What’s New
While most people are still looking ahead to spring books, you can get an instant tan by looking at publishers’ summer catalogs -- links are to the right of this page, under “Publishers Catalogs.”
Now that ’09 is over, we’ve taken down our links to the various best books lists, but kept up the spreadsheets of the adult and children’s picks.
The Oscar season brings new attention to ’09 movies based on books; be sure to check out our links to the trailers and our list of new and upcoming moview with tie-ins.
For more on EarlyWord,
click here.
Nora Rawlinson
Co-Founder and Editor
Fred Ciporen
Co-Founder and Publisher
More national press is arriving for Letters to Jackie (see our earlier story).
The AP ran a story that was picked up by many news outlets today. Author Ellen Fitzpatrick and two of the letter writers in the book will appear on CBS Evening News tonight and the New York Times is running a story in the “National” section tomorrow. The book rose to #195 on Amazon today.
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ebook available from OverDrive.
A book described as “the first definitive history” of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal won’t be released until mid-February, but news sources are already leaking tidbits.
According to the New York Times, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Ken Gormley, a law professor at Duquesne University and author of Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation (1997), ”adds new details…Mr. Gormley secured unusual cooperation from nearly all of the main players, including Mr. Clinton, Mr. Starr and Ms. Lewinsky.”
The first news story about the book came from Politico, under the headline “Monica’s back – says Clinton lied.” It details the book’s revelations, including Gormley’s assertion that Clinton had an affair with Susan McDougal, who went to jail rather than testify against him about Whitewater.
The AP also reports on the story, saying they “obtained a copy” of the book. That probably wasn’t difficult, since the publisher sent out galleys; both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus reviewed it.
Kirkus warned that most American might find it too soon to revisit events from ten years ago, but “for those wishing to understand exactly what happened during this confusing, dismal time, Gormley’s informed reporting and evenhanded analysis is the place to start.”
Libraries we checked have not ordered copies yet.
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Before the Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall was published here, many felt that Americans would not be able to follow its story of Tudor palace intrigue.
A bit of help is on its way. Anne Weir’s forthcoming The Lady in the Tower serves as a “useful companion piece,” says Janet Maslin in the NYT, to Mantel’s “delectably arch portrait of Anne [Boleyn].”
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Audio; Recorded Books; Anticipated Release: Feb 13, 2010
Featured on NPR’s Fresh Air last night, a book about the Smother’s Brothers that is not owned by most of the libraries we checked, despite strong pre-pub reviews.
The book rose from #4,970 on Amazon to #134.
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On NYT reviewer Janet Maslin’s list of the top ten books of 2009 is The Imperial Cruise, a title about Theodore Roosevelt that PW called “stridently disapproving.” In her review, Maslin calls it an “incendiary new book” that “may at times be overly eager to connect historical dots, but … also produces graphic, shocking evidence of the attitudes that [it] describes.”
The incendiary part is borne out by USA Today’s review which takes issue with most of the book’s assertions.
Bradley, author of the bestselling Flags of Our Fathers, looked into what led the US to the war in the Pacific. His research brought him to Roosevelt and a secret treaty with Japan. The book, titled The Imperial Cruise is about a secret diplomatic mission that resulted in that agreement.
The book is rising on Amazon, now at #102. Libraries, however, are showing modest holds.
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Hachette Audio; 9781600243950; $39.98
Large Print; Little, Brown; 9780316024617; Hdbk; $31.99
Perfectly timed with the zeitgeist, Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression has been drawing prominent reviews. Intriguingly, the book argues that those culturally fertile times were stimulated by two conflicting desires: for the blunt truth about the country’s economic circumstances, and for the desire to escape from it. All libraries we checked own it in modest quantities (1 per each large branch), with holds of 13 or fewer.
In Maureen Corrigan’s interview with Dickstein on NPR’s Fresh Air, she describes Dickstein as ”not only one of America’s most perceptive literary critics, but also one of our best critical writers” and praises his “zesty voice” and “lightly worn erudition” that make the book “a thrill to read.”
Major critics like the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Yardley and the New York Times‘ Dwight Garner have also weighed in. Yardley takes Dickstein’s emphasis on Depression literature (in addition to film, music and other forms of entertainment) as an opportunity to reconsider the works of John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell, among others. And though Garner finds fault with Dickstein’s rambling, encyclopedic style, he also finds much to admire.
In the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel praises Dickstein for his ”true critical daring” in advancing the causes of artists “long since dismissed as ‘middlebrows’ by the cultural elite.”
And in the Boston Globe, Saul Austerlitz reflects on Dickstein’s description of the passivity of the American response to financial and political turmoil:
“Even when faced with unprecedented chaos, relatively few Americans took comfort in fascism and Communism. While Dickstein doesn’t come right out and say it, the conclusion after reading his book is a fairly obvious one: Americans couldn’t be mobilized for political rallies because they were all at their local movie theaters catching the latest Cary Grant comedy.”
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President Obama’s gotten caught reading by the press fairly consistently since May 2008 - though more often during the campaign than during the first six months of his presidency. Rather handily, the Daily Beast has recapped his reading picks, which shows “a predilection for presidential profiles, a weakness for explain-it-all bestsellers, and the occasional hankering for literary fiction.”
There are 12 entries so far – that’s a year’s supply of reading for enterprising book clubs!
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Also available from BBC audio:
Library editions:
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Also available from Recorded Books
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Available from Brilliance Audio
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Available from BBC Audiobooks America
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Available from Random House Audio
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Also available from BBC Audio:
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Available in large print paperback:
And from MacMillan Audio
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Available from Simon & Schuster Audio
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Available from Simon & Schuster Audio
In the 8/3 issue of Time magazine, Lev Grossman calls Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, the “most flat-out fascinating book so far this year” and,
You wouldn’t get that from its title, which sounds like a tender coming-of-age novel, nor from its subtitle —How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science — which sounds like a course you napped through in college. But Holmes’ account of experimental science at the end of the 1700s — when amateurs could still make major discoveries, when one new data point could overthrow a worldview — is beyond riveting. Science was like punk rock: if you had a basement, some free time and some hubris, you could do it.
Large libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering (27 on 2 copies in one instance).
It’s also been admiringly reviewed in the NY Times, the NYT Book Review, and the Wall Street Journal.
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When Calvin Trillin found out that his friend Fred Kaplan was writing a book about the year 1959, he asked why Kaplan was wasting his time on “the most boring year of the century.”
On the NewYorker.com, George Packer says Kaplan knew what he was doing;
You’d be amazed how much stuff was going on in the unpromising year 1959, and how it all comes under the heading of breaking the chains of the old and embracing the new.
1959 has captured others’ imaginations as well; it will be featured on the upcoming CBS Sunday Morning as well as in George Will’s syndicated Washington Post column the same day.
And, it doesn’t get better than this, Renee Zellweger was recently photographed carrying the book.
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Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman, a gripping history of the ordeal faced by American forces in battling for the Bataan peninsula in the Phillippines during WWII, rises to #8 on Amazon after a round of coverage from CNN.com and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. Four major library systems we checked showed up to 56 reserves on 12 or fewer copies.
CNN.com interviewed Ben Steele, 91, a former Montana cowboy who is featured heavily in the book, as one of the last survivors of the Bataan march. One of the 76,000 American POWs who were forced to march 60 miles in the tropical sun (more than 7,000 of whom died), Steele kept his sanity despite starvation conditions and bayonet wounds by sketching the scenes around him.
The Christian Science Monitor called the book “the definitive account of this exceptionally grim chapter of human history. Many books have examined World War II in the Philippines… but none of them pack the punch of or are as beautifully written as this compelling volume. This is “can’t-put-it-down” history.”
As we already mentioned, Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times first made us want to read the book and helped it land on the Times bestseller list.
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Also in audio from Tantor:
Narrator: Michael Prichard
Beacon Books has signed a deal with Dexter King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s son and chief executive officer of King, Inc., to release new editions of four King books in 2010, according to an AP story that appeared in USA Today:
Under the agreement, Beacon will also compile King’s writings, sermons, lectures and prayers into new editions with introductions by leading scholars.
So far, it’s unclear whether this deal will reignite the objections of siblings Bernice King and Martin Luther King III, who have not settled three lawsuits related to their brother Dexter’s management of the King estate, and the control of their mother Coretta Scott King’s personal items, which caused a $1.4 million book deal to fall through last year, according to a previous AP story.
Let’s start a new award, for “The Review That Most Makes You Want to Read the Book.” It’s surprising how few would qualify.
My nominee this week comes from the NYT BR, in a special category, “Most Made Me Want to Read a Book about a Subject I’m Not Drawn to,” for Dwight Garner’s review of Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman.
Library reserves are averaging 5 to 1 in six large systems we checked. It’s been moving up Amazon and is currently at #22, indicating it will appear on next week’s best seller lists.
What about you? Seen any reviews lately that made you say, “I’ve just gotta read that one”?
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Also in audio from Tantor:
Narrator: Michael Prichard
Already a New York Times bestseller, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan by Doug Stanton, has risen to #14 on Amazon following the author’s Memorial Day appearances on the Today Show, where Lester Holt called the book ”fascinating” and “important,” and on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. Libraries we checked are showing heavy reserves on light ordering.
It tells the story of a dozen of the elite U.S. Special Forces and CIA operatives who went to Afghanistan after 9/11, who were able to inspire Afghan forces to overthrow the Taliban, although it emerged again after the U.S. turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq. Kirkus found the events in the story ”irresistible,” though it took the author to task for “quoting inner monologues and inventing dialogue to dramatize events.” The New York Times Book Review was more charitable, characterizing Horse Soldiers as a story “for those who like their military history told through the eyes of heroic grunts, sergeants and captains. Think of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers or Stanton’s own best seller, In Harm’s Way, the story of the survivors of the cruiser Indianapolis, which sank in shark-infested waters during World War II.”
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Available from Simon & Schuster Audio (May, 2009)
On the Daily Beast, Daphne Merkin writes about the cleverly titled Masters of Sex, a biography of Masters and Johnson, the pioneers of sex research, Masters and Johnson, calling it
…a richly informed and elegantly organized account of the two people behind the logo that stood for new sexual horizons.
The review is as fascinating as the book sounds.
Several libraries have not yet ordered it.
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Obama continues to make bestsellers. In the latest incident, he did so simply by accepting a book as a gift.
As reported in the Guardian, during the Summit of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez presented Obama with a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, a book that “contends that Latin America has been abused as industrialised nations plundered its natural resources, ranging from gold and silver to cocoa and cotton” and a “classic work in left-wing circles.”
Not only did the English edition rise to #2 in the US Amazon sales rankings, the Spanish edition rose to #288.
Libraries are showing reserve lists.
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