What’s New
We’re kicking off a new feature, EarlyWord Galley Chat. This is an opportunity for librarians to talk to each other about favorite galleys (we know you carried or shipped a boatload of them back from PLA).
To find out more, click here.
Our many links on the far right offer useful tools for selection and readers advisory librarians. Get a head start on the Fall season by checking out the new Publisher’s Catalogs, view trailers for Movies Based on Books and identify Movie Tie-ins. If you need a librarian-friendly contact at publishing houses, check our listings under Publisher Contacts.
For more on EarlyWord,
click here.
Nora Rawlinson
Co-Founder and Editor
Fred Ciporen
Co-Founder and Publisher
Chris Kahn
Ad Sales Director
Last night, Stephen Colbert grilled journalist Leslie Kean about her ten-year investigation into UFO’s. The book rose to #92 on Amazon sales rankings.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Leslie Kean | ||||
|
||||
…………………………….
 |
|
……………
On Wednesday, Colbert interviews author Heidi Cullen on climate change.
 |
|
Stephen Colbert continues his streak of interviewing authors. The Daily Show, unusually, has no authors on the schedule this week.
A journalist’s ten-year investigation into UFO’s.
|
|
——————————————–
|
|
A librarian’s Shout & Share pick at BEA, The Tenth Parallel was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, on the cover of the NYT Book Review and was reviewed in the Washington Post.
It rose to #56 on Amazon sales rankings.
The author will be interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air on Tuesday night.
 |
|
Blackstone Audio; UNABR
11 CDs; 1-4417-5360-1; $109
1 MP3CD; 1441753632; $29.95
10 Tapes; 1441753595; $79.95
Last night, Stephen Colbert used his stunned-conservative persona to good effect to discuss the issues raised by John Krakauer in his book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.
The trade paperback is out now. A documentary, The Tillman Story (not based on Krakauer’s book) releases on 8/20.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Jon Krakauer | ||||
|
||||
……………………..
 |
|
An ALA Shout and Share pick, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by well-regarded natural history writer John Vaillant looks at how Siberian tigers are faring amid climate change and a porous border with China. Publishers Weekly interviewed him, and praised the book as,
…a mighty elegy that leads readers into the lair of the tiger and into the heart of the Kremlin to explain how the Amur went from being worshipped to being poached.
Holds are edging up at libraries we checked.
The book is also in development for film by Random House Films, with a projected release date some time in 2011.
 |
|
Random House Audio; 9780307715074; $40.00
The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons by Richard Rhodes (Knopf) explores the role of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War and efforts to eradicate them. The LA Times reviews the final volume in the tetrology Rhodes calls The Making of the Nuclear Age, saying “some of this book’s most chilling passages . . . reflect the author’s acceptance of analysts’ opinions that nuclear terrorism may be much more technically feasible than generally admitted.”
Most books that receive media attention get it all at once, right around publication date; a few are discovered more slowly. This is true for Zoo Story, by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Thomas French. Spotted by Laura Miller in Salon last month, it was also a People Pick and gets two major pick ups this week. A review in today’s USA Today calls it,
…both top-notch reporting and page-turning storytelling…French’s narrative reads like a mystery novel. What will happen next? Will politics win out? Who will end up leading this zoo? What will happen to the chimps that escape?
The author appeared on the Colbert Report last night.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Thomas French | ||||
|
||||
……………………..
|
Tantor Audio; Read by John Allen Nelson; UNABR; On Sale Date: 07/31/2010
Trade 9781400118830 9 Audio CDs $34.99
Library 9781400148837 9 Audio CDs $83.99
MP3 9781400168835 1 MP3-CD $24.99
Yunte Huang’s examination of Charlie Chan, the Chinese detective that was featured in 40 movies beginning in 1934, has caught the attention of many reviewers. On NPR’s Fresh Air, critic Maureen Corrigan says Huang reveals that Chan was not always considered an outrageous stereotype. In his time, he was celebrated in China as the only positive portrayal of a Chinese character in American film.
The book is also featured in the current issue of Time magazine (Watching the Detective), was reviewed by Charles McGrath in the NY Times (Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero) and in today’s B&N Review (The Legacy of Charlie Chan).
|
On NPR’s Morning Edition today, the fascinating story of a man who lived in NYC in the 1880’s as a light-skinned African American, when he was actually white. As the story says, this was “highly unusual.”
Also highly unusual is NPR featuring a book that came out in hardcover over a year ago; the story is part of a special series Morning Edition is doing this week on how race is woven into American lives.
The book came out in trade paperback in January.
 |
|
OverDrive WMA and MP3 Audiobook
Tantor Audio
12 Audio CDs (Retail Unikeep Pkg); 9781400111510; $26.24
12 Audio CDs (Library Binder Pkg); 9781400141517; $52.49
2 Mp3-CDs (Retail SlimlineL Pkg); 9781400161515; $18.74
A sure sign that it’s back to school season; USA Today looks at four books that give “updated advice on navigating college.”
Writing about the book with the most up-to-date sounding title, The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up(Free Press), review editor Deirdre Donahue asks, “Are cellphones, Facebook and e-mail morphing into the campus equivalents of baby monitors? “
On the Today Show, Stephanie Dolgoff mourns former hotness, but tries to say the message of her book, My Formerly Hot Life, is to not fear aging. It rose to #80 on Amazon.
……………………..
 |
|
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Jennifer Arnold charmed viewers of Good Morning America when she showed off her training techniques with her dog, Butch. Arnold is against the idea that people need to be dominating “alphas” to their dogs; “they try so hard to please us that I find it very sad that we would ever use anything other than kindness to work with them.”
Her book, Through a Dog’s Eyes, rose to #165 on Amazon’s sales rankings, from #6,547.
……………………..
 |
|
OverDrive; WMA & MP3 Audiobook
Books On Tape; UNABR; 9780307737199; #30
We’re always happy to see a neighborhood joint do well, especially since our neighborhood is in Brooklyn, a borough sometimes overshadowed by that other one across the river.
So, imagine our delight when we heard Frankies Sputino, a restaurant a mere ten blocks from EarlyWord HQ, featured on NPR’s All Things Considered ? Like many of you, we first learned about the eatery from that font of all things worth knowing, Michael Rockliff, Workman’s head of library marketing (get a sample of his newsletter here).
As a result of the feature, the restaurant’s cookbook rose to #82 on Amazon sales rankings (from #2,453 yesterday).
 |
|
We’re not surprised when we see Gawker making fun of Rhonda Byrne’s book The Power, the followup to her super successful The Secret, releasing today, but USA Today? The newspaper’s book review editor Dierdre Donahue finds Byrne’s ideas pretty flimsy, and ends with this zinger, “With The Secret, Byrne made a fortune off the delusional bliss of magical thinking. Let’s not give her any more power.”
The Wall Street Journal, naturally, take a more businesslike approach to the whole thing, calling its publication a “bright spot” in a struggling business. Publisher Atria tells the WSJ that they have pre-orders for 924,000 copies, “the largest in its history.”
 |
|
S&S Audio; Read by: Rhonda Byrne; September 2010; ISBN-13: 9781442337961; $29.95
Jessica Stern is an expert on terror, not only because she’s studied it, but because she’s lived it. When she and her sister were children, a man broke into their home and raped both of them at gun point. She now teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard and has written two respected books on terrorism.
But her new book, Denial, is much more personal; in it, she explores how her own experience has affected her life. In the Washington Post, Marie Arana calls it an “incandescently honest book” and “a powerfully constructed memoir.”
 |
|
Adobe EPUB eBook from OverDrive
Both NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and Fresh Air featured The Murder Room, about Philadelphia’s Vidocq Society, which meets monthly to try to solve some of America’s cold cases.
 |
|
S&S Audio; Read by: Adam Grupper; 12 disks; 9780743532648; $39.99
See All Listings »