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.

After a spate of so-called memoirs being exposed as occasionally fictitious accounts of “truthiness,” New York Times columnist David Carr spent three years of verifying and fact-checking his recollection of his former life as a coke-dealing crack-house regular before his improbable rise as a, well, New York Times columnist, which is a pretty cherry gig, especially for a crackhead.

The result is “The Night of the Gun,” which sounds like a good title for a crazy incident based on hazy memory and conflicting accounts that finally wound up in a marginally literate police report. (We’ve read enough police reports to find this term — marginally literate police report — almost redundant.)
Carr’s account includes 60 interviews and the examination of hundreds of medical, legal and personal documents.

For those of us who have led secret lives while leading seemingly normal lives, this is probably a how-to guide of survival as a crack user and recovery guide.

A prominent media critic, Carr probably wanted to be sure his account was as bulletproof as a memoir can be by getting third-party corroboration of events as he remembers them. And, seriously, when you have a nose- or lung-full of cocaine, you need a little backup.
For more information, CLICK HERE.

Well, it might be unauthorized by one-half of the famous stoner comedy duo who rode their “ganja journalism” to fame and fortune in the 1970s and ’80s . The book, to be published Aug. 18, is likely to be chockfull of wild stories of the comedy team’s misadventures as comedy stars.

Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s brand of humor faded for a while after a bitter breakup in 1985, according to reports, but Marin has extended his career on film and television, and Chong found a gig as a stoned out (big stretch) Foto Hut owner on “That ’70s Show.”

Chong’s well-documented run-ins with the law, mostly over his unapologetic advocacy of marijuana, are featured in his bestseller, “I Chong,” and they don’t seem to have hurt his popularity among his fan base. Rumors of a reunion tour appear to have some legs. Meanwhile, Tommy Chong has some books to sell.

Advance information is sparse, but CLICK HERE for more info.

T is for Trespass is the title of Sue Taylor Grafton’s latest marvel of a mystery, but there are plenty of T words to describe the wildly popular novelist herself: tenacious, thorough and timeless are among them. Her literary role models include masters of the classic detective novel Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. And although her story lines prove topical and terrifying, Grafton herself is an amiable, albeit hardworking, wife, grandmother, fitness buff and cat lover. She maintains a home in her native Louisville, Ky., just about two hours from her sister, Ann, a retired librarian in Cincinnati.

Grafton and her husband of 20-plus years, Steven Humphrey, live part of the year in Southern California, where they met, but the author has made it clear she’s not a Hollywood kind of girl. She had enough of that in the 1970s and ’80s when she made her living writing screenplays for film and television. (Her television movie, Walking through Fire (1979), earned her a Christopher Award.)

To learn more about this book and author, CLICK HERE.

Citing it as too broad, a federal judge has thrown out an Indiana law that was about to take effect requiring bookstores and other retailers to register with the state and pay a $250 fee if they want to sell sexually explicit material. The Indianapolis Museum of Art was among the plaintiffs who sued to block enforcement of the law.
”A romance novel sold at a drugstore, a magazine offering sex advice in a grocery store checkout line, an R-rated DVD sold by a video rental shop, a collection of old Playboy magazines sold by a widow at a garage sale … would appear to necessitate registration under the statute,” wrote U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker wrote. Equally problematic is discerning exactly what constitutes “sexually explicit.”
The art museum’s CEO, Maxwell Anderson, called the ruling a victory for the First Amendment.

For more on the case, CLICK HERE.

Our newest book project is under construction as we speak. Take a sneak peek now and come back in a couple of days for a more finished product:

http://www.delmio.com/on-top-of-the-potty/

It features the work of Alan Katz and illustrator David Catrow in On Top of the Potty (And Other Get-Up-and-Go Songs) and reworked lyrics of classic children’s songs. Kids will love the potty humor, but parents, eh, not so much (some of it’s pretty gross). Writer Chuck Bowen is the producer of this mini exploration, sponsored by the Ohio Center for the Book, which has sponsored several other books and authors with Ohio connections.

Publisher Jonathan Karp uncorked a word that he once was told to never, ever — ever — invoke near an author: mulch. As in turning those unsold books into mulch, shredder fodder, to sleep with the leaves.

He now believes the term should be used, and implemented, often in this day of what he calls the “disposable book.” He’s writing about books that are put to press without the thorough research and editing that used to be the norm. Now, instead of two years or more between books, the norm for most active authors is a book a year, fiction or nonfiction, Karp laments.

And, he says, far too many books are published for the quick sale.
“I too have sinned. In weaker moments, I’ve been seduced by tales of celebrity, money, gossip and scandal. Among my crimes: I volunteered to edit a White House memoir by a self-serving egomaniac because I wanted to learn about presidential politics. (Hint: The author’s name was Dick Morris.) I worked on a book by Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega because we thought he might be able to provide an illuminating perspective on how the United States wields power in Latin America. And, in an effort to bolster the company’s bottom line, I acquired and edited an inspirational autobiography by the pop singer Clay Aiken, written and published in about four months. (For the record, Noriega was a lot more pleasant to deal with than Aiken.)”

To read the article, CLICK HERE.

Bookworms have a new weapon in their arsenal of ways to appear to be working when they’re actually reading their favorite authors.
Read at Work displays a Web browser window that is a dead ringer for a Windows launch page.

Hear the boss coming into your cubicle farm? No problem. You just carry on as if you’ve spent the entire morning working on that hopeless project they’ve dumped on you. No need to click to another page or, in a panic, shut off your screen and reboot the computer — a sure sign of guilt that even the most obtuse boss is likely to spot.
Books are organized in desktop folders that look like any other folder, only more literate.
It’s subversion in the name of literacy. The site, designed by Colenso BBDO, Auckland, is an effort by the New Zealand Book Council to get people to read.

To see for yourself, CLICK HERE.

http://www.readatwork.com/

Oprah Winfrey spoke at Stanford University’s commencement Sunday, advising nearly 4,700 graduates to trust their gut instincts. “Every wrong decision was the result of me not listening to my voice,” she said. “If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.”

Each graduate also received a copy of Book Club selection A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and another Winfrey favorite, A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

To read the story, CLICK HERE.

A survey made public at the Bookseller’s Reading the Future conference probably held few big surprises, noting that young adults age 18-24 don’t think books as we know them now have a big future. However, some liked the concept of e-readers. About half the young demographic believes bookstores will not exist as we know them now.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, those surveyed who were 65 or older prefer the “old” technology, with only 9 percent of them liking a downloadable books.
No doubt the industry is changing. Some elements will survive, others will not. Just as in nature, adapt or die.
At the conference The Book People CEO Seni Glaister was positive about the future of the book. “Content is king - always. As an industry I hope we don’t spend too much time worrying about technology and let’s protect our copyright, make sure downloads are available - but as content providers we shouldn’t worry too much about technology.”

To read more about the survey, CLICK HERE.