Bookseller Borders Group Inc. may be forced to close all of its remaining stores if no bidder is found in the next few weeks, according to a news report.
When she discovered that much of his memoir were fabricated, an irate Oprah Winfrey nearly drove the much-maligned writer to drink. Today he's back on her show for a re-match. In an exclusive interview, the controversial author of A Million Little Pieces speaks out about the big O, his blasphemous new book and his mixed feelings about A.A.
But America's worst school massacre took place May 18th, 1927, in bucolic Bath, Michigan, not far from the state capital of Lansing. It was also our country's first.
The toll was 44 killed, 58 wounded. The means were unprecedented. The target was the small farming town's new consolidated school building.
Arnie Bernstein relates the grim story in Bath Massacre, following the decades-old trail of suicide bomber Andrew Kehoe. In his forties, this slightly odd farmer worked his eighty-acre property dressed to the nines, disliked certain people for unknown reasons, and didn't keep up with his mortgage. Some of his interactions with neighbors were borderline creepy but there was nothing deeply, obviously weird about Kehoe.
He was an expert with dynamite and pyrotol for blowing up tree stumps, the bane of any farm, and also enjoyed using explosives (rather than fireworks) to celebrate Independence Day. Because he'd been hired to do work on the Bath school's plumbing and electrical system, he had an intimate knowledge of the building which helped him place his dynamite, wiring, and dynamite caps.
On that May 18th morning, half of the solidly built new school was blown up with several hundred children inside. Kehoe had rigged the building with 600 pounds of dynamite, only 100 of which blew up, but that was more than enough to create horror and devastation out of a war zone.
At 8:45 AM, the explosion echoed for miles in every direction. He also blew up his entire property after apparently murdering his wife. And then he drove his shrapnel-filled truck to the bombed-out school and blew that up, too, killing several people, including the school superintendent whom he seemed to hate.
Nowadays, Kehoe's massive purchases of dynamite and blasting caps would have -- hopefully -- triggered alarms long before he could have used them. But back then, if anyone noticed, there was no history of lunatic bombings like his to make it seem suspicious.
Sadly, the author's knowledge of Kehoe is fragmentary, but it's particularly suggestive that he might have suffered a serious brain injury at some point in his life, and that he not only killed a neighbor's dog and one of his own horses, but might have rigged a stove to blow up his stepmother.
Despite the fact that Bath wasn't yet wired for electricity and seems to have been bypassed by the Jazz Age, the story feels painfully modern. You have the bodies dug out from rubble, frantic rescuers, the blood and dust, the stench of death, the grisly rain of body parts, the horribly injured bystanders, the freakish survival stories, the makeshift morgue, the "epic destruction and epic heartbreak."
A year ago, the media went bonkers over news that the venerable word game, seeking to spice things up for the youngsters, was permitting the use of proper nouns.
The Berlin of 1933 was not the bombed-out, war-torn capitol so thoroughly documented in the many histories of World War II. Instead, this Berlin was one of excitement and color, tinged by anxiety but still full of promise, especially for the new U.S. Ambassador and his 24-year-old daughter.
Erik Larson, author of the fantastic Chicago history “The Devil In The White City,†explores that fleeting moment in history through the eyes of Chicagoan William Dodd and his daughter Martha during their first year in Germany. His new book, "In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin,†was released this week, and has already made Amazon.com's Top Ten list. Larson will discuss the new book in Chicago next week. Earlier this week, between speaking engagements in Kansas City, Larson caught up with us from his room at The Raphael Hotel, chatting about the book that took him three years of research to write.
CB: How did you find the main characters of your book, Chicagoans William Dodd and his daughter, Martha?
EL: I mean, the way the whole thing got started was that I was looking for an idea and reading William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." I was following my own advice and reading voraciously and promiscuously when I was looking for an idea. That book had always been on my list of book to read, and I was instantly enthralled. One-third of the way through the book, I realized that Shirer had been in Berlin from 1934 on, and he actually met all these people. I wondered what it would be like to be there in that time period and feel the gathering darkness of the city without the benefit we all have of knowing how it turned out. Those years between 1933 and 1934 turned out to be crucial because that's when Hitler became chancellor and in August of 1934, president and chancellor. And he then he decreed henceforth he would be fuhrer, with absolute power. I was looking for characters through whose eyes I can tell that story. At some point, I came across Dodd's diary and at some point after that, I came across Martha's memoir...So once I found them, and I got a sense of the interesting characters. Then it was a question of finding as much about them as I could.
It seems like the differences between Martha and her father really allowed you relate a well-rounded picture of what was happening in Berlin at time, right?
Martha at first was enthralled with the whole Nazi thing, and Dodd was this hapless professor with the expectation that Berlin would be rational...The fact that they were these two people with very different viewpoints was like "Devil in the White City" not just being about Holmes and not just being about Burnham. There's something about the two together. If I had hung the entire book on Dodd, it might have been interesting, but it would have lapsed into a diplomatic history. I find diplomatic histories the dullest of histories. And just the fact that they were father and daughter...Through Martha's eyes, I was able to take a look at the Berlin that so many people of that era saw. She was in a Berlin that was infinitely captivating and charismatic. It was a world-class capital and world-class city. We're accustomed to seeing it in shades of gray and black and white, but she saw it for what it was. It was full of color, with geraniums on every balcony. It was just a very, very lively and normal city, so that was her initial experience of it, and that was very important to pass along. That was a factor in how people perceived Hitler and the Nazis. I can't underscore how often there were accounts of people going into Berlin and not finding at all what they expected of it.
It's not the first time Chicago has appeared in your books, though it's less of a setting than in "Devil in the White City" and more of a context in which we can view the Dodds. How do you think Chicago in the 1930s informed their experience in Berlin?
I think the salient point is that Dodd was a professor of history and chairman of the department at the University of Chicago. Chicago was, for him and Martha, a fairly cozy environment. They were employed, both of them, at a time when the Depression was underway. They were among the lucky ones with a nice place in Hyde Park. They had a good life....Whether that is Chicago or the overall experience of the University of Chicago, [Dodd] brought certain beliefs and observations to Germany, expectations that these [Nazi] guys would not be the fruitcakes that they actually were. As for Martha, she grew up with a privileged childhood and a privileged young adulthood and given extreme freedom by the Dodds in Chicago. Whether that played on how she viewed and treated the Nazis, I don't really know.
How much did the prevailing anti-Semitism of the time affect what could be done about to stop the atrocities that eventually occurred under the Nazis?
I think the anti-Semitism at the time blunted, to some extent, the energy with which they were willing to seek a resolution to Hitler's excesses. It really is pathologic to think about: You have the Dodds, who have anti-Semitic leanings. He obviously had. It wasn't that he hated Jews or wouldn't associate with Jews, but he did have this sort of ambient, low-grade acceptance of the stereotypes that were in play back then.
Why was Dodd so stuck on using logic and reason to change the Nazis from within? Did his professorial background have anything to do with it?
I think part of it was the professorial background, and part of it was Dodd's nature. People's perception of the nature of Hitler was to perceive him as a maniac in some quarters, yes, but not as a maniac that really mattered. The perspective of Dodd and others was that it could not endure, that the [Nazi] government would not last because people would surely rise up and throw them out...Dodd really hoped and expected to influence the flow of events in Nazi Germany by quiet persuasion, by trying to get to, if not Hitler, then the rational man behind him, which we know was futile from the get-go.
As a people, we have said "never again," to the Holocaust, but there are so many modern-day events, from the Rwandan genocide to despots like Ghadaffi, in which swaths of people are abused and killed. What have you learned about what can be done to prevent or stop human atrocities?
If there's something to come away with from all this, it's that you really have to be on your guard, as we are, thankfully in this country, thanks to the Constitution, thanks to the Supreme Court and the types of political currents that ebb and flow, we have bedrock protections. The message from this era is that you do have to be watchful. When things begin to start slipping, you have to tighten up again and go back to square one because things happened very quickly when Hitler came into office...The one place where I do think our culture today has to be extremely careful is this whole thing about illegal aliens. Because any time you start defining a significant block of the population as "others," or as less than you, you start getting into dangerous waters. How you frame a debate is very important. When you call someone an "illegal alien," you've already stacked the deck against them...The Nazis hijacked the Jewish thing early on by defining it as "the Jewish problem" and started looking for a solution. These are not just words.
Erik Larson's Chicago-Area Appearances:
11:30 a.m., May 23; Union League Club, 65 W. Jackson in Chicago 6 p.m. May 23; Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library, 400 S. State St. in Chicago 12 p.m. May 24; University Club of Chicago, 76 E. Monroe St. in Chicago 7 p.m. May 24; Barnes & Noble, 55 Old Orchard Center in Skokie
Author Terry Kay is one of the South's treasures. He has written phenomenal books such as To Dance With the White Dog, The Runaway, The Valley of Light and many more. Each one he writes shines with the brilliance of his words and the beauty of his plots and characters. His latest novel, Bogmeadow's Wish, continues his winning streak of excellence. Romantic, comic and adventuresome, the book is a grand tour of Ireland with a fanciful story filling the pages.
Cooper Coghlan is a 32-year-old man living in Atlanta. He is employed in the field of public relations and is just coming off the termination of a romantic involvement. One of his favorite people in the whole world is his grandfather, Finn Coghlan. Finn was an Irish immigrant and has always retained his love for the old country and his belief in the magical elements of his heritage. This he has passed on to Cooper.
When his grandfather dies he leaves instructions that Cooper take his ashes to Ireland and cast them to the winds. Being an obedient grandson, Cooper makes his plans. Once he arrives in Ireland he finds that the magic his grandfather has described does exist. He also meets a young woman, Kathleen O'Reilly, who makes an impression on his heart.
The tour of Ireland is described in the most glorious words Kay has ever put on paper. You can actually visualize the spots Cooper visits. And strange as it may sound, you hear the words of the page coming into your mind with an Irish brogue. Now that takes talent, and Kay has it in bucketsful.
Kay tells this story with enthusiasm and a loving heart. He cares for these characters and makes them indelible on the reader's mind. You live, laugh, love with them; and when the story has ended you want more, more, more.
The best stories reach into our hearts and minds and make a place for themselves there. This is what Bogmeadow's Wish does. It goes through our mind and down to our heart where it stakes a claim to a small portion. There it will live in memory.
If you have not yet discovered the magic of Terry Kay's writing then get busy and start reading. There is a treasure trove of reading pleasure awaiting you. His books are always good but Bogmeadow's Wish contains some of his most lyrical writing ever. Bogmeadow's Wish is published by Mercer University Press. It contains 291 pages and sells for $26.99.
A charming animated baby, Kristin Neff's son Rowan retreated into himself as a toddler, losing his few words and becoming prone to inexplicable screaming fits.
For authors, choosing a book cover is the fraught moment their very private creation starts putting on its game face and getting ready to enter the market. For cover designers, it can also be the beginning of their own struggle on behalf of their favorite ideas.
ISTANBUL -- Half a century after a U.S. obscenity trial, the work of Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs is heading back to court, this time in Turkey.
An Istanbul-based publisher and his translator face obscenity charges for publishing Burroughs' novel, "The Soft Machine," and the same arguments about morality, literature and social value that shaped the American debate in the early 1960s are unfolding today.
"The book lacks narrative unity, while it is written in an arbitrary fashion that is devoid of cohesion in meaning," a Turkish government board said in a March ruling. "The way the book deals with the coarse, sleazy, vulgar and weak aspects of humans will develop an attitude that allows the justification of criminal activities in the readers' minds."
Decades ago, a court in Boston banned Burroughs' most prominent work, "Naked Lunch," after concluding it was obscene. A higher court reversed the ruling a few years later after testimony in the book's defense by poet Allen Ginsberg and writer Norman Mailer.
Burroughs' raw depictions of heroin addiction and homosexuality are hard to digest for some in Turkey, whose mostly Muslim population of 74 million is steeped in old traditions.
The case is part of a debate about free expression under a government that has successfully battled over Turkey's secular political system with the military and other hostile state institutions. The ruling party, led by devout Muslims who call themselves "conservative democrats," leads in the polls ahead of June elections, but opponents say its vows to pursue democratic reform mask an autocratic streak.
On Sunday, protesters in Turkish cities demonstrated against government plans to implement Internet content filters, saying the new system amounted to more censorship in an already heavy-handed effort to control information. Thousands of websites are banned under regulations aimed at curbing child pornography, illegal gambling and other cybercrimes.
Publisher Irfan Sanci printed 2,500 copies of Burroughs' novel, meaning a tiny fraction of Turks would see a hard copy. An advisory panel, the Prime Ministerial Board for the Protection of Children from Harmful Publications, said the book was not literature and was obscene because of its graphic descriptions of sex.
Article 226 of the penal code says its provisions "shall not apply to scientific, artistic and literary works" in some cases.
"There is a conflict between society, and the laws and the government," Sanci, 55, said in an interview with The Associated Press at his publishing house, Sel Yayincilik. He speculated that he was hit by a double dose of old state authoritarianism and a growing emphasis on "moral codes" by the government.
Sanci said two policemen from the Istanbul prosecutors' office informed him that the case will go to trial; he has testified before prosecutors and is awaiting a court date. The penalty for an obscenity conviction can be years in jail, though Sanci said the sentence is usually a fine.
He was cleared last year of obscenity charges for publishing a translation of "The Exploits of a Young Don Juan," published in 1911 by Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Geneva-based International Publishers Association commended Sanci.
The publisher was once a member of an illegal leftist organization and spent several years in jail after a military coup in 1980.
"The Soft Machine" is the first book in a trilogy by Burroughs, who died in 1997. Sanci has released the second and his team is working on the third.
"You can't judge the moral code of the Beat Generation," said Bilge Sanci, the publisher's daughter and his executive editor. She said the official panel, whose 10 members are chosen by government ministries and agencies, is not versed in "literature or aesthetics."
The board is led by Ruhi Ozbilgic, a deputy secretary in the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has worked in customs, agriculture and state planning. Nurettin Yuksel, an official linked to the board, said its conclusions were not binding and that it was up to prosecutors to decide on the next step.
Burroughs is a scandalous figure in the American literary pantheon who, along with Ginsberg, novelist Jack Kerouac and others in the 1950s and 1960s, became known as the Beat Generation of writers that railed against the mainstream.
In "The Soft Machine," the protagonist confronts Mayan priests who manipulate the minds of slave laborers, and Burroughs uses the so-called "cut-up" splicing method to jumble the text and disrupt the narrative order.
Burroughs sought to "pull the rug out" from under readers and alter their perceptions by awakening them to pre-existing notions, said Richard Doyle, a professor of English who teaches a Burroughs class at Pennsylvania State University in the United States.
"Without understanding the goal of these techniques, then you're going to be puzzled that this is a work of art and you're only going to see the graphic language and so forth," Doyle said.
The first lines of "The Soft Machine" get right into petty theft and drug use, referring to the New York City subway – "the hole" – where the main character and "the sailor," a junkie who also appears in "Naked Lunch," roll drunks for pocket change:
"I was working the hole with the sailor and we did not do bad. Fifteen cents on an average night boosting the afternoons and short-timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free. But I was running out of veins."
Suha Sertabiboglu, a Turkish dentist who translated "The Soft Machine," said he worked on it eight hours a day for a month and that it was the most difficult of 38 book translations he had done. He said he sometimes sought meaning in a passage, only to realize there was no conventional meaning.
"It is anti-literature," he said.
___
Associated Press writer Ceren Kumova contributed to this report from Ankara, Turkey.
Barnes & Noble and Borders have censored the latest cover of Dossier Journal featuring androgynous model Andrej Pejic taking off his button-down while his long blond locks are rolled in curlers, Elle.com reports.
We spoke with Dossier Co-Founder and Creative Director Skye Parrott who explained that the bookstores asked for all copies of the magazine to be placed in "opaque poly bags because even though they knew Andrej was a man, he looked too much like a woman, basically," a move that she suspects will limit sales, but that's not really the issue here.
"It's a naked man on the cover of a magazine, which is done all of the time without being covered up, so I definitely don't think it merits this, but I understand what it is," Parrott told HuffPost Style. "It's not a coincidence that it's only the giant U.S. chain stores that are asking us to do this....It's only the American copies that are being censored. It seems that it probably made people uncomfortable. But that's part of what's interesting about the cover, I think, is that it's playing with those ideas of gender roles. He's topless, you can see that he's a man, but if you look at his face, he looks like a woman and he's so beautiful, he's both in that picture, in a way. I think that's what's interesting about it."
CNN anchor Don Lemon has come out. In a new book, "Transparent," Lemon talks about his life and his sexuality, and he revealed that he is gay in an interview with the New York Times. In a tweet on Sunday night, Lemon, who has anchored in a variety of roles for CNN, linked to the Times article and wrote, "wanted to be the firs to share with u. thanks for your support!!!"
By coming out, Lemon becomes one of a tiny number of openly gay anchors on television; the list also includes Rachel Maddow and Thomas Roberts, both of MSNBC.
In the interview, Lemon said that he has never hid his sexuality from his co-workers at CNN, but decided to take a more public step after he felt that he could not write an inspirational book without being open about who he is.
Lemon also said that he was "scared," because he was talking about things that "people might shun me for." He said that he was particularly concerned about what the reaction in the black community would be. At one point, Lemon got so nervous that he thought about removing the parts of the book that dealt with his sexuality, but he changed his mind.
Lemon has been a reporter and anchor at CNN since 2006. On Monday, he is scheduled to give several interviews on the network about his revelation.
“I think it would be great if everybody could be out,†he told the Times. “...I think if I had seen more people like me who are out and proud, it wouldn’t have taken me 45 years to say it, to walk in the truth.â€
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's face turned red with rage. Leaning in close to U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Khrushchev said that Cold War Berlin was "the most dangerous place on earth." He told Kennedy he would "perform an operation on this sore spot - to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer...to the satisfaction of all peoples of the world."
It was June of 1961, and the setting was neutral Vienna. This first and last Kennedy-Khrushchev summit would prove to be one of the most explosive and decisive meetings ever of the two most powerful leaders of their time. It would be followed a little more than two months later by the Berlin Wall's construction and then two months after that by a showdown of Soviet and U.S. tanks at Checkpoint Charlie.
Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War - and more perilous. For the first time in history, American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood arrayed against each other, only a hundred yards apart. One mistake - one nervous soldier, one overzealous commander - and the tripwire would be sprung for a war that could go nuclear in a heartbeat.
Most of us remember that time in our childhood when we picked up a book that we just couldn't put down. Our imaginations were such that it transported us to magical places, and we, too, were solving mysteries with Lewis Barnavelt, or being swept up in a tornado and deposited in Oz.
Though we may have both feet on the ground now, we still remain nostalgic about those books we read as kids that changed the way we saw the world.
This week, we asked Huffpost readers on Facebook to tell us what book from their childhood they have never been able to forget.
Did we forget one of your childhood favorites? Let us know in the comments!
On a family vacation from Wisconsin to Dauphin Island, Alabama, we stopped at Lincoln's home in Springfield, IL to take a tour. In the front parlor, there was a photograph of Honest Abe hanging on the wall. He was standing out in front of his house next to a young basswood tree. I asked the docent if the tree in the photograph was the same as the old basswood standing out in front of the house. He responded that he believed it was, so I went outside to investigate. Under the tree I found scads of basswood seeds all over the ground. I started picking them up and jamming them into my pocket. That was the germination of the project. The next three stops--Mark Twain's home in Hannibal, MO, Elvis's Graceland, and Faulkner's Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS--provided more seeds from trees that were connected to great Americans. It was while I standing in line at Graceland to pay my respects to Elvis at his grave that I had this powerful idea to go around the country gathering seeds from the trees of all my heroes, mostly writers, but also lots of boxers, musicians, and historical figures and locations. I would gather the seeds and grow them into an inspirational little grove of my own. That was the original idea, until a friend of mine suggested I write a book instead. That book, "Seeds," is the story of my serendipitous journey to find the trees that inspired famous American writers, from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton.
When Carol Ross was 22, Walter Cronkite hired her to write the evening news. He had a crew of writers, but she was his personal writer, the one who sat next to him, just out of camera range. No fool he --- Carol Ross was not just young and talented, she was extremely attractive. Gossip followed, none of it true.
When I met her, she was 24. I had an instant crush, which resulted in a dinner or two. There were many guys meeting her after the broadcast that year, and I don't think she noticed any of us --- she was consumed by her job, and then she was consumed with leaving it to crew on a boat in the Caribbean.
Our next dinner was thirty-five years later. She had another name now, having married John Howard Joynt III. And a very different situation: Howard Joynt, the popular owner of a popular bar in Georgetown, had died. He left behind a five-year-old son and a very puzzled widow, for right after his death, the IRS showed up to demand $3 million in back taxes, penalties and interest.
Carol Joynt didn't have $3 million. And then there was the problem that couldn't be assessed so neatly --- she really hadn't known her husband. At all. He was tall and affable, quick to open the champagne, and he had cast himself as her protector, and she bought it all.
Oh, there were signs. Early in the marriage, he hit her. Pushed her out of the car at night, in a rainstorm, far from home. Drank himself into a hate-spewing jerk.
But then Howard would be his adorable self again. And Carol would go back to sleep.
There are many memoirs by women who don't know their husbands until they die --- for me, the biggest jaw-dropper and gold standard is Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, by Julie Metz --- but none has the brutal irony of "Innocent Spouse." [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The irony: She had to convince the IRS that she was an "innocent spouse." Let me translate that legal term of art into common English: The journalist who worked for Cronkite and Charlie Rose and Larry King --- the professional with an inborn knack for ferreting out The Facts --- had to convince professional skeptics that, in her personal life, she was spectacularly incurious. In a word: an idiot who she signed tax returns she never read and was clueless about her husband's cavalier business practices.
It's to Carol Joynt's great credit that she writes as a professional. She knows what the peg of the story is --- how did a smart woman become so dumb --- and she confronts it head-on:
I wasn't proud of what [the IRS] report said about me, but not because the facts were wrong. They were right. It made clear that in my marriage, I had given over control of my life to another person. Sheltered would be the polite word. Idiotic seemed more like it, even stupid: 'Throughout her adult life, Carol steadfastly avoided getting involved in financial matters because she knew they were complex and she did not understand them.' When the report didn't make me feel like a fool, it made me feel like a concubine: 'Carol was enticed and overwhelmed by Howard's . . . obvious comfort in a good life she had never before experienced. . . . She fell in love with Howard believing he would be able to take care of her and would never let anything happen to her. That was her Faustian pact.' There it was, the truth I was unable to speak. I'd sold myself for what I thought would be a better life.
In these pages, you see her reach out to powerful friends, and you see them come through. You follow her efforts to run her husband's business long enough to resolve its tax problems. She works overtime to be a good mother to her son. She starts an interview show at the restaurant that is honest, satisfying work and becomes the invaluable Washington correspondent for NewYorkSocialDiary.com. She dreams of "widow sex" but fends off suitors.
This is not exceptional material. Sadly, it's all too common --- this is an old, old story. Happens every day. And will continue to happen as long as men feel the need to dominate and women can't summon the guts to confront.
What makes this memoir exceptional is Carol Joynt's unending honesty. She doesn't spare herself --- on many pages, she really does come off like an idiot. And you really do want to scream: How can you be so dumb? But she perseveres. She learns. She gets it right. Her son's okay. She's still walking.
And, in the end, she does the hardest thing --- she comes to terms with the father of her son, her lover, her protector, her fraud of a husband. As she writes: I try not to carry grudges or to remain angry. Like sea anchors, they stop forward motion. I needed to move on to survive. Howard was dead. What good was it to waste time and energy on anger toward a dead person? For the longest time I didn't sense anger, and only toward the bitter end did I come to terms with how it nested deep inside me. I resented that he left me a bankrupt business and no road map, a manager who worked against me, landlords who didn't want me and who were incapable of trusting a woman as a business owner, and this financial mess he'd got himself into that consumed me, my resources, my energy and the time and happiness I should have had to devote to raising our son. I was angry at myself, too, and shared the blame. When I finally at long last was able to close the business and regain my freedom, I cut loose that last sea anchor: my anger.
I wasn't wrong to like this woman. You won't be either.
Ask someone why writing might be a fine vocation and you will hear the usual trifecta: Fame, Fortune, and getting to do Cool Stuff. The wonderful thing about being a writer is that while those first two can be elusive, the Cool Stuff is quite easy to come by. Long before you are rich or famous, you can get to do some pretty cool stuff as a writer if you put your mind to it. Here are some of the cooler things I have gotten to do as a writer and I assure you: I am not rich or famous.
I got to drive Jay Leno's turbine car. One of only three running Chrysler turbines in the world, the car is priceless, literally and figuratively. The full story is here, so as not to repeat myself.
I got to drive Bobby Isaac's K&K Charger Daytona. This car won the NASCAR National Championship in 1970 and later set more than two dozen land speed records at Bonneville. I drove the car on the road outside of the Talladega raceway after I met the owner of the car and told him I had written Bobby's biography. Somehow, it seemed fitting: The car is on the cover of the book.
I got to fly in a B-17 bomber. The Yankee Lady is one of only a handful of survivors and resides in a museum in Michigan. The barn-door sized rear tail is even bigger when you see it up close. Flying over southeastern Michigan at only a couple thousand feel, I crawled up into the place where the bombardier sat and watched the farmland pass by below. It was eerily reminiscent of so many WWII movies I'd seen.
I've met four current or former governors of Michigan. At a recent book event in Lansing, I met former Governor James Blanchard who bought two copies of my Chrysler Turbine Car book. Blanchard had played a role in the story -- he was involved in the first bailout of Chrysler during the Iacocca days -- and he asked me to sign one copy for him and the other for Sergio Marchionne. I didn't meet Sergio, but the CEO of Chrysler is a friend of Blanchard's; the former governor now sits on the board of Chrysler.
I've been quoted by the New York Times, and have been featured as an expert on CNN, the BBC and by quite a few local TV stations and newspapers. One of the earliest things I wrote was about the lemon law -- my legal specialty -- and whenever someone looked for an expert to comment, they somehow found me. One day a producer from the BBC called and said a film crew was coming over to America to study our consumer protection law because they didn't have an equivalent law in England. I became the spokesman for American law in their piece. It wasn't broadcast here but the producer sent me a tape of it. I did get to the see the CNN piece and I have copies of the New York Times article.
So, if you set out to write because you are seeking Fame, Fortune and Cool Stuff -- hang in there. The Fame and Fortune might take a while but the Cool Stuff is just around the corner. And every writer I've ever met has stories just as cool . . .
Every summer through elementary and middle school ended with tears and tantrums over summer reading I hadn't done and refused to do.
Sure, there were a few books I endured because I had to, and one or two that I sort of liked, but no one would have accused me of being a Reader. I'd rather have watched T.V. or played video games.
These days, I tell this to groups of elementary school students when I visit schools to talk about being a writer, and, when I get to the part about TV and video games, the boys in the crowd usually cheer.
Their cheers, and the eye rolls from their teachers at the back of the room, reinforce what we hear in study after study, article after breathless article: Boys Don't Read.
The 2010 Kid and Family Reading Report, sponsored by Scholastic, found that regardless of race, geography or socioeconomic status, boys were lagging far behind girls in reading outside of school assignments. Only 39 percent of boys rated reading outside of class as important, while 62 percent of girls said it was "extremely or very important." A 2005 NEA study by Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky found that between 1980 and 2004, the gender gap in reading between boys and girls had grown so wide that the authors determined it had become a "marker of gender identity." Again: Boys don't read.
It has become conventional wisdom in publishing for children and teens that girls will read a book with a boy on the cover, but boys won't read a book with a girl on the cover. In the book business, a lot of time is spent thinking about how to lure boys into reading. Humor is a sure bet, with Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy Kid leading the way. But publishers aren't done there. Add a card game? Add a video game? The hit series 39 Clues did both. Trinkets? There are tales from James Frey's fiction factory about adding a sword to I Am Number Four so there would be something to merchandise when the movie came out. And, as the Hunger Games phenomenon shows, you don't have to have a boy protagonist as long as you have satisfying levels of violence. If you shoot it, they will come.
Turning boys into readers isn't just a worry for publishing executives trying to find the next blockbuster series. There are massive policy implications. Girls are outperforming boys in reading in all 50 states, and boys are more than twice as likely to be to be placed in special education classes than girls.
Literacy expert Pam Allyn, founder of LitWorld and the Books 4 Boys program at Children's Village and author of the newly released, Pam Allyn's Best Books For Boys, observes that "illiteracy rates correlate with the risk of a jail sentence later in adolescence, making it twice as likely for nonreaders to be incarcerated." And indeed, 93 percent of the prison population in the United States is male.
The stakes for boys reading are high. The last few years have seen a spate of thoughtful books published, grappling with the "problem" of school age boys. They have titles like Boys Adrift, The Trouble With Boys, The Purpose of Boys, and Why Boys Fail. There is broad agreement that boys are a struggling and that they must be turned into readers.
But what if they already are?
When I tell elementary school students about my own years as a boy who didn't read, I talk about TV and video games to make a point, not just to get a cheer. Even when I hated to read, I was hungry for stories. I found them in places that weren't teacher-approved, but I found them just the same.
Video games and television shows were filled with plot and conflict, character and emotion. I read Choose-Your-Own Adventures and X-Men comics and Nintendo Power Magazine and Zoobooks and I made up my own stories about the villains and the heroes, the far-flung places and wild animals. I never thought of anything I did as reading, and I never thought I was training myself for a life as a writer.
But I was.
When Matt De La Peña was growing up in a "tough working class neighborhood in San Diego," he would go to the library every morning, but he wasn't there for the books. "I wasn't technically a big reader," he said. "But I would tear through every issue of Basketball Digest, hidden inside the biggest book I could find, so that the librarian wouldn't catch me." He knew she wouldn't approve.
"I didn't think much of it at the time, but I wasn't interested in just stats. I was looking for the narratives surrounding the game. Who were these players? What did they have to overcome to get where they were? What drove them to be the best?"
A self-identified jock, basketball took him to college, and gave him the material for what would become his first novel, Ball Don't Lie. He is now an acclaimed young adult novelist, and is widely read by that much-lamented constituency, teenage boys.
"[My guy fans] are usually kids of color, usually from the wrong side of the tracks and they find themselves in my books. None of them would probably define themselves as readers. But a smart librarian probably put the book in their hands, pivoting off the sports interest to bring them to the novels. And they are some of the most loyal fans. Once they're hooked, they read everything."
Boys don't read. Except when they do.
The fact is that boys are reading. Just like girls, boys are hungry for stories that speak to them, that excite their imaginations and reflect their experiences. They are hungry for information to help them make sense of the world, or achieve a goal or just to geek-out on whatever is holding their attention at that moment. How could I read about the weight of elephant poop and not feel the ground shaking under a stampede of massive beasts or giggle at a pile of poop twice my size? How could I battle a spider-shooting monster heart on the last level of CONTRA, and not dream up my own elaborate monsters to battle?
Boys today are consuming more text than at any time in human history. Adults simply are not valuing the reading that boys are doing. Teachers, librarians, writers like me, and even boys themselves, have privileged the literary novel above all other forms of literacy.
A researcher at the University of Ontario recently looked into the reading lives of boys and found that almost all of the boys in her study described the reading they enjoyed, just like young Matt De La Peña and I did -- game manuals, fact books, graphic novels, sports magazines -- as "not really reading."
He argues passionately that schools need to broaden the tent of "what counts and does not count as a valid literacy activity," inviting so-called 'low culture' into the classroom alongside 'great literature' and showing that the interests, needs, and tastes of boys are valued and have a place in a reading life.
There are plenty of fart jokes in Shakespeare, and plenty of pathos in Captain Underpants.
If you're going to bill a film as a big budget sexual thriller, you've got some lofty expectations to meet -- especially when it comes to casting. In daring to clump itself in that category, the newly announced flick "The Paperboy" is at least making that crucial first star-studded step.
In hot news out of Cannes, The Hollywood Reporter relays that the film, based on the 1995 Pete Dexter novel of the same name, will star Matthew McConaughey, Sofia Vergara, Zac Efron and Tobey Maguire. Here's the synopsis, courtesy Publisher's Weekly:
Narrator Jack James is the son of the Moat County Tribune's editor and publisher. While Jack's older brother, Ward, reports for the Miami Times, Jack has settled for a job delivering papers for the Tribune. But when Ward and his partner, evil dandy Yardley Acheman, come to Moat County to investigate the four-year-old murder of the local sheriff, Jack assists them in the inquiry.
Lee Daniels will direct the film, which will serve as the second straight dramatic escapade for McConaughey after a decade spent in romantic comedies. His role in "The Lincoln Lawyer" earlier this year was lauded and compared to his breakout in "A Time To Kill," setting him up for a new focus on artistic choices.
For Efron, it's another step in the adult drama direction; the "High School Musical" superstar has been making strides to cement his status as a leading man, with last year's tepidly received romantic drama "Charlie St. Cloud," and his upcoming war drama, "The Lucky One," in which he plays a Marine home from battle.
Maguire, of course, is no stranger to book adaptations; he'll soon be playing narrator and protagonist Nick Carraway in the star-studded Baz Luhrmann-directed "The Great Gatsby." Vergara recently signed on to a big screen remake herself, playing a temptress in the Farrelly Brothers' "The Three Stooges."
Everyone has a language peeve. Mine is "literally," a great word with no close synonym. When used as a mere intensifier or to mean simply "It felt as though..." it has almost no kick at all. And when misused, it can be spectacular: what Lindsey Graham recently said of an American program to turn weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel for peaceful energy. Truly this is a good thing, but Graham probably shouldn't have said that "the United States is literally taking nuclear swords and turning them into plowshares." My first thought was that it was pretty sweet that DARPA had finally invented nuclear swords. My second was, "But who wants a nuclear plowshare? Would you eat vegetables out of a field plowed with one?"
So I'd like to keep "literally" meaning "not figuratively," and every time I see it used to mean "figuratively" I sigh a little sigh. You certainly have your peeves too. Maybe it's "Between you and I." Maybe it's "Jenny and myself are going to have to think that over." There are enough to fill many books, and indeed they have filled many books--some of them bestsellers. All of us who love language hate to see it used incompetently.
But I got the idea for my recent book by noticing that there seemed to be more than defending the language going on when people talked about this or that usage. Take Black English: linguists have long known that it's a regular dialect of English with its own consistent internal rules, like Scots or Southern White English. But while most people know that it's unacceptable to make fun of someone's skin color, they feel free to make fun of their language. Zach Galifinakis has a joke about using lots of Axe body spray, though since he lives in a black neighborhood, he calls it "Ask". It's a pretty good joke, and he defuses it by saying "If you didn't get that, you're not a racist." But many people really think that "aks" in Black English is mouth-breathing stupidity, rather than merely dialectal. It has a long history in English, even appearing in Chaucer: "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housbond to the Samaritan?"
In other words, there's nothing wrong with treasuring good English. But people confuse "grammatical" and "good." "Correct" English is often plodding or incompetent. Meanwhile, many people who aren't one hundred-percent fluent in standard English are nonetheless brilliant, charismatic and persuasive--I should know, as my father, who could charm a fish out of water, was an earthy, profane southerner, and not exactly Henry Higgins when it came to "proper" English.
Too many people take the step beyond caring for their language to enjoying laying scorn on others who use it differently. This is several different problems at the same time. One is, as mentioned, the bigotry against dialectal English, apparently the last form of prejudice acceptable even in polite, liberal company. It's important for African-Americans (as for all Americans) to master standard English, but part of that bargain should be accepting that their language, like my dad's Southern White English, deserves a place too, and one without scorn.
The second way in which people go wrong with language peeving is simply picking the wrong peeves. There are many "rules" that are "known" to copy editors and sticklers everywhere that simply aren't so. Famously, the ban on splitting infinitives and another on ending sentences in prepositions have both been known to be bogus by quality grammar-book writers for at least a century. But these "rules" seem unkillable. So do many other more rarified ones, which seem to live on so that copy-editors can one-up each other: Use "each other" for two people but "one another" for three or more. Use "that" for restrictive clauses like "the house that Jack built", but "which" for non-restrictive ones like "the house, which Jack built,..." But these and so many others are not "rules": they began life as one grammar-book writer's fetish and made their way into print to plague us with an endless game of grammar-gotcha.
So by all means, treasure language. But don't let your love for good English mean disdain for people who don't use it exactly as you do. Part of a healthy love for language is an understanding of the many different forms it takes. Dialects are healthy parts of real communities. Changes to a language are natural, not simply degrading. Even if my friend "literally" doesn't survive, quality English will.
There is an interesting piece at Book Beast about "The Future of Book Reviews: Critics vs. Amazon Reviewers." It reports on a panel discussion sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle which, unsurprisingly, included four prominent 'professional' reviewers but no one representing the casual reader/reviewer, who the pros all, unsurprisingly, kicked around. Too bad, because while many of the criticisms of the armchair critic were valid, a much more important point was missed. The flaws of customer criticism notwithstanding, the ability of readers to offer their feedback into the great public discussion of literature contributes significantly to an interest in reading, and writing... which is one of the goals of literary criticism in the first place.
The criticisms of the proletariat reviewers who publish their views on Amazon and elsewhere were predictable. Such reviews are "often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated," sniffed Morris Dickstein, Distinguished Professor of English and Theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who added that such reviews are often lacking in "taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument." Take that, "I'mAnAvidReader" (see all my reviews)" Amazon critic! Author Cynthia Ozick said she found it "disheartening" that the most committed readers are Amazon customer reviewers. Participants lamented the way sites like Amazon offer "If you read this, you might also be interested in..." suggestions that threaten to narrow the breadth of what readers read. As French novelist and commentator Herve Le Tellier put it, "If you follow that advice, you will always read the same book, maybe not written by the same person, but the same book."
And Dickstein offered this; "The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing." Well, that depends on what your definition of reviewing is, doesn't it? And more important, what your views are about the purpose of reviewing.
So that my cards are on the table... I have written two books, the first of which got a few nice reviews, the second of which got one three-sentence trashing by a 'professional' reviewer who may have "taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument," but apparently hadn't actually read my book. (This opinion was universally shared among my colleagues and friends who read both my book and the shallow 'banal... blankly opinionated' review.) I am also, I shamefully confess, only a casual book reader and a minimal consumer of book reviews, though I devour all sorts of other written material.
With those meager credentials, may I humbly suggest that the way these professional literary reviewers see reviewing is more than a wee bit effete, and narrow. May I suggest that the democratization of reviewing, as much as it certainly does give voice to all kinds of awful writing and thinking, is important precisely because it gives readers that voice. They are now participants in discussing the world of literature that reviewing, in its broadest sense, exists to encourage. Their ability to chime engages them in reading. (Writing, even.) The online world is a giant book club, which is generally good for books.
The democratization of reviewing provides an encouragement to authors as well. Few things will do a book as much good as a professional review in a high-profile publication (now that Oprah's leaving, of course), but the wider opportunity for favorable buzz about your work, not only from customer reviews but the proliferation of online book review sites which allow reader input, is liberating. An author with no name (me), no established body of work (me), no contacts among the literati (me), faces severe barriers-to-entry to the professional reviewing world that can mean so much. But now, that world is not the only way to get one's work reviewed and discussed.
Here's something else the critic's comments seem to have overlooked. While the wide-open conversation about what's good and what's bad, what's recommended and what's not, may not meet the highest standards of professional literary critics in terms of thought or erudition, or satisfy the more intellectual function of the classic literary review, not every reader wants a review for that kind of erudition and thought. Sometimes we just want to know what a book is about and whether it's good read, and why. And we can get a sense of that from the Amazon and online reviews.
Finally, pardonnez moi, Monsieur Le Tellier, mais a lot of people like one sort of book more than others. Readers of history like reading history, not sci fi. Sci fi readers are more into books like Dune (read it) than the Public Orations of Demosthenes (didn't). Most readers have preferred genres or topics, so the "If you liked that, you might like this..." recommendations at Amazon and elsewhere (mercenary as they are), don't narrow what a reader reads. They expand it, by making readers aware of books they might not otherwise know about.
Remember when President Bill Clinton said, "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is?" This kerfuffle has to do with what the meaning of literary criticism is. Ms. Ozick captured a more liberal definition, which provides room for the sort of reviews written by readers for Amazon and elsewhere, when she said, "Not only are they willing to buy books consistently, not as a now-and-then event; they also are intent on evaluating them in a public way, and they devote time and effort to fashioning a response. In short, they are serious about the meaning and effect of books, exactly what we would call a literary point of view."
It seems like the reflections of people serious about the meaning and effect of books qualify as a valuable form of literary criticism. It seems "blankly opinionated" to suggest otherwise.
Many books and films have partisans who insist their works are loved and admired by the American people, but "To Kill a Mockingbird" is the real thing.
The Harper Lee novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has sold nearly 50 million copies in the 50 years since its publication. And when the U.S. Postal Service recently issued a stamp honoring "Mockingbird" star Gregory Peck, it used a still from that Oscar-winning performance as its image.
When Rona Jaffe's fast-paced, sassy tale of New York girls' office life, The Best of Everything, came out in 1958, it was an instant bestseller. Jaffe was 26 and had knocked the manuscript out in five months. She was mobbed at book signings by secretaries wanting their copies inscribed to "All the girls on the 49th floor". Shortly before her death in 2005, Jaffe wrote: "To this day women come up to me and say that the book changed their lives."
One day in the spring of 2009, Edward Tufte, the statistician and graphic design theorist, took the train from his home in Cheshire, Connecticut, to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with a few members of the Obama administration.
Education was something else in the 18th century. W. B. Sandys was just nine years old when he penned a volume titled Ancient Maps and Universal History. Measuring only a little over four inches high, this little book has the feel of being a very well-executed assignment. It contains four maps and historical accounts as well as two "Charts of Biography," which graphically show a timeline of historic figures, and throughout the volume Sandys demonstrates his aptitude in history, geography, pen-and-ink drawing, and calligraphy. The paper is too opaque for Sandys to have traced the maps, but given their detail and accuracy, he likely copied them from a published work. The accompanying text, which he has penned in a somewhat uncertain calligraphic hand, may be of Sandy's authorship.
The first map shows the Assyrian Empire, and it is accompanied on the following page by a 10-line historical account focusing on the reign of Cyrus, who, Sandys notes, "may justly be considered the wisest conqueror and the most accomplished prince to be found in profane history." These historical accounts are written as if on old scrolls, and it is here that Sandys flexes his creativity. The maps are probably copies; the text, which is briefer with each successive map, is mostly rote repetition of basic facts with only a few juicy details thrown in; but the scrolls -- even as the text on them becomes shorter and drier -- become elaborate torn affairs, more evocative of pirate treasure maps and belying the basic facts recounted on them. At the same time, those "basic facts" are pretty impressive -- I'm not sure I knew anything about the Assyrian Empire when I was nine years old.
Here is the manuscript in its entirety. Notice the delicate watercolor highlights on the maps and the enthusiastic shading of the scrolls, and remember that this is the work of a young boy.
For more information about this manuscript, click here.
In the natural order of life, children outlive their parents. But when the order is reversed, parents can be caught between the bitterness of their loss and the sweet celebration of a life. Marly Cornell is firmly committed to the celebration. When her daughter Cody was born with the most severe form of spina bifida, doctors told the young mother that if Cody survived at all, she might be paralyzed and/or brain damaged. But Marly experienced something different when she looked down at the newborn. She remembers, "Somehow as I looked at those wide eyes and felt the grip of her little fingers around my thumb, I knew she was fine -- no matter what else might be wrong."
Eight infants a day in the U.S. are born with spina bifida (166,000 Americans, according to the Spina Bifida Association) and it remains the most common permanently-disabling birth defect.
As it turned out, Cody did survive but there were plenty of difficulties along the way -- dozens of surgeries, a wheelchair for her mobility and various changes in her family -- but her mother never changed her mind -- Cody was fine, more than fine. Cornell treasures her daughter's joyride of a life in a new book called The Able Life of Cody Jane: Still Celebrating (LightaLight Publications, May 2011). She describes a person who was, from her earliest years, a sensitive kid with a droll sense of humor who did not allow her physical limitations to define her or get in the way of her fun. A staunch defender of the vulnerable, Cody stepped up to advocate for others who were treated unfairly, and for herself when necessary -- and, as every person with a disability knows, that can be a daily occurrence. The chemistry between mother and daughter pops off the page as their close relationship grows into an enduring friendship that balances Cody's adult life of independence with inevitable dependencies.
Marly's eyes light up as she explains, "Stories about people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions are framed so often in tragedy and pity instead of recognizing the powerful spirit, joy and humor that is often part of daily life for so many people who confront difficult and genuine barriers."
Cody died in 2004 at 32 years old, but she still got the last laugh. Marly reflects, "Looking back, it seemed like Cody had a tough life in many ways, but that was not how we experienced it at the time. That wasn't how either of us felt. We laughed every day and sometimes more when situations were scariest."
It's a safe bet that Cody, ever the witty one, is yukking it up with the angels.
The Able Life of Cody Jane was published with the support of the Spina Bifida Association. For more about this, go to www.theablelife.com.
Pop-up bookstores are an international phenomenon, from New York to Chicago to Honolulu to London to Berlin -- and now one has come to Pittsburgh and it's the biggest one ever. Twenty-four thousand square feet of vacant space has been turned into a temporary bookstore -- exactly where a Borders used to be. For one month, Fleeting Pages, a coalition of independent presses, authors, artists, magazines and zines, is stocking the space with books, magazines, zines, comics and art.
Fleeting Pages' fleeting bookstore offers books from the smaller presses, both independent publishing houses and self-publishing venues, including non-fiction, fiction poetry, graphic novels, zines and comics. In addition, all kinds of workshops are being planned, from making your own zine, to how to self-publish, to how to start up volunteer-run bookstores.
In my own town, with its many vacant shopfronts, I would love to marshal the forces for a month-long used books store, a chance for all of us to recycle our own overcrowded bookshelves, sharing what we've read and loved and finding new morsels (or meals!) of written works to bring home and devour. Every year the Halloween store shows up for a month or two, a seasonal and fleeting emporium of costumes, decorations and treats. If the ghouls can do it, why can't we book lovers?
The goal of Fleeting Pages is to lead the way for innovative thinking about the future -- and books -- in whatever forms necessary. As it says on their website (not a fleeting one, I hope: too many resources in one place!):
"There are a lot of great bookstores out there who do what they do really well and have a local population that both appreciates and supports them. There are a lot of people in the publishing industry with ideas based on their experience. And there are a lot of consumers who know what they would like in a bookstore that would make shop there. Exploring all of those ideas about the future of the bookstore is something that we hope will happen during the month. We have an open call for submissions on the topic- bookstores. Past, present, and future."
Open call, people! Join in, buy some books and remember, as Barnes & Noble says in its new Nook campaign, "Reading is Forever". Let's make sure bookstores are, too.
Blogger. Vlogger. Tweeter. Author. Journalist. These words aren’t synonymous, and yet they all have one thing in common: behind these terms are people who are jockeying in the media world for your attention.
For authors and other creative professionals, an appearance at the Googleplex, the company's sprawling complex of office buildings, is good business -- but nonetheless conjures some mixed emotions in light of Google's complicated relationship with content creators. The company is involved in a bitter lawsuit over its efforts to scan all of the world's books and make them available online, and has long stood accused of unfairly profiting from work that is excerpted and indexed by the company's search services.
Shares of Barnes & Noble (BKS: Charts, News, Offers), the largest American brick and mortar bookseller, have plunged 80% in the past five years as investors began to doubt the sustainability of its business model, but has since bounced back 50% in the past month, rising from under $9 to its current $13-$14 trading range.
Finding a home for nearly 9,000 gently used books isn't easy. Just ask Lou Iori, a 16-year-old student at the British School of Chicago.
Lou is planning to spend every free minute in the next few weeks sorting through hundreds of boxes of books from the now-closed Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary on Chestnut Street. Some of the books will be donated, and others will be sold to raise funds for charity.
Long ago I read that the acid test of a poet was to write a sonnet. The straitjacket of meter and cadence of its composition drew out the worst and best of whomever had already tried their hand in battle with assonant rhymes. I confess that with my irreverent 17 years it seemed that those hendecasyllables, grouped in two quartets and two triplets, were only for those who had not been able to prove themselves in the freedom of modern poetry. Displays of novelty that I flaunted until I read Francisco de Quevodo, and the theory of rejecting the combination of "cuidado" and "enamorado" blew me away.
Well, I have to tell you that, like a sonnet, there is nothing harder to write than a technical manual. I know, you'll laugh, and say that anyone can manage to produce a leaflet for a medication or explain how to use a washing machine. Try it and see if you can, experiment and you'll see how difficult it is to create an instruction booklet that isn't full of the same boring and graceless prose of so many others. You'll realize, then, how hard it is to avoid sounding dully didactic or petulantly professorial, to avoid boring your readers to death.
I am telling you this because I just finished a manual about WordPress with the title, "A Blog to Speak to the World." When reviewing the more than 400 pages I composed, I wondered how I found -- in this unstable Cuba -- the time, the peace and the skill to finish this book. Some friends tell me I've been sidetracked into a minor genre... and that makes me laugh. I fact -- I reveal to them -- I have just composed my own delicate sonnet, with 20 chapters that are like 14 lines and some technical advice instead of declarations of love. My book, in one of life's coincidences, will be presented in Madrid this coming May 21, the birthday of the poet with the round pince-nez and the aquiline nose. The same insolent who wrote, "my flame can swim frigid water and will flaunt so cruel a law," as if instead of eternal romance he was relating the act of managing a blog from a country drowning in censorship.
Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation. Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani and other Cuban bloggers in English. Yoani's new book in English, Havana Real, can be ordered here.
But that whiz-bang success also made "Eat, Pray, Love" "synonymous with something very poppy and chick lit-y," the author said in her NYPL talk, noting that for all its success, "Eat, Pray, Love" didn't get the literary accolades her earlier works did. ("Pilgrims," her first collection of short stories, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize.)
The British children's author and illustrator Edward Ardizzone is best known for writing and illustrating the Tim series and for his collaboration with his cousin Christianna Brand on the Nurse Matilda books. But he also illustrated an edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn for Heinemann Educational Books in 1970.
Children’s books and other educational materials produced by the publisher Scholastic reach about 90 percent of the nation’s classrooms. With this enormous access to what amounts to a captive audience of children, the company has a special obligation to adhere to high educational standards.
Ann Arbor-based Borders Group Inc. told customers in an e-mail today that it would commit to paying the shipping costs of books the chain has not stocked at its stores.
The book publishing sector has woken up to the revolution that is now beginning to quickly redefine it - and is falling over itself to stake out unfamiliar new digital credentials.
2. "10th Anniversary" by James Patterson, Maxine Paetro (Little, Brown)
3. "The Sixth Man" by David Baldacci (Grand Central Publishing)
4. "Sixkill" by Robert B. Parker (Putnam Adult)
5. "The Land of Painted Caves: A Novel" by Jean M. Auel (Crown)
6. "I'll Walk Alone" by Mary Higgins Clark (Simon & Schuster)
7. "The Fifth Witness" by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
8. "Chasing Fire" by Nora Roberts (Putnam Adult)
9. "A Turn in the Road" by Debbie Macomber (Mira)
10. "Caleb's Crossing" by Geraldine Books (Viking)
11. "She Walks in Beauty" by Selected by Caroline Kennedy (Voice)
12. "Bel Air Dead" by Stuart Woods (Putnam)
13. "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
14. "Save Me" by Lisa Scottoline (St. Martin's Press)
15. "If You Were Here" by Jen Lancaster (NAL)
HARDCOVER NONFICTION
1. "Bossypants" by Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur)
2. "Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?" by Steven Tyler with David Dalton (Ecco)
3. "If You Ask Me (and of Course You Won't)" by Betty White (Putnam Adult)
4. "The Dukan Diet" by Pierre Dukan (Crown Archetype)
5. "Stories I Only Tell My Friends" by Rob Lowe (Holt)
6. "From This Moment On" by Shania Twain (Atria)
7. "The 17 Day Diet: A Doctor's Plan Design for Rapid Results" by Dr. Mike Moreno (Free Press)
8. "20 Years Younger" by Bob Greene (Little, Brown)
9. "Guy Fieri Food" by Guy Fieri (Morrow)
10. "A Singular Woman" by Janny Scott (Riverhead)
11. "The Heart and the Fist" by Eric Greitens (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
12. "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House)
13. "My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business" by Dick Van Dyke (Crown)
14. "Get Rich Click!" by Marc Ostrofsky (Razor Media)
15. "Play Like You Mean It" by Rex Ryan with Don Yaeger (Doubleday)
MASS MARKET PAPERBACKS
1. "Worth Dying For" by Lee Child (Dell)
2. "Water for Elephants: A Novel" by Sara Gruen (Algonquin)
3. "Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
4. "The Search" by Nora Roberts (Jove)
5. "Something Borrowed" by Emily Griffin (St. Martin's)
6. "Storm Prey" by John Sandford (Berkley)
7. "Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Objective" by Eric Van Lustbader (Vision)
8. "Hannah's List" by Debbie Macomber (Mira)
9. "Savage Nature" by Christine Feehan (Jove)
10. "A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
11. "Moonlight Cove" by Sheryl Woods (Mira)
12. "A Storm of Swords" by George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
13. "Chasing The Night" by Iris Johansen (St. Martin's)
14. "One Magic Moment" by Lynn Kurland (Jove)
15. "Something Blue" by Emily Giffin (St. Martin's)
TRADE PAPERBACKS
1. "Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back" by Todd Burpo, Sonja Burpo, Colton Burpo and Lynn Vincent (Thomas Nelson)
2. "Water for Elephants: A Novel" by Sara Gruen (Algonquin)
3. "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam Adult)
4. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot (Broadway)
5. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan (Anchor)
6. "Lone Survivor" by Marcus Luttrell (LB/Back Bay)
7. "Something Borrowed" by Emily Griffin (St. Martin's Griffin)
8. "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" by Christopher McDougall (Vintage)
9. "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese (Vintage)
10. "The 9th Judgment" by James Patterson (Grand Central Publishing)
11. "Inside of a Dog" by Alexandra Horowitz (Scribner)
12. "Medium Raw" by Anthony Bourdain (Ecco)
13. "The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel" by Garth Stein (Harper)
14. "The Postmistress" by Sarah Blake (Berkley)
15. "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" by Jamie Ford (Ballantine)
In the age of rapid digital revolution in publishing, when readers have book review options ranging from decades-old publications like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, to Twitter book clubs, literary websites, online publications like this one, and Amazon reader reviews, what is the role of the book reviewer? And how has that role changed?
We've had our eyes on you lately and have seen you reading a wide array of genres, as usual. From best-sellers to beloved classics, you've been seen reading it all this month!
What book do YOU want to be spotted reading public? Let us know in the comments!
Ian Spector didn't expect to create a cottage industry by making up "facts" about Chuck Norris like the one claiming the action star has 600 miles of black belts in his home.
But when opportunity knocks, you don't respond with a roundhouse kick.
Well, Chuck Norris might. The mythical Chuck Norris who, according to the "facts" compiled by Spector, once actually made it rain cats and dogs just so he could solve a mouse problem.
History suggests that the "Chuck Norris is the ultimate badass" meme actually started in 2005 when Conan O'Brien started making "Walker: Texas Ranger" jokes whenever a joke bombed.
However, it was Spector who turned a website of fictional facts about the man, the myth, the legend into a huge Internet success story that paid off for him when he got a book deal while still majoring in cognitive neuroscience at Brown University.
"It was an accident," he admitted to AOL Weird News. "I was working on an entreprenuerial project, but when a major book publisher offers you money, you take it."
Spector has just released his fourth book on Norris, "The Last Stand of Chuck Norris: 400 All-New Facts About The Most Terrifying Man in the Universe" (Gotham Books), which includes new findings about Norris.
For instance, did you know that only God is allowed to edit Chuck Norris' Wikipedia page? Or that when Chuck Norris claps with one hand, the sound is deafening? How about this one: Chuck Norris can ignore the call of nature for 36 hours, but he can never ignore the call of duty.
Some might think the public would tire of hearing dubious details about Norris -- and Spector is one of them.
"I do see this is having a shelf life," Spector said. "But I'm really surprised at how intensely people feel for him and these jokes. But I'm not a Chuck Norris fan. I've only seen one film of his and he sued me after the first book."
There was eventually a settlement that allows the publishing of facts while letting Norris control his brand.
"I guess he didn't want a whole book of dick jokes," Spector said.
Too late! According to Spector's new book, Norris has nicknamed his testicles "the good, the bad and the ugly," and his orgasms have been known to trigger avalanches throughout Europe, volcanic eruptions around the Pacific Rim and violent political unrest across Tatooine.
Although Spector says he's surprised the Chuck Norris "facts" have lasted, he thinks they succeed because there is a forumula for making them work.
"You take something normal and combine it with something crazy," he said.
A perfect example: Chuck Norris visited the Virgin Islands. Now they're just the Islands.
There's another factor that might be best termed "red state/ blue state."
"If you're a fan of Chuck Norris, you'll like this book," Spector promised. "But it's just as funny if you're not."
Spector is surprised that many people do consider Chuck Norris to be the ultimate badass based on the jokes he's helped propagate.
"A lot of people only became aware of him after the jokes became popular," he said.
He may have a point, says Los Angeles-based branding expert Grant Powell.
"The jokes may have been the best thing that's ever happened to Chuck Norris' career," Powell said. "They're so over-the-top. They wouldn't work for, say, Steven Seagal because Norris takes himself so seriously that he doesn't take himself seriously."
Still, Powell understands Norris' concerns over Spector's book. "If the jokes run out of steam, it could affect the brand," he said.
No effort was made to contact Norris for this article because, to paraphrase a John Updike quote, gods don't answer fan mail.
However, Leslie Greif, the creator of "Walker: Texas Ranger" says there are ample reasons why testosterone-fueled "facts" (like this one: "Chuck Norris designed the first Ed Hardy shirt when he ran out of douchebags to kill") still strike a resonance in fans and fear in the hearts of evil men.
"Every culture needs heroes," Greif explained. "And he's the only true authentic actor who was a five-time world martial arts champion."
Unlike Spector, Greif believes the jokes will have staying power, much like the Greek myths of Hercules or tall tales like Paul Bunyan.
Part of that, he concedes, is the fact that the name "Chuck Norris" just sounds tough.
"For that reason, I think that people who don't who Chuck Norris is will still find the Chuck Norris jokes funny," he said.
Comedian Jay Thomas, who is best known as Eddie LeBec on "Cheers" and currently hosts a talk show on Sirius satellite radio, isn't so sure.
"I think you have to know who Chuck Norris is to get these jokes," he said. "Part of it, he's this little guy -- 5-foot, 4 inches -- he's not a great actor and he's so serious that it's funny. If I know my kids, I think they will hoard these books for 40 years and then they will put out the jokes themselves using someone else's name."
Comedy writer Pat Gorse, who writes for Radio Online and has worked with Rodney Dangerfield and "The Tonight Show," thinks Norris' lack of public response -- other than his lawsuit against Spector -- is the best response.
"If you don't get pissed, you don't look ridiculous -- even if it is ridiculous," he said.
Whether the jokes disappear from the public consciousness or are handed to future generations, like Helen Keller jokes, remains to be seen. Still, Spector has made a name for himself as the go-to guy for celebrity brand recognition.
"People are aware of what I do now," he said. "And a couple of weeks ago, I was approached to discuss doing similar things for other celebrities."
How will Norris react?
Don't know, but according to Spector's book, "celebrities die in threes because for Chuck Norris, killing one celebrity is never enough."
On Wednesday night, the cozy screening room at West Hollywood's Soho House was buzzing as crowds gathered to hear bestselling author and Huffington Post blogger Laura Dave read from her third book, "The First Husband." After friends, family, and fans had settled into plush red velvet chairs, Dave read a few pages. "I hate long readings," she said with a laugh. "I've chosen a passage that will last exactly 8 minutes because I think reading is boring." Her honesty makes the room smile. "There's so much candy too!" Laura points to the trolley in the corner, filled with old-fashioned treats. She ruffles through the pages of her book, and suddenly she has transformed the evening into a casual exchange instead of a monologue.
"The First Husband" is Dave's most recent novel. She tracks protagonist Annie Adams' choice between her first husband and her relationship with the one that got away (Nick, her ex-boyfriend). Yet, the objective of this novel is less about the men, and more about Annie's search for herself.
Marriage, divorce, and the challenges of relationships is not exactly new territory for Dave. Her other two novels have tackled these issues, as well. In what Publisher's Weekly called her "winning debut", Dave's first novel, "London is the Best City in America" the protagonist, an emotionally-stunted woman named Emmy, abandons her boyfriend and travels to her brother's wedding, where she is forced to take inventory of herself and what she wants in a relationship. Reese Witherspoon agreed: Her company, Type-A--along with Universal and Mandalay Entertainment--have begun adapting the book for the big screen.
Similarly, Dave's highly acclaimed sophomore novel, "The Divorce Party," which USA Today called, "endearingly quirky," is in development at Echo Films, Jennifer Aniston and Kristin Hahn's new production company.
During the reading, Dave explained that her novels tend to be prompted by questions. "London is the Best City in America," for example, was born out of the question: 'How do we choose a life for ourselves?' and 'How do we choose a mate?'
In "The Divorce Party," married couple Gwyn and Thomas Huntington invite their friends to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary, only to announce their plans to divorce. Maggie, their future daughter-in-law, then questions her future role in their son's marriage. The story of forgiving relationship mistakes and forging bonds is told through the realities of Maggie and Gwyn, two different generations dealing with similar challenges.
Dave's new book is about what happens after you've gotten married, left someone, or gotten dumped--when someone is transitioning into new or different life. Dave explained that she was nearly two hundred pages into a different book (set in Big Sur) and "The First Husband" was what she referred to as her "fun side project." But within one week of starting "The First Husband," she put down her other manuscript to devote herself to this story completely.
Her protagonist, Annie Adams, has followed love around the world, and when we meet her, she is about to be left by her boyfriend of over five years. Almost immediately after, Annie enters into her first marriage to Griffin, her rebound boyfriend of three months. The novel tackles Annie's misunderstandings of marriage and her own role in a relationship. Annie yearns for her ex-boyfriend (in Los Angeles), but is faced with a new reality (in Massachusetts) that she has lost herself in. Eventually, Annie is forced to make a choice between men. Annie's sympathetic "thought parade" as Dave says, gives the reader insight into how she is able to become proactive in her own happiness.
Dave got engaged recently to screenwriter and producer Josh Singer, known for his work on "The West Wing" and "Fringe." Did their relationship have any influence on this book? "We got engaged in December," says Dave. "The galley [copies] were already out! I’m working on this and I’m also working on a television show on the early years of marriage, so my poor Josh, if he wasn’t a writer…" she says with a laugh. She does make it clear that her personal life and creative life do remain separate, yet in some ways they overlap: "These are ideas that I’m thinking about: How do we commit? How do we make marriage work? How to we continue our growth together and apart?" Her fiance, Josh Singer was sitting front row during the reading. "He is such a great reader for me," she says. Then Dave returns back to her characters: "I feel like we're divorcing people we never married," she says. Dave references her grandmother's generation, "They never would have done that." She smiles as she explains that this book is about re-committing "to the commitment" of a relationship. Something I'm sure her grandmother would be proud of.
Laura Dave's novel, "The First Husband" hits bookstores May 12, and her book tour begins in Atlanta, Georgia on May 19th. For more of Laura's insight, check out her website, her Twitter, and her work for The Huffington Post.
Rock musicals are now a mainstay on Broadway. Shows such as Rock of Ages, Sister Act, Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia, Rent and Spring Awakening -- to name just a few -- have revamped the traditional musical.
For musical theater actors, that's a big wake-up call. To properly train a new generation, Sheri Sanders, who has performed in Hair and The Full Monty, created a master class: "Rock the Audition." Since 2004, she has taught performers at Pace University, Syracuse University and the Paper Mill Playhouse to treat the rock musical audition with the same care as legitimate musical theater.
And it's working.
Her students are currently in the Broadway, touring, or regional productions of several shows, including Priscilla, Queen of The Desert, Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, Sister Act, Shout, Mamma Mia, Wicked and Rent.
To reach a wider audience, Sanders has written Rock the Audition -- How to Prepare for and Get Cast in Rock Musicals, debuting this month. It covers everything from picking the right song to vocal techniques, body language to interpretation. Sanders shared her insights about this evolving art form:
Why are rock musicals so distinct? Rock music is a wildly different form of self-expression than legit musical theatre. Rock songs (meaning anything not legit: pop, R&B, blues, disco, folk and country) were meant to dance to, make sweet love to. They were never intended to move a plot. If there is a jukebox musical, existing pop songs are strategically placed into the context of a script to tell a "musical theater story."
If it's a new musical with music specifically created by a famous pop artist, like Elton John (Billy Elliot) or Bono (Spider-Man), these songwriters craft "emotional moments." The storytelling in a rock musical is different, too. The songs stop time and capture the feelings of a character.
Why are rock musical auditions different? The actor is responsible for figuring out how to pick, cut, arrange, vocally style and interpret a song off the radio for the audition. They don't have to do any of that for legit musicals. That's why I wrote a book -- to teach performers how to do it. It's a totally different way to perform.
Can any musical theater actor do it or are the vocal demands specific? Any musical theater performer can sing popular music for an audition. But in order to really succeed at it, the actor has to research and study the eras of pop culture because people expressed themselves differently in each.
For example, if you are auditioning for the musicals Memphis, Jersey Boys or a regional theatre production of Hairspray, one can't just sing a song from the mid-'50s or '60s with a contemporary voice. You have to be able to transport the creative team into the era. You have to style the music and interpret the song like you actually live in that era. People, and the music they sang, were crisp, clean and innocent. So your voice, body and storytelling have to reflect that. It's very different from the late '60s to the mid-'70s, where people, because of the Vietnam War, became raw, loose and poetic. And so did the music. The best way to learn is to study all kinds of popular music, and watch videos on YouTube to see what people and life was like.
Are rock musicals an effort to target younger audiences or just the traditional musical in a new guise? We are taking rock music and trying to fit it into a traditional musical theater form. Rock musicals have been on Broadway since the early '70s, starting with Godspell. Hair served up classic rock. But Rent appealed, for the first time, to the younger generation. It was bringing this generation to the theater because for them, these characters were real. It wasn't our parent's music. It was ours. Keep in mind, Rent, American Idiot, Spider-Man -- these are contemporary rock. We also have shows like Baby, It's You! , which appeal to the adults more than teenagers. They are all considered rock musicals.
Rock music is less about voice, more about the personae. How does that influence auditions? I had to write a book about this because most musical theatre performers think it's about the voice. It's like what Beyonce does. She becomes Sasha Fierce. She is a very shy person. But Sasha is commanding, sexy and fabulous. She's in the groove, in the pocket ... That's a contemporary pop personae, brooding, internal, raw, with an ache in the voice. It's not about being a great "singer"... most recording artists aren't necessarily great singers. Madonna is not a great singer, but boy can she sell a song. She's a great performer. That's what matters.
Rock The Audition, Hal Leonard Books www.rock-the-audition.com
Donald Trump's campaign for president was once the talk of the town, what with all the zany birtherism and the occasional use of the f-word whilst stumping. But then: disaster! This week, Trump's polling numbers all but collapsed under the weight of Seth Meyers' japery and the fact that some actual news of great world importance broke, forcing a mass migration of cameras away from Trump's proximity.
This might have been a good opportunity for Trump to quietly fade back into the world of reality teevee. Instead, he's working hard to win back some attention and keep people interested in his pseudo-campaign. But what to do, what to do? Here's Scott Conroy at Real Clear Politics with the answer:
Reality TV star and real estate mogul Donald Trump is working on a policy book, which Regnery Publishing will release in conjunction with his potential presidential campaign, RCP has learned.
Yes! Of course! Write a policy book. That's something President people do, right?
Regnery intends to place the book on a crash schedule, and it is tentatively set for a late-summer release date.
The book does not yet have a working title.
A "crash schedule," eh? That probably means at this moment, Trump is trumping around Trump Tower, with a passel of Trumpterns scurrying behind him, rapidly writing down all of Trump's policy thought-farts onto steno pads, with an aim toward turning them into sentences, and, with a little luck, paragraphs.
Naturally, Trump's "policy" ideas can stand to be considerably expanded upon. As of right now, the only thing we know for sure is that he intends to keep tricking foreign dictators into signing leases for tents, send Iraq an invoice for all the freedom we gave them (payable in oil), and lob expletives at China to finally bring them to heel. (President Hu Jintao: "We never anticipated, and ultimately could not contend with, the idea that the Americans would send a puffy-faced clown to browbeat us, constantly. Please accept our unconditional surrender.")
Designed to add some intellectual heft to Trump's light political resume, the book will lay out the New York City businessman's policy prescriptions for the country.
I'm guessing that's intended as a joke? Anyway, look for this book to hit the shelves in late summer. It will be "heavily ghostwritten" and probably have a foreword by Meat Loaf.
You set out to lose 20 pounds and you are excited, energized and can see your ideal physique just around the corner. You start out strong, you are making progress and then it happens, your motivation starts to slip, you are not making it to the gym as many times each week. You are not feeling creative about your workouts and the fun is gone. Your dream body seems too far away.
I know, I'm preaching to the choir. You've probably felt this way about weight loss and if you are a published or aspiring author you've experienced these types of highs and lows when writing a book. You can see the finished hardcover book in your mind. Just like with the diet, you start off strong. You're creative and your adrenaline is pumping, and then the routine of sitting at your desk sets in. The fun is gone and your book feels more like a pipe dream than an attainable reality.
I recently heard an interview Mike Keonigs did with The 4-Hour Body author, Tim Ferriss and it hit me. As Tim was describing what makes diets fail I realized it's the same thing that puts manuscripts at the bottom of a pile on the farthest corner of our desks. We are approaching them with a single plan in mind.
As Tim explained, "I don't think people need more motivation. I think they need more feedback and accountability. I don't have a tremendous amount of willpower but I do have good tracking." What he means by this is he uses certain online programs and apps to track his physical efforts, which gives him the daily awareness of how he's doing. In addition, Tim recommends that we don't just have one goal in mind such as looking better or fitting into a different pants size. "I encourage people to always have one appearance goal and one performance goal. One of the reasons people fail is they don't have a second goal, they need a performance goal." A performance goal might be running a longer distance or lifting a heavier weight. What this does for us is give us different measures of achievement. The scale might not move in a week but our ability to reach that fifth mile of our run is worth getting excited about.
The same dual-goal philosophy can be applied to writing (or more aptly finishing) your book. Sure, you can track your word count or page numbers and feel a sense of achievement from increasing those numbers but you can also measure your success from a performance goal of adding even more value to your reader. A way to do that is by developing a learning tool, or creating a mechanism for change in your reader. In essence, you are lifting heavier weights and adding better conditioning to your writing workout. These resources can be even more beneficial to your audience than the 1,500 words you added to Chapter 3, for instance.
So don't always think in terms of an appearance goal (finished manuscript) when you are writing a book, keep your motivation going by adding performance in the form of techniques, exercises and strategies for your reader. It's a fun and exciting way to add value while also adding content. With two goals in mind, you won't lose your mojo on the days you've only added 500 words to your manuscript.
How does a woman, an American woman born in mid-century, write a memoir? The chutzpah and femmechismo needed to undertake the project go against the apron.
I was raised, "Don't think you're so big." Yet to be a writer at all, you have to inflict your ego on a page and stake your reputation. To be a poet, the effect should be transcendent and disarming.
At the onset of writing my own story, I brought myself up-to-date on the memoir racket. I researched the bestsellers among women authors who contemplate their life's journey. The results were dispiriting: Diet books! The weighty before and after's.
You look up men's memoirs and find some guy climbing a mountain with his bare teeth -- the parallel view for women are pounds of cookies they rejected or succumbed to.
The next tier of bestselling female memoirs is the tell-all by a movie star, athlete, or political figure. The first two subjects are designed to exploit gossip -- the last are so circumspect you wonder if they're funded by government cheese.
The last group of popular memoirs -- across the gender divide -- are the authors who unload a great weight in the form of psychic burdens from childhood. The subject is driven mad by lunatic or intoxicated parenting, sidetracked by years of self-destruction, only to be redeemed at the end by a clean break from addiction and dysfunction.
I'm as vulnerable as anyone to the pitfalls of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a class system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love? I have sympathy for the dark places in my family history, while at the same time repeating, "This can't go on."
I came of age at the moment in the Los Angeles 1970s when women -- in jeans and no-bras -- were taking to the streets. Sexual liberation and feminism were identical in my high school milieu.
As I entered my twenties, and feminists disowned each other over sexual expression, it reminded me of what I went though in the labor movement, civil rights, the Left -- "let the weak fight among themselves." Radical feminists didn't need FBI infiltration -- the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was well under way.
It was part of our radical ethos to not proclaim your name -- it went against our sense of the collective. Everyone was supposed to know how to write, talk, run a web press, unclog a toilet, stage a demonstration.
Most people unfamiliar with my work imagine that anyone with the nickname of "Susie Sexpert" must be an id-centric airhead, a happy but too-dim nympho. They imagine, along the dumb-blond trajectory, that I just haven't thought things through, about where sexual liberation might lead -- how a female Narcissus could drown in a pool of clitoral self-absorption and drag unfortunate others with her.
I haven't set any records in sexual feats -- far from it. I was motivated from the sting of social injustice -- the cry of "That isn't fair!" gets more impulsive behavior from me than, "I want to get off."
My parents were far more radical than I, because of basic changes in their generation: My mother didn't die in childbirth. She went to college. My parents married though they weren't the same religion. They divorced -- before it became an American way of life. My father's ashes can be found in a Native burial ground instead of a WASP family plot. They strayed so much further than I did from their immediate ancestors. They were better educated than I, but I had a bigger mouth. I don't who to blame for that.
The other side of my memoir, the one that isn't the "Si Se Puede" version of Auntie Mame, is exemplified by loss. I'm more preoccupied with people dying than people coming. Every loss uncovers a piece of why we persevere in spite of it all. Sex -- its quixotic vitality, not its banal marketability -- is one of those things that makes you feel like, "I'm not done yet."
It turns out a memoir, for man or woman, is a progress, not a final deliverance. Using Mr Mailer's criteria, I'm going for "dykily psychotic," definitely "bright," and hopefully, crowning.
Adapted from "Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir," by Susie Bright. Available from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. (c) 2011.
Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist and twice Ralph Nader's Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate , has written a dramatic and prescient book, The Militarization of Indian Country (Honor the Earth). Completed in February 2011, the book is currently at press and comes on the heels of the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, also known as "Geronimo EKIA" (Enemy Killed in Action). When the code name for bin Laden was revealed, Native American groups sat up and took notice. Harlyn Geronimo, a great grandson of the legendary Apache chief, asked Congress for a formal apology.
As a member of the Onondaga Nation, Geronimo is an Army veteran who served two tours in Vietnam. In a statement submitted to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Geronimo demanded, "That this use of the name Geronimo" be expunged "from all the records of the U.S. government;" adding "to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader in history."
Which brings us to the timely publication of LaDuke's book. In it she uses considerable scholarly prowess to examine how and why Native culture has become inextricably entwined with military institutions. Consider that the names the military uses for operations and weapons come straight from Native nomenclature. In recent war accounts, the American media wrote vividly about the use of "Apache Longbow" and "Black Hawk" helicopters as "Tomahawk" missiles rained from the sky in the Gulf and Middle East Wars. Soldiers who burn out in the battlefield in a foreign land "go off the reservation." The implication is that they flee to Indian land.
In a transcript of an interview with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now," LaDuke charges this terminology and the use of the code name "Geronimo" for bin Laden represent "the continuation of the wars against indigenous people."
Those who disagree might say that LaDuke is relying upon "political correctness" to make her point, but read the book and what emerges goes straight to the heart and soul of the militarization of not just Indian culture, but mainstream American ethos as well.
We visited with LaDuke at Minnesota's White Earth Reservation, where she lives, and asked her to elaborate on the military's use of Native terminology in the bin Laden affair.
I understand why they did it, he (bin Laden) was expensive to fight, he was elusive, and he was smart. He had far more political support than Geronimo. Obviously Pakistan liked him. The problem with the use of the code word, "Geronimo" shows a lack of the historical understanding of using the name of such a national hero, and not just to native people. Geronimo is also a national hero to Americans. In this case it is an insult. The book illustrates how the military has always been above reproach.
The Militarization of Indian Country examines in dreadful detail how the military has poisoned, murdered, and exterminated parts of indigenous culture. It is carefully organized into sections examining the deep ties between the military and indigenous people, how the economy drives the military and vice-versa, the military's appropriation of Indian lands, and a somewhat hopeful prognosis for future relations if America rethinks her priorities.
In this well-researched, critical, and historical analysis, LaDuke at times takes the stance of a spiritual teacher, redefining and correcting the common interpretation of what it means to be a "warrior." LaDuke uses both a scholarly and soulful process; reclaiming the breadth and depth of Native spirituality on behalf of her people, and giving the reader concise insight into a belief and honor system that is unique in its interpretation of war, its responsibilities, and its consequences.
She writes:
I do not hate the military. I do despise militarization and its impacts on men, women, children, and the land. The chilling facts are that the US is the largest purveyor of weapons in the world, and that billions of people have no land, food, and often, limbs, because of the military funded by my tax dollars.
LaDuke begins her narrative at the Fort Sill army post in Lawton, Oklahoma, where she says the Skull and Bones society of Yale is still accused of "grave robbing, exhuming, stealing and then desecrating the bones of Goyathlay, or Geronimo, the great Apache chief." Today, the Comanche nation is asking for an agreement that the military not destroy the sacred site of Medicine Bluff.
"A small request, it would seem, at the only active military installation still remaining from the Indian Wars of the 1800s, and at the largest artillery range in the world," LaDuke writes.
"Ogichidaa is an Ojibwe word that loosely translates as 'warrior,'" LaDuke says, but the nuance imparts a deeper meaning as "those who defend the people" when used in the plural. Words and language are important and too often misinterpreted or bastardized so as to completely lose the original significance.
The words of the great chief Sitting Bull are a good example; words that LaDuke uses to drive this message home. She quotes Sitting Bull as he explained the responsibilities and the mind-set of the native warrior.
For us, warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another's life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves and above all, the children, the future of humanity.
LaDuke challenges the reader to grasp the disconnect inherent in the stereotype of Indian warriors as "bloodthirsty killers." "There are critical differences, however, between a war fought to defend the people and the land, and a war fought to create or sustain an empire, to impose colonial rule on an unwilling population," LaDuke says.
In this context one can truly understand Native people's revulsion of the word "Geronimo" when used to identify the murderous bin laden. It is especially fascinating that LaDuke wrote The Militarization of Indian Country before the current controversy arose. Truth is universal and does not adhere to convenient historical timelines.
In LaDuke's narrative, the broken treaties, poisoned waters, rivers of tears, forced death marches and massacres such as the one at Wounded Knee serve to riddle the reader with guilt. It is not the guilt of immediate responsibility, but guilt that comes from realizing that ignorance breeds culpability. The Seventh Cavalry, the same unit that conducted the "Shock and Awe" campaign in Iraq, inflicted the atrocities at Wounded Knee. To ignore historical precedent is to acquiesce and condone future atrocity. The reader realizes that obliviousness is no excuse.
There is a difference between the ancient customs of tribal warfare designed to keep enemies at bay and warfare "designed to kill en-mass," LaDuke says.
"I'm up for a fight. If you gotta fight, fight," LaDuke said in our interview at White Earth. "But you must look at the expenditure and the fact that the majority of people killed in war are non-combatants, and that the military is the largest purveyor of weapons."
In her book, LaDuke writes "more than four fifths of the people killed in war have been civilians. Globally there are some 16 million refugees from war."
The facts are undeniable and irrefutable. From Alaska to Los Alamos, to the Hawaiian island of Kaho'olawe, and every inch of American soil in between, the assault on indigenous life has been vicious and complete. The holy Hawaiian island was used as a bombing range, destroying sacred shrines and actually cracking the aquifer before Congress placed a moratorium on the bombing.
The Militarization of Indian Country also charges that the U.S. military is the largest polluter in the world.
From the thousands of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific that started in the 1940s, obliterating atolls and spreading radioactive contamination throughout the ocean, to the Vietnam War-era use of napalm and Agent Orange to defoliate and poison vast swaths of Vietnam, to the widespread use of depleted uranium and chemical weaponry since that time, the role of the U.S. military in contaminating the planet cannot be overstated.
Indigenous people have certainly experienced the brunt of the exposure. LaDuke tells the story of Virginia Sanchez, a Shoshone woman who grew up downwind and in the shadows of the Nevada atomic bomb testing site. Her brother died of Leukemia at 36 and she has lost many other relatives to cancer. Her testimony is powerful and riveting.
When the nuclear tests were exploded, in school we would duck and cover under the desk, not really understanding what it was. We weren't wealthy, you know our structures weren't airtight.
Seventy miles southwest of Salt Lake City a small community of Goshutes live on an 18,600 reservation where the U.S. government has "created, tested and dumped toxic military wastes all around them," LaDuke writes. Not 10 miles away, at the Dugway Proving Grounds, the federal government conducts military tests of chemical and biological weapons.
In the 1990s, documents were declassified regarding an Arctic experiment conducted on native populations without their knowledge. The village of Point Hope was irradiated so that the military could study the bioaccumulation of radiation in caribou. No one told the people.
LaDuke provides many more examples of how the military has been intimately entwined with the destruction of Indian land and culture, and this analysis could be compared to a forced marriage based upon systematic rape.
Which brings us back to Geronimo (Enemy Killed In Action).
Despite all of the atrocity perpetrated upon them, Native people remain at high rates of enlistment in the U.S. military, and have the most living veterans of any community. Of the 42,000 who served in Vietnam, 90 percent volunteered.
"These people deserve respect," LaDuke rightly says.
The reality, as LaDuke told Amy Goodman, is that "Geronimo was a true patriot, his battles were in defense of his land, and he was a hero. The coupling of his name with the most vilified enemy of America in this millennium is dangerous ground. "
Probably the best testimonial to LaDuke and her critical thinking comes from Cornel Pewewardy, D.Ed. His heritage is Comanche and Kiowa, and he is a Director and Professor of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University.
The Militarization of Indian Country reflects a resurgence of the classic warrior perspective in the great spiritual traditions of Indigenous warriors. While "The Art of War" is unmatched in its Taoism principles... (this is) a book about Winona LaDuke's love for the Warriors of Peace -- Indigenous ways of understanding the roots of racism, violence, conflict, resolution and reconciliation.
At White Earth, LaDuke told us that while she was "humbled" by Pewewardy's tribute, her main reason for writing The Militarization of Indian Country was to repay a "debt" she felt she owed her father. Vincent Eugene LaDuke (Sun Bear) was a conscientious objector to serving in the Korean War. He spent 11 months in prison for his beliefs.
LaDuke credits Portland editor Sean Cruz with providing valuable research and editing skills.
For more information and to order advance copies of The Militarization of Indian Country, please contact Honor The Earth at info@honortehearth.org.
People in Newham, which is one of London’s most ethnically diverse boroughs, have for years been able to read newspapers in dozens of languages at the council’s libraries.
Yoani's blog,
