When was the last time you heard the Boston Public Library’s “Statement of Purpose” quoted on TV?

For us, it was Monday night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (see below; if you want to skip ahead to the specific section, it’s 2:30 minutes into the piece).

Sadly, the Boston Public Library is currently facing budget cuts and may be forced to close ten branches.

“Ripped from the headlines” is a book publicist’s cliche, but Adam Haslett’s debut novel Union Atlantic goes one step further; it actually predicted the headlines.

On NPR’s Morning Edition today, Lynn Neary says the book,

…sometimes reads as if Haslett was listening into the private conversations that led to the economic collapse and the bank bailouts that followed.

Yet the remarkable fact is that Haslett finished the novel well before the real-life events took place. In the late ’90s, Haslett was reading about the Federal Reserve and some of the economic problems that were just beginning to stir.

Listen to her interview with Haslett here.

Also, on NPR’s All Things Considered Monday night, reviewer Alan Cheuse paired Union Atlantic with Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, as “Two Novels That Are On The Money,” calling them both “terrific reads.”

Union Atlantic Adam Haslett Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Nan A. Talese – (2010-02-09) ISBN / EAN: 0385524471 / 9780385524476

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The Privileges Jonathan Dee Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Random House – (2010-01-05) ISBN / EAN: 1400068673 / 9781400068678

e-book available on OverDrive.

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.”

Says Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air, “Chances are, you’ve never heard of William Stewart Halsted, but if you’ve ever had a surgical procedure of any kind, you could say he’s affected your life…no one did more to modernize medical surgery.”

He was also a cocaine and morphine addict.

Gerald Imber, who has written a book about Halsted, was interviewed on last night’s show (listen here. Warning: surgical procedures are described; don’t listen before lunch)

The book rose to #74 on Amazon. Library ordering is light.

Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted Gerald Imber Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 412 pages Publisher: Kaplan Publishing – (2010-02-02) ISBN / EAN: 1607146274 / 9781607146278

Knopf announced late yesterday that a new book about Barack Obama, written by New Yorker editor David Remnick and titled The Bridge, will be published on Apri 6th.

Remnick has already written about the president for the New Yorker including a long essay in Nov., 2008. According to Publishers Weekly the first printing will be 200,000 copies.

Remnick won a Pulitzer in 1994 for his book, Lenin’s Tomb.

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama David Remnick Retail Price: $29.95 Hardcover: 672 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-04-06) ISBN / EAN: 1400043603 / 9781400043606

Marilyn Johnson, author of This Books is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, appeared on the NPR program On the Media this weekend (listen here — warning; as you may guess from the title of the piece, Librarians Gone Wild, show producers couldn’t resist a few librarian stereotypes).

Johnson gave a pitch for the importance of libraries right now,

More & more people are not only using the library, they need the services of the librarian to help them weave their way around the bureaucracy …it’s a tragedy that the economic stimulus  package doesn’t put more money into libraries…librarians are really economical, they’re not expensive resources and they’re helping put this country back to work.

In addition, Salon interviewed Johnson yesterday (mentioning the “debaucherous goings-on at the American Library Association’s conference;” luckily, they’re referring to the book-cart drills).

More publicity is in the works:

NYT BR, 3/7 (plus, a possible review in the daily NYT)
USA Today interview

This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All Marilyn Johnson Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Harper – (2010-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061431605 / 9780061431609

Audio: Tantor; 2/22/10
Trade: 9781400116348; 7 CD’s; $34.99
Library: 9781400146345; 7 CD’s; $69.99
MP3: 9781400166343; 1 MP3-CD; $24.99

It’s impossible stay on top of all the books that are published, even just the popular ones; that’s why we’re always on the lookout for shortcuts. Newsweek and the Daily Beast both have columns that work as handy RA cheat sheets.

Newsweek gets right to the point with the title of their regular feature, “We Read it [So You Don’t Have To].” The editors recently decided to create a book club around it, complete with Twitter and Facebook pages as well as its own archive on the Newsweek site. Currently, it includes 7 nonfiction titles, ranging from the current crop of political scandal books (The Politician by Andrew Young, Staying True by Jenny Sanford and The Death of American Virtue by Ken Gormley) to the sleeper success, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Click on each title and you’ll get a brief annotation, “Buzz Rating” and a critique to make your own.

The Daily Beast has been running a weekly column with a similar thrust, “Do I Have to Read…?” The columnist, “William Boot,” promises,

This isn’t your typical book-review column. I’m reading the bestsellers: the Grishams, the Cornwells, the Higgins Clarks. Moreover, I’ll render the kind of blunt verdict you get when reading about toasters in Consumer Reports… If you want a different approach, try The New York Review of Books.

Who is William Boot? Hard to know, since Boot is a pseudonymn (presumably to avoid hate mail from outraged publishers, agents and authors — when Boot hates a book, he sounds like Virginia Kirkus having a bad day), taken from the protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop (the Daily Beast itself takes its name from the fictional newspaper in that book).

Scoop Evelyn Waugh Retail Price: $14.99 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Back Bay Books – (1999-09) ISBN / EAN: 0316926108 / 9780316926102

Boot considers only about 38 of James Patterson’s I, Alex Cross readable. On the other hand, of the 279 pages of Anne Tyler’s Noah’s Compass, he recommends 285 of them (he went back and reread a section which he enjoyed the second time around).

He may be more of a populist than the crowd at the New York Review of Books, but not by much.

This week, Boot steps outside his brief and covers a book that’s not a current bestseller, Dick Francis’ Comeback.

The full list of titles Boot has considered is available here.

In today’s New York Times, Janet Maslin gives this ringing endorsement to first novel Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,

…read just [the first] page, and you may find you’ve fallen head over heels for Ms. Simonson’s funny, barbed, delightfully winsome storytelling. Don’t say you weren’t warned … As with the polished work of Alexander McCall Smith, there is never a dull moment but never a discordant note either. Still, this book feels fresh despite its conventional blueprint. Its main characters are especially well drawn, and Ms. Simonson makes them as admirable as they are entertaining.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand Helen Simonson Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Random House – (2010-03-02) ISBN / EAN: 1400068932 / 9781400068937

Random House Audio; UNABR; 9780307712844; $40
Audio downloadable from OverDrive

Amy Greene’s debut novel, Bloodroot, was published in January to strong reviews.

An interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday is bringing it sales; it rose to #146 on Amazon. Libraries are showing heavy holds where ordering is light (one library has 152 holds on 9 copies).

As interviewer Jacki Lyden describes the book, it “tells the story of a family in Appalachia that’s been living under a curse for generations … Through [Greene’s] pages, the culture that comes to life is as haunted and as mesmerizing as a fairy tale or a dream; as evil and as vile as a curse and as beautiful as that ephemeral blood root flower.” The plant of the title has blood-red sap that can either cure or poison.

Listen to the interview here.

Bloodroot Amy Greene Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 0307269868 / 9780307269867

UNABR Simultaneous Audio: Random Audio; 9780307713230; $40
eBook and audio available from OverDrive

Why are vampires so popular right now and what does that say about our culture?

NPR’s Margot Adler set off to answer these questions. As research, she read 75 currently-popular vampire titles (full list, with annotations, on the NPR site, where you can also listen to the full story, which was on All Things Considered on Thursday, 2/18).

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

One of the books highlighted in the HarperCollins MidWinter Buzz Session, was a title that had just been added to the list, Somewhere Inside by Lisa and Laura Ling.

You probably remember the news stories about Laura Ling being arrested last year in North Korea, along with fellow journalist Euna Lee. The women were dramatically rescued after Bill Clinton interceded by negotiating on their behalf with North Korean President Kim Jong-Il. Laura’s sister Lisa is also a journalist and the two tell their stories, in alternating chapters, from Laura’s perspective inside the North Korean prison and Lisa’s in the U.S., as she desperately tries to help her sister.

Lisa is a special correspondent for the Oprah show; it’s just been confirmed that the book will be featured on the show in mid-May.

The essential question when deciding whether to buy more copies of a suddenly-successful book is, “How long will the interest last?”

In the case of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, all signs indicate that interest is not going to fade soon.

The book tells the sad and fascinating story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, some of her cancer cells were removed and are still living in medical laboratories where they have played a part in major medical breakthroughs, including the discovery of the polio vaccine. The fact that her descendents are unable to afford medical care is just one of the many moral issues that the book raises.

The book’s story as well as the story of the author who became obsessed with it, have generated a great deal of media coverage, as we noted earlier, but beyond that, the reviews indicate the book is as strong as the story it tells.

Entertainment Weekly‘s review editor, Tina Jordan, who has read a LOT of books, calls it  “The best book I’ve read in quite a while,” on the magazine’s blog Shelf Life. She even included this personal information in the review that appears in the magazine’s current issue,

Honestly, I shouldn’t even have been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I had the flu and was so feverish that sweat was dripping off my nose and spattering the pages. But I could not put the book down — or even stop for a glass of ice water. Lacks’ story was that compelling.

The many consumer reviews to date have been strong, with several attesting to the book’s readability.

San Francisco Chronicle, “[Lack’s descendent], Deborah at times seems as if she walked out of a novel’s pages. She is so vivid, so unforgettable, that it seems as if Skloot must have invented her. On the other hand, maybe no novelist, however skilled, could have imagined a character quite like Deborah.”

The New York Times, “…floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of Erin Brockovich, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain.

Boston Globe, “…a fascinating read and a ringing success. It is a well-written, carefully-researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America. Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go.”

It’s on the 2/28  NYT Nonfiction list for the second week, and is rising on the USA Today list; libraries are showing heavy holds.

We recommend buying more now; word of mouth could carry this into the summer.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Crown – (2010-02-02) ISBN / EAN: 1400052173 / 9781400052172

Random House Audio; UNABR; 9780307712509; $35
Audio and e-book available from OverDrive.

Tune in to NPR’s On the Media this weekend as Marilyn Johnson, author of This Book is Overdue, talks about why librarians are the heroes of the digital age (check for local listings here).

And, more publicity is in the works:

NYT BR, 3/7 (plus, a possible review in the daily NYT)
USA Today interview

This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All Marilyn Johnson Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Harper – (2010-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061431605 / 9780061431609

Audio: Tantor; 2/22/10
Trade: 9781400116348; 7 CD’s; $34.99
Library: 9781400146345; 7 CD’s; $69.99
MP3: 9781400166343; 1 MP3-CD; $24.99

World War II era debut novel The Postmistress has been racking up some strong reviews and comparisons to other blockbuster debuts, like The Help and Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.

The new issue of People (3/1/10) gives it 3 of 5 stars, saying “…it’s a slam-dunk for book groups and readers who savor shifting through what-ifs.” Why not four stars, then? The reviewer feels there are flaws; “Blake works hard to set up situations involving moral questions and the effort shows.”

What about our prediction that it will appear in the top five on the 2/28 NYT Hardcover Fiction list?

We were wrong, but not by much. Advance word says it lands at #8.

By comparison, The Help first landed on the 3/1/09 NYT list at #29. It was 20 weeks before it rose into the top ten, hitting #9 on the 7/19/10 list. It gradually climbed into the top five, hitting #1 last month.

The Postmistress Sarah Blake Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam – (2010-02-09) ISBN / EAN: 0399156194 / 9780399156199

Audio from Blackstone Audiobooks

• CD: $100; ISBN 9781441725714
• MP3 CD: $29.95; ISBN 9781441725745
• Cassette: $65.95; ISBN 9781441725707

Audio and e-book available from OverDrive