taken over by one of the alien “slugs.” Thus, begins America’s fight for survival but, despite the best efforts of America’s military, the entire center of the U.S., from north to south, is soon lost to the Puppet Masters.

The Puppet Masters is very much a novel of its time. Heinlein, for instance, makes comparisons between what it is like for an American living under the control of a Puppet Master and what it is like to live behind the Iron Curtain or in communist Russia. Sam comes to the conclusion that the two experiences must be very similar, maybe even worse for the unfortunate Europeans and Russians. Too, modern readers are likely to find Heinlein’s attitude toward women to be sexist, and at least a bit offensive, because his female characters, unless they are elderly, are always described in terms of their attractiveness, first, and their abilities, second. And, while this long version of the novel does include Sam’s sexual escapades, his romance with Mary, and references to orgies and the like, it is all presented in a very 1950s squeaky clean manner. It is the kind of thing that appealed mightily, of course, to teenage male readers of the era.

The Puppet Masters holds up surprisingly well today despite the fact that it was one of the first alien invasion novels of its type, one in which those being invaded by aliens took the initiative to fight back. One could not likely have read the novel during the 1950s without thinking of America’s cold war with Russia and all the horrors that might suddenly spring from that standoff. Mr. Heinlein knew his audience well and The Puppet Masters became a science fiction classic.

(The photo, above, is of the original cover of The Puppet Masters.)




Rated at: 5.0

Physics and Tiger Woods

Did something good actually come from the Tiger Woods debacle of last week? Author John Gribbin probably thinks so because one of his books just received a huge sales boost after it was spotted in one of the photos of Tiger's wrecked vehicle. This kind of thing has happened before, of course, when celebrities or presidents are spotted carrying a book around, but this is a surprise because Gribbin's book is about physics, of all things. Take a look at this picture.


That's a copy of Get a Grip on Physics there on the floorboard. According to Britain's The Independent:

The book deals with the basics of physics, from its earliest developments to cosmology – although there is no mention of what happens when you shunt a heavy SUV into a stationary fire hydrant.

[...]

The book was 2,268th position on the Amazon sales list, up from 396,224th the previous day.

If these numbers are for real, and that's a big if, I wonder how many of the recently purchased copies of Get a Grip on Physics will actually be read. I suspect the percentage read will be very low - not that Mr. Gribbin is likely to care.

The Dewey Tree

Lisa Roe, better known in the book-blogging world as The Online Publicist, has come up with a wonderful idea to honor the memory of a lady whose sudden death was a shock to all of us a few months ago. Dewey was a "community organizer" in the best sense of that phrase - she could have taught those who abuse that job title a whole lot about what is right and what is wrong in the world.

Lisa suggests that Dewey's fellow book-bloggers gather up a few of those hundreds of books we all have sitting around the house and pass them on to others in honor of what Dewey meant to our community. Details and suggestions can be found on Lisa's website, so please take a look there and help make this project a huge success.

Let's make sure that Dewey's good work continues forever. Thanks, guys.

Britain's Smallest Public Library

It's time for another feel-good story and this time around it comes all the way from the little English village known as Westbury-sub-Mendip. It seems that the villagers have adopted one of those old British phone booths, the reds one everyone remembers from the day when phones weren't carried in our pockets. But it's what they've done with it that is so cool.

They've created the U.K.'s smallest library. Actually, it's a village book exchange, but, hey, that's close enough for me - maybe even better. Details come from Mail Online:

Villagers rallied together to set up the book box after their mobile library service was cancelled.

It has really taken off,’ Parish councillor Bob Dolby told The Guardian.

‘Turnover is rapid and there's a good range of books, everything from reference books to biographies and blockbusters.’

The phone box library is open every day for 24 hours and is lit at night. There is a regular check on it to see if some titles are not moving. These are then shipped on to a charity shop to keep the phone box collection fresh.

As someone who has started book exchanges in locations ranging from Algeria's Sahara Desert to the tallest office towers in Houston, I have to applaud these guys. Well done, folks.

Spooner

Warren Spooner was trouble even before he was born. Spooner weighed in at all of five pounds when his mother finally pushed him in out into the world after spending 53 hours in labor that first week of December 1956. He arrived only a few seconds after his more handsome twin brother and, even though his twin never took a breath, Spooner knew that his dead brother would always be his mother’s favorite child.

As difficult a child as he was to give birth to, Spooner’s mother found him an even more difficult one to raise, especially in contrast to his near genius siblings. However much Spooner may have struggled with reading and writing, however, he had certain skills of his own. At four years old, for example, he discovered a talent for breaking into the homes of his Milledgeville, Georgia, neighbors during the night, peeing into their shoes before placing them in their refrigerators, and making a clean getaway.

This little guy with such great potential in the field of home break-ins, though, was fatherless, leaving a hole in his family that would soon be filled by one Calmer Ottosson. Ottosson was a formal naval officer who managed to make such a fiasco of a congressman’s burial at sea that he was looking for a fresh start when he arrived in little Milledgeville. With Spooner, he got more than a fresh start; he would spend the rest of his life trying to salvage his new stepson.

Spooner is not a plot driven novel. Rather, it focuses on a series of events in the lives of Warren Spooner and his stepfather, often with significant gaps of time and experience between one event and the next. The steady passage of time, spread over more than 500 pages, though, results in a dual biography of two men whose lives were closely tied together for decades. The two first meet when Calmer begins to court four-year-old Spooner’s mother and they are still close when Calmer, suffering from early signs of dementia, is taken into Spooner’s home for the remainder of his life.

Along the way, the two, especially Spooner, do a lot of living, and the reader comes to care for both of them. Life would never be dull for Spooner; he makes sure of that via a series of reckless, spur-of-the-moment decisions that sometimes seem likely to kill him or drive him nuts. But Calmer is always there to help pick up the pieces and, when it counts most, Spooner is there for Calmer.

Pete Dexter has done a masterful job with Spooner, filling it with laugh-out-loud absurdity at times and with tear-jerking tragedy at others. Readers will have to decide for themselves if they are reading a comedy or a tragedy, something I am still trying to figure out for myself. Comic tragedy, anyone? How about tragic comedy? Either way, this one is definitely fun.

Rated at: 5.0

(Advance Reader Copy provided by Grand Central Publishing)

A Question of Blood

A Question of Blood (Ian Rankin’s 14th John Rebus novel) is a complicated police procedural told in seven parts, one part for each day it takes Rebus and Siobhan Clarke to close the books on the Edinburgh school shooting that claims the lives of two students. The case does not appear to be a difficult one because one of the three students in the room at the time of the murders has survived to tell what he saw and the alleged murderer, an outsider, has killed himself at the scene. For Rebus and his Edinburgh police colleagues it is a question of why, not who.

John Rebus, always the outsider even among his peers, is determined to answer that question and soon finds himself in conflict not only with certain of his fellow officers but with two Army investigators that seem determined to cause him as much personal grief as possible. For a loner, though, Rebus does have one or two loyal friends willing to cover his back when he needs it most. One of those friends is in charge of the school shooting investigation and is willing to use Rebus in an “unofficial” capacity even though, midway through the investigation, Rebus has been suspended by his superiors. The other is Siobhan Clarke, the young policewoman for whom Rebus has formed a rather unlikely attachment.

It is precisely this emotional attachment to Siobhan that gets Rebus into so much trouble. He is so determined to stop the career criminal that has been threatening her that one night he is seen leaving the man’s home at precisely the wrong moment. As a result of this connection to the stalker, if Rebus is to figure out the why of the school murders, he is going to have to avoid the phone calls and visits of the investigators whose job it is to determine whether or not he is guilty of violent criminal activity.

A Question of Blood, at its heart, is a book about relationships, families, loners and friends. John Rebus is not close to anyone in his family and can count his friends on one hand. In his own way, he probably loves Siobhan Clarke but there is no way he ever could, or would, express his feelings to her. Some of his friends are much like Rebus; they spend too much time in pubs or sitting alone at home drinking themselves toward the next hangover – and they rather enjoy the lifestyle.

Rankin’s Edinburgh is the perfect city for loners. It is a dark, wet and rowdy place, and its streets are populated by teenage thugs that respect no one unwilling to mix it up with them. Rebus can only stomach what he sees because of his deep sense of outrage about what is happening to his city and those around him. Police work is all he has left and, even though he does as much as he can to protect the innocents of Edinburgh, he senses that his is a losing battle. He accepts his fate, however, and is a little unnerved by the emotions he finds himself feeling and expressing at the end of day seven.

A Question of Blood is a satisfying police procedural with an extra twist or two but John Rebus fans will enjoy it most because of the opportunity it gives them to spend some time with their old friend. For such a loner, John Rebus is an easy guy to like.

Rated at: 4.0

I Want This Typewriter

Man, do I want this typewriter!

This is the little machine that produced every word written by Cormac McCarthy in the last 50 years, every single word - some 5 million of them. And now Mr. McCarthy is selling his little Olivetti typewriter and donating the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute. Unfortunately, those who know about this kind of thing estimate that the sale will bring somewhere between 15 and 20 thousand dollars.

The New York Times says:

Christie’s, which plans to auction the machine on Friday, estimated that it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000. Mr. McCarthy wrote an authentication letter — typed on the Olivetti, of course — that states:

“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”

Speaking from his home in Santa Fe, Mr. McCarthy said he mistakenly thought that the typewriter was bought in 1958; it was actually a few years later. He had a Royal previously, but before he went off to Europe in the early 1960s, he said, “I tried to find the smallest, lightest typewriter I could find.”

Oh, to have money like Tiger Woods (and a less volatile wife) or Paul McCartney (minus the insane wife). As originally described, or not, this baby would look great sitting on the desk in my home office.

Black Water Rising

Jay Porter is struggling. He lives in a cramped little apartment with his pregnant wife, a woman he has known since she was thirteen years old, and he wonders if they can ever afford a better home. Porter, a player during the Black Power movement of the 1960s, is now a lawyer with a cheap, strip mall office and an incompetent secretary he can just afford. His clients are walk-ins and referrals who can barely afford to pay him at all, much less an amount that would offer Porter a decent profit for his work. So, when one of those clients arranges a free boat ride down Houston’s Buffalo Bayou in lieu of a cash payment, Porter accepts the deal and decides to celebrate his wife’s birthday on the little boat.

As the boat makes its way through the heart of downtown Houston in near total darkness, the Porters and the boat’s captain are startled by a woman’s desperate screams for help. It is impossible to see the woman or her attacker from the boat but, as they are paused to listen, the three soon hear the sounds of someone rolling down the bayou’s steep bank and splashing into the water. Porter manages to get the barely breathing woman into the boat but, because he fears getting involved in the problems of this white woman, he brings her to the police station’s front door and slips away before anyone can see him or get his name.

It is only when he sees the story in the newspaper that Porter learns that the woman he rescued may not have been a victim at all - she might, instead, be a murderer. Still reluctant to get involved, Porter only learns how much trouble he is in when a stranger offers to pay him for his silence about what he saw and heard the night of the murder. The man leaves Porter with two choices: take the money and remain silent or be shut up for good.

Attica Locke has here the makings of an intriguing story about a former Black Power radical trying to make his way through the still tense racial attitudes of 1981 Houston, Texas. She does, in fact, do a remarkable job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of 1980s Houston, a period during which the city was facing almost uncontrollable growth in both population and serious crime. It was a time when whole neighborhoods were off limits after dark to whites and blacks alike, high crime black neighborhoods whites did not dare enter and high income white neighborhoods where blacks drew the immediate attention of Houston cops.

Locke, though, makes the mistake of creating two additional subplots that do little more than complicate her story. First, she gets Jay Porter involved with a young man who has been beaten by union thugs who want to head off an economically crippling strike by dockworkers at the Houston port facilities. Next, she exposes Porter to a plot by Big Oil to manipulate the price of gasoline at the pump, a plan about which only one old white man and Porter seem to care. These subplots overwhelm the more interesting, and plausible, mystery of the woman in the bayou and eventually begin to seem almost cartoonish - especially in the way that Big Oil is represented in the most stereotypical way possible. Few of the associated characters seem real and, as a result, even Porter and his wife become less sympathetic characters.

And that is a shame because the first chapter of Black Water Rising is one of the best lead chapters I have read in a while. This could, and should, have been a very different book.

Rated at: 2.5

Pete Dexter's Missing Pages

I'm doing it again - getting excited enough about a book to write about it even before I finish it. This time it's Spooner, by Pete Dexter, a book that came from nowhere to catch me completely by surprise.

I was not unaware of Pete Dexter's work before I started Spooner, having read God's Pocket, Deadwood and Paris Trout, Mr. Dexter's first three novels. But none of those prepared me for the wit and humor on display in this new one. The writing in Spooner reminds me a lot of what John Irving produced at his peak, the kind of writing I've really missed. Warren Spooner is a special character, one not easily forgotten even though he is surrounded by equally memorable (and rather strange) people, including his mother and the stepfather who helped raise him. This is the story of a very troubled young man and his stepfather's refusal to give up on him - no matter what.

I knew this one was going to be fun when I spotted Pete Dexter's "note to early readers." Who could resist reading a book with a note that says, in part:

As far as I know, sometime in November of last year, the book you have in your hands was three years late. There are many reasons it was three years late, probably the most conspicuous being that it was once 250 pages or so longer than the version you hold, and it takes maybe half a year to write an extra 250 pages, and at least twice that to subtract them back out. I realize this leaves another year and a half unaccounted for, and all I can say about that, readers, is get in line. Whole decades are missing from my life, and I am pretty sure I wouldn't have it any other way.

[...]

...god knows how many of my greatest admirers have died while I've been diddling around with this thing - and so you can understand, perhaps, that in the end somebody had to put his/her foot down and say enough, and in the end somebody did. Be assured it wasn't me. I could have kept this up for another five years.

[...]

...you should keep in mind that you're reading somebody who is still missing 18 months of the last 36, and has no idea about 2006 at all.

The Advance Reading Copy of Spooner comes in at a whopping 466 pages, all of them worthy (at least through the 365 pages I've read to this point), but I wonder what those other 250 pages had to say about Spooner and Calmer. It's a shame that we'll never know.

We're All Doomed!

The New York Times and some San Francisco books stores believe the world, as they know it, is soon to end. According to them, the twin monsters known as WalMart and Glenn Beck are on the verge of killing off liberal thought. In the best tradition of Chicken Little, the Times has this to say about the discounting of a handful of bestselling hardcovers by WalMart, Amazon and Target:

So if this is all a scheme to control those influential bestsellers, just what would a future look like if, say, Wal-Mart became the last bookstore standing?

A visit to Wal-Mart stores in Oakland and Mountain View revealed a remarkably limited selection, a narrow worldview and a political bent that can be summed up best with two words: Glenn Beck. The Oakland Wal-Mart carried only 21 hardcover titles: Mr. Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” (plus the audio book) and his holiday offering, “The Christmas Sweater”; “Going Rogue” by Sarah Palin; the book of Carrie Prejean, the dethroned Miss California, “Still Standing”; and titles from the Rev. Rick Warren and the television minister Joel Osteen.

[...]

Praveen Madan, co-owner of The Booksmith in San Francisco, disagrees with this fear. He said people would not start “reading this rightist propaganda literature instead of reading more worthy things” simply because the books cost less.

Mr. Madan said bookstores were more threatened by the recession and e-books than the current price war. Censorship? Not with the Internet selling virtually every book. He, Ms. Caldwell and Mr. Petrocelli — all independent bookstore owners — sell online, and even Wal-Mart’s Web site has a larger, more diverse inventory.

Mr. Madan, at least, is bringing a little common sense to the scare tactics of the Times. He knows that his Bay area customers are not likely to buy "rightist propaganda" as long as he continues to be their supplier of "leftist propaganda." Don't think so? Just read what another bookstore owner there has to say about the Palin book:

“It’s like buying porn,” he said. “People might want to buy it, but they don’t want to be seen buying it in the Bay Area.”

Lit

Reading Mary Karr’s latest memoir, Lit, is akin to catching up with an old friend over a cup of coffee or, perhaps in this case, over something a bit stronger than coffee. Karr’s earlier memoirs, The Liars’ Club (1995), which covered her childhood years, and Cherry (2000), the story of her adolescence and early adulthood, established for her a well deserved reputation as an exceptional memoirist. Now, some nine years after Cherry, Karr completes her story, for now, by revealing how she managed to overcome the odds to escape both the insular little town in which she grew up and the quirky upbringing she endured there.

One thing is certain; Mary Karr has not had an easy time of it. Growing up in a muggy, mosquito ridden little East Texas refinery town, one in which its residents breathe polluted air no matter from which direction it blows (as I well remember), she was raped by a teenaged neighbor when she was eight years old. Her father, a heavy drinking refinery worker, loved her dearly but was not exactly a role model for his daughters. Her seven-times-married, artistic mother was a bit of a desperado in spirit who struggled with a tendency toward full-blown psychotic episodes throughout much of her life.

As she so frankly details in Lit, Mary Karr is a combination of the good and the bad components of both her parents. Always a bit of a rebel at heart like her mother, she went into the world resenting those born to wealth as much as her father disliked them, taking pride that she could at least outdrink those who “had been born on third base” but who believed “they hit a home run.” And outdrink them, Mary did - all the way to the point of her own debilitating struggle with alcoholism, a struggle that would steal years of her life and ultimately destroy the marriage that produced her son.

It was a close thing, but Mary managed to save herself, and she accomplished it by doing something so completely out of character for her that it still surprises her. She turned to prayer and organized religion despite a lifetime spent scoffing at both. Despairing and suicidal, she committed herself to what she calls “The Mental Marriott” and the timeout there that would ultimately lead her to place her future in the hands of God, the possibility of whose existence she previously had not been able to take seriously. Lit is a word of several meanings when it comes to Mary Karr. It can be a reference to her success in the literary world or it can be used to describe the drunken state in which she spent so many of her waking hours for so many years. Finally, and most hopefully, it also describes the religious experience that saved Mary Karr’s life when she finally “saw the light.”

Fans of Karr’s previous memoirs will be pleased with this inspirational addition to her story, but Lit also works well for those reading her for the first time, so well that I suspect the new Karr readers will now want to turn to the first two books.

Rated at: 5.0

(Advance Reading Copy provided by Harper)

Across the Endless River

Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, born in 1805 during the Lewis and Clark expedition, is one of the most unique figures in American history. The son of a French fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, and Sacagawea, the Indian woman who played such a prominent role in the expedition, Baptiste was carried on his mother’s back all the way to the Pacific Ocean. He was born with a foot in two different worlds and, before he was twenty years old, the young man would find himself visiting Europe’s major cities as the five-year guest of amateur natural historian, Duke Paul of Wurttemberg.

In Across the Endless River, Thad Carhart recounts how the two men met and imagines what Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau might have experienced during his half-decade living among Europe’s minor royalty. As Carhart points out in his “Author’s Note,” while no record of Baptiste’s European years exists today, some details of Duke Paul’s history during those same years are known. Carhart largely uses what we know about Duke Paul to frame Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau’s European adventure. Baptiste would have been, for instance, instrumental in assembling and cataloging the Duke’s huge North American natural history collection and would have witnessed the Duke’s arranged marriage (a marriage very much to the Duke’s economic advantage) and his equally arranged separation after the birth of his son.

Across the Endless River clearly contrasts the differing lifestyles Baptiste experienced before he turned twenty. In America, as a boy, he moved between his Mandan village and Captain Clark’s St. Louis home, and learned the skills that would allow him to make his living as a frontier guide for Europeans looking for adventure and fortune. He was able to converse in several Indian languages and is known to have also spoken English, French, German and Spanish, a skill that allowed him to move relatively easily within whatever world he found himself.

One can only imagine, of course, what Baptiste thought of the different cultures he experienced and this is the real theme of Across the Endless River. What would a man raised in the wilds of a young country think of the decadent lifestyle of European royalty? What would he think of the servant class and its relationship to the wealthy? Would he relate to the servants or would he learn to reflect the attitudes of the Duke and the Duke’s royal family? Would he have sexual adventures in Europe and who might those couplings involve – prostitutes, servants, members of the royal family? Would he be treated as a mere curiosity in Europe or as an equal?

The possibilities are endless for a man caught between two, so different worlds, and Thad Carhart makes the most of them. The book does suffer a bit because of the contrast between its fast paced early sections and the much slower pace at which the book’s European sections move. Much of Baptiste’s time in Europe is spent idly traveling from one royal home to another where little more than another banquet or ball ever seems to occur. This may perfectly reflect the lifestyle of Europe’s “rich and famous” of the day but even Baptiste grew bored with it and it gives the book an uneven feel. In the end, though, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau is a fascinating character and it is great fun to speculate along with the author about what he was really up to from 1824 to 1829.

Rated at: 3.5

(Review Copy provided by Doubleday)

City of Bones

When a dog returns to its waiting owner with a human bone clutched in its jaws, Detective Harry Bosch inherits one of the coldest of cases, the 20-year-old murder of a young boy who was never reported missing. Bosch has seen everything during his long career with the LAPD but he is still capable of feeling a sense of outrage about the murders he investigates for the city. And what he learns about the short life of this young murder victim will hit him particularly hard.

It soon becomes obvious that the boy lived not just a short life, but a very painful one. There is evidence of numerous breaks in the bones recovered by the police and some of the fractures appear to have been suffered when the boy was only two years old. Bosch knows there is a killer out there who believes that he will never be caught - and that the killer is likely to be one of the boy's parents. What he does not know is the boy’s name or who his parents are.

There can be no doubt that Michael Connelly is a master of the police procedural and much of City of Bones is textbook police procedural. The reader is intimately exposed to the time-consuming and tedious process that is a police investigation, including the dozens of false leads that have to be worked before the real ones can be followed. Detective Bosh and his partner, Jerry Edgar, are determined that, against all odds, they will bring this boy’s killer to justice and, as one piece of the puzzle after another slowly begins to fall into place, they seem to be getting there. But at what cost to the boy’s family and to the detectives, themselves?

City of Bones is a superb procedural but what saves it from the possibility of becoming tedious are side-plots involving two women well known Harry Bosch. One is the egotistical coroner he is forced to work with, a woman so determined to become a national celebrity that she has her own documentary cameraman follow her around from case to case. The other is an overage police rookie who manages to attach herself to both Bosch and the case he is working. Between these complications, the internal politics of the LAPD and the 20-year-old murder case, Bosch has plenty on his plate.

What longtime Harry Bosch fans will remember most about City of Bones, however, is likely to be the revelation Harry makes at the very end of the story.

Reader, beware: Don’t go there first.




Rated at: 3.5

A Quick Personal Note

I have been down with the flu since Friday and I've spent more time sleeping than reading or doing anything else. Thankfully, I'm feeling a bit better this afternoon and I'm hoping that things gradually return to normal for me over the next few days.

I've actually been able to finish two books since Thursday but I can't imagine writing anything about them right now that would even come close to making sense. The good news is that I've caught up on sleep (thanks to the medicine) and lost a few pounds. The bad news is that I caught the flu on my third vacation day and I'll be way behind when I return to the office early next week. At this point, I'll consider this a moral victory if I can keep some of those lost pounds from returning - you have to take your wins where you find them.

Bookshop Santa Cruz Is "Just Plain Nutz"

The bookstore from which I would never buy a book is at it again. Remember this from July 16,2008? Well, here we go again. This time it's Sarah Palin and her new memoir that are being ridiculed by the business-plan-challenged management of Bookshop Santa Cruz. Not surprisingly, the Santa Cruz Sentinel is there to cheer them on:

By golly, a downtown bookstore has found a way to poke fun at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and draw attention to her new book released this week, "Going Rogue: An American Life." Several copies of Palin's book, about her experience as John McCain's running mate in 2008 and life in Alaska, are stacked on the checkout counter at Bookshop Santa Cruz next to a bowl filled with small bags of walnuts -- a 2-for-1 special of sorts. Customers who buy Palin's book, priced at $29 in hardcover, also get a free bag of "Just Plain Nutz."

[...]

However, down the street at Borders, customer Marc Schwartz laughed at the Palin stunt, but turned the joke on Bookshop Santa Cruz.

"For them, it's hypocrisy. They're using Palin to line their pockets," Schwartz said. "They like capitalism as long as they have a monopoly on it."

Bookshop Santa Cruz isn't worried about offending many customers. So far only one book has been sold.

"We know some customers have to buy it because it's on some uncle's wish list," Coonerty-Protti said. "But it's not a big seller for the Santa Cruz market. We haven't had a lot of interest in selling the book anyway."

Why would any conservative-minded reader patronize a bookstore that believes he is an idiot? Obviously if Bookshop Santa Cruz has only sold one copy of a book that has already sold 300,000 copies elsewhere, the answer is: they don't patronize it. I admit to getting a bit of a chuckle from the fact that this bookstore is located in a state on the brink of financial collapse and in search of a bailout from the rest of us. Does that tell you a little about who is "Just Plain Nutz"?

(No, I am not a fan of Sarah Palin and will not be reading her book. I am, though, intrigued by the utter stupidity of some businesses and those who "manage" them.)

First Impressions of the Sony PRS-600 Reader Touch Edition

I decided to purchase the Sony PRS-600 Reader Touch Edition this morning and I've been playing around with it all day. I was relieved to see that the Sony salesperson was familiar with the offer (although I was the first such transaction handled in this store) and that everything was set up to make it all go pretty quickly. I was given $75 off the price of a new reader for turning in my old one.

I was able to get my new reader "authorized" by the Sony e-book store and had all of my e-books on the new reader within an hour of having arrived back home.There were 113 e-books on the old reader and I had quite a few others in formats not supported by my old PRS-500. So after uploading the 113 books I knew would work, I started in on the ones in .txt and PDF format - and they all seem to work just fine on the new reader.

I hated to see my old PRS-500 being carried to the backroom but after playing around with the new version in the store for a few minutes I knew I would never be happy with the old one again. There are just too many new features - the very ones I've been wanting to see for a long time. I'm not saying that the PRS-600 is perfect, because it is not.

There are definite pluses and minuses:

Pluses:

1. Handles multiple formats, including epub, .txt, PDF, and Word documents
2. Offers five font sizes to help overcome formatting differences
3. Allows for "highlighting" and written notes on book pages
4. Has slots for Sony Memory Stick and SD cards
5. Touch Screen makes turning pages quick and natural
6. Notes can be written by hand, using a stylus, or by using the pop-up keyboard
7. Internal Memory can hold approximately 350 books
8. Extended battery life of 2 week or about 7500 page-turns (Old reader was good for only 1400 page-turns)
9. Battery takes charge much more quickly than the one in the PRS-500
10. Pop-Up Dictionary that defines any word double-tapped by stylus
11. Works with library e-books downloaded from public library systems
12. Screen Orientation can be switched to horizontal to better read certain PDF documents


Minuses:

1. Touch Screen means that the "ink" appears a bit lighter than in the old reader
2. Touch Screen makes the new reader more susceptible to glare problems
3. Lacks WiFi connection to purchase and download new material
4. Sony e-book store is still clunky and slow, requiring lots of patience

I'm happy with what I've experienced so far and I hope that I feel the same way two weeks from now. I have placed about 140 books on the reader, mostly classics, and have "borrowed" my first e-library-book (although the choices seem very poor here in Harris County, Texas). I don't use the reader for music or pictures so I won't be testing those aspects of the PRS-600. I can't imagine ever having such an urgency to get my eyes on an e-book that I'll miss the WiFi option so that won't be much of a minus for me. At this point, the only thing that has bugged me at all is the glare I get in certain lighting situations.

E-books will never replace physical books for me; they are just not the same thing. But I suspect that I'll be reading more of the classics because of this new reader and I'll be more likely to accept review copies in e-book format now. And, frankly, my wife is thrilled with the idea that the rate at which physical books come through the front door might slow down a bit. Maybe that's the answer - buy physical copies of books I want to keep and electronic copies of ones that are more disposable. We'll see.

Sony Wants to Sell Me a New Reader

Sony may have just sold me a new e-book reader - with an assist from Kristy who alerted me to an email offer she received from Sony yesterday. It turns out that, as far as its e-book store goes, Sony is killing the e-book format that works on my PRS-500 reader. That means that I can no longer get new content for the reader from Sony.

Sony offers two workarounds, however, and both of them are tempting. Option number 1 involves sending my PRS-500 back to Sony for about two weeks so that they can do a free firmware update that would allow my reader to use the new format. Option number 2 offers me either $50 or $75 for my old reader if I buy one of the two new Sony readers.

I'm seriously considering the PRS-600, the "Reader Touch Edition." What intrigues me is that the reader claims to work perfectly on PDF files, Word documents, other text files, the ePub format, and others. It also offers access to all the non-copyrighted Google books out there and to library systems that make e-books available to patrons. It seems to cover all the bases for me. Admittedly, if I understand correctly, there is no WiFi access for ordering new books from Sony or another bookstore but that is not an option I would use often anyway. No big deal.

The numbers look like this:

I spent $300 in 2005 for the PRS-500. Sony is willing to give me back 75 of those dollars if I give them another $300 for a PRS-600, leaving me with $525 invested in Sony readers. Now, of course, I've used the original reader for over 4 years so I've probably gotten my money's worth out of it already. (I'm a CPA and I just can't help running the numbers in my head - bad habit.)

I'm off the rest of the week, and I will probably run up to the big Sony Store at my local mall tomorrow. Can I resist the temptation? Should I even try? I suspect it's hopeless.

Last Night in Twisted River

Last Night in Twisted River is not quite the comeback John Irving needed to make readers forget, or to forgive, the dreary Until I Find You, but it is a giant step in the right direction. One of things Irving has always done best is to create remarkably detailed and realistic settings in which to place his larger-than-life characters and he uses that skill to great effect here. Irving also touches on so many of his familiar themes (wrestling, single-parent homes, New England locales, sudden loss of those closest to you, and bears, among them) that his longtime readers will recognize the territory.

This story of the Dominic Baciagalupo family, spanning more than five decades and three generations, begins in the remote logging environment of 1950s New Hampshire, very near the Canadian border. Dominic, known to everyone in the logging camp as “Cookie,” is in charge of feeding all those involved in the formidable task of harvesting the riches of the New Hampshire forests. He has lived alone above the cookhouse with his twelve-year-old son Danny ever since losing his wife to the tragic river accident that claimed her so suddenly one winter night. Dominic, having experienced or witnessed numerous crippling, if not always fatal, accidents in Twisted River over the years, knows that he lives in “a world of accidents” and he lives in dread of the next moment someone close to him will be snatched away.

Even in his wildest imagination, however, Dominic could not have imagined the accident that would force him to flee Twisted River with his son in a desperate attempt to keep the two together. Nor could he have imagined that what happened in the cookhouse that night would haunt Dominic and Danny Baciagalupo for the next fifty years. The pair may have left Twisted River behind forever but they still had to reckon with a man who wanted revenge so badly that he would never stop searching for them. Over five decades, and three generations, Dominic and Danny would live in several states and Canada, moving every time their tormentor seemed to be catching up with them.

Dominic and Danny are lucky to have the help of their old friend, Ketchum, a giant of a man who still lives near enough Twisted River to keep an eye on the man filled with such hate for Dominic and his son. Several times over the decades, Ketchum convinces Dominic and Danny that it is again time for them to abandon their new life in favor of avoiding the man who wants to see them dead. Several geographic moves will culminate finally in Danny and his father living in Toronto where Dominic works in a popular restaurant while Danny pursues his career as the bestselling author Danny Angel.

Ketchum, Dominic and Danny are not the only memorable characters in Last Night in Twisted River, however. The book is filled with women that are large in every sense of the word and each of them plays a significant role in the lives of the Baciagalupo men. Among others, there are “Injun Jane,” Dominic’s one-time lover who weighs in at more than 300 pounds; “Six-Pack Pam,” Ketchum’s lover who is large enough to intimidate most men with malice on their minds; and “Lady Sky,” the naked skydiver who literally falls into Danny’s lap.

Last Night in Twisted River is an intriguing story but there is a bit of a problem in the way that Irving tells it. At over 550 pages in length, its repetitiousness becomes tedious, especially, but not limited to, the chapters following the book’s climax. Too, numerous pages toward the very end of the book are used as a political rant of sorts (an extremely mean-spirited and vulgar rant, at that) against all things Republican, conservative, George W. Bush, or religious right. Similar, but more concise, expressions made earlier in the book fit the voices of the characters making them, but one feels that the rant at the end of the book is there strictly for the benefit of Irving, not his characters. It makes for a jarring change of tone and, because it occurs so close to the end, it is what some are likely to remember most about the book.

Rated at: 3.0

(Advance Reading Copy provided by Random House)

Two Chunksters at a Time

I am reaching the end of one of those rare weeks for me - 7 days during which I have not finished a single book. Not one. I should have seen this coming but it still feels strange. It's not that I haven't been reading at pretty much my normal pace for the last week or so but I started two books on the same day that, between them, total right at 1,000 pages. Now, almost 800 pages of reading later, I'm only now approaching the end of the two novels.

One of the books I've been immersed in for the last few days is the new John Irving novel, Last Night in Twisted River, a 553 page saga that covers three generations of one family over a period of 50 years. I'm over 500 pages in now and still feel ambivalent about the book but Irving has reminded me of one storytelling technique I have always found interesting.

In this story, Irving spends several hundred pages building suspense about the threat that two of his main characters are trying to escape. The years pass - the threat refuses to go away - and it seems more and more likely that time will finally force a deadly confrontation. When it finally happens, Irving sets the scene in great detail and brings the suspense to its peak level. Then, just when the action is about to begin, he does something unexpected by revealing the end result of the confrontation in what at first seems like just a descriptive throwaway phrase at the beginning of a sentence.

It takes a moment for the words to sink in but when they do the reader is stopped in his tracks. Irving spends the next dozen or so pages describing what happened but the reader already knows how the scene ends and is reading from a whole different perspective than the one most often offered in thrillers (not that Last Night in Twisted River can be called a thriller). I find this to be a very effective way to handle suspense and tension in a novel and I've come to prefer it to the more straightforward, linear approach to storytelling.

I wish I could think of other specific examples of this approach but, even if I could, they would probably be "spoilers" and I couldn't use them. In fact, I can already see that reviewing Last Night in Twisted River is going to be a tricky.

Man Hopes to Donate 100,000 Books Before His Time Runs Out

I was hoping to find something today that would be a nice contrast to yesterday's downer about the 12 thieves caught stealing $140,000 worth of textbooks from several Maryland libraries. I never expected to find something as perfect as this story, however.

According to Kentucky.com, sixty-four-year-old Jim Davis of Sheperdsville, KY, is in a desperate race against the clock to collect and donate 100,000 books to Kentucky libraries before his personal battle with cancer makes it impossible for him to continue.

...he was touched by a Kentucky Educational Television program about two months ago decrying the disproportionate number of high school dropouts in some Eastern Kentucky counties as well as the increase in teen pregnancies and soaring use of illegal drugs.

"If we don't do something now to keep kids in school and give them a good education, this whole country is going to hell in a hand basket," Davis said.

He contacted Bullitt County Public Schools and churches in that area, asking people to help him collect 100,000 books for libraries that needed them. He asked for textbooks, reference books, children's books, anything people had on their shelves collecting dust but not enhancing minds.

[...]

Davis saw that KET documentary while recovering from rounds of radiation and chemotherapy for cancers found in his brain, lungs and hip in January.

"The doctors gave me a year to 18 months to live," he said.

But the treatment sent the cancers into remission, he said. Follow-up CT and PET scans, however, found cancer in his neck, lower spine and stomach, he said.

[...]

Davis estimates he and others have collected 50,000 books. That's halfway to his goal.

Although he plans to be in Powell County on Monday, "I'm not doing this for that," he said. "This is something I can do before I'm gone."

A lot of people, including the Barnes & Noble folks, are working to help Mr. Davis meet his goal but he's only half way there. If anyone out there is interested in getting books to Kentucky on his behalf, please call (502) 428-6029 for details.

12 Book Thieves Hit Libraries for $140,000

College and community libraries in Maryland have lost $140,000 worth of textbooks to twelve thieves looking to make a quick buck by reselling the books to area college students.

WBAL-TV, Baltimore, has the story:

The investigation into the thefts began in July when University of Maryland, Baltimore County police discovered a large number of the books in a car. The barcodes were removed from many of them. UMBC police said they believe that more than $54,000 worth of books were stolen from the campus library.

[...]

Their cases were supposed to go to court in September, but a judge dismissed three of them, claiming that police didn't have probably cause to stop and search the car.

UMBC police then shared their information, and the book theft investigation continued in other areas until the indictments were announced Tuesday.

[...]

"Ironically, there were books on ethics and philosophy, but largely, the bulk of the books were in the nursing field and the sciences, like chemistry," said Mary Eilerman, HCC's Chief of College Security.

Charging documents showed that some of those who were charged are family members.

According to the story, these guys were checking out dozens of books at a time, near the 75-book limit that some of the libraries allow its patrons. Maybe it's me, but why should anyone be allowed to check out 75 books at a time? Are there really enough books in the library system to allow one person to walk away with 75 of them? We all know how slow some people are to return books - are they even allowed to renew 75 books for additional time?

I know there are librarians out there who see this kind of thing all the time. Please help me understand why any library would allow such a large number of books to walk out the door with one person. I don't get it.

What Would You Give Up to Keep Reading?

Kathleen, over at Boarding in My Forties, asks an interesting question today.

"What would you give up to keep reading?"

Like Kathleen, I've been a reader as long as I can remember, always carrying a spare book around for those unexpected moments when I can sneak in a few extra minutes of reading time. I've come to the point that I actually see long lines and traffic jams as little bonus reading opportunities - and I'm willing to bet that's worked wonders on my stress level and blood pressure.

So what would I give up to keep reading? Well, that's a no-brainer for me. I would give up any hobby that intrudes on my daily reading - but that's not as easy as it sounds because I'm already so conscious of time wasting activities that I have very little fat left to cut. For instance, I found a way of compressing even my limited television watching hours by recording almost every single program I watch and then zipping through the commercials. Since every 60 minutes of television programming includes more than 20 minutes of commercials, this really saves a lot of time I can devote to reading.

But I am an avid fan of Houston sports teams - and can't bring myself to record football or baseball games - so I lose a few hours a week to television commercials that way. And, even though I've been a baseball fan almost as long as I've been a reader, if it came down to a choice between giving up reading or giving up my beloved Astros, it would be sorry, boys, but you can play ball without me. That might not impress non-sports fans, but I suspect some of you know how serious a reader that means I am.

What about you guys? What would you give up to keep reading?

Nibble & Kuhn

Derek Dover is fast approaching a career crossroad all too familiar to young attorneys and accountants everywhere. In Derek’s particular case, Boston law firm Nibble & Kuhn is considering him for promotion to partner– and, as is usually the case, only three things can happen. He will be made partner; he will not be made partner and will have to resign himself to years of grunt-work for those who do reach that level; or he will be asked to leave the firm.

Derek, until recently, believed that his chances of being the one chosen to join the firm’s inner circle were pretty good. But things change, and he is finding out just how quickly that can happen. Derek has mixed emotions about the make-or-break case he suddenly inherits, one in which he is to represent seven young boys who claim to have gotten cancer from the industrial polluter located near their neighborhood swimming hole. He knows the case is inherently weak, and he is astonished at the poor preparation done by the partner who handled the case prior to dumping it in his lap, but he knows that winning the case is vital to the future of Nibble & Kuhn. He also knows that winning this case will almost certainly land him the partnership he wants so badly.

And then there is Maria Parma, one of Nibble & Kuhn’s newest and lowest ranking associates, with whom Derek is madly in love. The good news is that Maria is so in love with Derek that she can barely keep her hands off him even in the office. The bad news is that she is engaged to someone she has known all her life and cannot even imagine how she might break off that engagement without devastating the two families.

Nibble & Kuhn is a lighthearted look at a law firm gone mad. Despite the failings of the firm’s overall leadership and the despicable nature of the man at the very top, David Schmahmann finds enough humor in Derek Dover’s situation to make this one fun to read. His story is, of course, absurd. Or is it? Is justice, as dispensed by the American judicial system, really nothing more than a role of the dice? Is it all a matter of which side can place the highest number of gullible jurors in the jury box? O.J. Simpson, anyone?

Despite its serious (and disturbing) message, Nibble & Kuhn is filled with smile-out-loud moments as Derek and Maria struggle with their own relationship while trying not to look like total incompetents in front of a judge who recognizes the absurdity of the case they are representing in his courtroom. I think readers of Nibble & Kuhn will care about what happens to Derek and Maria and that they will be pleased with the book’s satisfying, if somewhat predictable, ending.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review Copy provided by Academy Chicago Publishers)

Just What Is It about Sarah Palin?

Just what is it about Sarah Palin that makes her such a threat to her opponents (both outside and inside her own political party)? Seldom has a politician seemingly come from nowhere to generate so much hate, disgust, love, and enthusiasm in the political class of America.

The Christian Science Monitor book blog has a nice summary of all the Palin book activity scheduled for this month:

Being released today is “Sarah from Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar” by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe. The authors are reporters (Conroy is a digital journalist for CBS News and Walshe was a reporter and producer at Fox News) who were “embedded” on the Palin vice-presidential campaign trail.

[...]

On Nov. 12 comes “The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star” by Matthew Continetti. Continetti is an associate editor at The Weekly Standard magazine. The book’s subtitle probably tells you all you need to know about the book’s political orientation but in case you’re interested, Karl Rove calls it “a tough, revealing look at how the bias or habits of liberals in the media led them to assault a political figure who shared neither their values nor background.”

[...]

On the 17th, just as Palin’s own book hits bookstores, readers will also be able to pick up “Going Rouge: An American Nightmare,” a collection of essays pulled together by two senior editors at Nation magazine. Here, again, the subtitle probably tells you all you need to know about the book’s angle on Palin, but if you need another clue, consider the fact that its publisher, OR Books, has a self-described “distinctive progressive edge.”

To make this all more confusing, however, is the fact that another “Going Rouge” is being published on the same day. That “Going Rouge” is a satirical coloring book by Julie Sigwart and Micheal Stinson who identify themselves as “longtime liberal activists.”

Longer range, journalist Joe McGinniss (”The Selling of the President,” “Fatal Vision”) is currently researching his own unauthorized Palin biography.

Personally, I don't get it. On the one hand, Palin's opponents seem so terrified of her potential that they are desperate to destroy her as quickly as possible and, on the other, her fans see her as the best possible chance to save conservatism. Perhaps it's because I'm conservative on fiscal matters and fairly liberal on social issues that I understand neither her appeal nor the anger directed her way.

One thing for sure: book publishers have to be loving her right about now.

Me and My Antique Sony E-book Reader

I normally only use the Sony reader when I'm on a trip during which it is impractical to carry several books with me and, since I don't travel at nearly the pace I used to, my PRS-500 has been stashed out of sight for the last several months.

But this afternoon I decided to take a look at it through today's eyes rather than through the eyes of a 2005 purchaser of the technology. And, you know, this is not a bad little gizmo. Admittedly, it doesn't offer the ability to wirelessly purchase e-books from the Sony bookstore or to download any of the "million" books made available by Google. (I have been expecting to hear that Sony has upgraded the PRS-500 software to make the Google books compatible with the reader but I'm now starting to doubt that will ever happen.)

This Sony e-book reader (Sony's original version) is relatively lightweight and it has room for well over 100 books on its hard drive plus an SD card slot that makes the reader's capacity almost limitless. So this antique reader (almost three years old now) still has its uses.

What does irk me is the poor job the reader does on PDF documents and e-books not "published" by Sony explicitly for the PRS-500. The resolution on those books is very poor, so light a shade of gray on white that it is almost impossible to read them. Couple that problem with the small font displayed by the reader - and the reader's inability to adjust the font of these particular books - and the third-party books are just about worthless to owners of this Sony device. I have noticed, though, that books saved as text files are legible when displayed on the reader - just very ugly because of the limited formatting offered by text files.

This was my first visit to the Sony e-book store in a long while and I was happy to see that some very much needed cosmetic changes have been made to the store's appearance. Unfortunately, the electronic bookstore still has a clunky feel to it and it is not all that easy to move around the site with any degree of confidence. I always feel lost there. I did notice that book downloads are quicker than I remembered them to be - and, since I had to download again all 57 of the Sony e-books I own, that was nice to see. Prices are competitive with those of Amazon and Sony offers special prices on several books, even to offering about ten of them free and several others for only a buck.

I understand why Sony is spending all its time and money on the new readers. The future of the company depends on getting new products from the pipeline into the stores. I get it. But why can't Sony throw me and the other thousands of early-adapters a bone by upgrading the primitive software of the PRS-500? I buy a lot of Sony products as it is, but they could really lock my business in by showing me that they care enough about me as a past customer to keep my $300 investment working as long as possible.

Come on, Mr. Sony, give a guy a break.

Ghetto Lit - Good, Bad, Embarrassing?

Juan Williams, one of my favorite political commentators and writers, has an article in the Wall Street Journal on what he calls Ghetto Lit. I've often wondered how serious black authors feel about having their books housed in their own little ghettos in bookstores all across America. You know what I'm talking about, those little sections labeled "Black Literature" and the such. I assume that black authors sell more books to African-American readers that way, but I also believe that they lose many more sales to white and hispanic readers - a net loss to them and to their publishers.

Ghetto Lit, admittedly, is a whole other thing. From what I've personally seen of it, and from what Mr. Williams has to say about the genre, perhaps those writers are lucky to get their books inside a bookstore at all.

As the author of books on black history and black culture, I was disappointed but not surprised. To see a working-class 30-ish black woman with a book these days is almost always to find her reading a selection from the fastest-growing segment of African-American letters, a genre called "ghetto lit" or "gangster lit."

The best that can be said about these books is that they are an authentic literary product of 21st-century black America. Black women are much bigger readers than black men, and gangster lit dominates the best-seller list in Essence Magazine, which calculates rankings using sales at black-owned bookstores nationwide. Recent titles shout out to the hard, fast lifestyle: "Bad Girlz 4 Life," "Still Hood" and "From the Streets to the Sheets."

[...]

The black imagination as revealed in gangster lit is centered on the world of drug dealers— "dough boys" who are heavy with drug money—and the get-rich-quick rappers and athletes who mimic the druggie lifestyle. And there are lots of "ghetto-fabulous" women, referring to themselves as bitches, carrying brand-name handbags and wearing big, gaudy jewelry. Attitude and anger are everything. The dispiriting word "nigger" is used freely by black characters talking about one another.

[...]

At least two black-owned publishing houses have been created as a result of the growing market for these books. Large established publishers, including Simon & Schuster, Kensington Books and St. Martin's, are on the bandwagon. They created "urban fiction" divisions after realizing that the grass-roots demand for these books was strong enough that authors were making money with vanity-press printing and hand-to-hand sales at black beauty salons, over the Internet and even from car trunks.

[...]

Not only the best but the worst that can be said about these books is they are an authentic literary product of 21st-century black America. They are poorly written, poorly edited and celebrate the worst of black life.

[...]

It is hard to believe, but legendary black writers telling stories about the full scope of the black experience, from Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison, are being pushed aside. Inspirational books on black history or the civil-rights struggle are now for the classroom only. Even libraries now stock gangster-lit novels, because they bring new readers in the door.

Mr. Williams obviously feels very strongly that this kind of writing is harmful to the community it is targeting - and I just as strongly agree with him. The other word that comes to mind is embarrassing. Come on, guys, you can do better than this. Is this really the way you want to represent yourself to the world. Shame on you, writers of this trash. Shame on you.

Now This Is Just Silly

We've talked about the limited price war on books being fought by Walmart, Target and Amazon but what happened today turns an idea that already is dangerous to publishing into one that is simply absurd. John Grisham's new book, Ford County, seems to have helped set off a feeding frenzy.

This New York Times piece does its best to explain what happened yesterday:

At first, Amazon appeared to be the low-price player when it extended its $9 price tag to three hardcover books that were officially released Nov. 3. Amazon had originally offered that price in response to price-cutting by Wal-Mart on its Web site for preorders of 10 titles that included the three that were released Tuesday: “Ford County” by John Grisham, “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver and “Kindred in Death” by J. D. Robb. As of Tuesday morning, Amazon still had those titles priced at $9 while Wal-Mart, which had offered them on pre-order at $8.98, and Target, which had offered pre-orders for $8.99, had raised their prices. At Walmart.com, for example, “Ford County” was selling for $12, while “The Lacuna” was $13.50. At Target.com, “The Lacuna” was on sale for $18.89 and “Kindred in Death” was $17. But by late morning, Amazon had raised its prices — “The Lacuna” and “Kindred in Death,” for example, were offered for $13.50 — while Walmart.com had cut them again.

I think the three wheeler-dealers are right on the brink of ticking off some of the customers they're so busy trying to attract. When book prices start going up and down like Wall Street stock certificates there are going to be some who feel they have been cheated by buying in when they did. They are going to experience buyer's remorse and wish they had bought two hours earlier or one hour later. And they are going to blame Walmart, Target and Amazon.

This is getting strange but I suppose they Big Three are loving the publicity so much that stranger decisions may yet be coming.

Jackson

Few would argue that American workers are facing a crisis of confidence today - or as T.P. Jones puts it, a “loss of certainty.” That jobs are disappearing is beyond dispute; layoffs and terminations can be easily counted and their staggering number makes national headlines every week. It is, however, more difficult for the average worker to buy into the government’s claims about the number of new jobs being created or saved during the same week that so many jobs have been lost. There is just too great a feeling of “smoke and mirrors” involved, especially when it comes to the easily manipulated “jobs saved” category.

Jackson, book one in the Loss of Certainty trilogy, personalizes today’s economic headlines by placing the reader inside the heads of a group of Midwesterners who have spent their entire working lives at JackPack, one of Jackson, Iowa’s biggest businesses. The Jackson Meatpacking Company employs some 2,000 Jackson citizens who do the backbreaking work of slaughtering several thousands hogs a day and, tough as the job might be, most of them cannot imagine ever doing anything else. But times are changing.

Jackson Meatpacking’s physical plant is old and rundown and no one will loan the company the money it needs to modernize the facility. The company is already facing a slow death when its management suddenly learns that a fierce and well-funded competitor is moving into the region and will be buying hogs from the same farms counted on by Jackson Meatpacking for its own supply of healthy animals. As hog prices inevitably rise because of this new competition, JackPack’s daily losses will increase, and the company will be pushed ever closer to the day it has to shut its doors for good.

But no one is ready to pull the plug on the company, least of all its employees and the man who runs it. That man is the grandson of Jackson Meatpacking’s founder and, because most company stock is still in the hands of his relatives, he has a very personal stake in the success of the operation. Even at that, he is not the only one with everything to lose if the company shuts down, meaning that a very different group of people will have to find a way to work together if JackPack is to have any chance of surviving. This time the inherent distrust between white collars, blue collars and union leaders will have to be cast aside for the good of all. Add to this mix a young investigative reporter new to Jackson and the vindictive newspaper publisher who hired her for reasons of his own, and it is anyone’s bet as to what Jackson Meatpacking’s ultimate fate will be.

Jackson includes an interesting side plot involving the construction of a dog racing track that must largely be built during the coldest months of a long Iowa winter. This side story involves city managers, construction people, and numerous other characters that I suspect will play larger roles in the second book of the Loss of Certainty series.

T.P. Jones did an extraordinary amount of research in preparation for Jackson and the books that will follow, and it shows. His characters are everyday, real people faced with uncertain futures and they react to the stress of their situations just as hardworking people all across America are reacting to their own uncertain futures today. At almost 540 pages, Jackson is a long but easily read book because Jones uses a very fluid and straightforward style to tell his story, a story to which his readers will strongly relate.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review copy provided by Synergy Books)

Direct from Target, Amazon and Walmart: Book Rationing

Looks like Amazon, Walmart and Target are not too crazy about the idea of subsidizing the indie bookstores around the country by selling those stores bestselling books at prices lower than those at which the stores can obtain them from publishers on their own.

Indies were quick to recognize a win-win situation when they saw one. All they have to do is buy the books at these giveaway prices, mark them up enough to make a tidy profit, and still give their loyal customers a nice discount. Indies are happy; their customers are happy; Amazon, Walmart and Target are ticked off. What a deal.

This Wall Street Journal article has the details:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has limited its online customers to two copies each of certain bargain books. Amazon.com Inc. has a three-copy maximum on certain discounted titles and Target Corp. has a five-copy limit online.

[...]

The retailers are losing money on each copy sold because publishers charge them about 50% of a book's hardcover price. The prices for the 10 books involved in the promotion are also lower than the wholesale price independent booksellers pay for the merchandise.

Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer at the Boulder Book Store, in Boulder, Colo., said he had intended to buy as many as 70 copies of Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna" from Walmart.com, Target.com or Amazon, because their prices are "more than $5 cheaper than what we can get it for from the publisher, Harper.

Mr. Kashkashian said he was surprised to see that the three retailers were limiting the quantities sold. "We're a big store, and if a customer wanted to order 100 copies of anything, we'd sell it to them," he said.

[...]

Joel Bines of consultancy AlixPartners LLP said retailers commonly ration loss-leader promotions to stop competitors from buying up the merchandise. In the book promotion, Mr. Bines noted, some independent booksellers surely would purchase Wal-Mart's books in bulk if possible at their below-wholesale price. He said some of the books would also probably end up on eBay, offered by speculators.

"It's to prevent a run on the bank, so to speak," Mr. Bines said of the limits. "They are losing money on every item they sell at this price, so they want to make sure the items actually go to customers, who might then buy something else."

I understand why the three big retailers are trying to protect themselves from this kind of thing and I wish them luck. I also understand why the indies, who are being crushed one-by-one by Target, Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders, would jump at an opportunity to stick it to the bullies on the block. Are the indies crossing an ethical line if they have employees, friends and family members order the maximum number of books allowed by Target? It's definitely a gray area but I think that if I were in the shoes of an indie bookstore owner, I would do it. (And I know that Target, Walmart and Amazon would do the same if the shoe were on the other foot.)

Great Festival with One Disappointment

The Texas Book Festival was even better this year than last, but that might be because I was so much better organized this time around. I haven't had time to digest all I saw and heard but I can say that it was a wonderful experience to hear so many authors speak - authors who were only names on a book jacket before the festival are now real people with distinct personalities, and that will make me a better reader of their work.

I will say that one of my favorite writers let me down in a big way. I knew, of course, that she was very much a liberal because I've read most of her books. I always take something positive away from reading this woman and her new book, as she explained it to her audience, sounds as intriguing as any of her earlier works. She's quite the humorist (and feminist) and makes men the butt of many of her jokes and stories so, as you would imagine, her audience was about 80% female and largely of the age group coming of age in the '60s and '70s.

I try to avoid politics here - but when she made the statement that anyone protesting the President's policies regarding health care or anything else is objecting simply out of racism - no other reason - I had to pack up my things and leave the audience (so quietly that I doubt that anyone even noticed). I'm paraphrasing what she said but I have the exact quote on my recording of her presentation (along with me muttering "bullshit" a couple of times).

This is a writer who is best known as a BS-sniffer, a reputation she takes great pride in claiming. Apparently, her BS-sniffer does not work on words that come out of her own mouth. I can't believe she believes such a simplistic explanation of the Tea Party protesters and, even more shockingly, I can't believe that she doesn't recognize how ignorant this makes her sound.

Having one of your favorite nonfiction writers call you a racist is not a great way to end such a pleasant weekend. But I'll live - and eventually I'll read her new book.

2009 Texas Book Festival - Day 1

I managed to stay pretty much on schedule today with one major exception. I decided to skip the last hour so that I could make a side trip to a little community north of Austin to visit my brand new great niece. It was a good choice and I really enjoyed meeting her (she's five days old now).

I found the session on "Are Books Dead" t0 be fascinating despite the fact (or maybe because) all four presenters are heavily involved in the e-book business. The good news is that everyone on the panel ,and everyone else in the room, agreed that books are far from dead. The bad news is that panel members see the growth of e-books as another nail in the coffin of independent bookstores unless those stores find a way to specialize even more than they already do. There was also an interesting discussion on what public libraries might look like in anothrt ten years - again, not a very encouraging picture for book lovers. More later.

This is the House Chamber in which the first session was held (about 20 minutes prior to the session):


And this is a shot of the front part of the room:



The second session was in the same room and featured four excellent biographers who gave insights into their most recent biographies, their research techniques, biographers they admire, and plans for their next books.

From left to right, Brad Gooch, Blake Bailey, moderator Dwight Garner, Brenda Wineapple and Tracy Daugherty

I admit that I went into the Peter Maass presentation expecting the worst from him in regards to the oil industry and his discussion of his new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. Perhaps because he was speaking to a whole bunch of Texans, Maass was pretty even handed and did not try to make the oil companies into complete villains. There is plenty blame to spread around when it comes to oil's impact on producing countries and on the countries so desperately needing the oil of those third-world nations. It is not a pretty picture - and I'll have a whole lot more to say about the book when I can get it finished and sit down to write a formal review.

I managed to get this shot of Peter Mass (on the right) and moderator John Spong without annoying either of them too much (no flash involved):



Peter Maass, author of Crude World

And tomorrow is another day. Austin is pretty wild tonight, especially along its infamous 6th Street where tens of thousands hit the street in celebration of Halloween every year. From what I understand, it's a night the Austin police dread and they expect things to be particularly wild this year because this is the first time that Halloween has been on a Saturday night in eleven years. It's Austin's version of Mardi Gras.

I think I'll stay and read. How sad is that?

2009 Texas Book Festival

The rains have stopped, the temperature has dropped, and it looks it will be a nice weekend for Austin, Texas. I'm leaving early tomorrow morning for my three-hour drive to the capitol where I'll be enjoying Texas Book Festival XIV. I have all my battery chargers going right now so that I'll be able to record video, audio and still pictures when opportunities to do so present themselves.

I've penciled in the following sessions but I'm staying open to last minute changes of plan:

Saturday -

10:00 - 11:00
Are Books Dead?: The Digital Future of Reading, moderated by Bob Carlton

Or

Richard Russo - a 45-minute presentation

11:30 - 12:30
Writing about Writers: Blake Bailey (on Cheever), Tracy Daugherty (on Barthelme), Brad Gooch (on O'Connor) and Brenda Wineapple (on Hawthorne)

1:00 - 1:45
Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
with Helen Thorpe

2:00 - 2:45
Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil with Peter Maass

3:30 - 4:15
Margaret Atwood - 45-minute session

There are several conflicting sessions I would love to get to and that might result in a change of plans tomorrow. For instance, Joe Lansdale has a session at the same time as the one with Margaret Atwood - and Atwood's is a bit of a walk from where I will be for the previous session. It's the last presentation of the day, and I might decide based entirely on how up I am for a long walk in the opposite direction from where I will be parked. I would also like to make the 2:00 discussion between Elizabeth Berg and Amanda Eyre Ward but I'm reading the Peter Maass book right now and would love to challenge him on his extreme bias against the oil industry (any book of this type with book blurbs from Robert Redford and Robert Reich is a clear indicator of its point-of-view). What to do?

Sunday -

11:00 - 11:45
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle with David Wroblewski and Dick Donahue

12:00 - 12:45
Gerald Posner as presented by The Daily Beast and Texas Book Festival

1:30 - 2:30
Scene of the Crime: Two Texas Mystery Writers with Kathryn Casey and Jay Brandon, moderated by Steven Saylor

3:30 - 4:15
Barbara Ehrenreich on her book, "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," introduced by Sarah Bird

Or

Douglas Brinkley on his new book, "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America," introduced by Evan Smith

4:00 - 5:00
A few minutes listening to the music of one of my favorite Austin singers, Jimmy Lafave

I made a few changes on the fly last year so this is not necessarily who I will see because I'm hoping to get in as much as possible over the two days. The amount of overlap is distressing because for some hours I want to be at three sessions at once and, for other hours, nothing much appeals to me. Oh, well; I suppose that's a nice problem to have.

Demented Censor Runs Wild in Tennessee

Well, it seems that Maury County (Tennessee) Library patrons are going to have to use their imaginations a little more than they thought they would when they went to the library for something to read. The library is being victimized by a mystery censor with a big blue pen and a tiny little mind who is marking out all the "offensive" words in those library books.

MercuryNews.com has the details (what there are of them):

Officials believe the same person has used a blue pen to censor words in between 50 and 100 books during the past several months.

Library Director Elizabeth Potts said most of the books are mystery novels, but the vandal also targeted the "9/11 Commission Report."

Potts said no one is forced to read the books and "if they don't like them, they should just return them."

Potts said the library doesn't have the money to replace the damaged books, so patrons will to have to use their imagination to guess what the blotted out words are.

If this wasn't so stupid, it would be funny. I am so sick of all the nannies out there who think they know better what's good for me than I do. Come on, library system, nab this fool before more books are destroyed.

Macmillan Authors Take a Pay Cut

Publishing giant Macmillan (including the Farrar Straus & Giroux and St. Martin's Press imprints) has a new deal for its authors, one that lowers royalties on e-books to 20% of net proceeds received by the company. That is well below the 25% rate paid by most other mainstream publishing houses.

According to the New York Times,

Currently, most popular retailers of digital books sell new releases and best sellers for $9.99 apiece, far below the typical $25 to $35 list price on hardcovers. For now, the retailers still pay publishers a standard wholesale price that is equal to half the list price of a hardcover book, but publishers fear that as e-books grow to a bigger share of the total market, the retailers will pressure publishers to cut their wholesale prices.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said that Macmillan was anticipating a time when Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-book retailers would try to push down wholesale book prices. “This is Macmillan’s attempt to pre-emptively squeeze authors.”

[...]

Richard Curtis, a literary agent ...said the difference between Macmillan’s standard e-book royalty and other publishers was not the point. “The point is whether we should be playing on such a low ballfield at all,” Mr. Curtis said, “and whether the industry should not really be thinking about a 50 percent royalty of net receipts.” He argued that because the cost to publishers of producing e-books was so low, authors should get a higher proportion of sale proceeds.

What Mr. Curtis says makes perfect sense to me. It costs the publisher relatively little to produce and market an e-book in comparison to doing the same for a paper version of the same title. Why should the authors accept such a small royalty percentage when publishers appear to be making a bigger profit, percentage-wise, on e-books than they make on the paper and cardboard kind?

I am intrigued by how the publishing and book marketing business models are evolving - and by the rapid pace things are changing. This is going to get interesting. At this point, I only hope that things work out well for all of us: publishers, writers, and readers. Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

Massachusetts Private School Trashes Library - Opens Coffe Bar Instead

Here we go. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, but Cushing Academy's decision to dump almost its whole library in favor of a lavish rec room seems a little empty-headed to me. According to this USA Today article, the school junked almost all of its library books in favor of Kindles, big screen TVs and a coffee bar. Welcome to the Cushing Cyber Cafe, boys and girls:

Its 20,000-book collection was barely used, administrators say. Spot checks last year found that, on some days, fewer than 30 books, or about .15%, circulated. And it was becoming rather lonely down there.

[...]

So the venerable boarding school west of Boston — the first in the USA to admit both boys and girls — last summer undertook another first: It began getting rid of most of the library's books. In their place: a fully digital collection.

[...]

Three big-screen TVs now greet visitors at the entrance, and the old circulation desk is now a coffee bar. Officially it's called Cushing Cyber Cafe, but students quickly nicknamed the spot "12K Cafe" after its $12,000 espresso machine.

[...]

He concedes that the $12,000 coffeemaker has become a distraction, but he says the real idea behind the cafe was to create "a new commons, a new agora, where people in a convivial setting exchange ideas and socially interact around ideas with culture and literature at their fingertips."

The USA Today article does a good job enumerating the pros and cons of a high school taking this approach with its school library so, if you still find yourself on the fence, you should take the time to read the whole thing. Myself, I have to wonder why these school administrators think that a bunch of students who don't seem to be readers in the first place are suddenly going to become avid readers/users of e-books. I suspect that once the "new" wears off, they will just be watching a lot of television and getting wired on all of the expresso being cranked out by their fancy new coffeemaker.

Private schools can get away with this kind of thing as long as apathetic parents let them but if I were a student there I would hate to have my research limited to only the books available on Amazon.com.

Perhaps Cushing Academy should change its name to Amazon Academy.

Even Money

Even Money, the third collaboration between Dick Francis and his son Felix in the last three years, is another in the long line of Dick Francis horse track mysteries, and it is a good one. Longtime fans of Dick Francis might react differently to Even Money, of course, believing that it suffers in comparison to the author’s earlier work. I, on the other hand, having only ever read one other Dick Francis novel, and that many years ago, experienced Even Money more as a standalone novel. And as such, I enjoyed it.

Ned Talbot is thirty-seven years old and has been a bookmaker all his life, having inherited the family business from his grandfather, Teddy Talbot. In fact, when Ned sets himself up to do business at various tracks, the board above his head still says “Trust Teddy Talbot” on it. With the help of Luca, a computer whiz who accepts and manages each day’s bets, Ned makes a decent living for himself and Sophie, his mentally fragile wife. He may be doing quite well but Ned thinks often about how bookmakers are despised by most everyone in the racing world, even those who make their own livings from the services he and his fellow bookies provide.

Ascot is not one of Ned’s favorite racetracks and, in fact, he seldom enjoys setting up shop there. But because his grandfather had considered participation at Ascot to be one of the firm’s best marketing techniques, Ned and Luca are there hoping to make the best of things. What Ned does not bargain for is the stranger who approaches him at the end of the day to claim that he is Ned’s father, a man Ned had thought dead for thirty-six years. Just one hour later, as Ned and Peter Talbot make their way to Ned’s car, they are assaulted by a knife-wielding thug and Ned begins a frantic race of his own, one he has to win if he is to stay alive.

It is relatively common for bookies to be robbed of their day’s earnings before they leave the track, but Ned senses that what happened to him and his father is no ordinary mugging. What he discovers in his father’s rucksack (30,000 pounds in cash, counterfeit horse passports, an electronic device that reminds him of a television remote, and ten little devices each the size of a grain of rice) confirms for Ned that his father was specifically targeted by the man who attacked them. Now he wants to know why.

Even before the sudden appearance of his father, Ned has a lot going on in his world. Sophie is bipolar and her illness has gotten so bad that she has again been institutionalized for treatment; Luca is threatening to quit the firm unless Ned makes him a full partner; and the grandmother who raised him is suffering from dementia and living in a nursing home. Via these subplots, the reader comes to see Ned Talbot as a real human being who has managed to get himself in way over his head - and that is half the fun of Even Money.

I particularly enjoyed the novel’s details of how the world of bookmaking works, how odds are set, how bookies cover themselves with side bets of their own (a bit like insurance companies cover themselves by reinsuring their risk through other companies), and how they view themselves and those with whom they do business. I have not been a fan of this type of novel in the past but that little bit of “inside information” makes it more likely that I will seek out other Dick Francis novels now.

Rated at: 4.0

(Advance Reader Copy provided by G.P. Putnam's Sons)

Alternate History Sunday - The Winterberry

I read a whole lot of science fiction as a young teen and, in fact, I credit that genre for turning me into the avid reader that I am. The fifties and sixties were a nice period for science fiction writers, a couple of decades during which some of the real masters were reaching their peak or first appearing on the scene, and it was exciting to see what they would come up with next.

Alternate history is sometimes considered to be part of the science fiction world but that assumption can be misleading because so much alternate history is a rewrite of military history or other major world events. Of course, lots of alternate history does involve time travel and, as Harry Turtledove points out in his introduction to The Best Alternate History Stories of the 2oth Century, so many well known science fiction writers have very successfully written alternate history that it seems natural to lump the two genres together.

I dipped into Turtledove's anthology this morning to read "The Winterberry" by Nicholas A. DiChario - and I wish I could tell you more about this little gem but whatever I tell you might ruin its impact. So I'll be very careful. "The Winterberry" is a bit unusual as alternate history goes in that the author leaves it up to the reader to figure out exactly what piece of history is being rewritten.

The clues DiChario offers are more and more obvious until suddenly everything becomes clear. The story is only ten pages long and, honestly, not much happens. But when that little light goes off in your head, "The Winterberry" becomes a story you will remember and think about for a while because what the story's mentally handicapped narrator tells you about his life in his big house takes on a whole new meaning. Enough said.

Fuzzy as all of this must be, I hope it manages to influence a few people to find and read the story. I think you will like it - and you might develop a taste for alternate history in the process.

Little Bird of Heaven

Little Bird of Heaven is vintage Joyce Carol Oates, so much so, in fact, that fans of her writing will immediately recognize the novel’s setting and tone. Krista Diehl, the young girl whose father Eddie is suspected of the brutal murder of his mistress, is beginning to realize just how dangerous the world can be for a girl fast approaching sexual maturity. She is both repelled and fascinated by the boys and men with whom she is beginning to come into contact, and what her father is accused of having done leads her to the conclusion that men are dangerous beings. When her father one day emotionally grabs her by the wrist, her first thought is “Always you are astonished. Their size, their height. Their strength. That they could hurt you so easily without meaning to.”

Zoe Kruller was somewhat of a minor celebrity in little Sparta, New York. She was the best thing that her bluegrass band had going for it and any performance of theirs at the local park was guaranteed to attract the attention of a large number of male admirers, men who found it difficult to resist Zoe’s charms. To Krista, however, Zoe was the woman who served her ice cream at the local dairy and always remembered her name. She was Krista’s friend. That she was also her father’s mistress and that he would be accused of her bloody murder would change Krista’s life forever.

Also changed forever by Zoe’s murder would be her son Aaron, a boy whose own father is believed to be the most logical suspect in the murder if Eddie Diehl can prove that he is not the killer. Aaron, already on somewhat of a downward spiral of his own, is as certain that his father is not guilty of the crime as Krista is sure that her own father did not do it. Krista’s determination to find the truth about her father and his relationship with Zoe Kruller leads her to become as obsessed with Aaron Kruller as her father had been obsessed with the boy’s mother.

Oates tells her story from two distinct points-of-view. The first half of the book is filtered through the eyes of Krista Diehl who is really too young to understand everything that she discovers about the murder. This part of the book focuses on the gradual disintegration of the Diehl family which results from everything that happens to them following the murder. Aaron Kruller narrates the second half of the book and, since he is older than Krista, he fills in some of the blanks of Krista’s version of the events before and after his mother’s murder. Inevitably, these two young people have so much in common that their paths cannot help but cross – in a way that neither of them could have imagined and from which each are lucky to come out whole.

Little Bird of Paradise is a novel about self-discovery, pain, loss and how children so often have to pay for the sins of their parents. It is well written, as is almost always the case in a Joyce Carol Oates novel, but it is sometimes not easy to read because one feels, almost from the start, that its two narrators are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their fathers. This sense of impending doom will, however, keep readers turning the pages all the way to the end.

Rated at: 5.0