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Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order by Philip Coggan

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:39:17 +0000

For the past forty years western economies have splurged on debt. Now, as the reality dawns that many debts cannot be repaid, we find ourselves again in crisis. But the oncoming defaults have a time-worn place in our economic history. As with the crises in the 1930s and 1970s, governments will fall, currencies will lose their value, and new systems will emerge. Just as Britain set the terms of the international system in the nineteenth century, and America in the twentieth century, a new system will be set by today’s creditors in China and the Middle East. In the process, rich will be pitted against poor, young against old, public sector workers against taxpayers and one country against another.

In Paper Promises, Economist columnist Philip Coggan helps us to understand the origins of this mess and how it will affect the new global economy by explaining how our attitudes towards debt have changed throughout history, and how they may be about to change again.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Philip Coggan

Philip Coggan is the Buttonwood columnist of the Economist. Previously, he worked for the Financial Times for twenty years, most recently as investment editor. Among his books are The Money Machine, a guide to the city of London that is still in print in the UK after twenty-five years, and The Economist Guide to Hedge Funds.

Editorial Reviews

Financial Times
“Bold and confident … Coggan covers the terrain with characteristic calmness and objectivity, avoids over-simplification, and laces his arguments with his trademark erudition … The alphabet soup of acronyms, from SIVs to CDO Squareds, is blissfully lacking … Finally, the book is free from the shrieking ideology that afflicts virtually all contemporary debates over money. Indeed, it offers a clear explanation of the fresh ideological divisions that have arisen over how to deal with the crisis … the book should be taken very seriously.”

Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2011
“Coggan traces ‘history’s tug of war between monetary shortage and excess’ in this engaging and timely book about the current financial crisis…. Thoughtful and thorough.”

Kirkus, November 15, 2011
“Comprehensive…. A helpful analysis for anyone who wants to know how the world got into the present financial mess, which issues need to be addressed and what the consequences might be.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan
“This book stands way above anything written on the present economic crisis.”

Amid Debt Crisis, A Trail Of Broken ‘Promises’

NPR Book Review – February 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

Financial writer Philip Coggan traces the current global financial crisis to the 1970s, when the U.S. went off the gold standard.

“Up till then, every form of money had some link to precious metal: gold or silver,” Coggan, author of a new book, Paper Promises: Debt, Money and the New World Order, tells Morning Edition‘s Renee Montagne.

Coggan, who writes about finance for the Economist magazine, explains that before that time, the U.S. used gold to back the dollar; other countries could exchange their currency for American gold. But when President Nixon went off the gold standard, “essentially you had no limit on the amount of money that could be created and no limit on the amount of debt that could be created.”

The result, he says: asset bubbles.

Debt was used to buy assets, which rose in price and then burst. He points to Black Monday in 1987, when global financial markets crashed and the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 20 percent. Those same factors, he says, led to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and the more recent housing bubble. When bubbles burst, central banks stepped in and cut interest rates to keep the system afloat.

“The result of all that was that it was kind of a one-way bet for speculators: Keep borrowing money to keep buying assets; central banks will always bail you out,” Coggan says. “And that’s why we ended up in this mess that we are in … with lots of debts and central banks creating money to try and prop the whole system up.” [Read the full article...]

Diary of a Mad Fat Girl – A Sharp And Fast-Paced Tale by Stephanie McAfee

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:13:17 +0000

Graciela “Ace” Jones is mad-mad at her best friend Lilly who cancels their annual trip to Panama City for mysterious reasons; at her boss Catherine for “riding her ass like a fat lady on a Rascal scooter;” at her friend Chloe’s abusive husband; and especially at Mason McKenzie, the love of her life, who has shown up with a marriage proposal one year too late. Ace is never mad, though, at her near-constant companion, an adorable chiweenie dog named Buster Loo.

Ace’s anger begins to dissipate as she takes matters into her own hands to take down Chloe’s philandering husband-and to get to the bottom of a multitude of other scandals plaguing Bugtussle, Mississippi. Then, she starts to realize that maybe Mason deserves a second chance after all.

With a sharp and distinctive voice, Stephanie McAfee delivers a hilarious and fast-paced tale about Ace Jones and her two best friends-thick as thieves and tough as nails-navigating Southern small-town politics and prejudices, finding love, and standing up for each other all the way.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Stephanie McAfee

Stephanie McAfee was born and raised in Mississippi, but currently resides in Pensacola, FL. She loves reading, writing, being outdoors, and traveling.

Reader Review

If you like to laugh, read this book.
If you like to save money and laugh, read this book.
If you like sassiness and silliness, read this book.
If you are from the South and you understand that “because they needed it” should be grounds for a trial acquittal, read this book.
If you read books for accuracy and proper grammatical usage, you might wanna just walk on by.
If you think that no one should gain satisfaction from another person’s unfortunate consequences, you won’t like this book.
If you don’t understand the healing quality of frozen peas, well, just stick with books written by scholars. – Melinda W Melvin, Amazon.Com Reader Review

New in paperback: Stephanie McAfee’s ‘Diary of a Mad Fat Girl’

The Washington Post Book Review – February 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

Stephanie McAfee’s Diary of a Mad Fat Girl (NAL, $15) offers a fascinating tale, but not between its covers. The girl-buddy cape, starring a sassy, overweight Mississippi teacher, brims with local color but is burdened by too much plot and too little nuance. With an endearingly flawed narrator in a conflicted relationship, this is chick-lit territory that many talented writers — Jennifer Weiner and Rebecca Wells among them — have explored far more deftly.

What makes “Diary of a Mad Fat Girl” so fascinating is how it became a book in the first place. McAfee is a former teacher from Mississippi who, after being rejected by numerous literary agents, decided to self-publish her e-book in December 2010. “When I discovered Smashwords (and later Amazon KDP and Barnes & Noble PubIt!), I thought, ‘Hey, why not give this a try?’ ” she says in the book’s publicity materials. “Kindle ads were on the back of literally every magazine we subscribed to at the time. . . . And what does everyone want after Christmas? A bargain. Enter my 0.99 cent ebook.” [Read the full article...]

Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down by Robert Fitzpatrick And Jon Land

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:05:51 +0000

The Jack Nicholson film The Departed didn’t tell half of their story. A poor kid from the slums, Robert Fitzpatrick grew up to become a stellar FBI agent and challenge the country’s deadliest gangsters. Relentless in his desire to catch, prosecute, and convict Whitey Bulger, Fitzpatrick fought the nation’s most determined cop-gangster battle since Melvin Purvis hunted, confronted, and killed John Dillinger.

In his crusade to bring Bulger to justice, Fitzpatrick faced not only Whitey but also corrupt FBI agents, along with political cronies and enablers from Boston to Washington who, in one way or another, blocked his efforts at every step. Even when Fitzpatrick discovered the very organization to which he had sworn allegiance was his biggest obstacle, the agent continued to pursue Whitey and his gang . . . knowing that they were prepared to murder anyone who got in their way.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Robert Fitzpatrick And Jon Land

ROBERT FITZPATRICK spent twenty-plus years as an FBI agent and chief in a career highlighted by his involvement in the Martin Luther King, Jr. killing and the ABSCAM investigation in Miami that resulted in the indictments of numerous public officials. He played a key role in the famed “Mississippi Burning” investigation and recovered the rifle that was used in the MLK assassination and that ultimately led to the arrest of James Earl Ray.

JON LAND is the critically acclaimed author of thirty novels, including the bestselling series featuring female Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong: Strong Enough to Die, Strong Justice, and Strong at the Break. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Editorial Reviews

“This is a stupendous read, as electrifying as Mystic River but even more horrifying for being absolutely true. Betrayal is a page-turner of the highest order. You will not be able to put this book down—guaranteed.”
—Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of Impact

“A rapid-fire tale told with a passion that is a testament to the agent with the courage to wage the decades-long battle to get to the truth.”
—Lorenzo Carcaterra, New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers

“Jon Land elegantly captures the voice of FBI chief Robert Fitzpatrick as he battles his fellow agents to get to the truth behind the blood-soaked reign of gangster Whitey Bulger. Terrifying in scope and scathing in message, Betrayal is a must-read.”
—Robert K. Tanenbaum, New York Times bestselling author of Outrage

How Whitey Bulger Corrupted The Justice System

NPR Book Review – February 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Whitey Bulger was captured last year, he’d spent close to 20 years on the run — and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Bulger was the head of an Irish gang terrorizing the streets of South Boston. The Massachusetts State Police wanted him gone, but curiously couldn’t touch him.

Why? Bulger was a confidential FBI informant, and the bureau shielded him for years.

Robert Fitzpatrick, the author of Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down, says Bulger was widely known to be an unsavory character.

“He’s a stone killer, has been known to be a hit man for the Mafia out of Providence, and he’s also known to be the head of the Winter Hill gang, a bunch of Irish guys trying to take over the rackets, extortion and the drug stuff up in Boston,” Fitzpatrick tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

Fitzpatrick was a young FBI agent with a solid track record when the bureau sent him to Boston to sniff out corruption in the office. One of his first tasks was to evaluate Bulger, who was supposedly providing information on Mafia activities in New England. [Read the full article...]

The Fear Index – A Mystery Novel About Conscious Machines by Robert Harris

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:27:05 +0000

At the nexus of high finance and sophisticated computer programming, a terrifying future may be unfolding even now.

Dr. Alex Hoffmann’s name is carefully guarded from the general public, but within the secretive inner circles of the ultrarich he is a legend. He has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that predicts movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions. But one morning before dawn, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of his lakeside mansion, and so begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him.

Fiendishly smart and suspenseful, The Fear Index gives us a searing glimpse into an all-too-recognizable world of greed and panic. It is a novel that forces us to confront the question of what it means to be human—and it is Robert Harris’s most spellbinding and audacious novel to date.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Robert Harris

Robert Harris’s previous books include Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, Conspirata, and The Ghost Writer (originally published as The Ghost). His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been a television correspondent for the BBC, political editor of The Observer, and a columnist for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. He lives in a village near Hungerford in Berkshire, England.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Ingenious . . . There aren’t many writers who can produce genuine page-turners these days but Harris is one and The Fear Index had me gripped from the start . . . The characters are superb . . . Harris is stunningly good at explaining complex financial instruments in layman’s terms.”
—Sunday Express

“Harris’s great skill is to inhabit fully and convincingly the worlds he writes about, showing off his vast research yet never allowing the white-knuckle narrative to lose momentum.” —New Statesman

“As gripping a tale as anything Harris has written . . . It crackles with energy and invention, and the author’s obviously extensive research into the arcane world of state-of-the-art computing technology, algorithms, trading and hedge funds is dished up lightly and intelligibly.” —Irish Independent

Robert Harris, In ‘Fear’ of a Financial Frankenstein

NPR Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

When British thriller writer Robert Harris set out to write his new novel, The Fear Index, he had 1984 and Frankensteinon his mind. He wanted to explore how humans fall victim to the domineering forces of their time, and he set his sights on global finance.

Then on May 6, 2010, something known as a “flash crash” happened on Wall Street. The Dow plummeted — the result, in part, of lightning-fast, computer-generated trades.

Harris tells Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep that he had found the catalyst for The Fear Index, the story of a hedge fund, a scientist and his computer run amok.

Harris’ protagonist is the brilliant physicist Alex Hoffman, who has made billions through his algorithm that tracks incidences of fear-related words on the Internet and uses them to decide when to buy or sell stocks. All goes swimmingly (and lucratively) for Hoffman — until the computer program begins misbehaving.

“I thought I was making it up,” says Harris. “But when I finished the novel, I discovered this is happening [and] quite common, actually. [Topics] trending on Facebook, Twitter and so on [are] read by algorithms and factored into calculations as to what shares to buy.” [Read the full article...]

What It Was – A Hard-Boiled Noir Style Mystery Novel by George Pelecanos

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:03:53 +0000

Washington, D.C., 1972. Derek Strange has left the police department and set up shop as a private investigator. His former partner, Frank “Hound Dog” Vaughn, is still on the force. When a young woman comes to Strange asking for his help recovering a cheap ring she claims has sentimental value, the case leads him onto Vaughn’s turf, where a local drug addict’s been murdered, shot point-blank in his apartment. Soon both men are on the trail of a ruthless killer: Red Fury, so called for his looks and the car his girlfriend drives, but a name that fits his personality all too well. Red Fury doesn’t have a retirement plan, as Vaughn points out – he doesn’t care who he has to cross, or kill, to get what he wants. As the violence escalates and the stakes get higher, Strange and Vaughn know the only way to catch their man is to do it their own way.

Rich with details of place and time – the cars, the music, the clothes – and fueled by non-stop action, this is Pelecanos writing in the hard-boiled noir style that won him his earliest fans and placed him firmly in the ranks of the top crime writers in America.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos is the author of several bestselling novels set in and around Washington, D.C. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, and a producer and Emmy-nominated writer of the HBO hit series The Wire. He currently writes for the acclaimed HBO series Treme. www.george-pelecanos.com.

Reader Review

I’ve long been a fan of Pelecanos’ work, my initiation starting with his novel RIGHT AS RAIN, and continuing along after that joyride to include his other works. I was struck from the beginning by the authenticity of his characters, the rhythm of his writing, and his powerful handling of violence. His work has a verisimilitude often absent in genre fiction. He isn’t a crime novelist, he’s a NOVELIST, period. I’m of the opinion that Pelecanos never makes a wrong note. I’ve read SHOEDOG, one of his lesser known novels, more than a handful of times. Now, to his latest work. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new Pelecanos shortly on the heels of THE CUT, his hardcover released late last year (another gem, by the way). The surprise was then elevated upon learning that this newest novel would return to the world of Derek Strange, a character I’ve grown to love. But then, I love all of the characters in Pelecanos’ world, from Nick Stefanos, to Terry Quinn, to…well, you get the point. This newest novel gripped me from page one and never let up steam. Written in scenes both cinematic and rhythmic (vignettes)told from the points of view of several characters, WHAT IT WAS is a study in how a crime novel should be written. Violent but emotionally satisfying, poignant in its rendering of the human condition (here you have the criminal perspective, the police perspective, the private investigator perspective, the girlfriends riding shotgun with their criminal boyfriends perspective–all handled with aplomb). To say that Pelecanos is a master is an understatement. I’d read a new book every month from him. Kudos.

Phillip Thomas Duck
author of Triage: A Thriller (Shell Series)

Book review: ‘What It Was,’ by George Pelecanos

The Washington Post Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

I’ve read most of George Pelecanos’s 17 previous novels, always with admiration, but four can be singled out as his finest work: “Right as Rain” (2001), “Hell to Pay” (2002), “Soul Circus” (2003) and “Hard Revolution” (2004). All feature a decent and thoughtful — but far from perfect — African American named Derek Strange and are set in Washington. The first three show Strange as a middle-aged private detective. “Hard Revolution” goes back to 1968, when he was a young D.C. policeman; it climaxes with a powerful portrayal of the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Having completed this great quartet, Pelecanos moved on to other characters, but now, in “What It Was,” he returns to Strange, in 1972, as a 26-year-old private detective. The idea for the novel came to him when he was researching a possible Watergate book. He chanced upon a story in this newspaper titled “Cadillac Smith’s Legend of Violence,” about Raymond “Cadillac” Smith, a notorious criminal of that era. The fictional central figure in this novel, Robert Lee “Red” Jones, is loosely based on Smith’s career. [Read the full article...]

A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:43:22 +0000

In this expansive story collection, acclaimed writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala continues her lifelong meditation on East and West. Set in India, England, and New York City, A Lovesong for India reveals what unites us across oceans, cultures, and lifetimes.

In “Innocence,” an older couple, whose social standing is marred from a decades-old scandal, rent out rooms in their Delhi home for both companionship and income. Isolated and battling blame and guilt, the couple becomes deeply invested in the lives of their two tenants. With the addition of a third renter—a beautiful and provocative woman from India—tensions in the household push the story to its feverish conclusion.

The story “Talent” finds Jhabvala in New York City reflecting on the friction between family and societal expectations. Magda is a talent scout whose entire life is her work until she meets Ellie, a singer whose immense ability and unguarded personality captivate Magda. Soon Ellie is integrated into Magda’s extended family for better or worse.

Remarkable and unwavering, this collection is the hallmark of Jhabvala’s celebrated career and a testament to her “balance, subtlety, wry humor, and beauty” —The New York Times.

Book World: ‘A Lovesong for India’ by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The Washington Post Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Quick: Name a writer of Polish roots who immigrated to London, learned English on the fly, wrote about hard-to-parse, faraway places, and became one of the most distinguished English novelists of the 20th century.

Joseph Conrad? Well, yes. But you might have said Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a prodigious talent who has brought India alive on page after page of remarkable fiction in the course of the past 60 years. Ironically, Jhabvala is far better known for bringing alive not India, but England and America in the Merchant Ivory films “A Room With a View,” “Howards End,” “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” “The Remains of the Day” — a phenomenally successful run of movies for which she was the lead screenwriter. Known for her resonant dialogue, emotional subtlety and deadeye aim, she is a master of narrative no matter what the medium, plucking her stories from a vast store of life.

In her latest book, “A Lovesong for India,” Jhabvala returns to two passions that ignited her career: India and the short story. Here is a collection to remind us why, at 84, Jhabvala stands tall among her contemporary cohort: why she is so much like Forster (with a more discerning eye on India), Austen (with a more global sensibility) and Conrad (with a feminine touch).

She was born in Germany of Polish-Jewish parents. Forced to flee the Nazi onslaught in 1939, her family took refuge in London, where she landed as a 12-year-old girl with no knowledge of the language. All the same, she was — as so many transplanted children can be — alert to the world around her. She excelled in school, graduated from London University, married a young Indian architect and went off to spend 24 years in Delhi. [Read the full article...]

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:16:26 +0000

A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China.

The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China’s future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China’s modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure.

This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.

About Stephen R. Platt

Stephen R. Platt received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize. He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China. An undergraduate English major, he spent two years after college as a teacher in the Yale-China program in Hunan province. His research has been supported by the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. He lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

“Platt has skillfully converted his erudition into an eminently general-interest treatment of what may have been the most lethal civil war in history.”
—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist (starred review)

“Splendid . . . An upheaval that led to the deaths of 20 million, dwarfing the simultaneously fought American Civil War, deserves to be better known, and Platt accomplishes this with a superb history of a 19th-century China faced with internal disorder and predatory Western intrusions.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Stephen Platt’s history of the Taiping rebellion in mid-19th century China sheds an authoritative and comprehensive window on a major event in world history that up until now has too often been consigned to a footnote in the West. It is a critically important achievement.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

A Chinese Civil War to Dwarf All Others - ‘Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom’ by Stephen R. Platt

The New York Times Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

There should be a term in German that describes the sinking feeling you have when reading a serious book of scholarship, one whose determined author deserves praise and tenure, that no civilian reader should pick up, that will not warm in your hands, that will make you regret the 10 hours of your life lost to it, and that, once put down, will not cry out to be picked back up.

Such a book is “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War,” by Stephen R. Platt, a young academic who has a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale and is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He’s written a dense, complex work, about a war too little known in the United States, in which the narrative pilot light never ignites.

This Chinese civil war lasted from 1851 to 1864, overlapping in its end with America’s Civil War. Mr. Platt describes it as “not only the most destructive war of the 19th century, but likely the bloodiest civil war of all time.”

Some 20 million people lost their lives, many of them in grotesque ways. There are enough beheadings, flayings, rapes, suicides, disembowelments, mass killings and acts of cannibalism in “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom” — more about these things in a moment — that it can seem like a version of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” spat into being by Cormac McCarthy. [Read the full article...]

Defending Jacob: A Courtroom Thriller by William Landay

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:26:22 +0000

Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He’s his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own—between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he’s tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.

Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis—a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About William Landay

William Landay is the author of The Strangler, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Crime Book of the Year, and Mission Flats, winner of the Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel and a Barry Award nominee. A former district attorney who holds degrees from Yale and Boston College Law School, Landay lives in Boston, where he is at work on his next novel of suspense.

Editorial Reviews

“William Landay makes bold use of his genuine storytelling gift, his amazing ability to craft believable dialogue, and, above all, his extraordinary understanding of what it means to be a husband and father to present us with an unforgettable tale of an ordinary marriage and family in crisis. On the surface this novel reads like a first-rate thriller, but at its heart it’s a love story. It’s the story of a man who adores his wife and child, but more than that, it’s a novel that describes the fine edge between love and madness, and the lies we sometimes tell ourselves. Landay has proven himself to be an extraordinary writer, and Defending Jacob is an amazing novel. Do yourself a favor and read it. It’s that good.”—Nicholas Sparks

“More than a terrific legal thrill ride, Defending Jacob is an unflinching appraisal of the darkest, most poignant consequences of the love that binds, and blinds, families. It’s one of those rare books that call for contemplation and insight along with every breathtaking surprise.”—Stephen White

“A novel like this comes along maybe once a decade . . . a tour de force, a full-blooded legal thriller about a murder trial and the way it shatters a family. With its relentless suspense, its mesmerizing prose, and a shocking twist at the end, it’s every bit as good as Scott Turow’s great Presumed Innocent. But it’s also something more: an indelible domestic drama that calls to mind Ordinary People and We Need to Talk About Kevin. A spellbinding and unforgettable literary crime novel.”—Joseph Finder

Book review: ‘Defending Jacob,’ by William Landay

The Washington Post Book Review – February 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

In the publicity material for William Landay’s “Defending Jacob,” its publisher and several advance readers liken the novel to Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent,” arguably the finest of American legal thrillers. The hype is justified. I don’t think Landay’s novel has quite the elegance or gravitas of Turow’s, but it’s an exceptionally serious, suspenseful, engrossing story that deserves and should achieve a large audience.

The similarities start with the fact that Turow and Landay are lawyers who began as prosecutors, and each novel is narrated by a prosecutor who finds himself in grave legal trouble. Each book delves deep into the character of its protagonist and his family, and both offer caustic but informed indictments of our legal system. Finally, both provide a stunning ending. If you remember the surprise at the end of “Presumed Innocent,” be warned that the outcome of “Defending Jacob” is even more unexpected.

The two novels differ in one important regard. Turow’s Rusty Sabich was charged with murdering his lover. Landay’s Andy Barber, a prosecutor in Newton, Mass., has his world upended when his 14-year-old son is accused of murder. Before that calamity, Andy and his wife, Laurie, had shared a comfortable, happy suburban lifestyle with Jacob, their only child. The boy was often withdrawn and monosyllabic, but no more so than many other teenagers. [Read the full article...]

Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives by Ruth W. Grant

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:02 +0000

Incentives can be found everywhere–in schools, businesses, factories, and government–influencing people’s choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses.

Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas–plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered.

Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, Strings Attached questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

About Ruth W. Grant

Ruth W. Grant is professor of political science and philosophy and a senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. She is the author of “John Locke’s Liberalism” and “Hypocrisy and Integrity”.

Editorial Reviews

“Strings Attached offers a fascinating tour of the history, morality, and unintended consequences of the modern obsession with using incentives to change behavior. Exploring cases from plea bargaining in criminal courts to paying students to earn good grades, Grant compellingly argues that using material incentives to get people to do things they otherwise would not raises important and previously unexamined questions about ethics, power, and character.”–Lynn Stout, University of California, Los Angeles

“This remarkable book asks some deceptively simple questions: With what norms should we judge the use of incentives? How can we compare incentives to coercion and persuasion? With characteristically lucid prose and a productive blend of theory and case studies, Ruth Grant illuminates an often neglected arena of inquiry. At a time when philosophers advocate ‘libertarian paternalism’ as an alternative to coercion and governments deploy ‘conditional cash transfers’ as instruments of social policy, Grant’s reflections could hardly be more relevant.”–William Galston, The Brookings Institution

“Moving comfortably from Plato, modern philosophy, and organizational science to plea bargaining, medical research, and IMF loans, this impressive book lays bare some of the ethical complexities raised by the use of incentives in various social and political contexts. A comprehensive look at an underanalyzed topic, this book is a pleasure to read.”–Alan Wertheimer, National Institutes of Health

When Life Is a Bunch of Carrots

The New York Times Book Review – February 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

WHAT does it mean to treat human behavior as if everyone has a price? That’s the broad question animating “Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives” (Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton) by Ruth W. Grant.

When the government offers tax deductions for charitable donations, when a soup kitchen feeds the homeless on the condition that they attend church, or when the writer of a will attaches stipulations to a bequest — all these situations involve incentives.

Dr. Grant, a political science and philosophy professor and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, says we tend to view such incentives as some form of voluntary trade. In fact, she says, they often indicate an imbalance of power, and thus raise ethical issues.

“How can legitimate uses of incentives be distinguished from illegitimate ones — bribery or blackmail, for example?” she asks. She puts forth three standards for evaluating incentives: legitimacy of purpose, the autonomy involved in choosing to accept an incentive, and the effect on the character of the parties involved.

She explains that the current notion of incentives emerged in three spheres in the early 20th century. The first was the young field of scientific management, in which Frederick Taylor experimented with paying workers by the task to increase productivity and reduce idleness. [Read the full article...]

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:40:47 +0000

From the bestselling author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, this startling long-lens view shows how America is coming apart at the seams that historically have joined our classes.

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Charles Murray

CHARLES MURRAY is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention in 1984 with Losing Ground. His subsequent books include In Pursuit, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, In Our Hands, and Real Education. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

“a timely investigation into a worsening class divide no one can afford to ignore.”
–Publisher’s Weekly

“[Charles Murray] argues for the need to focus on what has made the U.S. exceptional beyond its wealth and military power…religion, marriage, industriousness, and morality.”
–Booklist (Starred Review)

“Charles Murray … has written an incisive, alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American society.”
–Roger Lowenstein, Bloomberg Businessweek

A Lightning Rod in the Storm Over America’s Class Divide

The New York Times Book Review – February 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

WASHINGTON — When Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s book “The Bell Curve” appeared in 1994, it was denounced by social scientists, liberal pundits and a little-known Chicago civil-rights lawyer named Barack Obama, who in a commentary on NPR accused the authors of calculating that “white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism as long as it’s artfully packaged.”

Anyone who remembers the firestorm over that 845-page doorstop’s dense arguments about race, class, genetics and I.Q. might be tempted to look at the cover of Mr. Murray’s latest book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” and think, “Here we go again.”

But “Coming Apart,” which depicts members of white elites as hypocrites living in a bubble and the white working class as succumbing to moral decay, is hardly a flattering portrait of white people, let alone, Mr. Murray insists, a partisan barnburner.

“It’s not a brief for the right,” Mr. Murray said in a recent interview at the American Enterprise Institute here, where he has been a scholar since 1990. “The problem I describe isn’t a conservative-versus-liberal problem. It’s a cultural problem the whole country has.”

“Coming Apart,” which shot to No. 5 at Amazon.com immediately upon publication last week, has certainly prompted much conversation, if little in the way of consensus. David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, pre-emptively declared it the most important book of the year, saying, “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.” [Read the full article...]

Is White, Working Class America ‘Coming Apart’?

NPR Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

According to the libertarian social scientist Charles Murray, America is “coming apart at the seams.” Class strain has cleaved society into two groups, he argues in his new bookComing Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010: an upper class, defined by educational attainment, and a new lower class, characterized by the lack of it. Murray also posits that the new “lower class” is less industrious, less likely to marry and raise children in a two-parent household, and more politically and socially disengaged

By focusing solely on whites, Murray says, he is trying to correct the assumption that these are markers of the American racial divide. The class divisions transcend race.

By Murray’s calculations, the upper class is 20 percent of the white population. The working class is 30 percent. Over the past 50 years the two groups have branched away from each other culturally and geographically. The “educated class,” Murray tells NPR’s Robert Siegel, has developed distinctive tastes and preferences in a way that is new in America, evinced in everything from the alcohol they drink and the cars they buy to how they raise their children and take care of themselves physically.

Added to that, spatial segregation has resulted in “ZIP codes that have levels of affluence and education that are so much higher than the rest of the population that they constitute a different kind of world,” he says. [Read the full article...]

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:38:19 +0000

On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered a dramatic rant against Obama administration programs to shore up the plunging housing market. Invoking the Founding Fathers and ridiculing “losers” who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli called for “Tea Party” protests. Over the next two years, conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and money to help right-wing Republicans win electoral victories in 2010.

In this penetrating new study, Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go beyond images of protesters in Colonial costumes to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising. Drawing on grassroots interviews and visits to local meetings in several regions, they find that older, middle-class Tea Partiers mostly approve of Social Security, Medicare, and generous benefits for military veterans. Their opposition to “big government” entails reluctance to pay taxes to help people viewed as undeserving “freeloaders” – including immigrants, lower income earners, and the young. At the national level, Tea Party elites and funders leverage grassroots energy to further longstanding goals such as tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of business, and privatization of the very same Social Security and Medicare programs on which many grassroots Tea Partiers depend. Elites and grassroots are nevertheless united in hatred of Barack Obama and determination to push the Republican Party sharply to the right.

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism combines fine-grained portraits of local Tea Party members and chapters with an overarching analysis of the movement’s rise, impact, and likely fate.

About Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and past president of the American Political Science Association.

Vanessa Williamson is a PhD candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University. Previously, she served as the Policy Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Editorial Reviews

“Readers interested in grassroots political organizations, the influence of outside interests on political parties, or the Tea Party itself, as well as those whose leanings fall elsewhere on the political spectrum will find this an eye-opening book.” –Library Journal

“This is an indispensable guide to the Tea Party phenomenon, and also an excellent demonstration of the power of first-hand research to add a richness of understanding that survey results can’t provide. By spending patient time with Tea Party activists around the country, Skocpol and Williamson have been able to create a far fuller picture of the Tea Party than we have had before.” –Nicholas Lemann, Dean, and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University

“This important book will draw fire from both the political left and right, for contrary to the denunciations of liberal commentators, the Tea Party is not a motley collection of racist crazies. And contrary to the praise of conservative commentators, the Tea Party is not a pure grass-roots citizens’ movement. Skocpol and Williamson provide a much-needed dose of analysis that begins to balance out the polemics that dominate discussion of the Tea Party.” –Morris P. Fiorina, Wendt Family Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

“The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson

The Washington Post Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Now, in the early weeks of what promises to be a rancorous political year, we have two books that explore this phenomenon and attempt to explain its meaning. All three of their authors are academics — though Kabaservice has no university connection at the moment,Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson are in the Harvard government department — and both books are published by the same academic house. Kabaservice’s loyalties clearly lie with the moderate-to-liberal establishment (his previous book was a sympathetic account of Kingman Brewster’s presidency of Yale), while Skocpol and Williamson appear to be well left of center, but all three authors have made honest efforts to treat their controversial subject fairly. [Read the full article...]

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World by Sam Sommers

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:43:12 +0000

An “entertaining and engaging” exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life-and how understanding them can improve everything you do.

The world around you is pulling your strings, shaping your innermost instincts and your most private thoughts. And you don’t even realize it.

Every day and in all walks of life, we overlook the enormous power of situations, of context in our lives. That’s a mistake, says Sam Sommers in his provocative new book. Just as a museum visitor neglects to notice the frames around paintings, so do people miss the influence of ordinary situations on the way they think and act. But frames- situations- do matter. Your experience viewing the paintings wouldn’t be the same without them. The same is true for human nature.

In Situations Matter, Sommers argues that by understanding the powerful influence that context has in our lives and using this knowledge to rethink how we see the world, we can be more effective at work, at home, and in daily interactions with others. He describes the pitfalls to avoid and offers insights into making better decisions and smarter observations about the world around us.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Sam Sommers

Sam Sommers is an award-winning teacher and researcher of social psychology at Tufts University outside Boston. His research specialties include how people think, communicate, and behave in diverse settings, as well as psychological perspectives on the U.S. legal system.

At Tufts Sommers is known for his engaging lecture style and has won multiple teaching awards, including being selected by the Student Senate as the Professor of the Year in 2009. (His wife would insist on mentioning that he was also voted by the student newspaper the “hottest” male professor on campus; however, being well-versed in the power of situations, he’d note that the honor had less to do with him than with the anything-but-fierce state of the competition.)

Sommers has given talks at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., Dartmouth, Cornell, Emory, UMass, and Rutgers. His research has been featured by a wide range of media outlets, and he has testified as an expert witness in criminal trials in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Oregon.

In his free time, Sommers enjoys hanging out with his wife and two daughters, blogging on the Psychology Today website, batting lead-off for the vaunted Tufts Psychology summer softball team, and exerting more effort than he probably should editing Seinfeld and Daily Show clips for use in the classroom.

Editorial Reviews

“In this wonderful and witty book, Sam Sommers reveals one of the most important factors driving human nature. (Hint: Look around.) He demonstrates time and time again that who you are is shaped by where you are.” —Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide

“Understanding and appreciating the power of situations gives you a leg up in life, and Situations Matter is the best place to start investigating this challenge. It is excellent, entertaining reading for anyone interested in classic human questions about morality, conformity, and the real differences between men and women.” — Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, and author of Create Your Own Economy and The Great Stagnation

“It can be easy to overlook how ordinary situations shape behavior. It might seem like Sam Sommers is brilliant for choosing to write a book on this important topic, but he’d probably just explain that circumstance drove him to it. Still, we’re all lucky he did.” — Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design

“Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,” b y Sam Sommers

The Washington Post Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Most of us consider ourselves to be objective, consistent people who make decisions that reflect our core principles, no matter what the situation. In “Situations Matter,” psychology professor Sam Sommers throws this common-sense notion out the window. Our environments are actually much more powerful than we think.

Statistics show that people are more likely to marry someone who lives in the same neighborhood than someone from farther away. And the idea that women are more nurturing and less aggressive by nature? An experiment that allowed women to anonymously blow their opponents away during video games showed that they were just as trigger-happy as the male participants. Our perceptions, both of ourselves and of the actions of others, are heavily influenced by context. We are, Sommers suggests, unconscious of the way that different scenarios can manipulate our seemingly objective understanding. [Read the full article...]

Mistaken – A Novel About The Entwined Lives Of two Dubliners by Neil Jordan

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:34:24 +0000

“I had been mistaken for him so many times that when I heard he had died it was as if part of myself had died too.” So begins Mistaken, the new bestselling novel from the master of gothic fiction, Neil Jordan.

Kevin and Gerald were two boys growing up on opposite sides of the Dublin economic divide. Though they had never met, they shared a growing awareness of each other through episodes of mistaken identity. Yet Kevin was doubly haunted, living next door to the one-time residence of Bram Stoker, and the shadow of both a vampire and Gerald stretch far across his early years. For a time, the boys’ doppelganger paths would cross innocently enough—one stealing the other’s unwitting girlfriend, or being called out to in the street–until a family tragedy sends them both down a much darker path.

About Neil Jordan

Born in 1950 in Sligo, Ireland, Neil Jordan’s early career began as a writer. After setting up The Irish Writers’ Cooperative in 1974, he went on to win The Guardian Fiction Prize for his book of short stories NIGHT IN TUNISIA (1976). Since then he has gone on to publish three novels, THE PAST (1979), THE DREAM OF A BEAST (1983) and most recently SUNRISE WITH SEA MONSTER (1994). Jordan’s published fiction has been translated into several languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

They’re the same age. They look almost the same. Yet their backgrounds are strikingly different. Kevin Thunder, the narrator, lives on Dublin’s impoverished northside, while Gerry Spain is from the well-heeled southside; the class antagonisms are raw. Kevin’s father is a bookie; Jerry’s is a lawyer, later a judge. Kevin’s rough-and-tumble schooling is far inferior to Jerry’s fancy private school. Their lives, however, will overlap for some 40 years, from their adolescence in the 1960s to Jerry’s death in his mid 50s (his funeral opens and closes the novel). Kevin finds himself being mistaken for Gerry: ejected from a store for shoplifting, approached invitingly by a girlfriend. Amid the confusion he has one dependable ally: his beloved mother, the caretaker of their building’s apartments. His father is often away, and Kevin is happy to replace him (there are Oedipal overtones). Mother and son go swimming together until one day, alone, she drowns. Jordan is at his best depicting their tender solicitude and Kevin’s coming-of-age encounters with Gerry’s girls. His touch is less sure with Kevin/Gerry. They eventually meet in a series of edgy encounters. By now Gerry is an undergraduate at well-manicured Trinity, while Kevin’s at a trade school; Gerry, shy and insecure, uses Kevin’s name for his published stories. The ladies still get them confused. “Were we…the light and shade of the same person?” It’s the classic dilemma posed by the genre. Jordan plays with it, offsetting Kevin’s weak light against the increasingly dark, addicted, adulterous Jerry, but years pass before he ratchets up the tension. The climax, flashy and camera-ready, involves impersonation and murder in Manhattan, but it seems less ordained than arbitrary. – Kirkus Reviews

Double Take - Film Director Neil Jordan’s Novel ‘Mistaken’

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Vampires, secrets, the mysteries of identity: the obsessions that run through the director Neil Jordan’s films are at the center of his beautifully enigmatic fifth novel. “I grew up . . . under the shadow of a vampire,” says the narrator, a man whose childhood home in Dublin was next door to a house where Bram Stoker, the author of “Dracula,” once lived. Although Jordan’s screen monsters are visible — he directed “Interview With the Vampire” and is now shooting “Byzantium,” about mother-daughter vampires — in this novel vampirism becomes the perfect metaphor for the story of two look-alike men who feed off each other’s souls all their crisscrossed lives.

“Mistaken” begins with the narrator, Kevin Thunder, at the funeral of Gerald Spain, a troubled, once famous writer dead in his mid-50s. (Surely Jordan knows these names have a Dickensian distance from reality; his literary references here include Poe and Joyce, one the icon of the haunted, the other of emotionally tortured men traipsing around Dublin.) At the cemetery, Kevin meets Gerald’s grown daughter, Emily, and some mysteries take shape as others begin to unravel. Emily befriends Kevin — she says some animal scent on his body reminds her of her father — and we begin to wonder. Will Kevin become Emily’s lover? Will he be more like a father? Could he actually be her father? [Read the full article...]

The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted By Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:15:11 +0000

Movie stars establish themselves as brands–and Taylor’s brand , in its most memorable outings, has repeatedly introduced a broad audience to feminist ideas. In her breakout film, “National Velvet” (1944), Taylor’s character challenges gender discrimination,: Forbidden as a girl to ride her beloved horse in an important race, she poses as a male jockey. Her next milestone, “A Place in the Sun” (1951), can be seen as an abortion rights movie–a cautionary tale from a time before women had ready access to birth control. In “Butterfield 8″ (1960), for which she won an Oscar, Taylor isn’t censured because she’s a prostitute, but because she chooses the men: she controls her sexuality, a core tenet of the third-wave feminism that emerged in the 1990s. Even “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) depicts the anguish that befalls a woman when the only way she can express herself is through her husband’s stalled career and children.

The legendary actress has lived her life defiantly in public–undermining post-war reactionary sex roles, helping directors thwart the Hollywood Production Code, which censored film content between 1934 and 1967. Defying death threats she spearheaded fundraising for AIDS research in the first years of the epidemic, and has championed the rights of people to love whom they love, regardless of gender. Yet her powerful feminist impact has been hidden in plain sight. Drawing on unpublished letters and scripts as well as interviews with Kate Burton, Gore Vidal, Austin Pendleton, Kevin McCarthy, Liz Smith, and others, The Accidental Feminist will surprise Taylor and film fans with its originality and will add a startling dimension to the star’s enduring mystique.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About M. G. Lord

M.G. Lord is a celebrated cultural critic and investigative journalist, and the author of Forever Barbie and Astro Turf. Since 1995 she has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the Times‘s Arts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, and ArtForum. Before becoming a freelance writer, Lord was a syndicated political cartoonist and a columnist for Newsday. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Review

Like those who think of actor John Wayne as a real-life He-Man, Jimmy Stewart as a sort of grown-up Scout master and Humphrey Bogart as a genuine tough guy, cultural critic Lord (Masters of Professional Writing Program/Univ. of Southern California; Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, 2005, etc.) sees a feminist in Elizabeth Taylor. The author analyzes Taylor’s portrayal of characters from the spunky little girl who rode her horse to victory in National Velvet to the strident middle-aged wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and in her stage performance as the fierce Regina in The Little Foxes. Into what is essentially a glowing mini-biography of the actress, Lord inserts detailed plot summaries of Taylor’s films, which she admits to having watched repeatedly , along with tidbits about Taylor’s several husbands and some of her fellow actors: Richard Burton, Eddie Fisher, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson and others. Besides finding material for her thesis in the scripts of Taylor’s movies, the author interviewed people who knew her, worked with her, were related to her or wrote about her, including gossip columnist Liz Smith and Burton’s daughter Kate. In Lord’s view, the actress’ work in the fight against AIDS in the 1980s demonstrates that roles played by Taylor as a young woman influenced her thinking about social justice as an older woman. Not central to the book but an informatory sidelight is the author’s account of the Hays Code, which dictated the moral content of Hollywood films from the early ’30s through most of the ’60s. It forbade nudity, adultery, sexual perversion, miscegenation, drug use and irreverence to religion and the flag. How the code shaped scripts and how directors worked around the restrictions is a story worth telling. – Kirkus Reviews

Smoldering Subversive - What Elizabeth Taylor Did For Women’s Rights

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 1012 (Excerpt)

Authors need obsessions; it’s their immoderate, uncontainable, sometimes irrational preoccupations that feed their creative energies. The best writers can lead readers to share their manias. If Melville hadn’t been overly invested in whales, no “Moby-Dick.” If Twain hadn’t been drawn to the Mississippi River, no “Huckleberry Finn.” If Tolstoy hadn’t been appalled by social hypocrisy, no “Anna Karenina.” For the journalist and cultural critic M. G. Lord, it’s curvaceous, charismatic icons of femininity that hold her imagination hostage.

Almost 20 years ago, Lord came into the public eye with her book “Forever Barbie,” an exploration of Mattel’s bodacious Barbie doll — the long-legged, narrow-hipped toy, endowed with “shocking torpedo orbs,” that has held children (and others) in thrall for half a century. Barbie, she explained, was inspired by a saucy postwar German doll called Lilli, which was sold to men as a jokey erotic knickknack. Mattel’s experts, testing an American variant in the 1950s, learned that little girls coveted the shapely doll, but their mothers were horrified by it. A shrewd ad campaign overcame maternal resistance by suggesting that daughters who dressed and groomed Barbie, with her vast collection of accessories and outfits, would learn how to become well-turned-out young ladies, rather than tomboys. It worked.

Now Lord’s idée fixe has leapt to another female American sex symbol, the violet-eyed actress Elizabeth Taylor, who died last March at 79. What Lord did for Barbie, she now does for La Liz in “The Accidental Feminist,” which argues that the lavishly proportioned actress was much more than a beautiful face and body: she was a pathbreaker for social progress and women’s rights — albeit, Lord concedes, an unwitting one. Taylor’s stepdaughter Kate Burton, who spoke with Lord for the book, demurred that while she could detect a “thread of feminism” in some of the movies, she “doubted Taylor had been conscious of it.” [Read the full article...]

Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image by Toby Lester

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:57:19 +0000

EVERYONE KNOWS THE IMAGE. NO ONE KNOWS ITS STORY.

This is the story of Vitruvian Man: Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of a man in a circle and a square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit, the figure appears on everything from coffee cups and T-shirts to book covers and corporate logos. In short, it has become the world’s most famous cultural icon, yet almost nobody knows anything about it. Leonardo didn’t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was playing with the idea, set down by the Roman architect Vitruvius, that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was therefore to imply that the human body was the world in miniature. This idea, known as the theory of the microcosm, was the engine that had powered Western religious and scientific thought for centuries, and Leonardo hitched himself to it in no uncertain terms.

Yet starting in the 1480s he set out to do something unprecedented. If the design of the body truly did reflect that of the cosmos, he reasoned, then by studying its proportions and anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been done before—by peering deep into both body and soul—he might broaden the scope of his art to include the broadest of metaphysical horizons. He might, in other words, obtain an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world as a whole. Vitruvian Man gives that exhilarating idea visual expression. In telling its story, Toby Lester weaves together a century-spanning saga of people and ideas. Assembled here is an eclectic cast of fascinating characters: the architect Vitruvius; the emperor Caesar Augustus and his “body of empire”; early Christian and Muslim thinkers; the visionary mystic Hildegard of Bingen; the book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini; the famous dome-builder Filippo Brunelleschi; Renaissance anatomists, architects, art theorists, doctors, and military engineers; and, of course, in the starring role, Leonardo himself—whose ghost Lester resurrects in the surprisingly unfamiliar context of his own times.

Da Vinci’s Ghost is written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester’s award-winning first book, the “almost unbearably thrilling” (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World. Like Vitruvian Man itself, the book captures a pivotal time in the history of Western thought when the Middle Ages was giving way to the Renaissance, when art and science and philosophy all seemed to be converging as one, and when it seemed just possible, at least to Leonardo da Vinci, that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of everything.

About Toby Lester

Toby Lester has written extensively for The Atlantic. His work has also been featured on the radio show This American Life. His previous book, The Fourth Part of the World, was highly acclaimed worldwide and has been translated into seven languages.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Every once in a while that rare book comes along that is not only wonderfully written and utterly compelling but also alters the way you perceive the world. Toby Lester’s “Da Vinci’s Ghost” is such a book. Like a detective, Lester uncovers the secrets of an iconic drawing and pieces together a magisterial history of art and ideas and beauty.” –David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

“Marvelously imaginative, exhaustively researched. . . . Guiding the reader Virgil-like through the Age of Discovery, Lester introduces a chronologically and conceptually vast array of Great Men (Columbus, Vespucci, Polo, Copernicus, et al.), competing theories, monastic sages, forgotten poets, opportunistic merchants, unfortunate slaves, and more. That he relates it all so cleanly and cogently—via elegant prose, relaxed erudition, measured pacing, and purposeful architecture—is a feat. That he proffers plentiful visual delights, including detailed views of the legendary document, is a gift. This map, Lester writes, ‘draws you in, reveals itself in stages, and doesn’t let go.’ Nor does this splendid volume.” —The Atlantic

“Erudite, elegant, enthralling. This is a wonderful book. Toby Lester understands, and makes us understand, the unique intensity with which Leonardo saw the world. He saw it not only in its infinite diversity but also as an impression of his own self, an explanation of what it means to be human. Hence Vitruvian Man.” –Sister Wendy Beckett, author of The Story of Painting

The Measure of All Things - ‘Da Vinci’s Ghost’ Examines One of the Artist’s Most Famous Images

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Albert Einstein wrote that the mind “always has tried to form for itself a simple and synoptic image of the surrounding world.” During the Renaissance, when the ancient Greek idea of man as the measure of all things leapt to the forefront of intellectual life, the human body became a preferred object for this type of “synoptic” speculation. In a widely read treatise titled “Divina Proportione” (1509), the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli echoed fashionable opinions of the day by declaring that our body measurements express “every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature.” Pacioli’s close friend Leonardo da Vinci provided illustrations.

In the richly rewarding history “Da Vinci’s Ghost,” Toby Lester, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, shows that Leonardo had long been fascinated by the concept of man as a microcosm of the universe. Before the Pacioli collaboration, the idea had inspired what has since become one of Leonardo’s most famous images, “Vitruvian Man” (circa 1490), a careful line drawing of a nude male figure whose outstretched arms and legs fit perfectly in the bounds of a circle and a square. “Vitruvian Man” has entered popular culture as an emblem of Leonardo’s genius — redolent of secret knowledge, referred to in the initial crime scene of “The Da Vinci Code” and reproduced on the face of the Italian one-euro coin. But as Lester points out, “almost nobody knows its story.” [Read the full article...]

Stay Awake: Haunting And Suspenseful Stories by Dan Chaon

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:14:18 +0000

Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.

A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.

Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

About Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications; and Await Your Reply, which was a New York Times Notable Book and appeared on more than a dozen “Best of the Year” lists. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

Editorial Review

“With this arresting collection, Chaon again demonstrates his mastery of the short story. . . . Chaon brings readers fantastically close, slowly drawing them into the anxiety or loneliness or remorse of his characters, and building great anticipation for the twists to come.”—Publishers Weekly

Fumbling in the Dark - ‘Stay Awake,’ Stories by Dan Chaon

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

In his somber, beautifully constructed 2009 novel, “Await Your Reply,” Dan Chaon presented three interlocking narratives, each involving a form of identity theft. Midway through, in a strangely haunting scene, a man and a woman are wandering the ruins of a drowned town: Nebraska’s own Atlantis, the man calls it. A reservoir that once flooded the place has dried up. Old buildings, now exposed, are washed out and ghostly, standing derelict amid silt and scrub grass. In both that novel and this new collection of stories, much of the world has that same quality of erosion and insubstantiality. Even the people seem hollowed out, teetering on the verge of collapse.

A curious aspect of the stories in “Stay Awake” is the recurring use Chaon makes of a few distinctive motifs. A man loses a finger in a fall from a ladder. Someone glimpses through a window a figure not of this world. A parent commits suicide. Children are deformed, abducted, sent away to foster families, even murdered. Yet the echoes within these narrative elements aren’t evidence of creative limitation. The sense, rather, is of a narrow cluster of related ideas being urgently worked out. These stories feel as though they had been written fast, one after another, expressing with some urgency a closely related set of variations on a given theme. [Read the full article...]

‘Stay Awake’: Stories On Grief And Everything After

NPR Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Grieving is a series of a million heartbreaks. Every morning, you wake, temporarily freed of the memory of what you’ve lost, only to have the memory rush in and crush you all over again. Mourning meddles with sleep and thought; it makes an hour feel like a month, and a year seem like a lifetime. Most people survive it, but not without a sense of lost time — and that they have lost something of themselves along the way.

It’s that uneasy feeling, that sometimes blurry line between the dreaming and waking lives, that is the theme of Dan Chaon’s darkly beautiful short story collection Stay Awake. It almost reads like a novel in fragments. Although each story contains different characters, there’s an unsettling thematic commonality among them. People are lost — to car accidents, suicides or diseases — and their loved ones do their best to get by. Often unsuccessfully.

In “Take This, Brother, May It Serve You Well,” an alcoholic widower with heart problems goes on a bender in downtown Portland years after the death of his wife. The descent feels like a slow, excruciating suicide. [Read the full article...]

Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:58:17 +0000

William S. Burroughs was one of the twentieth century’s most iconoclastic literary and artistic figures, an inimitable writer whose groundbreaking work in novels such as Junky and Naked Lunch forever altered the shape of American culture. Now, in this long anticipated collection, editor Bill Morgan takes readers through Burroughs’ correspondence from the early sixties through the mid-seventies, in more than three hundred letters that document Burroughs’ steady drift away from the Beat circle and that witness an era in which he became the center of a new coterie of creative people who would establish his reputation as an influential artistic and cultural leader beyond the literary world, toward multimedia.

Written to recipients such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Burroughs’ son, Billy Burroughs Jr., these letters shed new light on the writer’s controversial artistic process and literary experimentation, as well as his complex personal life. Here are letters to new friends in North Africa and Eur-ope—partners in Burroughs’ expatriate life—including Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Michael Portman, Alex Trocchi, and the surrealist artist Brion Gysin, who became a close confidant and whose “cut-up method” would deeply influence Burroughs’ writing.

An intimate glimpse into the private life of an often misunderstood artist, Rub Out the Words is also an unforgettable portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most uncompromising literary personalities.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About William S. Burroughs

Born in 1914 to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, William S. Burroughs was one of the most significant people in twentieth-century American popular culture and literature. A novelist, poet, and essayist, he was a primary member of the Beat Generation, influential upon such writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs was the author of eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays, among them the 1959 classic Naked Lunch. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974. He died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1997.

Editorial Review

Beat Generation expert Morgan (The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, 2010, etc.) has assembled a representative selection from the 1,000-plus letters that Burroughs (1914–1997) wrote during the 15 years the collection comprises. Most are to three correspondents: his son, Billy; his friends and colleagues Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin. Billy, we learn through the letters, had adolescent troubles with drugs (are we surprised?), including several arrests—but by the end of these letters he was married and having some publishing success as William Burroughs Jr. Ginsberg’s role as principal confidante was soon assumed by Gysin, to whom Burroughs wrote most frankly about everything from gay porn to drugs and Timothy Leary (whom he grew to revile) to philosophies of composition to books he liked (Dune, The Godfather) or despised (In Cold Blood). Included is a vicious letter Burroughs wrote in 1970 to Truman Capote, accusing Capote of betraying, even killing, his talent. Many of the letters deal with the process first employed by Gysin and then adopted and championed by Burroughs—the “cut-up” process. For years Burroughs was enamored of this technique of snipping passages from publications and pasting them up in novel arrangements. He tried the technique with photographs, motion pictures and audio recordings as well—all discussed at length in the letters. Burroughs also followed some complex choreography with scientology and L. Ron Hubbard, whom he later accused of creating a “fascist cosmos.” Perhaps most surprising: Burroughs’ phenomenal work ethic and assiduousness. – Kirkus Reviews

After ‘Lunch’ – The Letters William S. Burroughs Wrote at the Height of His Success

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1959, as this collection begins, William S. Burroughs was living in Paris at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur, the address that would come to be known as “the Beat Hotel.” “Naked Lunch” had just been published by the Olympia Press; because of censorship it would not be published in the United States for another three years. He was collaborating with the British artist and writer Brion Gysin on a variety of experimental procedures. Gysin had just accidentally discovered the cut-up method, in which pages of different texts are cut into sections and combined and rearranged to form new meanings. The two were also making tape-recorder montages and tinkering with a stroboscopic device called the dream machine. Burroughs was then at the height of his literary activity, working on many of his most important books, from “The Soft Machine” to “The Wild Boys,” within the following few years. Consequently, “Rub Out the Words,” unlike its predecessor (“The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959,” edited by Oliver Harris, 1993), is longer on argument than on incident.

Although the book includes roughly two dozen letters to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs had by then shifted his focus away from his erstwhile Beat comrades. He made only a handful of brief, mostly business-related visits to the United States during this period (the collection ends with his move back to New York in 1974, after 25 years abroad). He became famous in the 1960s, although the letters only obliquely reflect this. He certainly did not become rich; feuds with and complaints to and about his various publishers, generally on the subject of money, form a recurring subtheme. He was now at least temporarily free of his heroin addiction, apparently thanks to the apomorphine treatment devised by Dr. John Yerby Dent of London, and there are a great many repetitive proselytizing letters on that subject addressed to people around the world. (Apomorphine, which is not an opiate, has never been proved effective as a cure for addiction, although it is used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.) [Read the full article...]

The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards by William J Broad

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:38:51 +0000

IN THIS REMARKABLE BOOK ABOUT YOGA, William Broad, a lifelong practitioner, shows us that uncommon states are integral to a hidden world of risk and reward that lies beneath clouds of myth, superstition, and hype.Five years in the making, The Science of Yoga draws on more than a century of painstaking research to present the first impartial evaluation of a practice thousands of years old. It celebrates what’s real and shows what’s illusory, describes what’s uplifting and beneficial and what’s flaky and dangerous—and why. Broad illuminates how yoga can lift moods and inspire creativity. He exposes moves that can cripple and kill. As science often does, this groundbreaking book also reveals mysteries. It presents a fascinating body of evidence that raises questions about whether humans have latent capabilities for entering states of suspended animation and unremitting sexual bliss.The Science of Yoga takes us on a riveting tour of unknown yoga that goes from old archivesin Calcutta to the world capitals of medical research, from storied ashrams to spotless laboratories, from sweaty yoga studios with master teachers to the cozy offices of yoga healers. Broad unveils a burgeoning global industry that attracts not only curious scientists but true believers and charismatic hustlers. In the end, he shatters myths, lays out unexpected benefits, and offers a compelling vision of how the ancient practice can be improved.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About William J Broad

William J. Broad has practiced yoga since 1970. A bestselling author and senior writer at The New York Times, he has won every major award in print and television during more than thirty years as a science journalist. With New York Times colleagues, he has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as an Emmy and a DuPont. He is the author or coauthor of seven books, including Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, a #1 New York Timesbestseller. He lives in the New York metropolitan area with his wife and three children. He enjoys doing Sun Salutations.

Editorial Reviews

“Yoga, an ancient practice with millions of modern practitioners, has been the subject of overheated speculation and grandiose claims; it has been dismissed without warrant as well, underappreciated by some who might well benefit from it. The Science of Yoga is a lucid and long overdue account of what scientists have found in their attempts to ferret out the truth about what yoga can and cannot do to heal and make better the body and mind. It is a fascinating and important book.” — Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind and Touched With Fire

“The Science of Yoga offers a riveting, much-needed, clear-eyed look at the yoga mystique. In this investigation, science journalist William Broad pulls back the curtain on the little-discussed world of yoga injuries and risks, while setting the record straight about the numerous potential benefits. Downward dog will never look the same.” — Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

“If this book doesn’t motivate you to practice yoga, nothing will. Broad sheds light on yoga’s health benefits and hoaxes, covering everything from headstands to hypertension, the vagus nerve to the YogaButt. Finally I understand why I feel so good when I do yoga. His lively exploration of its evolution from Benares to Beverly Hills flows like any great practice should – with intelligence, good humor and some mindblowing insights.” — Priscilla Warner, author of Learning to Breathe – My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life and co-author of The Faith Club

Going to the Mats

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

In “The Science of Yoga,” William J. Broad brings something unusual to his subject: an open mind. Broad, the book’s biographical note informs us, has practiced yoga since 1970. For nearly that long he has also been a science reporter for The New York Times, writing books like “Teller’s War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception” along the way. But Broad brings neither the boosterism of a yoga devotee nor the leeriness of a professional skeptic to his project — just curiosity, energy and a commitment to follow where his investigations lead. That route turns out to be a long and meandering one, ending up at an ambiguous, or at least ambivalent, conclusion. Though “The Science of Yoga” lacks the clarity of a book that sets out to define and defend a preconceived position, what it does offer is an intellectually honest exploration that is true to yoga’s own winding path.

Broad’s objective is simple enough: to evaluate in scientific terms the claims made for yoga. But this turns out to be more complicated than it seems. For one thing, there are the sheer number and variety of those claims: yoga, it is said, can prevent heart disease, reverse aging, eliminate pain, and bestow serenity and peace. Broad patiently and exhaustively examines the evidence for each of these assertions, revealing surprises along the way. Yes, yoga can reduce anxiety and improve mood. No, it won’t help the overweight shed pounds. Yes, it may actually slow the body’s biological clock. Broad doesn’t just discuss the results of the scientific literature; he weighs the relative prestige of the journal in which the studies were published and scrutinizes each experiment’s design and methodology. This is more information than some readers may want, but Broad leaves no doubt that he’s done his homework. [Read the whole article...]

Raylan: The New U.S. Marshal Givens Novel by Elmore Leonard

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:10:38 +0000

The revered New York Times bestselling author, recognized as “America’s greatest crime writer” (Newsweek), brings back U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, the mesmerizing hero of Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the hit FX series Justified.

With the closing of the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal mines, marijuana has become the biggest cash crop in the state. A hundred pounds of it can gross $300,000, but that’s chump change compared to the quarter million a human body can get you—especially when it’s sold off piece by piece.

So when Dickie and Coover Crowe, dope-dealing brothers known for sampling their own supply, decide to branch out into the body business, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens to stop them. But Raylan isn’t your average marshal; he’s the laconic, Stetson-wearing, fast-drawing lawman who juggles dozens of cases at a time and always shoots to kill. But by the time Raylan finds out who’s making the cuts, he’s lying naked in a bathtub, with Layla, the cool transplant nurse, about to go for his kidneys.

The bad guys are mostly gals this time around: Layla, the nurse who collects kidneys and sells them for ten grand a piece; Carol Conlan, a hard-charging coal-mine executive not above ordering a cohort to shoot point-blank a man who’s standing in her way; and Jackie Nevada, a beautiful sometime college student who can outplay anyone at the poker table and who suddenly finds herself being tracked by a handsome U.S. marshal.

Dark and droll, Raylan is pure Elmore Leonard—a page-turner filled with the sparkling dialogue and sly suspense that are the hallmarks of this modern master.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has written more than 40 books during his highly successful writing career, including the bestsellers Road Dogs, Up in Honey’s Room, The Hot Kid, Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, and the critically acclaimed collection of short stories, When the Women Come Out to Dance. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Be Cool. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.

Editorial Review

The first and most successful of the stories complicates Raylan’s apprehension of marijuana trader Angel Arenas with the discovery that the dealers with whom Angel was meeting left with his money, his grass and his kidneys, which they propose to sell back to him for $100,000 (the price they demand for either one or both). Raylan’s questioning of Pervis Crowe, eastern Kentucky’s top marijuana grower, soon leads him to a transplant nurse known, for excellent reasons, as Layla the Dragon Lady. Their encounter ends with a sizable body count and Pervis’s oath of vengeance. Raylan’s second adventure pits him against Carol Conlan, a law-school–trained vice president of M-T Mining, whose skills in dealing with the problems that beset her employer extend far beyond the courtroom. After their conflict ends in a standoff, Leonard introduces still another strong woman, poker-playing Butler College student Jackie Nevada, who’s staked by aging horseman Harry Burgoyne, who’d appeared more briefly in the first tale. The villain of this third piece, Delroy Lewis, forces three of his female acquaintances to rob banks and then gets mighty annoyed when one of them ends up with an exploding dye packet. The fadeout finds Leonard acting as if he’s wrapped everything up, but you have to wonder.

A master’s valedictory canter around a familiar track—an unimpressive job of carpentry that’s still treasurable for Leonard’s patented dialogue and some truly loopy situations handled with deadpan brio. – Kirkus Reviews

Back on the Case

The New York Times Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the “most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,” is “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught. However, there’s more to it, which I didn’t pass on: “Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”

Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of “proper usage” is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning “Raylan.” At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery.

While relatively new to Leonard’s novels, I’m not new to the subject matter here. The titular character, Raylan Givens, is also the protagonist of an excellent FX television series, “Justified,” which is based on Leonard’s novella “Fire in the Hole,” originally published as an e-book in 2000. Givens appeared in two earlier books — “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap” — but the success of “Justified” has prompted Leonard to put him back on the job. [Read the full article...]

The Miseducation of Cameron Post – A Lesbian Coming-Of-Age Novel by Emily M. Danforth

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:49:04 +0000

When Cameron Post’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they’ll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl.

But that relief doesn’t last, and Cam is soon forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone (as her grandmother might say), and Cam becomes an expert at both.

Then Coley Taylor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship—one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, ultrareligious Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to “fix” her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self—even if she’s not exactly sure who that is.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a stunning and unforgettable literary debut about discovering who you are and finding the courage to live life according to your own rules.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Emily M. Danforth

Emily M. Danforth was born and raised in Miles City, Montana. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she’s worked as the assistant director of the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference. She teaches creative writing and literature courses at Rhode Island College and is coeditor of The Cupboard. This is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

“Danforth’s narrative of a bruised young woman finding her feet in a complicated world is a tremendous achievement: strikingly unsentimental, and full of characters who feel entirely rounded and real. A story of love, desire, pain, loss—and, above all, of survival. An inspiring read.” (Sarah Waters, author of THE LITTLE STRANGER )

“This novel is a joy—one of the best and most honest portraits of a young lesbian I’ve read in years—lively, funny, brash, and oh, so true! An absorbing, suspenseful, and important book.” (Nancy Garden, author of ANNIE ON MY MIND )

“A beautifully told story that is at once engaging and thoughtful. THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST is an important book—one that can change lives. ” (Jacqueline Woodson, award-winning author of AFTER TUPAC AND D FOSTER and HUSH )

Not Just for Kids: ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – February 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

There’s something about the open spaces of the Great Plains that make the exploration of nascent homosexuality even more alienating and risky than the same experience in a big city or suburb. At least that’s the story detailed in Emily Danforth’s young adult debut, “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” a book that reads like a literary response to the Katy Perry hit “I Kissed a Girl” if it took place under a big Montana sky.

Cameron Post is just 12 when she kisses her best girl friend on a dare — ostensibly as practice for future liaisons with boys. “No one had ever told me, specifically, not to kiss a girl before, [but] nobody had to,” Cameron writes in a novel penned from her perspective. “It was guys and girls who kissed in our grade, on TV, in the movies, in the world. That’s how it worked.”

Yet Cameron not only kissed a girl. She liked it.

That realization is followed a few hours later by the news Cameron’s parents were killed in a car crash, but the sorrow she feels at her parents’ death is tempered with even greater relief that no one knew about her more-than-friendly lip lock in a hay loft — and guilt that the crash may have been God’s punishment. That juxtaposition of emotions speaks volumes about shame and the societal taboo of lesbianism, especially in a small Christian community. It also forms the emotional core of this powerful novel exploring the nature of sexual identity and whether it’s a choice. [Read the full article...]

‘Miseducation’: A Cowgirl Coming-Out Story For Teens

NPR Book Review – February 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

Reading a coming-out novel, for me, can feel like approaching a lit fuse. I know it’s going to explode, but I’m not sure when. Many of them follow a formula: character struggles with homosexual desire in a homophobic world; character falls in tormented, transformative love; character is unceremoniously outed. Boom. In the fallout, things usually get a lot worse before they get better. As a formula, especially within young adult fiction, the story isn’t new. But sometimes, a book appears that shows why the formula endures. It can still work because it is still true.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Emily M. Danforth’s debut, is a coming-out novel, but while it follows the formula’s general trajectory, it also transcends it and demonstrates why these stories still need to be told.

Written in the first person from Cameron’s perspective as she looks back on her so-called “miseducation,” the novel opens in 1989. Cameron is 12 years old, and her parents have just died in a car accident. When she learns that she has been orphaned, her first feeling is relief: Her parents won’t ever learn that only the day before, she had been kissing her best friend, Irene. Cameron’s guilt over the kiss — and her attraction to girls — becomes tangled with her grief in complicated ways. Danforth makes sure that the knot of emotions buried deep in Cameron isn’t unraveled quickly or easily. There are no shortcuts to Cameron’s story, and that’s the reason it works. [Read the full article...]

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:31:49 +0000

These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.

The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.

Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander’s short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, which earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

“Englander’s new collection of stories tells the tangled truth of life in prose that, as ever, surprises the reader with its gnarled beauty . . . Certifiable masterpieces of contemporary short-story art.”
—Michael Chabon

“A resounding testament to the power of the short story from a master of the form. Englander’s latest hooks you with the same irresistible intimacy, immediacy and deliciousness of stumbling in on a heated altercation that is absolutely none of your business; it’s what great fiction is all about.”
—Téa Obreht

“It takes an exceptional combination of moral humility and moral assurance to integrate fine-grained comedy and large-scale tragedy as daringly as Nathan Englander does.”
—Jonathan Franzen

Book review: ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank’ by Nathan Englander

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

Give Nathan Englander credit for chutzpah. The title of his new book of short fiction, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” draws on two iconic antecedents: the young diarist killed at Bergen-Belsen and the Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Each, in its way, informs the collection; each, in its way, helps to set the terms. And what are those terms? The tension between the religious and the secular, between the American setting of much of this work and the more elusive textures of Jewish life.

For Englander — a self-proclaimed “apostate,” raised in an Orthodox community in Long Island, now living in Brooklyn by way of Jerusalem — this is a defining issue. “But what do you do,” he (or a character very much like him) asks in a story called “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side,” “if you’re American and have no family history and all your most vivid childhood memories are only the plots of sitcoms, if even your dreams, when pieced together, are the snippets of movies that played in your ear while you slept?”

The triumph of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” is Englander’s ability to balance one against the other, to find, even as he’s calling it unfindable, the deeper story, the more nuanced narrative. “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is a perfect case in point: Broken into 63 numbered sections, it is a story about the search for a viable story, in which the disconnected pieces come together to make a kind of sense. “What you do is tell the stories you have, as best you can,” the protagonist’s girlfriend tells him although, almost immediately, she backtracks: “I don’t mean that. … You find better stories than that.” [Read the full article...]

Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World’s Most Famous Film School by Steve Boman

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:00:04 +0000

In this comic and moving and completely true tale, Film School reveals what life is like at the elite school that trained Hollywood’s biggest names.

When Midwestern journalist Steve Boman applied to the University of Southern California’s vaunted School of Cinematic Arts, the world’s oldest and most prestigious film school, he had more than a few strikes against him: His wife was recovering from thyroid cancer. His beloved sister had just died of leukemia. He lost his job. He had three young children. He was in his late 30s…. And he had no experience in filmmaking.

As Boman navigates his way through USC’s arduous three-year graduate production program, he finds that his films fall flat, he’s threatened with being kicked out of the program and he becomes the old guy no one wants to work with. Defeated, he quits and moves back to the Midwest to be with his family. After he is urged by his wife to reapply, he miraculously gets in for a second time…only to have a stroke on the first day of classes. But instead of doing the easy thing – running away again — Boman throws caution to the wind and embraces the challenge. He slowly becomes a gray-haired Golden Boy at USC with films that sparkle. And then he does the impossible: While still in school, for a class project, he dreams up a television series that CBS catches wind of and develops into THREE RIVERS, a primetime Sunday night show.

This story of challenge and triumph—and what it takes to make it in the world’s most famous film school—is a must-read for anyone aspiring to become a Hollywood great or anyone just looking for a good story.

About Steve Boman

Steve Boman was just your average middle-aged ex-newspaper reporter and stay-at-home dad when he applied to be a student at the University of Southern California’s vaunted School of Cinematic Arts. Boman didn’t know what would await him at the world’s oldest and most prestigious film school, a place that has trained Hollywood heavyweights George Lucas, John Carpenter, James Ivory, Judd Apatow, Brian Grazer, Shonda Rhimes, John Singleton, Jay Roach, Conrad Hall, and many others.

Editorial Reviews

Film School is a must-read for anyone who has ever wanted to attend USC (myself included) or any other film program. It’s also a great motivator for anyone who wants to change careers but worries that it’s too late (me again). And have I mentioned how freaking awesome the cover is? — from Chicks Dig Books.

His approach is reminiscent of the Harvard student who became an able-bodied seaman in the 1830s and sailed in a tall ship around Cape Horn to write the classic of experiential journalism, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST.- From David Howard’s foreword to Film School.

“Read Steve Boman’s Film School to understand all the effort, heartbreak, creativity, begging, stealing, joy, backstabbing and stamina that it takes to make movies. Part exposé, part-American-Dream-come-true, Boman’s keenly observant and fascinating book takes the shine off of the glamour we know as Hollywood and shows us the real world of making movies.”
—Ali Selim, writer and director of SWEETLAND, 2007 Independent Spirit winner; director of episodes of IN TREATMENT, CRIMINAL MINDS

Book review: Steve Boman tells tales from ‘Film School’ at USC

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – January 31, 2012 (Excerpt)

I’ve always thought of advanced degrees in filmmaking as finishing school for misfits. Brilliant misfits, some of them. But misfits just the same.

Into the film school world stumbles Steve Boman, a former reporter seeking a midlife U-turn. Astoundingly, even to him, the father of three has been accepted into the graduate program at USC’s esteemed School of Cinematic Arts, where he will compete against hipsters half his age in the series of ever-larger student films over the course of a three-year program.

If you’re thinking “Paper Chase” for the movie set, you wouldn’t be far off. USC is, after all, the equivalent of the Harvard Law School of filmmaking, with all the quirks, all-night study sessions and faculty mind games such elite institutions seems to produce.

In “Film School,” Boman writes casually and very personally of his experiences. He doesn’t pull a lot of punches, but neither does he mock his cohorts and instructors, though the temptation must have been mighty. In true moviemaking fashion, he sets the scene and lets it play out for the reader:

“[Our instructor] appears to be sleeping or meditating or just plain ignoring us. We students file past and quietly take a seat. We hardly know each other, much less who this guy is. We think he’s the lead instructor, but maybe he’s a wayward parent or a homeless guy. A couple of my classmates look at me questioningly, wondering if I have a clue what’s going on. I shrug. I know as little as they do.” [Read the full article...]

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:23:13 +0000

In the years following World War II, a small group of gay writers established themselves as literary power players, fueling cultural changes that would resonate for decades to come, and transforming the American literary landscape forever.

In EMINENT OUTLAWS, novelist Christopher Bram brilliantly chronicles the rise of gay consciousness in American writing. Beginning with a first wave of major gay literary figures-Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, and James Baldwin-he shows how (despite criticism and occasional setbacks) these pioneers set the stage for new generations of gay writers to build on what they had begun: Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Tony Kushner, and Edward Albee among them.

Weaving together the crosscurrents, feuds, and subversive energies that provoked these writers to greatness, EMINENT OUTLAWS is a rich and essential work. With keen insights, it takes readers through fifty years of momentous change: from a time when being a homosexual was a crime in forty-nine states and into an age of same-sex marriage and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Christopher Bram

Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including Gods and Monsters (originally titled Father of Frankenstein), which was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Bram was a 2001 Guggenheim Fellow and received the 2003 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Review

The author, gay himself, does not say much about his own career here—just a couple of modest asides—but he does pay homage to those he considers the godfathers of gay writing, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and the “fairy godfather,” Gore Vidal, to whom Bram returns continually throughout. The author also slams those critics who could not see the literary merit of stories with gay characters and behavior—principally Stanley Kauffmann, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Midge Decter, though Bram points out that writers from Norman Mailer to Andrew Sullivan have at times had “issues.” Bram follows the careers of the godfathers, but he also looks at other important novelists, poets and playwrights, including Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Mark Doty, David Leavitt, Michael Cunningham and many others. Often he pauses for plot summary, analysis and judgment. The author also points out writers he believes have not received sufficient attention, among them Paul Russell, Mark Merlis and Henry Rios. Bram pauses occasionally to rehearse key events in gay cultural history—the Howl obscenity trial, the Stonewall riots, the televised 1968 clash between William F. Buckley Jr., and Vidal, Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade, the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and beyond. Bram also flashes some attitude here and there, and not just toward the enemies of gay writers. He sometimes chides Vidal, shines a harsh light on Capote and calls Edmund White’s novel Caracole “a complete dud.” – Kirkus Reviews

Writers at the Ramparts in a Gay Revolution

The New York Times Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater, first read “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s sprawling 1985 play about the early days of the AIDS crisis, he thought it was a mess. “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read,” Papp said. But the play so moved him that he added, “and I’m crying.”

Papp’s language echoes some of my feelings about Christopher Bram’s new book, “Eminent Outlaws,” a critical and biographical survey of America’s gay writers in the second half of the 20th century.

This book is not a mess, exactly. It’s argumentative and often resonant, and lit from below by a gossipy wit. But its power is less sentence by sentence than cumulative. You don’t realize how much the details of these writers’ books and difficult lives have touched you until the book’s final chapters.

Mr. Bram is a novelist, best known for “Father of Frankenstein” (1995), which became the film “Gods and Monsters.” With “Eminent Outlaws” he has filled a gap in our critical literature. [Read the full article...]

Thinking the Twentieth Century – Essays by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:30:23 +0000

The final book of the brilliant historian and indomitable public critic Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age on to a life of intellectual conflict and engagement.

The twentieth century comes to life as an age of ideas–a time when, for good and for ill, the thoughts of the few reigned over the lives of the many. Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explaining both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments. Spanning an era with unprecedented clarity and insight, Thinking the Twentieth Century is a tour-de-force, a classic engagement of modern thought by one of the century’s most incisive thinkers.

The exceptional nature of this work is evident in its very structure–a series of intimate conversations between Judt and his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder, grounded in the texts of the time and focused by the intensity of their vision. Judt’s astounding eloquence and range are here on display as never before. Traversing the complexities of modern life with ease, he and Snyder revive both thoughts and thinkers, guiding us through the debates that made our world. As forgotten ideas are revisited and fashionable trends scrutinized, the shape of a century emerges. Judt and Snyder draw us deep into their analysis, making us feel that we too are part of the conversation. We become aware of the obligations of the present to the past, and the force of historical perspective and moral considerations in the critique and reform of society, then and now.

In restoring and indeed exemplifying the best of intellectual life in the twentieth century, Thinking the Twentieth Century opens pathways to a moral life for the twenty-first. This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for: Thinking the Twentieth Century is about the life of the mind–and the mindful life.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Tony Judt

Tony Judt was educated at King’s College, Cambridge and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, in addition to being the Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995.

The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the United States. Professor Judt is the author of Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2005, winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.

Editorial Review

That could be a dry task, but for the quiet passion of Judt (The Memory Chalet, 2010, etc.) and Snyder (History/Yale Univ.; Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010, etc.), who spent most of 2009 talking about, in Snyder’s summary, “the limitations (and capacity for renewal) of political ideas, and the moral failures (and duties) of intellectuals in politics.” The authors consider these questions within the framework of 20th-century history and the biography of Judt, who died in 2010. Born in London in 1948, the son of immigrant Jews, Judt grew up with the modern welfare state, benefiting from its meritocratic educational system to attend Cambridge and pursue academic studies focused first on French history, then Eastern Europe after World War II. He was an ardent youthful Zionist who later severely criticized Israeli policies, creating a furor in 2003 with an essay arguing for a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Judt reluctantly took on the role of public intellectual because of a sense—clearly shared by Snyder, their conversations reveal—that the problems currently plaguing America in particular and the advanced industrial economies in general cannot be meaningfully addressed without understanding their deep roots in a history that stretches back to World War I. This history includes the ravages inflicted by unrestrained capitalism, the appeal and very similar failings of communism and fascism, the misguided uses to which the Holocaust has been put and the post-WWII social bargain that unraveled in the ’70s. Judt and Snyder analyze these and many other historical issues with lofty erudition matched by unabashed polemicism—Judt skewers David Brooks as a know-nothing and characterizes Thomas Friedman’s support of the Iraq war as “contemptible”). Social democracy has rarely had better-informed, more ethically rigorous advocates than these two distinguished men. – Kirkus Reviews

Things Fell Apart: Tony Judt’s ‘Twentieth Century’

NPR Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Without history, memory is open to abuse,” writes Tony Judt in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Perhaps more than anything else the late British-American historian wrote, that could have been his credo — his work, especially toward the end of his career, was marked by an almost activist concern for morality, what he called an “explicit ethical engagement.”

That approach made Judt, author of the critically acclaimedPostwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, one of the world’s most controversial historians — but also one of its most admired. After he died in 2010 of Lou Gehrig’s disease, his obituaries made note of both his intellect and his unflagging advocacy. Historians, he wrote, are “also participants in our own time and place and cannot retreat from it,” and he never did.

Thinking the Twentieth Century is Judt’s final work, and it’s fitting that it is just as complex as the historian himself. The book — essentially an edited transcription of conversations between Judt and Yale history professor Timothy Snyder — combines elements of memoir, history and philosophy. Each chapter begins with an autobiographical passage by Judt, tracing his life from his childhood in London, the son of Jewish immigrants, to the months before his death in New York. Following these are discussions with Snyder about European history and political philosophy, covering everything from Marxism and Zionism (both of which Judt once embraced) to the social democracy he advocated in his final years. [Read the full article...]

One Man’s History - Tony Judt Reviews His Life’s Journey

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Tony Judt was known to many people as the public intellectual who aroused a firestorm of criticism for an article he wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2003, calling for Israel to become a binational state and to lose its specifically Jewish character. That essay, as well as biting critiques of the Iraq war and the Israel lobby, earned him considerable enmity in some quarters, mitigated perhaps by the subsequent news that he had developed Lou Gehrig’s disease, to which he succumbed in August 2010.

This public persona is unfortunate because it obscures a much more interesting figure. As a historian of 20th-century Europe, Judt both chronicled and himself represented the huge ideological transformations that occurred between the beginning and end of that century. This life has now been documented in the quasi-autobiographical “Thinking the Twentieth Century.” Conceived after Judt’s illness had already been diagnosed, the book consists of transcriptions of his conversations with Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian who is the distinguished author of a number of well-regarded books on Eastern and Central Europe. Snyder, highly erudite and opinionated himself, is not your typical journalistic interviewer; the book is more a dialogue than an autobiography. [Read the full article...]

How to Be Black – The Ideas Of Blackness by Baratunde Thurston

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:52:04 +0000

If You Don’t Buy This Book, You’re a Racist.

Have you ever been called “too black” or “not black enough”?

Have you ever befriended or worked with a black person?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you.

Raised by a pro-black, Pan-Afrikan single mother during the crack years of 1980s Washington, DC, and educated at Sidwell Friends School and Harvard University, Baratunde Thurston has over thirty years’ experience being black. Now, through stories of his politically inspired Nigerian name, the heroics of his hippie mother, the murder of his drug-abusing father, and other revelatory black details, he shares with readers of all colors his wisdom and expertise in how to be black.

Beyond memoir, this guidebook offers practical advice on everything from “How to Be The Black Friend” to “How to Be The (Next) Black President” to “How to Celebrate Black History Month.”

To provide additional perspective, Baratunde assembled an award-winning Black Panel—three black women, three black men, and one white man (Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like)—and asked them such revealing questions as:

“When Did You First Realize You Were Black?”

“How Black Are You?”

“Can You Swim?”

The result is a humorous, intelligent, and audacious guide that challenges and satirizes the so-called experts, purists, and racists who purport to speak for all black people. With honest storytelling and biting wit, Baratunde plots a path not just to blackness, but one open to anyone interested in simply “how to be.”

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston is the director of digital at The Onion, the cofounder of Jack & Jill Politics, a stand-up comedian, and a globe-trotting speaker. He was named one of the 100 most influential African-Americans of 2011 by The Root and one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine. Baratunde resides in Brooklyn and lives on Twitter (@baratunde).

Editorial Reviews

Struggling to figure out how to be black in the 21st century? Baratunde Thurston has the perfect guide for you…Fans of Stuff White People Like, This Week in Blackness and other blogs that take satirical shots at racial stereotypes are sure to love How to Be Black. (The Root )

“A hilarious look at the complexities of contemporary racial politics and personal identity.” (Booklist )

“A hilarious blend of razor-sharp satire and memoir…Using his own story and humor, Thurston demonstrates that the best way to ‘be’ anything is to simply be yourself.” (Publishers Weekly )

“Terrific…How to Be Black is an assault on nostalgia–a satirical, biographic attack on the idea that ‘blackness’ or any label should be derived from historical description.” (Fast Company )

Baratunde Thurston Explains ‘How To Be Black’

NPR Book Review – February 1, 2012 (Excerpt)

It’s no coincidence that Baratunde Thurston’s new memoir and satirical self-help book How to Be Black was slated for release on the first day of Black History Month.

“I feel great about that,” Thurston tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “I think we have a moment every year in our country where everyone buys black stamps and thinks more explicitly about black people and blackness, so it was a perfect month to release a book on this subject.”

Thurston, a stand-up comedian and The Onion‘s digital director, says that he doesn’t get as many gigs this month as one might think.

“There aren’t as many black spokespersons to go around, so I’m happy to play that role from time to time,” he says. “But I think this year will probably be a little bigger than years past.”

That’s because How to Be Black is partially a practical guidebook for anyone looking to befriend or work with a black person, become the next black president or challenge anyone who says they speak for all black people.

But the book isn’t just filled with comedic advice. Thurston weaves together his comedy with thoughtful missives about his own education at Sidwell Friends and Harvard University, and his childhood in one of the worst crack-addled neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. His father was killed in a drug deal when Thurston was 6. His mother was what he describes as a “pan-African hippie type of woman who marched in the streets” and named him Baratunde as a way to “get back to Africa.” [Read the full article...]

Baratunde Thurston teaches you “How To Be Black”

The Washington Post – January 31, 2012 (Excerpt)

Baratunde Thurston, the Onion’s digital director, offers a tongue-in-cheek guide in his autobiographical book “How To Be Black.”

Here are 14 of the Columbia Heights native’s tips, some dating back to his days at a HUD daycare center, Sidwell Friends and Harvard. Want more? Thurston will chat live with readers on Friday, Feb. 3 at 11am EST.