Where we talk about books — and not just best sellers.
May 08, 2008
She's with the band
The very first entry on this blog featured a book titled American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland (Gotham Books, $26) — a book that appealed to the former Midwestern band geek in me.
Good news! The book's author, Kristen Laine, recently was awarded the L.L. Winship/PEN New England award for nonfiction. The award is given annually to books written by New England authors and/or books on New England topics. While the book is all about Midwestern teenagers, Laine lives in New Hampshire, which allowed her to qualify for the prize. (For a list of all the winners, check out the PEN New England Web site).
Author Kristen Laine
Last year's Winship winner in the nonfiction category was Sebastian Junger for A Death in Belmont.
To learn more about American Band and read more reviews, visit Laine's Web site. The paperback comes out in September.
NEW YORK (AP) — Prince the musical auteur is becoming an author.
21 Nights, a ‘‘photographic essay’’ that offers ‘‘a rare glimpse into the life, lyrics, and mystique’’ of the maker of such hits as ‘‘1999’’ and ‘‘Purple Rain,’’ will be published worldwide come fall, according to Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
The book, his first, is based on Prince’s 21 sold-out concerts in as many nights at London’s O2 Arena in 2007.
‘‘Juxtaposing his dueling worlds of music and solitude, [the book] will incorporate Prince’s evocative poetry and lyrics to new songs and other selections, and 124 full-color, sumptuous, never-before-published images by celebrated photographer Randee St. Nicholas,’’ Atria announced Monday.
21 Nights will include a CD of after-hours jams, ‘‘Indigo Nights,’’ unavailable from any other outlet.
The folks that brought you Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room are now giving similar treatment to the Eliot Spitzer scandal.
Peter Elkind, a senior writer for Fortune magazine, and filmmaker Alex Gibney are collaborating on the book version, to be published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), plus a documentary about the former New York governor who resigned over allegations about his connection to a $5,500-an-hour call girl ring.
‘‘This is not a quickie book," Portfolio publisher and President Adrian Zackheim told The Associated Press. "[Elkind] is going to do what he does best: Come back with a very, very satisfying, in-depth and complicated story.’’
No release date has been set.
Meanwhile, former Major Leaguer Darryl Strawberry (with help from author John Strausbaugh) is writing a memoir, to be published in 2009 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.
According to the publisher, the book, titled Straw, ‘‘details his life growing up in Crenshaw, Los Angeles, his rise to baseball superstardom as a Met, Dodger, and Yankee, the high life and low life, his brushes with the law, his triumphant battle over cancer, his religious awakening, and his marriage to the love of his life.’’
The Poetry Center of Chicago announces the winners of the 14th Annual Poetry Center of Chicago Juried Reading at a ceremony here in town last weekend. Poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller was the judge. Winners include:
First place: Sara Parrell of Madison, Wis.
Second Place: Stacey Lynn Brown, Edwardsville, Ill.
Third Place: Susan Elbe, Madison, Wis.
Other finalists, chosen from a field of more than 250 submissions, were: T. Zachary Cotler, Iowa City, Iowa; Brett Foster, Wheaton, Ill.; Elizabeth Hoover, Bloomington, Ind.; Jennifer Perrine, Des Moines, Iowa, and Amanda Rachelle Warren, Kalamazoo, Mich.
It was 1961, and Allen Ginsberg was in search of life’s meaning.
His quest would lead him to the gurus and ashrams of India, to its streets and heady opium dens. It is a journey that Deborah Baker tells through journals, letters, memoirs and other documents collected for A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (Penguin, 243 pages, $25.95).
Ginsberg’s friends in New York insist that he travel to the East and explore the subcontinent with them, but he does not need much encouragement. Ginsberg had already heard the ancient voice of William Blake reciting poetry inside his Harlem apartment. He had looked outside the window and noticed how everything was created by a ‘‘living hand,’’ how the sky itself was ‘‘the living blue hand.’’
‘‘From that moment, Irwin Allen Ginsberg became a divining rod in the headlong and holy pursuit of God,’’ Baker writes.
Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee often seemed to be odd man out in Washington.
He was one of the Senate’s most liberal Republicans, bucking his party on big issues such as Iraq, tax cuts, abortion and the environment. His reserved, sometimes quirky personality was never a smooth fit in the clubby Senate, where friendships can mean more than political ties in making things happen.
In his new political memoir, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President (St. Martin’s Press, 245 pages. $24.95), Chafee revels in his outsider status as he chronicles his disillusionment with the bitter partisanship that dominated his seven years in the Senate. He wields a broad brush, heaping blame on Republicans and Democrats alike for putting party loyalty and ambition ahead of the public good.
On the eve of Cynthia Ozick’s 80th birthday on April 17, four of her pessimistic but entertaining stories have been brought together under the title Dictation (Houghton Mifflin Company, 179 pages, $24).
It could have been Deception.
Ozick doesn’t write action packed page-turners and she allows herself more than an occasional literary or historical reference. But something is always going on — the book is hard to put down, even if you need to make sure the roast isn’t burning.
The title story fantasizes about two typists supposedly hired by two giants of 20th-century fiction: Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Miss Lilian Hallowes and Miss Theodora Bosanquet achieve what seems to them a bit of literary immortality. They successfully conspire to insert a few lines from a novel being written by one writer into the work of the other.
Contrary to the book jacket might make you think, this books is not about cows that go "moo." Here's a review:
By DINESH RAMDE
It’s easy to understand why business self-help books tend to sound the same.
After all, people won’t buy a book that tells them to keep doing the same things they’ve always done. So authors instead urge change, using variations of the same cliche: adjust your paradigm, think outside the box, cross the chasm, figure out who moved your cheese.
Then how do authors sell a new book that makes many of the same points executives have heard before? This comedic trio relies on a new paradigm of their own: irreverent humor in place of the stodgy business-speak more common to the genre.
David Bernstein, Beau Fraser and Bill Schwab, executives at advertising agency The Gate Worldwide, are co-authors of Death to All Sacred Cows (Hyperion Books, 224 pages. $21.95). This short book is amusing and easily digestible, although an impatient executive may tire of wading through irreverence to get to the main point.
In his latest police procedural, Joseph Wambaugh introduces a large assortment of quirky cops, each made readily recognizable by his own ‘‘handle.’’
For a start, there’s Doomsday Dan Applewhite, who lives ‘‘in constant anticipation of calamity.’’ There’s Compassionate Charlie Gifford, who finds street brutality amusing. There’s Nathan Hollywood Weiss, who is trying to break into the movies. And two surfer-dude cops, Flotsam and Jetsam, who’d really rather be at the beach.
Most of them are assigned to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Relations Office. Hence the title, Hollywood Crows (Little, Brown, 343 pages, $26.99). Dismissed by other officers as ‘‘the sissy beat’’ or ‘‘teddy bears in blue,’’ the Crows spend most of their time dealing with ‘‘quality of life complaints’’ such as loud music, barking dogs and illegal parking.
But as they complain about their paperwork, hit on one another and mosey from one seemingly unrelated complaint to the next, they manage to bump into a number of real crimes including robbery and murder.
Nearly always, these crimes provoke attempts at cop humor that vary between distasteful and offensive.
‘‘No such thing as rape in Hollywood,’’ one observes. ‘‘Just a lot of business disputes.’’
About midway through the book, it dawns on the reader that a few of the incidents in this episodic book relate to one another in a way that vaguely resembles a plot.
Ali Aziz and his hot wife Margot, owners of an upscale strip club called the Leopard Lounge, are in the middle of an ugly divorce. They are fighting over money. They are fighting over custody of their son, Nicky. Independently, each decides it would be nifty if the other were dead.
On their routine patrols, members of the Crows keep stumbling over bits and pieces of the murder plots. But will they put it together before it’s too late?
Wambaugh knows this turf; he was a Los Angels cop for nearly 20 years. During that time, he wrote some of his best novels, including The New Centurions, and his nonfiction best seller, The Onion Field.
After 13 years without a new book, he returned in 2006 with the stylish police procedural ‘‘Hollywood Station.’’
Hollywood Crows has its moments, but suffers by comparison.
Jeff Gordinier is talkin' about my generation in his first book, X Saves the World. Here's a review:
By THERESA BRADLEY
As baby boomers blossom into senior citizens and coddled 20-somethings hog the rest of the spotlight, the generation that lies between those demographics is slipping through the cracks.
Generation X — as the 46 million stereotypically sarcastic, self-doubting slackers born between 1960 and 1977 are known — gets little attention. But its emphasis on open-sourcing, independence and irony has quietly transformed lives, and now ‘‘Xer’’ writer Jeff Gordinier is calling on his cohorts to step up their effort.
His first book, X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking (Viking, 224 pages, $21.95),’’ is a nostalgic, hot-and-bothered survey of what Gordinier calls the ‘‘Gen-X odyssey’’ from coffeehouse cynics to dot-com millionaires and social innovators. Xers are, bit by bit, ‘‘changing the world,’’ he says, even as that 1960s phrase makes most of them sick with suspicion.
Born in the ‘‘leviathan shadow of the boomers,’’ whose ‘‘incredible shrinking values’’ Gordinier skewers, Xers honed a sharp sense of skepticism and separateness, ‘‘afraid to commit to their lives because they see so much of the world as a cliche,’’ he writes. He cites Beck, one of the generation’s hit singers.
Wary of canned idealism and false hopes but still drawn to the desire for change, Xers launched their own micro-revolutions instead, creating companies such as Netscape, Google and Amazon that empowered individuals and triggered a ripple effect that gave even small ideas huge potential.
Xers held the helm of pop culture for a short time — an era book-ended by opposing gym scenes in music videos for Nirvana’s anarchic ‘‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’’ and Britney Spears’ ‘‘regimented’’ ‘‘Hit Me, Baby, One More Time.’’
