Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category

Cash and Caldwell Memoirs Rising

Friday, August 6th, 2010

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.

Drumbeat for Junger’s WAR

Friday, May 7th, 2010

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.’ “

Religious Illiteracy

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Rising on Amazon is a book that claims the popular view that all religions are one dangerously obscures the important differences between them. God is Not One is currently at #180, rising from #413 yesterday.

Few libraries have ordered the book. It received its first prepub review in the 4/15 issue of Booklist; “Provocative, thoughtful, fiercely intelligent and, for both believing and nonbelieving, formal and informal students of religion, a must-read.”

The author, Boston U. professor Stephen Prothero, is making use of social media to promote the book. He’s currently in the middle of a virtual book tour, with dozens of religion-focused blogs reviewing the book. On Twitter, he’s created “Religion 140,” a 140-character “mini-course” (perhaps that should be called a “micro-mini” course) on the great religions.

He’s also created a book trailer, which is refreshingly free of tricks,

Old-school media is involved, too, with essays by the author in the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe.

Prothero’s 2007 title, Religious Literacy made it on to the bottom rungs of the NYT Nonfiction list for 3 weeks and on the extended list for two more weeks.

Making Different Cases

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Two books released on the same day, make quite different cases; the atheist Richard Dawkins makes the case for evolution in The Greatest Show in Earth, while Karen Armstrong makes The Case for God.

Armstrong’s book was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered last night; Dawkins is scheduled for the Colbert Report tomorrow night.

Both are showing heavy holds (Dawkins is running ahead of Armstrong) on light ordering.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Richard Dawkins
Retail Price: $30.00
Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: Free Press – (2009-09-22)
ISBN / EAN: 1416594787 / 9781416594789

Unabridged Audio:
Simon & Schuster Audio; 9780743579278 $ 39.99; 9/1/09

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The Case for God
Karen Armstrong
Retail Price: $27.95
Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Knopf – (2009-09-22)
ISBN / EAN: 0307269183 / 9780307269188


Unbridged Audio:

  • Random House Audio; 9780307702371; $50.00; 9/1/09
  • Books on Tape; 9780307702395; $100; 9/22/09

Large Type:

Thorndike Press; 9781410421531; $ 32.95; 11/1/09

Downloadable audio and eBook from OverDrive

Our Lady of Guadalupe Makes Bestseller Appearance

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of Civilization of Love by Carl Anderson and Eduardo Chavez has remained in Amazon’s top 100 over the past week and now appears at #137 on the USA Today list.  The book traces the ways that the Catholic Virgin has been a catalyst for relgious and cultural transformation from the sixteenth century to the present. None of the libraries we checked had any copies.

The book’s rise is clearly tied to Anderson’s role as chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the Knights of Columbus – the world’s largest Catholic organization. Our Lady of Guadalupe was prominently featured at the first international Marian conference and the Guadalupe Festival - attended by thousands in early August in Phoenix, Arizona – both of which came on the heels of the 127th Annual Knights of Columbus convention.

Co-author Chavez is an expert on Guadalupe apparitions and the first Dean of the Catholic University Lumen Gentium of the Archdiocese of Mexico. He and Anderson created a video for the book, hosted on their website.

Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love
Carl Anderson, Eduardo Chavez
Retail Price: $22.99
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Doubleday Religion – (2009-08-04)
ISBN / EAN: 0385527721 / 9780385527729

Martin Luther King Jr. Back in Print

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

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:

  • Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story – The story of the 1955-56 bus boycott organized by King
  • Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? – King’s penultimate book, written in 1967, on combatting poverty and responding to the Black Power movement
  • Trumpet of Conscience: A collection of speeches King delivered in November and December 1967
  • Strength to Love: A collection of King’s sermons

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.

‘Love Dare’ Rising on Amazon

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Last week, in our roundup of titles new to the USA Today bestsellers list, we noted the following, at #94:

The Love DareStephen Kendrick, Alex Kendrick, B&H, pbk, $14.99; The companion volume to the Christian-themed film, Fireproof, which is a surprise box-office success. The star of the movie, Kirk Cameron, who played Mike Seaver on the TV series Growing Painsappeared on the Today Show recently, promoting both the book and the movie. Libraries have not ordered it.

The book is now at #9 on Amazon and the movie was #8 on Variety’s weekly box office rankings.

On Monday, the NYT ran a story on the movie’s success;

An almost all-volunteer cast and crew, including a star who was an ’80s teen heartthrob, and a plot about a firefighter who saves his marriage by turning to God — it hardly sounds like a recipe for box office success, let alone a best-selling book. But that’s what the film “Fireproof” has spawned.

In addition to The Love Dare, a paperback novelization of the film has been published by Thomas Nelson and an inspirational book by the film’s executive producer.

The Love Dare
Stephen Kendrick and Alex Kendrick

  • Paperback: $14; 224 pages
  • Publisher: B&H Books (September 28, 2008)
  • ISBN-10: 0805448853
  • ISBN-13: 978-0805448856

 

Fireproof 
Eric Wilson and Alex Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick
#181 on Amazon
  • Paperback: $14.99; 320 pages
  • Publisher: Thomas Nelson (September 2, 2008)
  • ISBN-10: 1595547169
  • ISBN-13: 978-1595547163
Fireproof Your Life 
Michael Catt
#1,563 on Amazon
Catt, senior pastor of the Sherwood Baptist Church, is executive producer of the movie. The publisher describes the book this way,
…eight ways we can prepare our lives from the trials that will inevitably come our way. Discussing practical issues such as temptation, marriage and finances, he reminds us that in an eroding culture we are called to stand firm in our faith.
  • Paperback: $12.99; 176 pages
  • Publisher: Christian Literature Crusade (August 15, 2008)
  • ISBN-10: 0875089844
  • ISBN-13: 978-0875089843

Self-pub to Bestseller

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

We wrote about The Shack three months ago when it first appeared at #147 on the USA Today bestseller list. Now that it’s risen to #8 (from #11 last week), USA Today also takes note of it, with an article in today’s book section. The book, published by two former pastors is described as being about “the father of a murdered child [who] encounters God the Father as a sarcastic black woman, Jesus as a Middle Eastern laborer and the Holy Spirit as an Asian girl.” Published a year ago, its sale grew because of attention from Christian radio, websites and blogs.

The book’s success will surely add fuel to self-publishers’ dreams. The author says that his original goal was just to get it “copied and bound at Kinko’s in time for Christmas as a gift to my kids.”

Most (but not all) libraries I checked have copies, a few still show on order status, with heavy holds to copy ratios.

The Shack

William P. Young

  • Hardcover:$24.95
  • Publisher: Windblown Media (December 6, 2007)
  • ISBN-10: 0964729245
  • ISBN-13: 978-0964729247
  • Paperback:$14.99
  • Publisher: Windblown Media; (May 1, 2007)
  • ISBN-10: 0964729237
  • ISBN-13: 978-0964729230