As the National Book Critics Circle first reported on its blog Critical Mass, the Washington Post will drop its standalone book review section: “The last issue of Book World in print will be the February 15, 2009 issue. Thereafter, content will be split between the Outlook section and Style & Arts on Sundays. Daily book reviews in Style will continue.”
The Post cited lack of advertiser support and readership for the move.
While not the end of book coverage, the Post’s contraction signals no end to the shrinkage in newspapers and in book coverage that has convulsed both industries in the past decade and most acutely in the last three or four years.
Deputy Book Editor Rachel Shea assumes the reins from Marie Arana, who took a buyout, according to reports from the Post and Publishers Lunch.
Book World will remain remain an intact entity online. So if you must see it in all its ink-and-dead-tree glory, click and hit “control+p.”
Blame it on the publishers, if you will.
Says the New York Times: “As it happens, Book World never garnered much advertising from publishers, who generally spend very little on newspaper ads. Publishers now focus their marketing dollars on cooperative agreements with chain bookstores, which guarantee that certain books will receive prominent display at the front of stores.”
Meanwhile, a petition drive is on to save the section, says Critical Mass.
By Diane Evans It looks like the British-born author Neil Gaiman can thank the dead for giving him eternal life as an author.
The American Library Association just awarded its prestigious John Newbery Medal to Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. The annual award, named for an 18th century bookseller, recognizes an outstanding contribution to American literature for children.
The Graveyard Book is about a kid raised by ghosts. You can read an excerpt, along with an interview with Gaiman, at National Public Radio’s Web site at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95790778. Gaiman tells NPR he got the idea for the book two decades ago, when the only place he felt he could safely allow his young son to ride his tricycle was in a local churchyard. “I would sit there watching,’’ Gaiman recalls, “this incredibly happy kid in a graveyard.”
For the author, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book came to mind, about an orphan adopted by wild animals. Why not a kid adopted by dead people?
Gaiman tried writing the story several times over the years, only to give up, saying he didn’t think he was a good enough writer to develop the idea into a story. About four years ago, he decided to give it a try. So he developed the character of Nobody Owens, known to friends as Bod.
Bod had been orphaned at 2, the only one to escape the mysterious murder of his entire family. The inhabitants of a local graveyard take Bod in, to protect him and teach him the secrets of the dead.
Another Gaiman book, Coraline, opens in a film adaptation in February.
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For those of who like “best-of” lists, here are some of the finalists for awards that will be given by the New York-based National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit consisting of more than 900 active book reviewers:
Fiction
Roberto Bolano: 2666
Marilynne Robinson: Home
Aleksandar Hemon: The Lazarus Project
M. Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kittredge
Nonfiction
Dexter Filkins: The Forever War
Drew Gilpin Faust: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War
Jane Mayer: The Dark Side
Allan Lichtman: White Protestant Nation
George C. Herring: From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776
Biography
Paula J. Giddings: Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
Steve Coll: The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family In An American Century
Patrick French: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
Annette Gordon-Reed: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Brenda Wineapple: White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson
That must be what Congress is thinking as the prospect of yanking children’s books off shelves to prove they’re not toxic looms with coming enforcement of the Consumer Product Safety Act.
Banish Winnie the Pooh and Tigger too?
Opines the San Jose Mercury News: “As Tigger would say, that’s re-dikorus.
“The lawmakers thought they were voting to protect kids from exposure to lead and plastic. But they may have forced publishers, libraries and bookstores to conduct safety testing of all books to prove they aren’t toxic. Especially books with plastic or cloth covers geared to toddlers.”
The Merc suggests an exemption for libraries might be in order.
John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize winning author who chronicled the postwar life and times of Rabbit Angstrom in a series of novels, has died. NPR reported Tuesday that Updike had lung cancer.
Updike was regarded by many as a great teller of the American 20th century story, in part through the eyes of his basketball-playing, philandering, angst-ridden central character, Rabbit, from a young man still living in high school glory to unemployed typesetter to car dealership heir to retiree with a bad ticker who couldn’t resist one last game of hoops.
One of Updike’s endearing qualities was allowing his characters to age.
Updike’s Witches of Eastwick from 1984 became a hit movie, and he recently published a sequel, The Widows of Eastwick.
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, about a child raised by ghosts, has won the American Library Association’s Newbery Award. He tells NPR he got the idea for the book two decades ago, when the only place he felt he could safely allow his young son to ride his tricycle was in a local churchyard – a sort of Jungle Book with ghosts instead of bears and pumas.
The timing couldn’t be better for the author: Gaiman’s Coraline has been adapted to film, opening in February.
Edgar Allan Poe devotees celebrated the 200th anniversary of the godfather of goth’s birth last week.
The Bard of Baltimore died unhappily long ago, but modern-day fans of his dark work, including some pretty well-known writers, revel in his misery. The Mystery Writers of America published In the Shadows of the Master, a compilation of his works and essays by authors who were inspired by him.
Stephen King, Sue Grafton and Laura Lippman are among the contributors.
Lippman writes about solving a mystery herself: She watched over Poe’s grave in Baltimore and spotted the Poe Toaster – someone who annually leaves three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at his grave on his Jan. 19 birthday. (Poe, a notorious alcoholic and general malcontent, died at 40 in 1849.)
There was a time when “self-published” was another phrase for “unread.”
That time is passing, however, and Time magazine has taken notice. As with other forms of expression, novels are becoming increasingly democratic (with a lowercase “d”). Some writers have started small on their own and eventually found acceptance from big publishing houses. The rules of enlisting an agent an shopping your manuscript until you drop have changed.
Time’s By Lev Grossman writes: “Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It’s the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing’s remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn’t that freaky anymore.”
So too have the conventions of what makes a worthy book.
“…More books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.”
The Cleveland Public Library this week is introducing .epub, a new e-book format that allows users to read e-books on any computer or hand-held device. Free software, PC and Mac compatible, is downloadable at the Cleveland Public Library’s site, http://dlc.clevnet.org/0C705423-CB07-479B-84AF-702A5AA95826/10/241/en/Default.htm .
Overdrive, the Cleveland company that distributes .epub, says the format could replace PDFs as the industry standard format for e-books. The Cleveland Public Library circulated more than 100,000 e-books last year, WKSU 89.7 FM reports. Factor in the growing use of digital book readers such as Kindle, and those numbers are likely to keep growing.
And what are these trailblazers of the digital world reading? In Cleveland, romance novels are the e-books of choice.
By Diane Evans If I’m OK and you’re OK, then we should be able to play in the same sandbox even if I’m Sicilian American, you’re gay and the kid across the street is Southern Baptist. We might even learn from each other if we’re smart enough to look past our differences.
The paradox of the gay protesters who opposed Rick Warren delivering the inaugural invocation is that they, as gays, advocate inclusion. Inclusion is a two-way street. It means black and white. Liberal and conservative. Believer and nonbeliever.
As expected, Warren’s invocation reached for our common ground. Our commitment to freedom and justice. Our gratefulness to live in this country. And a common desire for wisdom, compassion and humility in our leaders.
Warren earned the invitation to be on stage, at that historic moment, because of how he inspired countless Americans with his words as an author. Time magazine missed the mark in saying that Warren encourages confusion about his agenda by trying to “be both the universally admired pastor who speaks to the nation and the influential leader who mobilizes religious conservatives.”
In what he says and writes, Warren owns up to his rigid conservative views. He became famous, instead, for his ability to transcend a narrow agenda. His book, A Purpose-Driven Life, inspired countless readers by holding out an ideal for greater meaning in our individual lives. He spoke to people of all different beliefs. Separate from the obvious spiritual message, Warren opened my eyes to why it’s important to really listen, respectfully, to people whose views may be disparaged by the “in” crowd of popular culture. My own views are far from the religious right. But Rick Warren, through his book, had a lot to say to me, Diane Evans, about why it’s so important to follow my soul and search out purpose in my own life. Many cultures and religions ascribe to the more universal parts of Warren’s message. The Italians say, Sta scritto nelle stelle: It is written in the stars.
Warren addresses the issue of how we discover what a greater power has written for our own lives.
As a nation, too, we can borrow from A Purpose-Driven Life. How can we focus our national resources for the greater good? What are the things that we, as Americans, should be doing in the world?
The inspiration of Barack Obama is that he walks the walk of inclusion. Look at his Cabinet choices. Or even his invitation to Rick Warren, who had taken Obama to task over abortion.
Religion has played a historical role in presidential inaugurations, going back to George Washington, who credited the birth of America to “providential agency.”
Now, an African American taking the presidential oath after an invocation by a Southern Baptist? That’s an America that makes me proud.
Diane Evans, founder and president of DelMio.com, was a longtime writer for the Akron Beacon Journal and Knight Ridder newspapers.
Related news: Warren receives “tepid” welcome at inauguration: CLICK HERE.
As Barack Obama is sworn in as president on Tuesday, the nation will be watching his every move. Booksellers will be especially interested in what appears on his bed stand in the White House.
Obama’s reading habits have caught the attention of the reading public. His admiration of Abraham Lincoln is well-known, especially since he was pictured with Team Of Rivals: the Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Among books Obama’s magic touch have affected are Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, and Hot Flat and Crowded by Tom Friedman. Obama is also a fan of Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow.
At the National Book Awards Eric Begosian declared: “I think it is … great news for everyone here tonight because our new president is, in the broadest sense of the word, a reader.”
Stayed tuned to see what the nation’s “first reader” opens next.
To see the NPR report, CLICK HERE.
To listen, CLICK HERE.
Of course, out commander in chief has written a couple of books of his own. DelMio.com explored his Audacity of Hope while he was still Candidate Obama. CLICK HERE for another look.
Mystery writer James Church returns to enigmatic North Korea in his latest book, Bamboo and Blood: An Inspector O Novel.
Interspersed with the tale of mystery and suspense is an informed exploration of North Korea, a deeply isolated and paranoid society that could be described as suffering from a national psychosis.
In her review, Donna Chavez writes in BookBrowse: “In the winter of 1997, trying to stay alive during a famine that has devastated much of North Korea, Inspector O is ordered to play host to an Israeli agent who appears in Pyongyang. When the wife of a North Korean diplomat in Pakistan dies under suspicious circumstances, O is told to investigate, with a curious proviso: Don’t look too closely at the details, and stay away from the question of missiles.”
BookBrowse thoughtfully provides a primer on the strange history of North Korea and its quirky totalitarian leaders, the late Kim Il-Sung and his officially “beloved” son, Kim Jong Il, who seems to continue to play nuclear cat-and-mouse with the United States as his communist kingdom starves.
The author is a bit of a mystery himself, apparently out of necessity. James Church (a pseudonym) reportedly is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia.
To read more, CLICK HERE.
In case a story based on decade-old news isn’t enough to hold your interest, those wacky North Koreans have decided to keep themselves in current events. They now claim to have enough weapons-grade plutonium to make four or five nukes. CLICK HERE.
Ever-busy John Grisham is back with what made him famous — legal thrillers. His latest, due out this month, might seem reminiscent to his breakout-novel-turned-movie, The Firm. In The Associate, bright and idealistic attorney Kyle McAvoy, fresh out of law school, lands a plum job at a plum firm only to find himself caught in a deadly web of intrigue and deceit.
Publisher DoubleDay has this to say: “With an unforgettable cast of characters and villains—from Baxter Tate, a drug-addled trust fund kid and possible rapist, to Dale, a pretty but seemingly quiet former math teacher who shares Kyle’s “cubicle” at the law firm, to two of the most powerful and fiercely competitive defense contractors in the country—and featuring all the twists and turns that have made John Grisham the most popular storyteller in the world, The Associate is vintage Grisham.”
If this all sounds familiar, rest assured it’s a new cast of characters and a different town, with all-new chase sequences (just a guess here).
HarperCollins is offering sneak peeks into upcoming titles for 2009, including morning TV show host Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.
HarperCollins is joining many publishers in finding ways to use Web media to sell books, either as electronic versions or those old-fashioned ink-and-dead-tree varieties.
Not exactly giving them away as Oprah Winfrey and Suze Orman are, but that’s no way to make money, is it?
They’re at it again. Oprah Winfrey and Suze Orman are collaborating on another free book download promotion, this time for Suze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan. It’s not like Orman or Oprah need the money, so have yourself a guilt-free download on Suze. This latest work is a survival guide of sorts in the wake of the financial crises that have erupted in the last couple of years
Just to make sure readers know Orman’s paying attention to the mayhem breaking out on the financial markets and in all likelihood in your life, an excerpt:
“Every U.S. taxpayer is now on the hook for a massive bailout—a bailout enginee red by the
same players in the federal government that had
turned their back on regulating the very practices
at the root of today’s fi nancial crisis. Angry? You
should be.
“But wait—it gets worse: Th e colossal miscalculations
on Wall Street have contributed to a massive
decline in the value of your 401(k) and IRA.
Years of diligent saving have been wiped out, and
you are afraid that your retirement accounts will
never fully recover.”
(Your humble editor just got his latest 401(k) statement, and it’s down more than 40 percent in the past year – ouch!)
To grab Oprah’s free download (only good until Jan. 15, 2009), CLICK HERE.
Otherwise, go to your friendly neighborhood bookstore to pay full price.
And to register for the live Webcast Thursday, CLICK HERE.
Dave Wilson, a former editor for Knight Ridder newspapers, is editorial director at DelMio.com.
The National Endowment for the Arts has a new take on reading in America with the release of its new report titled Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy.
In the preface, outgoing NEA Chairman Dana Gioia calls the findings a “turning point in recent American cultural history,’’ saying cultural decline is not inevitable and he could find no happier way to end his tenure at NEA. The report is so far afield from NEA’s gloomy Reading at Risk report five years ago, that even Gioia acknowledges that “one might ask if the new data are too good to be true.”
He says no, because the sample size of the study is roughly 20 times that of an average media poll. Plus, the NEA’s questionnaire has stayed consistent since the survey began 26 years ago.
If that’s the case, then what happened? In 2002, fewer than 47 percent of the American adults reported reading novels, short stories, poems and plays during the previous year. Now, in this survey, the percentage was over half.
Increases were reported across almost all groups measured: Whites, African Americans, Hispanics, men, women, young people, old people. In the most dramatic change, young adults, ages 18 to 24, went from reporting a 20 percent decline in reading in 2002 to a 21 percent increase in 20 08.
The report offers little by the way of explanation, other than to speculate on possibilities, such as heightened efforts by teachers and librarians, and the rise in community reading programs such the NEA’s Big Read.
In addition, there is also the not-so-inspiring news in the report that well over half of the American adults don’t read books unless they are required for work or school. That percentage increased in this latest survey.
Gioia is right that cultural decline is not inevitable. We’d be a hopeless culture if we thought so. Yet if there is a new chapter, it’s a first chapter that will need to be validated by future studies. Otherwise, this new report will be little more than a nice send-off for Gioia.
In his concluding remarks, Gioia warns we should not be complacent. He is right, because whatever gains we can claim now must be measured against years of studies showing declines relating to education and American competitiveness. Even now, as this glowing report comes out, other equally significant studies show cause for concern.
One recent report, from the Benton Foundation, found that only 7 percent of U.S. college students now major in math or science, and that if current trends continue, more than 90 percent of all scientists and engineers will call Asia “home” by 2010. That’s only next year.
I have two daughters who are young adult s, one 18 and the other 21. Both read quite a bit while they were home from college over the holidays. I loved seeing them both sacked out on the couch, one with Harry Potter in hand, and the other a Stephenie Meyer fantasy/mystery.
Great as a getaway from serious studies. But hardly enough alone.
Publisher Simon&Schuster has muted Simon Says in favor of the more straightforward Simonandschuster.com, a relatively clutter-free site for 2009 with smallish photos, simple icons and links to videos, interviews, book club resources and other features. With lots of titles and names, the home page is pretty author-centric, with bits of type meant to mimic tags.
We plan on stopping by and poking around a little more. Not an endorsement, per se, we’re just saying …
Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy is the just-released report by the National Endowment for the Arts, and it says that for the first time in 25 years, literary reading is up among American adults.
One the NEA’s flagship programs, the Big Read, is earning some credit for the success of the last few years. Other programs include Shakespeare in American Communities and Poetry Out Loud. All of these programs did not exist in 2002.
In his preface to the report, Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote: “Cultural decline is not inevitable. For those of us who have studied the impact of active and engaged literacy on the lives of individuals and communities, Reading on the Rise provides inspiring news. I can think of no happier way to end my tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts than by sharing such felicitous data and congratulating the legions of teachers,
librarians, writers, parents, public officials, and philanthropists who helped achieve the renascence. While we cannot be complacent, we can surely pause to celebrate our common success.”
While improvements have been tracked across most demographic groups, the report took the greatest gain to be among young adults. “The youngest group (ages 18-24) has undergone a
particularly inspiring transformation from a 20 percent decline in 2002 to a 21 percent increase
in 2008—a startling level of change.”
The report is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2008.
The New York Times reports: “Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.”
Some of us suspected all along. Children’s books are overflowing with left-wing idealism: sharing and caring, protecting the well-being of Chicken Littles everywhere. Even Dr. Suess’ The Lorax, an environmentalist manifesto, has fallen under suspicion. Professors Julia Mickenberg and Philip Nel have exposed this pattern in Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature.
Caleb Crain writes about this New York University Press publication in that bastion of liberalism, The New York Times. Lest we get ourselves in a lather over this commie threat in perfect binding (it could already be on your bookshelves!), Crain divides the works into three categories: Charming, Insufferable and Inappropriate.
The charming stuff you pat on the head and think, Well, isn’ that cute? The Insufferable will make you (or your kids/grandkids/wards of state) roll their eyes and the Inappropriate will probably leave some readers wondering, What was the editor thinking??
In other words, impressionable young minds will soon outgrow the message, for better or for worse.
To read the Sunday Times essay, CLICK HERE.
From NYT essay:
“Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel document in Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (New York University, $32.95), Marxist principles have been dripping steadily into the minds of American youth for more than a century. This isn’t altogether surprising. After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their early years — to share toys, to eschew the torture of siblings, to leave a clean environment behind them, to refrain from causing the extinction of the dog, to rise above coveting and hoarding, and to view the blandishments of corporate America through a lens of harsh skepticism. But fewer parents wish for their children to carry all these virtues into adulthood. It is one thing to convince your child that no individual owns the sandbox and that it is better for all children that it is so. It is another to hope that when he grows up he will donate the family home to a workers’ collective.”
Thirty years after the fact, Soviet tanks still litter the countryside in Afghanistan. Now, with U.S. troops battling resurgent enemies in Afghanistan and bordering Pakistan, NPR’s Gregory Feifer has written a new history of the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan, The Great Gamble.
It turns out that the “invasion” was the result of a series of bungled attempts to bolster the local Afghan communist government by, curiously enough, getting rid of the Afghan leader.
In the ensuing three decades, a local resistance became a player in the Cold War and gave rise to the Taliban, which aided and abetted al-Qaida in its terrorist attacks on the United States.
“The common view of the war was that it was a Soviet territorial grab. But the truth was much more confused,” Feifer tells NPR’s Renee Montagne.
Eight years after their own invasion in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. troops find themselves with a difficult challenge.
“We have to do, essentially, the opposite of what the Soviets did,” Feifer says. “We have to be incredibly sensitive to the needs of the local population. And our mission is to rebuild the society so that the government can be sustainable.”
HarperCollins imprint 4th Estate recently produced this slick stop-action video to celebrate its 25th anniversary, titled 25th Estate: This is Where We Live.
This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
Will it sell more books for 4th Estate/HarperCollins? Will it save the publishing industry? We don’t know. But the video is impressive.
Writes Apt Studio’s Peter Collingridge:
“We pitched a crazy, beautiful, and ambitious 3-minute animation to 4th Estate’s managing director, John Bond, and marketing director Ben Hurd. The animation would take place in a city made – literally – out of books, and we would pass through the city like a bird flying down the streets, witnessing scenes from these books taking place in lots of different districts over the course of an afternoon, evening and early morning.
“Each district would loosely represent part of their publishing programme – from ‘Museum District’ made up of non-fiction, to the ‘edgy fiction’ part of town (Soho and the red light district) to the European cafe district in the early morning referencing work in translation.”
It looks like the British-born author Neil Gaiman can thank the dead for giving him eternal life as an author.
Banish Winnie the Pooh and Tigger too?
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, about a child raised by ghosts, has won the American Library Association’s Newbery Award. He tells NPR he got the idea for the book two decades ago, when the only place he felt he could safely allow his young son to ride his tricycle was in a local churchyard – a sort of Jungle Book with ghosts instead of bears and pumas.
The Cleveland Public Library this week is introducing .epub, a new e-book format that allows users to read e-books on any computer or hand-held device. Free software, PC and Mac compatible, is 
Ever-busy John Grisham is back with what made him famous — legal thrillers. His latest, due out this month, might seem reminiscent to his breakout-novel-turned-movie, The Firm. In The Associate, bright and idealistic attorney Kyle McAvoy, fresh out of law school, lands a plum job at a plum firm only to find himself caught in a deadly web of intrigue and deceit.
Just to make sure readers know Orman’s paying attention to the mayhem breaking out on the financial markets and in all likelihood in your life, an excerpt:
In his preface to the report, Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote: “Cultural decline is not inevitable. For those of us who have studied the impact of active and engaged literacy on the lives of individuals and communities, Reading on the Rise provides inspiring news. I can think of no happier way to end my tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts than by sharing such felicitous data and congratulating the legions of teachers,
It turns out that the “invasion” was the result of a series of bungled attempts to bolster the local Afghan communist government by, curiously enough, getting rid of the Afghan leader.
