How does a Wisconsin vegetarian (talk about a rare species) wind up in New Orleans and discovers the joy of carnivorism? Ask Sara Roahen, author of Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table.

Adds Veryshortlist.com, “Her adventures in gastronomy are entertaining, instructive, often hilarious, and absolutely hunger-inducing — but also (this being New Orleans) heartbreaking.

“Three years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. Gumbo Tales is one fitting tribute to a great, peculiar city.”

For more, CLICK HERE.

To some observers, the merger was inevitable. Amazon.com has acquired the book lovers’ social network Shelfari.

Shelfari said in a message to its fans:

“It’s an exciting week here at Shelfari. You may have already heard, but we were acquired by Amazon yesterday. Yeah!

To some other observers, it’s not such a great fit. To read more, CLICK HERE.

Celebs keep writing, publishers keep paying

By Diane Evans

One of the books you’ll see all over the place this fall: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. With Bantam paying $7.2 million for North American rights to the title, expect big promotion – even though you may not see Buffett on a single talk show. He currently has no plans to be part of the promotion.
Which brings up a question: Would Buffett, at any point in his business life, pay that kind of money for rights to a celebrity book – knowing that 60 books already have been written on that same celebrity (in this case him) and about a dozen new ones are in the works.
I’d like to see that business plan. Especially given that it is common for celebrity books to lose money. For lovers of good reading, the real question is how many worthwhile manuscripts could have been discovered with $7.2 million. Perhaps a character as captivating as Harry Potter? Or a writer as reflective as Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love?
If publishing has lost glory, it’s because publishers go almost lock step on the road most traveled, which means playing off existing celebrities rather than creating new ones. They take the short cut, figuring, for example, that if you sell a million Buffett titles, you avoid the hard work of poring over heaven knows how many manuscripts in search of something great or at least inventive.
Is it any wonder that with the Harry Potter series completed, nothing has emerged of equal potential?
In The Snowball, the distinction is that Buffett pledged his cooperation to the first-time author, Alice Schroeder. He gave her access his files and correspondence. He also opened doors for her to interview people who could contribute insights. Schroeder and Buffett first met in the late 1990s when she worked as an analyst at Paine Webber covering Buffett’s Omaha-based conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
How well she analyzed Berkshire Hathaway is beside the point. In selling celebrity with a few new add-ons, she sized up the current book publishing industry right on.
The Snowball is due out Sept. 29.
Here’s another upcoming title, based on access to inside information: This one is Bob Woodward’s fourth book on Bush administration, titled The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. It is due out Sept. 8.
Publisher Simon & Shuster is keeping the book under tight embargo, although embargoes are often broken to generate buzz. “There has not been such an authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers,” Woodward’s longtime editor, Alice Mayhew, said in a statement. “This is the declassification of what went on in secret, behind the scenes.”
A celebrity journalist since his role in uncovering the Watergate scandal, Woodward also co-authored All the King’s Me” and The Final Days on the inner workings of Watergate and the Nixon administration.

Diane Evans is founder and president of DelMio.com and SuLit Communications LLC.

Research scientist and bona fide musician Daniel J. Levitin is out with a new book, “The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.” VeryShortList wonders out loud, “So ‘Baby Got Back’ is in the Love category? Comfort? Knowledge?”

Those would be three of the six categories. The others are Friendship (“Can’t We Still Be Friends”), Joy (um, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?) and Religion (“God Save the Queen”). But seriously, Levitin takes an earnest look at condensing the human experience with music into understandable stanzas, so to speak.
Reviewer Theodore Rushton writes at Amazon.com:

“Exquisitely written, it is really about ourselves because we are such a musical species. It makes me wonder: What if humans had never learned to talk, but merely communicate through music? It seems far more reasonable than merely talking without understanding — at which we’re all too expert.”

Getting back to the headline above: There have been some profoundly angry songs over the years: “Four Dead in Ohio” (About the 1970 Kent State shootings, which anger an entire generation to this day), “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (Massacre in Northern Ireland), “Horse to Water” (from REM’s most recent CD, “Accelerate”). Maybe the next edition will include a seventh category.

For more, CLICK HERE.

“Black & White and Dead All Over,” a murder mystery set in a modern newspaper newsroom, features plenty of gallows humor in ‘John Darnton’s new novel. USAToday says, “Drawing on his storied career at The New York Times, Darnton delivers a well-turned whodunit that reads like The Front Page with additional reporting by Evelyn Waugh and Agatha Christie.”
A colorful cast of characters populates the novel, including reporters and a certain New Zealand publisher whose name rings vaguely familiar: Lester Moloch (almost rhymes with Murdoch).

To read all about it, CLICK HERE.

Bob Woodward’s access to the inner workings of the Bush administration has yielded another book, “The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008.”

Publisher Simon & Shuster is keeping this one under tight wraps, due for a Sept. 8 release, although embargoes are often broken to generate buzz. The co-author of “All the King’s Men” and “The Final Days,” which introduced us to the inner workings of Watergate-scandal era Nixon and figures such as Deepthroat and G. Gordon Liddy (and later revealed the long-held secret identity of Deepthroat), Woodward has been a Washington icon for more than 35 years.

This is Woodward’s fourth investigative book on the Bush administration. The first, a fairly flattering book, “Bush at War” led to the far more critical “State of Denial in 2006.” If trends continue, “The War Within” is bound to turn ugly.

Read the AP article: CLICK HERE.

By Diane Evans
If you go to Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York, you learn pretty quickly that you need to show up early at the bookstore on the square if you want to be sure to get a New York Times before they’re sold out. It’s that kind of place during the summer season of programs. It’s where you might take a yoga class, go sailing, hear a lecture by someone famous from Harvard, and maybe go to church – all in the same day. And amid all this, the bookstore buzzes all day.
So, since Chautauquans view themselves as a literary bunch, you might be interested in what they’re reading. Here are a few of the titles that have been on the central display table this summer:

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert:
Some people hibernate when dealing with the emotional trauma of a difficult divorce. But not Gilbert, who self-prescribed a year of exotic travel and convinced a publishing house to pay for it with a book advance. The result is her adventure story, of self-discovery in Rome (the eating leg of the trip), of an ashram in India (the praying portion) and love (in Bali, where she reconnected with joy).

Marley & Me, by John Grogan:

This is Grogan’s love letter to his incorrigible Labrador retriever, Marley.
In telling of his own experience with the ill-mannered, psychologically challenged Marley, Grogan examines the mysterious bond between dogs and their owners. And through stories about his needy pet, Grogan also shares observations of life, marriage and fatherhood.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini:
In his first novel, The Kite Runner, and then in A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini writes about the Afghans caught in the middle of a seemingly endless string of wars and battles for power. Both novels paint a grim and moving picture of life in a war-torn country, and of lives lived in the face of hunger, death and a bleak future. Hosseini makes you realize that, even while bombs rain down and people are dying of hunger, people still fall in love, seek friends and, mostly, try to remain human.

The Dangerous Book For Boys, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden:
The Dangerous Book for Boys is not just about growing up, nor is it geared only for boys. It’s about the lessons from boyhood that come in handy later on. It’s part Boy Scout manual, part history lesson, part old-fashioned schoolbook. Some of this stuff might leave you scratching your head over its selections, such as must-read books for boys, or the five knots that every boy should know. Some stuff, such as how to build a bow and arrows, will probably appall many of today’s superprotective “helicopter” parents. But then that’s the point of the book: It’s OK to put a little danger in your life.

Same Taylor’s The Amnesiac is grabbing people’s attention.

Writes Very Short List: “The book opens in Amsterdam, where Briton James Purdew has been holed up in his apartment with his girlfriend, Ingrid, after a leg injury. As their relationship deteriorates, James hears about an ex-girlfriend in passing, yet he has no recollection of this woman. So begins a journey back to England, where he tries to piece together a large swath of his life that has simply vanished from memory. Taylor uses myriad tricks — multiple narrators, tenses switching from past to present, details disgorged in reverse chronological order — but they never seem at odds with the fascinating subject and complex characters.”

Amazon reviews are fairly glowing. To see more, CLICK HERE.

In “The Gridlock Economy,” Michael Heller says that having too many owners holding a piece of the economic pie causes the whole system to shut down, hurting everybody involved.

He gives the example of an entity trying to obtain several parcels of property by eminent domain, only to be stymied by one owner who holds out, either out of a desire to keep the property or to extract a higher price. The project never gets completed in some cases, or spends years in court.

The basic thrust of his book is that, in many cases, a monopoly is more efficient than competing mini-monopolies constantly undermining one another and by extension hurting the consumer. A monopoly assures its future health by making sure its consumers remain healthy enough to continue buying its products or services.

To read a more extensive review of “The Gridlock Economy,” CLICK HERE.

Thought we’d get rid of Harry Potter just because J K Rowling said so? Guess again.

To raise funds for the Children’s High Level Group, a charitable group to help children in institutions, Rowling is publishing “The Tales of Beedle the Bard: A Wizarding Classic from the World of Harry Potter” in December.

Net proceeds, expected to be near $8 million, go the the charity.

For more information, CLICK HERE.

The AMC cable series “Mad Men” might have limited exposure, but its influence in pop culture runs deep. The cigarette-smoking, martini-swilling culture and its clothing fashions of the’60s (no, not that hippie stuff) has touched off a wave of nostalgia (and a little hostility in some corners) for all things 1960s. Even a book of poetry has gotten an unexpected boost from the show. Says Advertising Age:

“(Fashion designer )Michael Kors isn’t the only one getting inspired by ‘Mad Men.’ Don Draper is also responsible for sparking a revival in sales of Frank O’Hara’s poetry. After a few moments of exposure on a recent episode, sales of ‘Meditations in an Emergency,’ a book of poems published in 1957, skyrocketed, perhaps proving that for budget-starved book publishers, one smart brand integration can make all the difference.

“Eric Price, associate publisher at Grove Press, would not reveal exact numbers but said that sales for the O’Hara book increased more than 218% compared with this time last year. Those are remarkable numbers for any book — and unheard of for a collection of poems by an author who died more than 40 years ago.”

For more, CLICK HERE, scroll down to the second article.