Two women’s memoirs are likely to get significant media attention next week.

Rosanne Cash’s Composed, about her music career and life as Johnny Cash’s daughter, is already getting admiring attention, though holds are modest on light ordering at libraries we checked.

The Los Angeles Times calls it “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read. Yes, Cash comes from a well-known family and makes her living in the entertainment business, but ‘Composed’ is really about her spiritual growth as a daughter, a sister, a mother, a lover, a wife and an artist.”

New York Magazine profiles Cash and O, the Oprah Magazine selects it as one of 10 Books to Pick Up in August 2010.

Composed: A Memoir Rosanne Cash Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2010-08-10) ISBN / EAN: 0670021962 / 9780670021963

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Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell is the Boston Globe book critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s account of her deep friendship with writer Caroline Knapp. Like Caldwell, Knapp was single by choice, dedicated to her writing and recovering from alcoholism, before she died of cancer in 2002.

Laura Miller in Salon calls it

…a slender and beautiful book… [Caldwell] never stoops to tear-jerking or sentiment. Which is not to say she won’t make you cry. It might be something as simple as her first-page description of love’s tempo that does it: “For years,” she writes, “we had played the easy daily game of catch that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and return.”

It was also a LA Times summer reading pick, and the #3 Indie Next pick for August .

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship Gail Caldwell Retail Price: $23.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Random House – (2010-08-10) ISBN / EAN: 1400067383 / 9781400067381

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

Hollywood: A Third Memoir by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster) is a new series of reminiscences from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and screenwriter. Booklist says the chapters are “disconnected,” and “his descriptions are not always charitable, but they are consistently sharp, interesting, and enjoyable.”

Where There Is Love, There Is God: A Path to Closer Union with God and Greater Love for Others by Mother Teresa (Doubleday) offers more wisdom from Mother Teresa culled from private lessons she gave to fellow nuns.

The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases by Michael Capuzzo (Gotham) is about the Vidocq Society, a real-life crime-solving group.  USA Today has a Q&A with the author. This one’s also an August Indie Next pick.

General Stanley McChrystal was ousted from his post by President Obama after making critical remarks about the administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan in a Rolling Stone interview.

Reactions from the news media showed they were caught off guard, shocked that Rolling Stone broke the story, as hilariously portrayed by Jon Stewart,

Now, there may be cause for even more professional jealousy; Little, Brown announced that it will publish a book about the war in Afghanistan by the author of the article, Michael Hastings. The book, as yet untitled, will “offer an unfiltered look at the war, and the soldiers, diplomats and politicians who are waging it,” according to the press release. No pub date has been announced. Hastings published a memoir in 2007, I Lost my Love in Baghdad.

The story was picked up by many news sources, including the AP.

On his radio show today, Glenn Beck was clear that he didn’t like the Washington Post’s review of his book. The reviewer, in his blog on the newspaper’s site, Political Bookworm, shoots back that Beck’s not clear about what’s actually in the review.

Two notable women’s memoirs go on sale next week – both with modest holds in libraries we checked, though that’s likely to change as the media weighs in.

Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home by Lisa Ling Morrow is a reporter’s account of her 2009 capture and five month imprisonment in North Korea, after filming a documentary about women who defected from North Korea to China and were later forced into arranged marriages or sex slavery.

In a starred review, Booklist calls the memoir ”a riveting story of captivity and the enduring faith, determination, and love of two sisters.”

The authors will be on Oprah on May 18th, and on the Today Show as well as CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 on May 19th. For more details, see EarlyWord’s Harper Buzz titlle page.

Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home Laura Ling, Lisa Ling Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-06-01) ISBN / EAN: 0062000675 / 9780062000675

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Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author’s third memoir of her escape from an arranged marriage in Somalia to Holland, and most recently of building a new life in America.

PW was not impressed:

…many personal stories are repeated from her earlier accounts… Her wholesale condemnation of an entire religion and the multiple cultures it has engendered is so sweeping and comprehensive, and her faith in Western values (particularly her romantic view of Christianity) is so wide-eyed, that the book ultimately reads like a callow exercise in expressing the author’s own sense of aggrievement.

Hirsi Ali recently contributed an op-ed to the Wall St. Journal about a fatwa against the creators of the comedy show South Park for their portrayal of the prophet Muhammad.

Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Ayaan Hirsi Ali Retail Price: $27.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2010-05-18) ISBN / EAN: 1439157316 / 9781439157312

Among the nonfiction titles going on sale next week, War by Sebastian Junger is poised to get the lion’s share of media attention. Holds are mounting at libraries we checked, undoubtedly helped by the advance publicity for this account of a platoon fighting in Afghanistan, which includes a New York Times op-ed by Junger and an excerpt from the book in Newsweek.

Junger will kick off his media tour with an interview on Good Morning America next Tuesday, May 11.

PW says that ”Junger mixes visceral combat scenes raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.”

Kirkus finds the book “often harrowing, though mostly conventional.”

WAR Sebastian Junger Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Twelve – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 0446556246 / 9780446556248

Large Print; Hachette; hardcover; ISBN 9780446566971; $28.99
Hachette Audio; UNABR CD; ISBN 9781607881988; $29.98
BBC Audio; UNABR; 9781607885344; 10 CD’s; $74.99
Adobe EPUB eBook and WMA Audiobook from OverDrive

Other Major Titles on Sale Next Week

Storm Warning: Whether Global Recession, Terrorist Threats, or Devastating Natural Disasters, These Ominous Shadows Must Bring Us Back to the Gospel by Billy Graham is the Christian evangelist’s latest examination of America’s problems. Though it’s the top pick on B&N.com’s “Coming Soon” list for next week, three out of four libraries we checked do not have it.

Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together by the Dalai Lama (Doubleday) advocates peaceful coexistence based on shared human experience. Not all libraries we checked had this one either.

The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is a behind-the-scenes look at the Hollywood studio formed in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Entertainment Weekly gives it a B-, saying that “LaPorte offers sharp critiques of business blunders made by DreamWorks’ founders… but with her blow-by-blow tale running well over 400 pages, it’s clear that she could learn a thing or two from the man about storytelling.”

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm (Penguin) gets a positive review from hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times: “Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, uses his gifts as a teacher to give the lay reader a succinct, lucid and compelling account of the causes and consequences of the great meltdown of 2008.”

Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball by Bill Madden (Harper) gets thumbs up from Kirkus: “Having covered the Yankees for 30 years, and with access to previously unavailable material, Madden provides a definitive and captivating biography of ‘The Boss.’ “

Former First Lady Laura Bush is making a bid for her memoir, Spoken from the Heart, to become a Mother’s Day gift of choice. Though the book goes on sale next week, scores of newspapers and national TV news shows have begun to cover it. Libraries we checked have mounting holds, and are catching up to the demand with more copies on order.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric sums up the revelations, starting with Bush’s account of how, at 17, she sailed through a stop sign and ran into another car, killing a close high school friend.

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praises Bush for capturing the her coming of age in Midland Texas in the 50s and 60s “with exacting emotional precision.” But Kakutani also calls the second part of the book “a thoroughly conventional autobiography by a politician’s wife… that sheds not the faintest new light on the presidency of the author’s husband, George W. Bush.”

The Washington Post parses Bush’s political statements in more detail.

Spoken from the Heart Laura Bush Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Scribner – (2010-05-04) ISBN / EAN: 1439155208 / 9781439155202

S&S Audio: ABR; 9781442305205; $29.99

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.

The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me Bruce Feiler Retail Price: $22.99 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-05-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061778761 / 9780061778766

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.”

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin Hampton Sides Retail Price: $28.95 Hardcover: 480 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2010-04-27) ISBN / EAN: 0385523920 / 9780385523929

Random House Audio; UNABR; 978-0-7393-5892-4; $45
OverDrive WMA Audiobook

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Other Major Titles on Sale Next Week

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.”

Terrorism expert Richard Clarke, warned NPR listeners about the threat of terrorist attacks via computers last night on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross (listen here).

As a result, the book rose to #63 on Amazon sales rankings. Several libraries we checked have not ordered it yet.

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2010-05-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061962236 / 9780061962233

Adobe EPUB eBook available from OverDrive.

Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers, made news on the HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, by declaring that John Paulson should be charged with fraud. Paulson is the hedge fund manager who designed the Goldman Sachs security that was “basically a mechanism of transferring money from you to John Paulson.”

He and his co-author James Kwak were also on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS Friday night, in an hour filled with outrage and incredulity (view it here). The authors told Moyers that the big banks have become more powerful since the bailout and are using their political muscle to change the rules to favor them, spending more than $1 million a day to fight financial reform.

The book is currently at #9 on Amazon sales rankings, making it the second nonfiction title on that list, after another book on risky securities, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short. Libraries we checked are showing heavy holds on both titles.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown Simon Johnson, James Kwak Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Pantheon – (2010-03-30) ISBN / EAN: 0307379051 / 9780307379054

Available as Adobe EPUB eBook from OverDrive.

On Tuesday night, Jon Stewart interviewed Mark Thiessen on Comedy Central’s Daily Show. Going in, you had to know, simply from the title of the book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, that the interview would be contentious.

The extended interview continues in two additional parts:

• Marc Thiessen Extended Interview Pt. 2
• Marc Thiessen Extended Interview Pt. 3

Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack Marc A. Thiessen Retail Price: $29.95 Hardcover: 376 pages Publisher: Regnery Press – (2010-01-18) ISBN / EAN: 1596986034 / 9781596986039

Releasing on Tuesday is Karl Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence. The book is embargoed, but news began breaking about it this week (see NYT story, “Ultimate Bush Insider Lifts Veil on Presidency“). It is currently at #52 on Amazon.

Since there were no prepub reviews, you may want to check your holdings. However, most of the libraries we checked own it, with fewer than 1 hold per copy ordered.

Courage and Consequence Karl Rove Retail Price: $30.00 Hardcover: 608 pages Publisher: Threshold Editions – (2010-03-09) ISBN / EAN: 1439191050 / 9781439191057

S&S Audio; ABRIDGED; 9781442334069; $29.99

A book by the son of one of the founders of Hamas is making headlines around the world. Published by the Christian press Tyndale House, the book is coming out next week in the U.S. Libraries have not ordered it.

Mosab Hassan Yousef claims in his memoir, Son of Hamas, that he was a top informant for Isreal, and helped prevent dozens of suicide bombings by providing classified information. The author was interviewed in Isreal’s newspaper, Haaretz, on Wednesday, but made no comment to other reporters.

The story is being covered in newspapers internationally, including the  Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Toronto Star as well as on TV (CNN and ABC News).

The book rose to #14 on Amazon’s U.S. sales rankings.

Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices Mosab Hassan Yousef Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Tyndale House – (2010-03-02) ISBN / EAN: 1414333072 / 9781414333076

Tyndale Audio; 3/2; 9781414333090; $29.99

Several new books about Barack Obama are in the works, in addition to the just-announced Bridge by New Yorker editor David Remnick (Knopf, 4/6/10) — see earlier post.

Coming a few days before Remnick’s bio, is a book by Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal magazine The American Prospect and author of Obama’s Challenge. Libraries we checked are not showing it on order.

A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future Robert Kuttner Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing – (2010-04-02) ISBN / EAN: 1603582703 / 9781603582704

Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter’s The Promise: President Obama, Year One will be published in May (most large libraries have it on order in small quantities). Alter also wrote The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, 2006, which got a boost in sales when Obama himself said he was reading it prior to taking office.

The Promise: President Obama, Year One Jonathan Alter Retail Price: $28.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-05-18) ISBN / EAN: 1439101191 / 9781439101193

S&S Audio; UNABR; 9781442334458; $39.99

According to USA Today, other books by presidential biographers are in the works. David Maraniss, whose account of the early Clinton years, First in his Class, is considered, “a standard text for the early life and political rise of the 42nd president” is at work on a “long-range project” about Obama.

And, Robert Draper, (Dead Certain: The Biography of  George W. Bush) is working on a book that considers Obama “in the context of the civil rights movement.”

Like his book needed more attention — Andrew Young, author of The Politican, at #2 on the 2/28 NYT best seller list after three weeks, is scheduled for a full hour on Oprah on Wednesday.

Oprah’s sympathetic interview with Elizabeth Edwards last summer helped make her book Resilience a best seller. It will be interesting to see how Oprah treats Young.

The Politician: An Insider’s Account of John Edwards’s Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down Andrew Young Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books – (2010-30-01) ISBN / EAN: 031264065X / 9780312640651

Unabridged audio now available from Tantor:

Trade: 9781400116508; 10 CD’s; $34.99
Library: 9781400146505; 10 CD’s; $69.99
MP3: 9781400166503; 1 MP3-CD; $24.99

The media appetite for political scandals, even ten-year-old ones, continues unabated.

Last night on NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Ken Gormley, whose book, The Death of American Virtue, recounts the Clinton impeachment (listen here). Gormley also appeared on the Today Show.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The book rose to #52 on Amazon, but library holds are light in most places.

It has also been reviewed widely in newspapers, including the following.

Wall Street Journal — a scrupulously even-handed and exhaustively reported book

New York Times — so exhaustive that some of it raises doubts about the value of Mr. Gormley’s exertions…. But by and large Mr. Gormley has packed his narrative with intense, overdue and definitive testimony about the still-surprising investigation of Mr. Clinton’s activities spearheaded by Kenneth W. Starr.

The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr Ken Gormley Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 800 pages Publisher: Crown – (2010-02-16) ISBN / EAN: 0307409449 / 9780307409447