Fans of Pat Conroy have something to look forward to in 2009 – a new novel by the author of The Prince of Tides and Beach Music.
Set in Charleston, S.C. (as usual), South of Broad spans roughly 20 years following the lives of a group of high school friends from the Holy City. It features a fictional serial killer and the very real Hurricane Hugo, which caused devastating damage to the low-lying seaport and surrounding communities in 1989. (Your humble editor was a copy editor in Myrtle Beach at the time and remembers those events quite vividly.)
If Conroy is true to form, this book will feature lots of Charleston’s  charm and captivating descriptions of the South Carolina Lowcountry – it’s bound to be made into a movie and just as likely to touch off a substantial tourism boom in and around Charleston.

Blogger Sean Scapellato, a Charleston resident, writes: “The novel will be big, epic, like the others (final book weighs in somewhere around 600 pages). Stylistically, Pat remains acute in his sensitivity, sprawling in his images, and is still the overwriting show-off that I love him for–except even better. He continues to grow as a writer, a claim he’s shy about, but one I think is true.”

To see the blog, CLICK HERE.

Unless, like Scapellato, you’re privy to advance edits of the book, you’ll have to wait until August or September for South of Broad to hit bookstores.

The reverberations of the latest “memoir gone bad” scandal continue to echo as Lerner Publishing Group is recalling its September release of Angel Girl, the children’s book version of Herman Rosenblat’s unbelievable (literally, it turns out) tale of love in the midst and aftermath of war. Lerner officials said they were recalling the book and offering refunds for returned books.

Industry newsletter Publishers Lunch reports, “They say in a statement they were ’shocked and disappointed to learn that the widely publicized’ story was fabricated. Author Laurie Friedman, who had interviewed the Rosenblats to retell their story for children, says ‘throughout the development of this book, the Rosenblats reviewed my manuscript and assured me of the authenticity of the details of their story. Unfortunately, I, like many others, am disappointed and upset to now learn of Herman’s fabrications.’ ”

Already, Rosenblat’s memoir Angel at the Fence has been withdrawn after Holocaust experts and others familiar with the story questioned with increasing persistence the veracity of the story. Finally, Rosenblat has admitted that parts of the story were complete fabrications.

For more, CLICK HERE.

Or HERE.

There is a reason the story seemed too good to be true: Because it’s not – true, that is.

Herman Rosenblat’s much-anticipated, and more recently much-scrutinized, memoir of surviving the Holocaust and later meeting and marrying the girl who helped him survive isn’t entirely true. In fact, Rosenblat  confessed over the weekend to agent Andrea Hurst that he made up much of the romantic tale – although he has been independently verified as a Holocaust survivor.

Berkley Books, a Penguin imprint, has canceled the planned February publication of Angel at the Fence amid the ensuing furor.

See the AP report, CLICK HERE.
The New York Times continues to follow the saga. CLICK HERE.

New York Times writer David Streitfeld has discovered the enemy of book publishers and bookstores and – drumroll, please – it is us.

By now most folks paying attention know that 2008 was largely a dismal, dismal year for retailers everywhere, with one notable exception: Amazon.com.   While mom-and-pop stores and big-box behemoths such as WalMart (to hyphenate or not? ‘Tis the style question of ‘08) alike report disappointing sales, Amazon.com bragged about record sales numbers. And, as Streitfeld points out, Amazon has changed many readers’ buying habits: A clean, slightly used copy can be had for a fraction of the price of a new copy of a book. And it’s killing publishers of easy-money reprints and many booksellers.

Streitfeld expounds: “Don’t blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans. What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.
“In other words, it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if they’re lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.”

For more doom and gloom, CLICK HERE.

For news junkies who can’t get enough news about newsmakers and the newsmakers who make them, we give you The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff.
No stranger to the news himself, Wolff – a Vanity Fair columnist and co-founder of news aggregator Newser – “attacks his subject with casual delight,” in the words of New York Times writer David Carr.
Murdoch-haters will love it.
Wolff focuses on Murdoch’s recent pursuit and purchase of The Wall Street Journal, the prospect of which made much of the journalism and business world shudder.
“Murdoch would clearly like his legacy to be cleansed by his acquisition of The Journal. That story, told with a mixture of contempt and awe, is rendered through the prism of family fecklessness and brute business tactics. It makes Murdoch’s globe-trotting history of buying tabloids and collecting politicians with equal facility seem a little beside the point, which might have been the gesture to begin with.

“Characters in the Journal saga are quickly introduced and put in a riveting, ­present-tense motion. Richard Zannino, then the chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, decides to put a toe in the water next to Murdoch and soon finds himself soaked from head to foot. Andy Steginsky, a money manager and ‘a Rupert Murdoch groupie,’ is the Zelig-like figure putting an arm on the Bancrofts, who are played like patsies from the jump. ‘They seemed like fools even to themselves,’ Wolff writes.”

Even Carr finds himself being skewered: “A lot of people come off as fools and flunkies, including me: ‘New York Times media writer David Carr censoriously opined during the takeover that Murdoch “has demonstrated a habit over time of using his media properties to advance the business interests of his organization.” Then, with the takeover completed, Carr pronounced him one of the most admired figures of the new media class precisely because he integrated all his business interests.’ It’s much more complicated than that, but subtext is always missed when you’re the one being gored, no?”

To learn more, CLICK HERE.

Stop us if you’ve heard this story before: Boy meets girl. Girl bravely helps boy survive difficult time. Boy loses girl. Boy reunites with girl, writes amazing memoir. Critics attack memoir as fiction.

This time it’s the story of Herman Rosenblat, a Florida retiree who survived the Holocaust whose chance encounter at the fence of a concentration camp led to romance, marriage and “Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived,” due out in February from Penguin imprint Berkley Books.
Though his being a Holocaust survivor is not in serious doubt, his story of meeting an apple-tossing girl and later meeting and marrying that girl, Roma (Radzicki) –  a Jewish girl masquerading as a Christian who lived near the Buchenwald camp during the war – has its unbelievers.
The amazing story of the boy and girl, separated by a fence, then transfer to another concentration camp, then emigration to the United States only to reunite through a blind date, seems to stretch credulity, which makes the story all the more compelling. But did it actually happen?

Writes Gabriel Sherman in The New Republic: “An increasing number of prominent Holocaust scholars say no. Though archival records show that Herman was interned in concentration camps during the war, scholars who are investigating the story believe that the central premise of his narrative–that a girl met him at the fence and that very girl became his wife–is, at the very least, an embellishment, and at worst, a wholesale fabrication.”
The story has been public for at least a decade, having made The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Hallmark Channel, Lifetime Television and CBS News, among other outlets.
To read more, CLICK HERE.

Gabriel Sherman follows: CLICK HERE.

Only a few shopping hours left before Christmas and you still haven’t finished your shopping? Quick! To a bookstore! Here’s a guide that might take you safely off the path of the bestsellers list, courtesy of NPR.

In selection her nominations for best books of 2008, Maureen Corrigan writes, “You know you have a terrific book in your hands when you encounter language or elegantly presented research that startles you into fresh awareness; you know it when the atmosphere of a novel doesn’t leave you for days, or years. In the case of the books listed below, I know they’re among the ‘Best Books of 2008′ because I’d be happy to read all of them — again.”

Among her picks are Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. For more at NPR, CLICK HERE.

To listen, CLICK HERE.

With a shiny new Nobel Prize to bolster his credentials, New York Times columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman has updated his 1999 book “The Return of Depression Economics,” and this time he has a free-falling economy to back up his words.
But Krugman, a champion among Democratic-leaning politicos and a vocal critic of the Bush administration, doesn’t devote a great deal of his book to bashing Bushies.

Writes Boston Globe reviewer Ross Kerber:    “Instead, much of this updated book is a retread of his 1999 work “The Return of Depression Economics,” a review of the lessons learned from the surprise crises that struck developing economies in the 1990s. Krugman has updated many of these pages and added three new chapters and a conclusion. But all focus on a central theme: that in their policy responses, officials (including in Washington) often got through by getting lucky.”
Lest we think this is a mere reprint, the new volume is subtitled “And the Crisis of 2008.”
“Surprisingly it is the redone older chapters that seem freshest – perhaps because the recent rush of events make the new pages seem like today’s conventional wisdom.”
He takes to task former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, calling his work from 1987 to 2006 overrated, and the rise of the “shadow” banking system that largely existed outside of regulating institutions, which has been blamed for everything from the credit crunch crisis to plummeting childbirth rates and global warming (OK, last two are tongue-in-cheek, but you get the drift).

Kerber concludes: “What is to be done now? Krugman concludes by proposing heavy spending such as on public works projects to restimulate the economy, ideas already popular in Democratic circles and backed by the incoming Barack Obama administration. Krugman was tough on Obama during the Democratic primaries over his health-care policies. Now his test will be to hold the incoming administration to the same standards of economic clarity that he applied to Team Bush.”

To read the Boston Globe review, CLICK HERE.

By Diane Evans
So what’s it worth to you – in dollars and cents – to retire to a comfy chair with a book with pages you can turn?  We’re about to find out, as even some of the most commercially successful authors experiment with free digital downloads.
Just this week, the trade newsletter Publishers Lunch reported that Suze Orman’s upcoming book, 2009 Action Plan, will be launched with an appearance on Oprah, and a free download of the book for a week, from Jan. 9 to Jan. 15.  A Spanish version also will be available.
Paperback print editions go on sale Dec. 20 for a suggested retail price of $9.99.  According to publisher Spiegel & Grau, the book covers topics such as credit, real estate, investing for retirement, paying for college, spending, saving and protecting your family.  Orman’s Website, at www,suzeorman.com,will also feature updates on the new policies of the new Obama administration.
Last February, during an Oprah show, Orman offered free downloads of Women & Money, which at the time had been on the market nearly a year. In less than two days, there were more than a million downloads. And that was without so much economic trouble.
Spiegel & Grau, by the way, is part of Doubleday, which is being eliminated as a division of Random House Inc.
Another free promotion of a book on finances:  Robert Kiyosaki’s new title Conspiracy of the Rich: The New Rules of Money.  It will be available for free online, a chapter at a time, at some point this winter before a print edition later in the year.

Xxxxxx

As for slacking standards amid economic turmoil in the publishing industry:  This week, questions arose over representations in a new biography on media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, published by Doubleday.
Author Michael Wolff’s new book, titled The Man Who Owns the News, includes several jabs at Judith Regan, a controversial former editor at Murdoch-owned HarperCollins.  Regan was fired over plans to publish the original release of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.
There is a long-standing spat between Wolff and Regan, and their personal issues don’t matter to the reading public.  However, nonfiction is supposed to carry the stamp of reasonable reporting and editing.
Wolff’s book reports that a top Murdoch lawyer accused Regan of making anti-Semitic remarks.  Far less prominently, in an endnote, Wolff acknowledges that parent company News Corp. later apologized to Regan and accepted that she didn’t make the remarks.
In another reference, Wolff says that Roger Ailes, Fox News Channel president and Regan’s nemesis in the Murdoch empire, once went on a date that Ailes later described as “the scariest three hours of my life.”   Both Regan and Ailes told Newsday that they never dated, but once had dinner to discuss business.
According to Ailes: Wolff’s book is “laced with inaccuracies, and you can add this one to the list.”
In an interview with a blogger on the Web site of the New York Observer, Wolff questioned Regan for commenting publicly now and not earlier.
If Regan (or Ailes) is an easy target, it doesn’t matter. Regan didn’t owe Wolff an interview.  However, authors of nonfiction – and their publishers – do owe readers a reasonable effort to tell a true story.
What can we expect as more book editors get laid off?

By Diane Evans
Maybe you’re someone just too snobbish for nostalgia.  If so, don’t read on, because I’m not going to apologize for feeling regret over the news that Doubleday is being dismantled as a division of Random House Inc.
Doubleday is just one of the casualties in a publishing industry streaming with bad news. Writing in The Daily Beast blog, author and editor Tina Brown noted, “The carnage in media jobs accelerated last week with hundreds getting whacked at CBS, NBC, Time Inc. and my own esteemed publisher Doubleday.”  You could add to the list:  Simon & Schuster, Thomas Nelson Publishers and Scholastic.
No surprise, with the economy what it is, coupled with consolidation of various forms of media in a digital age.
Doubleday, in particular, represented the mystique and glory of big publishing houses in New York.  I envision these places much as the newsrooms of major dailies under titans such as John S. Knight:  The quality of the written word mattered.  And you better get it right.
Among its legends, Doubleday had Jacqueline Kennedy as an editor. And it still is a house of celebrity.  Current authors include Suzie Orman, John Grisham and Dan Brown.
Of course, whether it was Kennedy at the table with client Carly Simon, or a current editor trying to coax the next book out of Dan Brown, the business is about selling books and making money.
The difference, in an earlier time, is that publishing had the air of a regulated industry. Now it’s like a deregulated free-for-all, with everything from free downloadable books, free Kindle books, self-published books, books-on-demand and you name what else.
Consumers have more choices, but they’ve also got more sorting out to do on their own, with publishers in a diminished role as institutional filters.
Meanwhile, continued cost cutting comes with raised concerns about poor editing, and in some cases, fabrications in books sold as nonfiction.
And the future?  In the mix of continued shakeout and job loss, there still will be serious books and serious publishers.
One title currently in the works at Doubleday that will now transfer to one of the remaining Random House units:  The yet-untitled story of Jackie Kennedy’s 16 years at Doubleday.  It’s by historian William Kuhn and it is slated to come out in 2011.  In an announcement in September, Doubleday said that Kuhn would draw on “previously untapped archival material” and interviews with Kennedy’s authors, collaborators and friends from the 1980s and 1990s.
That hits on why Doubleday’s demise is a loss:  Because it was the kind of publisher that invested in books that required the digging up of new and valuable information. If the trade-off is that we have more choices now, then the question is:  Is more really more? Or is it less?

To read more, CLICK HERE or HERE.

The one man who threatened to sink President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign this fall is reissuing his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist.” Former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers had the misfortune of publishing his book days before the 9/11 attacks of 2001, effectively killing any chance he had, however slim, of attracting a sympathetic audience to his peace-through-violence campaign.
Now in the wake of the 2008 presidential campaign in which desperate McCain partisans pointed to a thin connection Obama had to Ayers in Obama’s nascent political days in Chicago, Ayers is retelling his story with a new afterword.
The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Newton doesn’t find much to write home about. “Overwrought and inane” summarize the critic’s description of Ayers’ writing. Not exactly the touchstone of history, at least in that critic’s eyes.
Ayers, now a “respected professor in Chicago” in Newton’s words, is careful not to alienate his colleagues by overglorifying his radical past: ” ‘Fugitive Days’ is all that one might expect from a now-settled radical interested in reliving his youth but worried about discrediting himself to his modern peers. It’s self-consciously cool — the free love, the clenched fists, the running through the streets, the overbearing self-seriousness — but purposefully guarded.”

To read the L.A. Times review, CLICK HERE.

Start with a simple “Hi.” Avoid high-maintenance girls. Comb your hair! These and other back-to-basics nuggets of wisdom come from the author of Soaring Hawk Elementary School’s book fair best-seller, Alec Greven.
Alec, a fourth-grader from Castle Rock, Colo., bases his advice on watching other boys and girls interact.
“Pretty girls are like cars that need a lot of oil,” Alec advises. “It is easy to spot pretty girls because they have big earrings, fancy dresses and all the jewelry,” he writes in Chapter Three of How to Talk to Girls, published by HarperCollins.
The author, who himself remains single, advises against dating until you get “kind of old,” say 15 or 16. Some parents would like to double that age.

View the video:

To see the Galley Cat item, CLICK HERE.

To see the New York Post story, CLICK HERE.