Book News

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.

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.

It had to happen sooner or later. Somebody went to the trouble to compile a reference book of sorts for smut. Filth. Dirt. Bawdiness. “Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex” might not be the complete and unabridged guide to smut, but takes its best shot at 94 sex-related terms, as Advertising Age’s Media Guy says, “in often unexpected ways. What’s genius about this book, edited by Ellen Sussman, is that it features some 100 writers (including Jonathan Ames, Phillip Lopate and Patricia Marx), so the definitions (from cyber sex to… way, way beyond) are often deeply, charmingly (and sometimes bizarrely) idiosyncratic and personal.”
Kind of like sex itself.
If you act quickly, the Media Guy is giving away one free copy to some lucky e-mailer on or about Aug. 28. For more details, CLICK HERE.

It seems that the Ayatollah Kohmeini wasn’t the only party writer Salmon Rushdie annoyed.

In his autobiography, “On Her Majesty’s Service,” former Special Branch detective Ron Evans wrote that the author of “The Satanic Verses” so infuriated his British protectors that they once locked him in a cupboard while they went out for a pint or two at a nearby pub. No wonder that comedian Dennis Miller once joked that Rushie was in a “rush to die.”

Rushdie, whose book was seen by some to blaspheme Islam, led the Iranian Ayatollah to issue a fatwah for Rushdie’s death in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He had a knack for annoying the people who were supposed to protect him.

Writes the Telegraph of London: “Evans paints an unflattering picture of Rushdie as tight-fisted, rude and arrogant, and claims the team of protection officers nicknamed him Scruffy because of his unkempt appearance.”

Nobody said protecting the First Amendment (which doesn’t apply in England anyway) was easy.
For more, CLICK HERE.

Randy Pausch, a well-regarded scientist who rocketed to even greater fame after the publication of “The Last Lecture,” has died.
The Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science in Pittsburgh died Friday, 10 months after he was told he had a few months to live. What started as an actual lecture after learning of his terminal condition, word of his inspiring words went viral and propelled Pausch to unexpected fame outside of academic circles. The book adaptation, “The Last Lecture,” was a New York Times No. 1 best-seller.

To learn more, CLICK HERE.