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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).
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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 | ||||
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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).
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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.
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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
Critics have gotten a look the first episodes of HBO’s new series, Boardwalk Empire, based on the book by Nelson Johnson about Atlantic City during Prohibition (and, appropriately, published by a New Jersey publisher, Plexus Publishing). The reaction, according to the Washington Post, is a “love fest.”
The series begins September 19, with a season of twelve episodes.
Based on this trailer, there may be a new catch phrase in the making.
Official Web site: HBO.com/Boardwalk-Empire
Based on: Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, Nelson Johnson
Tie-in:
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Does it have something to do with the new goatee that Jon Stewart is sporting? On the Daily Show this week, he featured two historians, sending both of their books up Amazon’s sales ranking.
Last night, it was Robert O’Connell on Hanniblal’s victory at the battle of Cannae. Sewart told him, “You bring this story to such great effective life. It’s really fascinating and, boy, is it sad to see all the paralells of modern warfare and society.”
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Robert O’Connell | ||||
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On Monday, Stewart told William Rosen, “You’ve written a barn burner about the steam engine; I didn’t think it could be done.”
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| William Rosen | ||||
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Reviewers are fascinated by a new book that reveals immigrant life through five families and what they ate in their Lower East Side, NYC tenement home, 97 Orchard St, now the Tenement Museum.
The Barnes and Noble Review is the latest, calling 97 Orchard by Jane Ziegelman, an “illuminating, rangy, and wonderfully atmospheric book.”
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OverDrive; Adobe EPUB eBook
Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl, part of her Tudor series, reviews G.W. Bernard’s Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions in the L.A. Times, saying it is a fresh look at Henry VIII’s most controversial wife,
This is a disturbing book for the reader of Tudor history, as it carefully analyzes and then demolishes many of the statements that we are accustomed to taking as facts about the life of Anne Boleyn. Indeed, any student of any history will feel the earth shake slightly as G.W. Bernard boldly states the open secret: that most of the written record is hopelessly biased, based on gossip and speculation, that witnesses lie and that historians seek their own version of events.
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Graham Robb was interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday about his book, Parisians, An Adventure History of Paris. Host Jacki Lyden says, “None of the book is fiction, but it reads like the most thrilling of novels.”
The book has enchanted several reviewers;
Huffington Post, Christopher Lydon: Graham Robb’s Paris: 18 Arrested Explosions
NYT Book Review, Parisians – An Adventure History of Paris – By …
New York Times, A Pointillist Tour, Revolution to Riots
It appeared on the extended NYT best seller list for two weeks and is still on IndieBound Hardcover Non-fiction list.
Several libraries show holds ratios of more than ten to one.
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Tantor Audio, UNABR; Simon Vance (Narrator)
11 Audio CDs (Retail Pkg); 9781400117109; $26.24
11 Audio CDs (Library Binder Pkg); 9781400147106; $52.49
2 Mp3-CDs (Retail Pkg); 9781400167104; $18.74
Rising on Amazon as a result of an interview (listen here) on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, is Empire of the Summer Moon, a book about the life of the last chief of the Comanches, Quanah. It also tells the fascinating story of Quanah’s mother, a white woman, who was captured by the Comanches and became famous for not wanting to return to her former life. The book is now at #10 on Amazon.
It was also recently reviewed in the NYT Book Review, along with Nathaniel Philbrick’s book about Custer and Sitting Bull, The Last Stand.
While Summer Moon currently outranks The Last Stand on Amazon, libraries are showing many more holds, and on more copies, of the Philbrick title.
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Tantor Audio; Read by David Drummond; Unabridged
Trade; 9781400116553; 12 CD’s; $39.99
Library; 9781400146550; 12 CD’s; $79.99
MP3; 9781400166558; 2 MP3-CD; $29.99
It’s no surprise that there’s plenty of media attention for Daniel Okrent’s history of prohibition and drinking in America, The Last Call (attention, Glenn Beck, the founding fathers may have been men of faith, but they were also generally three sheets to the wind). Okrent, who was the first public editor of the NYT, is well-connected in the media and his book Great Fortune about Rockefeller Center was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. By the way, he also invented Rotisserie League Baseball. And, who could resist a book about American’s fraught relationship with alcohol?
Time magazine, says that the book about much more than Prohibition,
If you’re looking for a lasting legacy of Prohibition, it’s the Washington lobbyists who use Wheeler’s tactics [Wheeler was the "mastermind who transformed the temperance movement into a political shock wave"] to bend government to their agendas.
It gets an A from Entertainment Weekly review editor Tina Jordan,
Okrent is a born storyteller. In his hands, the prodigiously researched narrative, rife with tales of corruption, adventure, and backstabbing, flies like fiction.
People gave the book its highest rating and Business Week calls it “one of the year’s best history books.” It was also featured on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Libraries we checked are showing heavy holds on light ordering.
Okrent himself describes the book in the following video.
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S&S Audio; 9780743599214, CD, $39.99
Today’s NY Times previews an NPR’s Radio Diaries documentary, Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair, airing tomorrow.
McGee, an African-American handyman, was accused of raping a white woman in Mississippi in 1945 and convicted by all-white juries in three separate trials. Despite protests from many well-known people, his appeal was finally rejected by the Supreme Court and he was executed. The execution was covered live on the radio.
The article also covers a new book The Eyes of Willie McGee, coming next week. The author, Alex Heard, first heard a tape of the radio coverage in college. He went on to become a reporter and a Civil Rights activist. Haunted for years by what he heard in the recording, he began looking into the story and discovered that it had never been covered in depth.
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Books on Tape; UNABR; 11 CD’s; 9780307737083; $45
OverDrive WMA Audiobook
There’s a common theme among big titles arriving next week; many are aimed at Father’s Day gift giving (don’t panic, fellow procrastinators, it’s not until June 20th).
Media is lined up for The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me by Bruce Feiler. It was already in USA Weekend, featuring interviews with the men Feiler chose to take on a parenting role to his two girls, in the event he succumbed to the cancer that was successfully removed from his body in 2008. Upcoming coverage includes a profile in People (May 10; on newsstands next week), an appearance on the Today Show and The Glenn Beck Show on Fox News.
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HarperAudio; UNABR; 9780061988493; $29.99
Adobe EPUB eBook from OverDrive.
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The leadup to Father’s Day is also considered good timing for history titles. Heading that group is Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by historian Hampton Sides. Libraries we checked have ordered solid quantities.
In Salon, critic Laura Miller praises the book as “a genuine corker”:
Sides’ meticulous yet driving account of James Earl Ray’s plot to murder King and the 68-day international manhunt that followed is in essence a true-crime story and a splendid specimen of the genre.
The Los Angeles Times adds that this “taut, vibrant account. . . shows the synchronicity of movements as King and his colleagues plot political strategy and follow his speaking itinerary, while Ray draws ever closer.”
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Random House Audio; UNABR; 978-0-7393-5892-4; $45
OverDrive WMA Audiobook
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The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson (Bloomsbury) is an anthology of previously published essays that, according to PW, are “well written, sometimes elegantly so, and closely reasoned. They address familiar material from original and stimulating perspectives. Hanson’s arguments may not convince everyone, but cannot be dismissed.”
Paradise General: Riding the Surge at a Combat Hospital in Iraq by Dave Hnida (Simon & Schuster) is a physician’s account of serving in Iraq that’s “realistic, gritty and full of black humor,” according to Kirkus, but “surrenders to mawkishness and, worst of all, bad puns, seemingly in an effort to be the Patch Adams of Baghdad.”
Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings (Random House) is “a joy to read,” says Library Journal. “Despite other works examining this subject, libraries and readers of many persuasions will want this massive and detailed examination of the prime minister and his personal war.”
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore (Random House) is the account of an investment banker, Rhodes scholar and former aide to Condoleezza Rice who investigates the life of another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, who was wanted for killing a cop. In a starred review, PW says:
“Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures… that propelled the other Wes to his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken.”
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
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