NEW YORK — Eloise, the Plaza hotel’s most famous fictitious resident, has officially returned to the storied landmark following a $400 million renovation — with a portrait of the mischievous 6-year-old prominently displayed near its famous Palm Court dining room.
‘‘Children of all ages have been asking for Eloise and it is our pleasure to have her call The Plaza home once again,’’ said Shane Krige, the hotel’s general manager.
Eloise, known to fans worldwide from the children’s book by Kay Thompson (illustrated by Hilary Knight), is an endearing fixture at the hotel. An ‘‘Eloise’’ bubble bath, accompanied by milk and cookies, is available to all guests, and a children’s menu, which pictures Eloise on a tricycle, is available in all of The Plaza’s restaurants.
The portrait was returned to its original spot on a wall outside the sumptuous restaurant, whose stained-glass ceiling, covered with plaster in the 1940s, was uncovered and restored during the two-year renovation.
The Plaza, a National Historic Landmark, first opened in 1907. It officially reopened to the public last weekend after its new owners, Elad Properties, converted the hotel’s original 805 guest rooms into 282 hotel rooms and 181 condominiums.
AP
Around 55,000 across the country voted online and at libraries and bookstores in this inaugural event sponsored by the Children's Book Council. The winners in the Book of the Year categories are:
Kindergarten to Second Grade: Frankie Stein by Lola M. Schaefer, illustrated by Kevan Atteberry
Third/Fourth Grade: Big Cats: Hunters of the Night by Elaine Landau
Fifth/Sixth Grade: Encyclopedia Horrifica: The Terrifying TRUTH! About Vampires, Ghosts, Monsters, and More by Joshua Gee
Illustrator of the Year was awarded to Ian Falconer for Olivia Helps With Christmas
For more information: www.cbcbooks.org or www.bookweekonline.com.
]]>‘‘I think we are overdue. We produce thousands and thousands of catalogs, many of which go right into the wastebaskets,’’ HarperCollins President Jane Friedman, who said the switch would likely begin by summer 2009, told The Associated Press.
She's absolutely right — in my case at least. The obvious cost-efficiency and environmental aspects notwithstanding, I get more advance reading copies and finished copies of books sent to me than I'll ever cover in the paper, so I decided early on to not waste time going through the catalogs. If someone wants me to look at their book, they'll have to e-mail me a heads-up or send me a copy directly.
While most self-published authors don't see Grisham's kind of success, with a little persistence it can happen. Former Chicagoan John Bernard Ruane is getting a shot with his memoir Parish the Thought: An Inspirational Memoir of Growing up Catholic in the 1960s (Roswell Press, $19.99), which found its way into the book room right about the time I took over the job of Books Editor last year.
Anyone who grew up Catholic wlll relate to Ruane's stories of growing up in a Chicago parish, where he served as an altar boy and was schooled under the influence of nuns and priests in the 1960s. (One can't help recall John R. Powers' fictionalized memoirs about growing up Catholic in the '50s — The Last Catholic in America, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?)
Ruane, who now makes his home in Roswell Georgia, printed only 5,000 copies last summer. Most of the hardcovers have sold out and now Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will publish the paperback edition this fall.
None other than our city's own archbishop, Francis Cardinal George blurbs the book on the back cover:
"John Bernard Ruane writes about a truly memorable parish, St. Bede's in the Archdiocese of Chicago. His witty but moving recall of his years growing up is a marvelous tribute to his mother and father and to the parish itself. Chicago priests and parishes have shaped literally millions of Catholics, and all of us now have reason to be grateful to John."
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.
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.
]]>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.’’
]]>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.
]]> She weaves an intricate if somewhat tedious description of Ginsberg’s travels through India and his quest for meaning while accompanied by his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and in the company of poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger.The adventure is slow to start.
We first meet Ginsberg’s fellow Beat poets — Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso — and their stints in jail, mental wards and drug-infested apartments. The anecdotes flit from one character to another, causing confusion. The reader’s mind wanders and wonders when Ginsberg will finally embark on his trip.
He leaves having already received widespread acclaim for his poem, ‘‘Howl.’’
Ginsberg arrives in India to discover that almost everyone has a guru and is on their own spiritual path. Suddenly, he feels out of place, and so do his ideals of remaining loyal to the Harlem vision, of laboring for the working class, of never reading poetry for profit.
He realizes his conundrum: He wants to be a saint, but doesn’t have a cause.
‘‘’What’s to be done with my life which has lost its idea?’ is Jack drunk? Is Neal still aware of me? Gregory yakking? Bill mad at me? Am I even here to myself?’’
We gain insight that Ginsberg wants a quick answer to his search for meaning. Not content with teachings such as, ‘‘The only guru is in your own heart,’’ he asks the Dalai Lama if drugs can help him reach enlightenment.
The account of his travels through India draws heavily on the observations of Snyder and Kyger, and one yearns to hear Ginsberg’s voice more often. The explanation for this lack of insight comes from an unlikely source, a police officer intent on terminating Ginsberg’s visit to India:
‘‘Why do you stay here in India so long? People come, see and they go. What do you DO here? There must be some reason for you to stay so long.’’
Ginsberg admits that he wonders the same thing.
AP
]]>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.
He brands Bush as two-faced for solemnly promising during the campaign to be a ‘‘uniter, not a divider,’’ but later pursuing a hard-line GOP agenda using wedge issues like abortion and gay rights. Chafee complains about Bush’s ‘‘juvenile streak.’’ And he rails at Bush’s pretending to search for weapons of mass destruction behind the White House furniture during a skit at a black-tie Washington dinner.
‘‘It was obscene for him to joke about a falsehood that American troops had gone to their graves believing,’’ Chafee writes.
As U.S. casualties in Iraq mounted in fall 2003, Chafee says he even considered a primary challenge against Bush but quickly scrapped the idea after Saddam Hussein’s capture boosted the president’s political stock.
Chafee bemoans the GOP’s rightward drift and the disappearance of moderate Republicans such as himself. Chafee’s independence was a matter of political survival in a Democratic-leaning state.
Chafee’s hopes for a second full term were dashed in 2006 by Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the Democratic wave that swept control of Congress from the GOP. Chafee in 2004 voted for Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, as a symbolic protest against the younger Bush. Last year he became an independent.
Readers may detect a bit of pettiness, too. Chafee does not bother to refer to his 2006 GOP primary opponent Steve Laffey by name.
He recalls being ‘‘irked and amused’’ at the parade of ‘‘Democratic Bush enablers’’ who campaigned in Rhode Island for Whitehouse, such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
‘‘I was the only candidate in the race with a record of standing up to entrenched powers,’’ writes Chafee, the lone GOP senator to vote against authorizing the Iraq war.
The seeds of bitterness with Bush were sown early on.
Chafee recalls Vice President Dick Cheney outlining a ‘‘shockingly divisive’’ agenda during a meeting with a handful of moderate GOP senators shortly after Bush won the presidency in 2000.
‘‘Cheney was not asking for support — he was ordering us to provide it,’’ writes Chafee, who somehow seems surprised at such hardball tactics by Cheney, a man infamous for his take-no-prisoners brand of politicking. Chafee, too, seems stunned that none of his GOP colleagues put up much of a fight.
Chafee reminded Cheney that the votes of their small group of moderates would matter in a closely divided Senate.
‘‘I chose my words carefully, and probably stammered with the effort to contain my fury,’’ he writes.
Cheney, ever the conservative warrior, brushed Chafee aside.
Six years later, Rhode Island voters did roughly the same thing, ending the political balancing act that was Chafee’s Senate career.
AP
]]>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.
But nobody notices.
]]> At the same time James’ typist, the aggressive Miss Bosanquet, tries unsuccessfully to seduce Miss Hallowes, Conrad’s meeker amanuensis. Their literary deception accomplished, the typists part — never to meet again. Presumably they and their employers continue their careers.‘‘Actors’’ brings on stage a failed New York comedian. His Jewish ancestors were driven from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean half a millennium ago. He feels his talent reviving when he gets a chance to play ‘‘King Lear.’’
It’s a modernist adaptation he doesn’t like. But it gives him a chance to emit an ‘‘unholy howl.’’
Ozick’s description:
‘‘It spewed out old forgotten exiles, old lost cities, Constantinople, Alexandria, kingdoms abandoned, refugees ragged and driven, distant ash heaps, daughters unborn, ... the wild roaring cannon of a human heartbeat.’’
On opening night, another failed Jewish actor, trailing a cape and waving a walking stick, invades the stage from the audience with a rant about how wrong the production is. The way to do it, he shouts, is the way the great actors of the New York Yiddish stage did it years ago.
The curtain is brought down. Many in the audience laugh untill they cry.
Then there’s the tale of a pious American radio commentator. He marries an ignorant Italian peasant girl after a four-day romance on the shore of Lake Como. She’s a pregnant chambermaid he meets as she vomits into the toilet bowl of his rooms at a scholarly conference.
Waiting for the boat to New York, the couple visits Milan. Only when he sees her kneeling before one of the myriad holy statues on the roof of the cathedral does he realize that the marriage is to be the lifelong penance for his sins.
The final story — ‘‘What Happened to the Baby?’’ — recounts a whole set of deceptions. There’s the mystery of the baby’s death and a wife’s concealment from her husband of visits with their little daughter to lectures by a relative whom the husband despises as a faker. Later comes the pretense of a Bohemian life in Greenwich Village. And on and on, falsehood after falsehood.
The despised lecturer spends much of his life vainly promoting an artificial language he has invented as a rival to Esperanto. The last line of the book quotes his divorced wife: for years she had gone along with his misguided project, aware of its futility.
‘‘Lie, illusion, deception, she said — was ... it truly, the universal language we all speak?’’
AP
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.
Some of the book’s points make intuitive sense. For example, the authors advise against copying the industry leader because the strategies that made him No. 1 play to his strengths, not yours. Instead, they say, leverage what makes you different.
Other points are less convincing. Each chapter is generally a broad principle supported by two or three examples. But those examples don’t always apply to the average person or business.
For example, to refute the ‘‘sacred cow’’ that successful branding always requires a big budget, the authors note that cyclist Lance Armstrong hoped to sell $5 million of his yellow LIVESTRONG bracelets. Instead of launching a costly advertising campaign, he just wore one quietly — and soon he and Nike sold $70 million worth of them. Sure, maybe that works for Armstrong, but branding can still be pretty expensive for those of us who haven’t won six straight Tour de France races.
Some chapters contradict outright what the authors suggest elsewhere. Early on, they urge executives to fire unpopular jerks — even those who are talented and bring in a lot of business — for the good of company morale. But a few chapters later, the authors extol an assertive Coca-Cola executive who rose through the ranks because she flouted the company’s culture of politeness.
The point of the book may be to entertain as much as educate, and the irreverent tone certainly makes it a quick and easy read. However, the frequent off-the-wall asides eventually become a distraction from the actual business points and threaten to slow down the reader.
Death to All Sacred Cows breaks little new ground, but it does present the customary points more engagingly than the average business book does. In that regard, it’s easy to imagine a company distributing it to employees with greater confidence that the workers will actually read it. That alone makes the book worthy of attention.
AP
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.
AP
]]>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.’’
]]> Those Xer 1990s saw a new generation’s intensity, innovation and ‘‘social promise’’ upend old orders in art, advertising and business, as the dot-com boom turned their ‘‘loafer’s love of freedom’’ and ‘‘lizard-eyed respect for commerce’’ into hot market traits, Gordinier says.‘‘About money it was chic to be clueless. Then all of a sudden it was not,’’ he writes.
Yet when the bubble burst and stocks crashed in 2000, Xers found relief, not demise. Their generation had always preferred to do its own thing, undisturbed, like bugs under a log, Gordinier says.
Rather than fight, then, for keys to the kingdom — which slow-to-retire boomers are unlikely to hand over — Xers have continued creating their own ‘‘rogue colonies,’’ with companies such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Meetup nurturing an infinite number of niches and channels of communication that are antidote to the ‘‘American Idol monotony of mass culture,’’ Gordinier says.
A one-time rock and film critic who is now editor-at-large at Details magazine, Gordinier uses wild analogies and anecdotes to catalog Xer music, movies and business models, and to deride the self-involvement and vapid ‘‘me-me-me’’ chorus of the 70 million baby boomers who precede X and the 70 million ‘‘Generation Yers’’ who follow.
Gordinier paints his reflections in pop color, comparing Kurt Cobain to John Donne and deconstructing ‘‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’’ as his generation’s primary moral parable. But he also emerges with a new, grown-up-Xer call to action.
‘‘When it comes to changing the world the boomers choked’’ on their own self-importance, he writes. ‘‘We have a chance now, as yuppies, or just as adults, to cull whatever capital, influence, and media savvy we’ve amassed and to use it for good.’’
‘‘X Saves the World’’ is not just a kitschy title but a serious proposal. And for skeptical Xers, the ability to embrace a new, measured hope may be the mark of maturing.
That coming of age is embodied by the first Xer presidential contender, Barack Obama, Gordinier suggests. Born in 1961, Obama’s own journey from irony to idealism is breathing new life into the phrase ‘‘change the world.’’
That is exactly what Gordinier is asking Xers to do: to stop brooding, take stock of their accomplishments and think big.
For members of the misunderstood generation he is prodding, Gordinier’s book is a sometimes uncomfortable reminder of how crippling and tiresome all that cynicism and self-doubt really were.
But instead of wincing at the past, he is giving us a chance at redemption, urging us to stop resisting and to embrace the impulse we’ve always wanted to: to stand up and do good.
AP
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