Anne Perry’s acclaimed Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels have made London’s exclusive world of wealth and power an addictive literary destination for readers everywhere. This new masterpiece, a haunting story of love and treason, invites us not only into the secret places of Britain’s power but also into the innermost sanctums of the fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Thomas Pitt, once a lowly policeman, is now the powerful head of Britain’s Special Branch, and some people fear that he may have been promoted beyond his abilities. He, too, feels painful moments of self-doubt, especially as rumors reach him of a plot to blow up connections on the Dover-London rail line—on which Austrian duke Alois Habsburg is soon to travel to visit his royal English kin.

Why would anyone destroy an entire train to kill one obscure Austrian royal, or are the rumors designed to distract Pitt from an even more devastating plot? He must resolve this riddle at once, before the damage is done.

Meanwhile, in a London sickroom, an old Italian woman—at the end of a romantic career as a revolutionary spy—is terrified that as she sinks into dementia, she may divulge secrets that can kill. And a beautiful young Croatian woman, married to a British power broker, hoards her own mysteries. Apparently all roads lead to the Continent, and Pitt suspects that between them these two fascinating women could tell him things he desperately needs to know. But as the hours tick by, it seems that the only woman Pitt can count on is his clever wife, Charlotte.

No one sustains mesmerizing suspense better than Anne Perry.  In Pitt’s trial by fire, his wrenching moral dilemma, and his electrifying moment of decision, the beloved bestselling author gives us a climax never to be forgotten.

About Anne Perry

Anne Perry is the bestselling author of two acclaimed series set in Victorian England:  the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, including Treason at Lisson Grove and Buckingham Palace Gardens, and the William Monk novels, includingAcceptable Loss and Execution Dock. She is also the author of a series of five World War I novels, as well as nine holiday novels, most recently A Christmas Homecoming, and a historical novel, The Sheen on the Silk, set in the Ottoman Empire. Anne Perry lives in Scotland.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, the wise and knowing aunt of Pitt’s wife Charlotte, is right to be concerned about her old friend Serafina Montserrat. It’s not just that Serafina’s life is drawing to a close; her illness makes her mind wander, and oftentimes she says things she shouldn’t—and, according to her niece, Nerissa Freemarsh, things that just aren’t true. But Serafina speaks very much to the point when she tells Vespasia that she’s afraid “they’ll kill me” because “I know too much.” Sure enough, the next time Vespasia comes to visit, Serafina has already died. Pitt, who’s already been put on high alert by the hints about very contemporary terrorist threats Serafina has intimated to Vespasia, ascertains that the cause of death was an overdose of laudanum quite impossible for Serafina to have administered to herself. Whodunit? And even more important, why? It doesn’t take long for Pitt (Long Spoon Lane, 2005, etc.) to focus his concern on Duke Alois Habsburg, a decidedly minor noble whose upcoming visit to his cousins in England seems increasingly likely to end with his assassination. But which of the slippery bureaucrats Pitt must deal with in his new capacity as head of Special Branch is the traitor behind the plot? And how can Pitt, who continues to be superstitiously reverent toward his alleged social superiors, smoke out the traitor and deal with him? – Kirkus Reviews

Book World: ‘Dorchester Terrace,’ by Anne Perry

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Downton Abbey” addicts take heart! Season three of that luscious Edwardian bonbon may still be months away from delivery, but mystery dowager Anne Perry stands at the ready with her latest gaslit costume drama, “Dorchester Terrace.”

Speaking of costumes, Perry’s fashion-forward heroines give the Crawley ladies a run for their entailed money: For a soiree at Buckingham Palace, one well-heeled dame dons a billowing pink ball gown with daringly deep decolletage; another soberly struts a deep indigo wool day dress suitable for visiting shut-ins; a third decks herself out in exquisite jet jewelry to mutely signify mourning.

“Upstairs Downstairs”-type class tensions waft through Perry’s swank London townhouses as thickly as they do the passageways of Downton. (Indeed, the solution to one of the murders in this novel emerges after Perry’s detective hero, Thomas Pitt — himself the son of a gamekeeper — has a confidential chin-wag over a pot of tea with the housekeeper in a prominent household.) And, most ominously, the approaching storm of World War I twists nerves taut in both the British soap opera and Perry’s stately page-turner.

“Dorchester Terrace” is the 25th suspense novel featuring Perry’s married sleuths, Charlotte and Thomas Pitt. Through adventure after adventure, Thomas has diligently risen through the police ranks to finally ascend, here, to the apex: the august position of head of the Special Branch. Unfortunately, he barely has time to bask in that honor before the sky falls down. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

As one of the greatest rock icons of all time, Gregg Allman has lived it all and then some. For almost fifty years, he’s been creating some of the most recognizable songs in American rock, but never before has he paused to reflect on the long road he’s traveled. Now, he tells the unflinching story of his life, laying bare the unvarnished truth about his wild ride that has spanned across the years.

The story begins simply: with Gregg and his older brother, Duane, growing up in the South, raising hell with their guitars, and drifting from one band to another. But all that changed when Duane and Gregg came together with four other men to forge something new—a unique sound shaped by soul, rock, and blues and brimming with experimentation; a sound not just of a band, but of a family.

Bringing to life the carefree early days of the Allman Brothers Band, Gregg holds nothing back—from run-ins with the law to meeting girls on the road, from jamming at the Fillmore East to experimenting with drugs. Along the way, he goes behind the scenes of some of greatest rock music ever recorded, without shying away from the infamous and painful deaths of his brother, Duane, and Allman Brothers bassist Berry Oakley. Speaking for the first time about the profound impact that his brother’s death had on him, Gregg offers a tribute to Duane that only a younger brother could write, showing how, to this day, he still confronts the grief of losing his big brother, even as Duane continues to guide and inspire him.

Setting the record straight about the band’s struggles in the face of death, Gregg shows how the decision to persevere came with a heavy price. While the rock and roll excesses of drugs, alcohol, and personality clashes led to a series of breakups that culminated with the band’s permanent reunion in 1989, Gregg fought his own battle with substance abuse, going to rehab no less than eleven times and floating through a string of failed marriages, including his tabloid-frenzied relationship with Cher, before finally cleaning up once and for all.

Capturing the Allman Brothers’ ongoing, triumphant resurgence as well as his own recent fight against hepatitis C and featuring over one hundred photos from throughout the band’s history, Gregg presents a story as honest as it is fascinating, providing a glimpse inside one of the most beloved and notorious bands in the history of rock music and demonstrating how, through it all, the road goes on . . . forever.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Gregg Allman

Gregg Allman is one of the original members of the Allman Brothers Band and a legend of American music. A recipient of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and continues to make music as a solo artist and with the Allman Brothers. A multiple Grammy Award winner, he has sold millions of records around the world, with his most recent album, Low Country Blues, debuting at No. 5 on the Billboard chart. He lives in Georgia.

Alan Light is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone and the New York Times. The former editor-in-chief of Spin and Vibe magazines, he is a two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing.

Editorial Review

Addicted to drugs and alcohol for much of his adult life and married multiple times, the author certainly has a hayloft full of celebrity scandal to sift through. While ABB’s principal songwriter and lead vocalist covers all of his lowlights, he’s much more interested in exploring the fantastic blend of blues, rock and jazz that so famously bonded he and late brother Duane to four other maverick musicians starting in the late 1960s. This is a story about musical brotherhood. With gentlemanly charm and compassion, the author vividly recounts how a guitar first transformed the lives of two restless boys living in Florida with their widowed mom. Allman’s portrayal of his complicated relationship with Duane is rich and moving. Although dead by the age of 24 following a tragic motorcycle crash, Duane (considered one of the greatest guitar players of all-time) nonetheless looms large in these pages. The author’s ability to share his enduring guilt in the aftermath of Duane’s tragic passing is nothing less than profound. After successfully receiving a new liver in 2010, Allman appears to have at least one more silver dollar left in his pocket. As his many-faceted memoir so effectively demonstrates, the road does, indeed, go on forever for the Allman Brothers Band. – Kirkus Reviews

Gregg Allman’s memoir, ‘My Cross to Bear’

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Gregg Allman didn’t sell his soul to the devil. But if he had, the transaction would probably rate just a paragraph toward the back of his new memoir, “My Cross to Bear,” sandwiched between an ode to motorcycles and a two-sentence account of his fourth marriage.

The Southern blues-rocker, who’s played off and on with the Allman Brothers Band since 1969, has experienced many born-under-a-bad-sign moments. His story includes overdoses, emergency surgeries and rehab stints; six wives and five children (not necessarily from his marriages); and myriad suicides, murders and fatal crashes. As fans know well, older brother Duane died in a motorcycle wreck in 1971, and bassist Berry Oakley perished the same way at almost the same spot a year later. Cynics might say this is routine rock-bio stuff. The weird thing is that Allman seems to agree.

Credited to Allman and rock writer Alan Light, “My Cross to Bear” has a melodramatic title but a phlegmatic outlook. Duane Allman’s death was clearly important to his brother, as it was to a band that had just begun to attract a major following, in large part because of Duane’s guitar prowess. But the loss doesn’t register as particularly important in this just-the-facts telling that gives every event roughly the same emphasis. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department is offered a bit of luxury by friends and supporters within the Party – a week’s vacation at a luxurious resort near Lake Tai, a week where he can relax, and recover, undisturbed by outside demands or disruptions. Unfortunately, the once beautiful Lake Tai, renowned for its clear waters, is now covered by fetid algae, its waters polluted by toxic runoff from local manufacturing plants. Then the director of one of the manufacturing plants responsible for the pollution is murdered and the leader of the local ecological group is the primary suspect of the local police. Now Inspector Chen must tread carefully if he is to uncover the truth behind the brutal murder and find a measure of justice for both the victim and the accused.

About Qiu Xiaolong

QIU XIAOLONG is a poet and author of several previous novels featuring Inspector Chen as well as Years of Red Dust, a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2010.  Born and raised in Shanghai, Qiu lives with his family in St. Louis, Missouri.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Chen Cao, veteran of the Shanghai Police Bureau and renowned writer, is unexpectedly called away from a conference outlining “new responsibilities for Communist Party officials” to visit Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center, noted for its lush natural surroundings. In order to avoid being bothered by his protégé Sergeant Huang Kang and other detectives seeking help, he keeps his respite at the coveted getaway a secret. Ironically, Wuxi has devolved into a shabby resort, its legendary Tai Lake now brackish with pollution, the result of industrial development in the region. Chen finds a kindred intellectual soul in Shanshan, a young woman who proves to also be a font of information about local business in general and the chief polluter in particular: Liu Deming, representative of the People’s Congress of Zhejiang Province and owner of The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company. After Liu is found murdered, the investigative tables are turned when Huang catches the case, forcing Chen to play Watson to his unsteady Holmes. Huang’s slowness is a constant test of Chen’s patience, but he develops an effective strategy of convincing Huang that the suggestions he plants are Huang’s own. A wronged wife and unhappy employees top the list of suspects, with Shanshan a ubiquitous presence. – Kirkus Reviews

Qiu Xiaolong’s ‘Don’t Cry, Tai Lake’ has a political edge, but endearing innocence

The Washington Post Book Review – May 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Qiu Xiaolong, the author of this odd, charming and quite political detective novel, was a teenager in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, the only way he could read Sherlock Holmes stories was to hide his book beneath the red-plastic cover of “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.”

After the madness passed and reading was more permissible, Qiu entered college and studied Chinese and English literature. He particularly loved the poetry of  T.S. Eliot . In 1988, a fellowship took him to St. Louis — Eliot’s birthplace — where Qiu and his family still live and where he has since written seven novels about the poetry-loving Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai police.

Chen’s crime-fighting successes have brought him fame as an eccentric but brilliant detective. His eccentricities include the fact that, even in the middle of an investigation, he might pause to dash off a poem. He’s an honest cop who roots out corruption, which can put him at odds with Communist Party officials. Fortunately, he has the protection of his mentor, Comrade Secretary Zhao, one of the most powerful men in Beijing.

“Don’t Cry, Tai Lake” begins when Zhao declines a vacation at the Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center, a luxury resort for senior party officials, and sends Chen in his place. The resort is not far from Shanghai and overlooks the huge, once gorgeous Tai Lake. Now the lake is ringed by factories and severely polluted by toxic wastes. That fact, denied by the party faithful and regretted by Chen and a few environmentalists, is the crux of the novel — and Tai Lake is the author’s symbol of the widespread pollution throughout China. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

WHAT IS IT THAT DRIVES THE SUCCESS OF AMERICA AND THE IDENTITY OF ITS PEOPLE? ACCLAIMED WRITER AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE JACK HITT THINKS IT’S BECAUSE WE’RE ALL A BUNCH OF AMATEURS.

America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical garages—fiddling with everything from solar-powered cars to space elevators. In Bunch of Amateurs, Jack Hitt visits a number of different garages and has written a fascinating book that looks at America’s current batch of amateurs and their pursuits. From a tattooed young woman in the Bay Area trying to splice a fish’s glow-in-the-dark gene into common yogurt (all done in her kitchen using salad spinners) to a space fanatic on the brink of developing the next generation of telescopes from his mobile home, Hitt not only tells the stories of people in the grip of a passion but argues that America’s history is bound up in a cycle of amateur surges.

Beginning with Ben Franklin’s kite and leading all the way to the current TV hit American Idol, Hitt argues that the nation’s love of self-invented obsessives has always driven the country to rediscover the true heart of the American dream. Amateur pursuits are typically lamented as a world that just passed until a Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg steps out of his garage (or dorm room) with the rare but crucial success story. In Bunch of Amateurs, Hitt argues that America is now poised to pioneer at another frontier that will lead, one more time, to the newest version of the American dream.

About Jack Hitt

JACK HITT is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and public radio’s This American Life. He also writes for Rolling Stone, GQ, Wired, and, of course, Garden & Gun. He has won the Peabody Award, as well as the Livingston and Pope Foundation Awards. His stories can be heard on This American Life’s greatest hits CD, Lies, Sissies & Fiascoes, and The Best Crimes and Misdemeanors: Stories from The Moth. He is the author of a solo theater performance, currently touring, entitled Making Up the Truth.

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Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Veteran journalist Hitt (Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain, 2005, etc.) posits that various brands of amateurism conceived in the interest of advancing knowledge offer meaningful insights into a uniquely American character. The narrative thread holds together nicely through chapters focusing on the legendary amateurism of Benjamin Franklin, birdwatchers seeking the ivory-billed woodpecker, inventors of various gadgets, genealogists, archaeologists, astronomers and linguists. Hitt wisely concedes that other nations harbor amateurs, as well, but he maintains that American amateurs are notable for their comfort with exploration and with rebelling against authority. Elsewhere in the world, where socioeconomic status is often hardwired at birth, the word “amateur” suggests class warfare. In the United States, the word often carries a hint of adventure. Searching for lasting answers, Hitt studies business theory, providing a serious explanation that outsiders are often not hidebound by the curse of knowledge. In other words, when it comes to reconceiving a workplace, an industry, a charitable endeavor or some other institution, perhaps ignorance sometimes can be considered bliss. Knowing almost nothing about something can become the catalyst driving breakthrough discoveries. When talented amateurs receive positive recognition for their accomplishments, such as the “genius grants” provided annually by the MacArthur Foundation, the white heat of innovation might be kindled further. Hitt inserts himself into the narrative as he meets with living amateurs and discovers newly released material about deceased amateurs. The first-person approach is usually effective because it generates passion about the possibilities of the intellect. – Kirkus Reviews

Americans: A ‘Bunch Of Amateurs,’ And Proud Of It

NPR Book Review – May 19, 2012 (Excerpt)

Jack Hitt says if you drill down into the American spirit to find out what makes Americans so American, you’ll find it’s the fact that we’re all amateurs at heart. In his new book, Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, he pinpoints the first American to use the amateur label to his advantage: Benjamin Franklin.

Flash back to the early days of the Revolutionary War. Franklin has traveled with John Adams to France, and they’re both trying to convince the king to spare the American military some cash. Franklin insisted on wearing the outfit of an American frontiersman — complete with a Davy Crockett-style coonskin cap. Adams hated Franklin’s get-up — he wrote about the ridiculous outfit in letters to his wife, Abigail.

Franklin and Adams met at the gates of Versailles for a meeting with the king, says Hitt: “I just love this image of Franklin stepping out of his carriage in his coonskin cap, while Adams is in his silks and his breeches and his waistcoat and his feathered hat and looking at Franklin like:What are you doing? And Franklin [being] like: You don’t get it, John, this is who they think we are. This is how we’re going to get the money. And of course, Franklin did get us the money.” [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

In February 1943, a group of journalists—including a young wire service correspondent named Walter Cronkite and cub reporter Andy Rooney—clamored to fly along on a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Seven of the sixty-four bombers that attacked a U-boat base that day never made it back to England. A fellow survivor, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. “I think I’m going to say,” mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell.”

During his esteemed career Walter Cronkite issued millions of words for public consumption, but he never wrote or uttered a truer phrase.

Assignment to Hell tells the powerful and poignant story of the war against Hitler through the eyes of five intrepid reporters. Crisscrossing battlefields, they formed a journalistic band of brothers, repeatedly placing themselves in harm’s way to bring the war home for anxious American readers.

Cronkite crashed into Holland on a glider with U.S. paratroopers. Rooney dodged mortar shells as he raced across the Rhine at Remagen. Behind enemy lines in Sicily, Bigart jumped into an amphibious commando raid that nearly ended in disaster. The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling ducked sniper fire as Allied troops liberated his beloved Paris. The Associated Press’s Hal Boyle barely escaped SS storm troopers as he uncovered the massacre of U.S. soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge.

Assignment to Hell is a stirring tribute to five of World War II’s greatest correspondents and to the brave men and women who fought on the front lines against fascism—their generation’s “assignment to hell.”

About Timothy M. Gay

Timothy M. Gay is the author of Satch, Dizzy, & Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball before Jackie Robinson and Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend. His essays and op-eds on American history, politics, public policy, and sports have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, and many other publications. A graduate of Georgetown University, where he majored in American history, Tim lives in Virginia with his wife and children.

Editorial Review

Gay (Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson, 2010, etc.) ambitiously reconstructs the events of WWII through the eyes of the reporters who were on the ground (or in the air) trying to get the scoop first. The New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling fled Paris in advance of the invading Nazis; the AP’s Hal Boyle covered Operation Torch in North Africa; Stars and Stripes cub reporter Andy Rooney accompanied bombing missions to Germany; the New York Herald Tribune’s Homer Bigart witnessed the horrors of the Sicily invasion; and UP correspondent Walter Cronkite got a front seat at the Normandy landings on D-Day. Gay chose these five correspondents over, say, Ernie Pyle, who was already hugely famous, or Martha Gellhorn, because the five were “a journalistic band of brothers” (although one feminine point of view would have added a fresh perspective). Cronkite, Bigart and Rooney had all been trained in the Air Force and formed the core of the ill-fated Writing 69th, while Gay simply admires the work of Liebling, who was one of the oldest reporters. The author considers their newspaper beginnings in forging their styles: Cronkite the “meatball journalist” from Kansas City; how Bigart’s harsh Calvinistic Pennsylvania upbringing and speech impediment helped fashion his taut, wry sentences; Rooney, conscripted from Colgate University, brash and clueless at the Stars and Stripes, went on to make his mark “saluting the unsung grunts behind the scenes.” Boyle, also from Kansas City, worked his way up at AP and established a column while in Morocco, “Leaves from a Correspondent’s Notebook.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Assignment to Hell: The War Against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle” by Timothy M. Gay

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The cause of 60 million deaths, World War II remains the greatest cataclysm the human species has inflicted on itself: an exhibition, if the gods were watching, of humans at their most depraved, but often their most noble. No wonder that seven decades later historians are still toiling to convey the dimensions of that horror, and the glory that often shone through it.

Timothy M. Gay believes that some glory belongs to the daring correspondents who covered the fighting in Europe against Nazi Germany. Five Americans among them are handsomely celebrated in Gay’s “Assignment to Hell” — Walter Cronkite, then of the United Press wire service; Hal Boyle of the Associated Press; Sgt. Andy Rooney of the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes; A.J. Liebling of the New Yorker magazine; and Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune.

The stories they hammered out on portable typewriters, close to — sometimes amid — the actual fighting, their copy wangled through the censorship and somehow back to the United States, established reputations that grew into dazzling postwar careers and lasting fame. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

The author of the highly acclaimed Founding Gardeners now gives us an enlightening chronicle of the first truly international scientific endeavor—the eighteenth-century quest to observe the transit of Venus and measure the solar system.

On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the earth and the sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in remote corners of the world, only to have their efforts thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs: eight years later, the scientists would have another opportunity to succeed.

Chasing Venus brings to life the personalities of the eighteenth-century astronomers who embarked upon this complex and essential scientific venture, painting a vivid portrait of the collaborations, the rivalries, and the volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. In the end, what they accomplished would change our conception of the universe and would forever alter the nature of scientific research.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Andrea Wulf

ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in London, where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of The Brother Gardeners, long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and winner of the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award, and of Founding Gardeners; she is the coauthor (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for The Sunday Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, and she reviews for several newspapers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Editorial Review

Until this busy narrative, Wulf had turned her eyes more earthward with three previous outings about gardens (The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, 2011, etc.). Here she glides easily into the heavens, where she clearly explains how Venus’ transit across the sun, which occurs every 105 years (and each time does so twice, at eight-year intervals—one will occur in June 2012), gave Enlightenment astronomers a chance to figure out such things as the distance between the earth and the sun. Their 1769 calculation—transit-derived—was quite close. The author follows the two international attempts, in 1761 and 1769, to accomplish the measurements from various global viewing points, describing in grim detail the vast difficulties of travel and communication, the geopolitical complications (wars didn’t help) and the various personalities of potentates and scientists that characterized the endeavor. The 1761 transit occurred before everyone were sufficiently ready, and the measurements were disappointing; 1769 was better—though poor Guillaume Le Gentil of France, who’d spent nine years devoted to the projects, saw only clouds at his observatory in Pondicherry, India. Worse, Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche died of typhus only days after his successful recordings. The author notes the imprecision of the instruments, the difficulties of determining precisely when the dark spot of Venus began and ended its journey across the sun’s yellow wafer and the arduous treks Enlightenment men (yes, all men) undertook to Lapland, Tahiti, Hudson Bay and Baja. More than 100 pages of back matter reveal the sturdy research undergirding the lively narrative. – Kirkus Reviews

Perilous Crossing - ‘Chasing Venus,’ by Andrea Wulf

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Next time you find yourself grousing when the passenger in front reclines his seat a smidge too far, consider the astronomers of the Enlightenment. In 1761 and 1769, dozens and dozens of stargazers traveled thousands of miserable miles to observe a rare and awesome celestial phenomenon. They went by sailing ship and open dinghy, by carriage, by sledge and on foot. They endured discomfort that in our own flabby century would generate years of litigation. And they did it all for science: the men in powdered wigs and knee britches were determined to measure the transit of Venus.

That beautiful name, transit of Venus, describes the hours-long passage of our nearest planetary neighbor across the face of the sun. Transits occur in eight-year pairs followed by interludes of more than a century. Their rarity highlights the news hook for Andrea Wulf’s account of this ur-Big Science project: the next transit of Venus happens to be soon, on June 5 and 6, 2012. For a writer, that’s deadline pressure on a cosmic scale.

So get ready for transit-themed crossword puzzles and astronomers on “Good Morning America.” On the day itself, count on a tsunami of Twitter and Tumblr feeds. But from June 7, 2012, until Dec. 11, 2117, all that publicity goes away. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

In the critically acclaimed memoir Girl Meets God, Lauren F. Winner chronicled her sojourn from Judaism to Christianity. Now, in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Winner describes how experiences of loss and failure unexpectedly slam her into a wall of doubt and spiritual despair: “My belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone.”

Witty, relatable, and fiercely honest, Winner lays bare her experience of what she calls the “middle” of the spiritual life. In elegant and spare prose, she explores why—in the midst of the overwhelming anxiety, loneliness, and boredom of her deepest questioning about where (or if) God is—the Christian story still explains who she is better than any other story she’s ever known. Still is an absorbing meditation combining literary grace with spiritual wisdom. It is sure to resonate with anyone looking to sustain a spiritual life in the midst of real life.

About Lauren Winner

Lauren f. Winner is the author of numerous books, including Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath, and teaches at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Books & Culture, and other periodicals.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

In a previous memoir, Girl Meets God (2002), the author detailed her religious conversion to Orthodox Judaism and then Christianity. A decade and a divorce later, she looks at her Episcopalian life post-conversion. Shaken by her failed marriage and her mother’s death, Winner found herself in what she characterizes as an unsettling “middle” moment, “when the things you thought you knew about the spiritual life turn out not to suffice for the life you are actually living.” Throughout this provocative memoir, Winner maintains her insistent deflection of the personal. She claims the book is neither a “manual for ‘getting through’ the middle,” nor a “defense of Christianity,” nor a memoir—“it is not consistently storied enough to count, by my lights, as a memoir.” Yet the book’s most poignant moments are those obviously gleaned from intimate self-reflection or personal experience. While these “notes” may not adhere to the tight chronology characteristic of many memoirs, they do outline a linear spiritual progression common to Christian belief. These kinds of introspective works only succeed when the authors own their doubts and inspiration, which Winner does here, try as she might to claim otherwise. Note, for example, this evocative passage on the plight of losing the ability to pray: “when you don’t know what you believe…prayer sounds like a barefoot hike from Asheville to Paris: it would be nice if you got there, you are sure there is a nice glass of wine and a nice slice of brie waiting for you at some café somewhere, but there is really no way you can imagine actually making the walk.” – Kirkus Reviews

In ‘Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis,’ Lauren F. Winner suffers a spiritual dry patch

The Washington Post Book Review – May 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

It’s very tricky to review a religious, inspirational book. Because what are your criteria? What if your faith is not the same as the author’s? What if the author’s inspiration tastes to you about as inspirational as flat 7UP? If you write disapprovingly, it may sound as though you’re talking trash about God — never a good idea. And what if (God forbid!) you don’t believe in God?

There’s a brand of religious person who not only thinks God is her Best Friend but also that this friendship goes both ways. If you’re looking for a sermon of sorts, here is “Still,” written by Lauren F. Winner, a young woman who was brought up Jewish and converted to Christianity. Now she teaches at Duke Divinity School, and along her spiritual journey, she’s written such books as “Girl Meets God” and “Mudhouse Sabbath.”

In the case of “Still,” the occasion for these pages is the fact that she’s gone through a divorce and is suffering a spiritual dry patch, a diminishment of the ardor she experienced while going through her conversion and shortly after. The first third or so of “Still” is devoted to that feeling of loss or sadness that one feels when one’s faith begins to melt away: “I went to church by habit. I went prompted by some deep-buried intuition. Most days I went brittle, like a dry cake of gingerbread. Like the hinges of an old book.” [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

A longtime backpacker, climber, and skier, Michael Lanza knows our national parks like the back of his hand. As a father, he hopes to share these special places with his two young children. But he has seen firsthand the changes wrought by the warming climate and understands what lies ahead: Alaska’s tidewater glaciers are rapidly retreating, and the abundant sea life in their shadow departs with them. Encroaching tides threaten beloved wilderness coasts like Washington’s Olympic and Florida’s Everglades. Less snowfall and hotter summers will diminish Yosemite’s world-famous waterfalls. And it is predicted that Glacier National Park’s 7,000-year-old glaciers will be gone in a decade.

To Lanza, it feels like the house he grew up in is being looted. Painfully aware of the ecological—and spiritual—calamity that global warming will bring to our nation’s parks, Lanza sets out to show his children these wonders before they have changed forever.

He takes his nine-year-old son, Nate, and seven-year-old daughter, Alex, on an ambitious journey to see as many climate-threatened wild places as he can fit into a year: backpacking in the Grand Canyon, Glacier, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and along the wild Olympic coast; sea kayaking in Alaska’s Glacier Bay; hiking to Yosemite’s waterfalls; rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park; cross-country skiing in Yellowstone; and canoeing in the Everglades.

Through these poignant and humorous adventures, Lanza shares the beauty of each place and shows how his children connect with nature when given “unscripted” time. Ultimately, he writes, this is more their story than his, for whatever comes of our changing world, they are the ones who will live in it.

About Michael Lanza

Michael Lanza is a veteran freelance outdoors writer and photographer. He is the northwest editor of Backpacker magazine, where his articles about the impacts of climate change on Montana’s Glacier National Park and other wild lands helped Backpacker win a National Magazine Award. He runs the website TheBigOutside.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Worried about the increasing evidence that global warming is affecting America’s national parks, Backpacker northwest editor Lanza crammed a year full of visits to 10 sites with his wife and two young children. Based on the premise that his children needed to see these natural wonders before the parks completely disappeared, the book is part family travelogue and part ecological observation. Scientists are not “talking about the distant future; they’re talking about ecological calamities and social breakdown on a scale unprecedented in human history, which many adults alive today will witness.” With this thought ever-present, Lanza writes with a bittersweet tone. He relishes his children’s joy as they discover these natural wonders for the first time and remembers his own first experiences. However, there is also a darker side to the narrative, as the author contemplates the sometimes-drastic changes that have taken place in the last 30-40 years. Glaciers that no longer exist in Glacier National Park, the erosion of shorelines as sea storms grow in strength, the death of Joshua trees in California’s Joshua Tree National Park—each site is under attack from events instigated primarily by humans. Although Lanza has opened the doors to this world to his children and readers alike, he offers no solutions to the current problems. His best advice: See what you can of these natural wonders before it’s too late. – Kirkus Reviews

“Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks” by Michael Lanza

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Michael Lanza begins this account of family camping by sketching the new — but not improved — look that some national parks will take on if global warming is not checked soon. “Yosemite’s famous waterfalls . . . will lose their impressive force and peter out earlier in the year.” “Rising seas will inundate at least one-third of Olympic National Park’s seventy-three-mile-long wilderness coastline.” “Joshua Tree National Park . . . will lose its namesake flora.” Taking along their 8-year-old son, Nate, and their 6-year-old daughter, Alex, Lanza and his wife set out to visit the wilds of 10 national parks, most of them in the West but also including the Everglades in Florida, while the going was good.

In some ways, the kids behaved as you might expect. The profusion of boulders at Joshua Tree inspired them to make the park into a “jungle gym” — not just for themselves but also for their toys. “Using a twenty-foot length of thin utility cord I’ve given them,” Lanza writes, “they lower their stuffed animals down short cliffs.” But fears that Nate and Alex might squawk about being deprived of the comforts of home proved misguided. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Flying the not-so-friendly skies…

In her more than fifteen years as an airline flight attendant, Heather Poole has seen it all. She’s witnessed all manner of bad behavior at 35,000 feet and knows what it takes for a traveler to become the most hated passenger onboard. She’s slept in flight attendant crashpads in “Crew Gardens,” Queens—sharing small bedrooms crammed with bunk beds with a parade of attractive women who come and go at all hours, prompting suspicious neighbors to jump to the very worst conclusions. She’s watched passengers and coworkers alike escorted off the planes by police. She can tell you why it’s a bad idea to fall for a pilot but can be a very good one (in her case) to date a business-class passenger. Heather knows everything about flying in a post-9/11 world—and she knows what goes on behind the scenes, things the passengers would never dream.

Heather’s true stories in Cruising Attitude are surprising, hilarious, sometimes outrageously incredible—the very juiciest of “galley gossip” delightfully intermingled with the eye-opening, unforgettable chronicle of her fascinating life in the sky.

About Heather Poole

Heather Poole has been published in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. Her regular online column, “Galley Gossip: Confessions from the Jumpseat with Heather Poole,” has received more than two million views and is featured on AOL’s award-winning travel website, Gadling.com.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Whether you’re a frequent or once-a-year flier, there’s something for everyone in this witty tell-all.” (Publishers Weekly )

“[An] insider’s perspective on the friendly skies . . . [an] entertaining, gonzo account.” (Booklist )

“A veteran flight attendant’s hilarious take on what really happens behind the scenes at 35,000 feet.” (People )

“Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet” by Heather Poole

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Heather Poole became a flight attendant right out of college in the 1990s, she had no illusions of its being a glamorous profession. After a training program that resembled boot camp crossed with “American Idol,” she made the cut — which meant she had to live on $18,000 a year in New York, bunk with dozens of colleagues in crowded crashpads, and accept that “the only thing consistent about [the] lifestyle is just how inconsistent it truly is.” A friend of Poole’s aptly summed up the flight attendant’s way of life: “If I made as much money as passengers thought I made, worked as little as my neighbors thought I did, or had as much fun on layovers as my friends think I do, I’d have one helluva job.”

The worst part seems to be dealing with difficult passengers, which Poole notes has only gotten more insufferable since Sept. 11. “Cruising Attitude,” Poole’s travelogue-as-memoir, is best when dishing gossip about celebrities on flights and sounding off about difficult passengers. There are those who demand three cubes of ice instead of four, try to eat out of the trash, get belligerent or incapacitated after downing booze and sleeping pills — and even a sleeping passenger who Poole thought was dead. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

A remarkable literary hybrid—part biography, part detective story—about the enduring figure of Robinson Crusoe.

January 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty,Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and mired in political controversy and legal threats. But for the moment he is preoccupied by a younger man on a barren shore—Robinson Crusoe.

Several miles south, another old man, Robert Knox, sits bent over a heavy volume—published nearly forty years before.Knox’s Historical Relation was a best seller when it was published in 1681, just a year after he escaped from Ceylon and returned to England.

Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? Crusoe explores the intertwined lives of two real men, Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox, and the character and book that emerged from their peculiar conjunction. It is the biography of a book and its hero: the story of Defoe, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and of Robert Knox, the man who was Crusoe.

About Katherine Frank

Born and educated in America, Katherine Frank is the author of several acclaimed biographies—of Emily Brontë, Mary Kingsley, and Indira Gandhi. She lives in England.

Editorial Review

At the end of his life, Defoe labeled Crusoe more of an allegory than a novel, implying a good degree of autobiography at the same time. Biographer Frank (Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi, 2002) introduces Robert Knox, once a true captive, who survived on his wits and the English practice of making your environment adapt to your needs rather than adjusting to it. Defoe mined information from a vast library, including The Odyssey, The Tempest, Pilgrim’s Progress and an extensive number of published accounts of castaways. As Defoe cherry-picked incidents from different lives, he adapted them to reflect disasters he had suffered. He also had no compunction about fitting other stories neatly into his own. His Captain Singleton contained blatantly lifted passages from Knox’s published story of his 19-year captivity in Ceylon. Frank parallels the lives and adventures of Defoe, Knox and Crusoe, illustrating a deep relationship between author and models. This side-by-side biography of the two men shows similarities between their lives and their attitudes toward disaster, although their personalities and moralities were markedly different. Many have said that Crusoe is much more a self-help book than a novel, while Knox’s story is a treatise rather than a travel book. They both exhibit a similarly distinct philosophy of life. Defoe proselytizes on morals, lessons and their meanings while encouraging his readers to turn the challenges of adversity into advantage. Knox teaches by example. – Kirkus Reviews

“Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth”

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The wrecking of a vessel on a remote island, from “The Odyssey” to “The Tempest” to “Lost,” is an evergreen beginning for stories about what makes us civilized and human. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe may be the archetypal survivor, who endures his desert island by imposing his values on inhospitable surroundings. When “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” was published in 1719, true stories of seafaring adventures, run-ins with pirates, and encounters with strange lands and peoples were so popular that Defoe’s fictional book was touted as a true-life tale. The proposed candidates for the “real Robinson Crusoe” would have crowded him off his island, but in her intelligent and surprising new book, “Crusoe,” biographer Katherine Frank focuses on Robert Knox, a young sailor whose story arises at the intersection of adventure, commerce and colonialism.

In choosing Knox rather than Alexander Selkirk — the Scottish castaway usually put forward as the “real” Crusoe — Frank makes it clear that she considers the state of captivity, whether in a far-off land or a grim London prison, to be more central to the Crusoe myth than the desert island. Knox and Defoe never met, but their entwined stories of imprisonment give a fascinating glimpse of a world stirring into modernity. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

In a world replete with stories of sectarian violence, we are often left wondering: Are there places where people of different ethnicities, especially with significant Muslim minorities, live in peace? If so, why haven’t we heard more about them, and what explains their success?

To answer these questions, Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac undertook a two-year exploration of oases of civility, places notable for minimal violence, rising life-expectancy, high literacy, and pragmatic compromises on cultural rights. They explored the Indian state of Kerala, the Russian republic of Tatarstan, the city of Marseille in France, the city of Flensburg, Germany, and the borough of Queens, New York. Through scores of interviews, they document ways and means that have proven successful in defusing ethnic tensions. This pathbreaking book elegantly blends political history, sociology, anthropology, and journalism, to provide big ideas for peace.

About Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac

Karl E. Meyer, a Princeton PhD, served on The New York Times editorial board, and previously was a foreign correspondent and editorial writer on The Washington Post. He is author of a dozen books including Dust of Empire, and is emeritus editor of the World Policy Journal.

Shareen Blair Brysac was a prize-winning documentary producer for CBS News and is author of Resisting Hitler: Mildred Fish Harnack and the Red Orchestra. Together they wrote Tournament of Shadows and Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East. The couple live in New York City and Weston, Connecticut.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Meyer and Brysac, a married couple, have written previous books together (Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East, 2008, etc.) and separately. By examining “neglected oases of civility,” they break from the conventional wisdom that ethnic and religious strife are inevitable when perceived enemies share geographic space. These oases include Flensburg, a northern German city emerging from the Schleswig-Holstein region, the longtime border area contested by the warriors of Denmark; the Republic of Tatarstan in the former Soviet Union, where the Muslim majority and the substantial Orthodox Christian minority coexist peacefully; Marseille, France, where a population that is about one-quarter Muslim, an unusually high percentage for a European nation, mingles successfully with sizable Orthodox Christian and Jewish populations; the state of Kerala in India, a densely populated entity bordering the Arabian Sea, where Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities have practiced mutual respect; and Queens, N.Y., where more than 2 million residents speak 138 languages. The authors on-the-ground reporting is impressive, especially given the built-in language barriers. Near the end of the book, Meyer and Brysac share 11 guidelines “promoting civility in diverse societies,” which include public grappling by government and private authorities with stereotypes of unpopular minorities; free reign of minority languages within the larger society; constructing housing to integrate diverse populations rather than segregate them; developing public libraries as community centers to overcome language and other cultural differences; empowering women as well as men; and harnessing popular culture to cross societal barriers. – Kirkus Reviews

“Pax Ethnica: Where and How Diversity Succeeds” by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

As a legal scholar and practitioner, I have long examined ethnicity through the prism of international criminal law and how ethnic hatreds feed the major war crimes tribunals prosecuting atrocity crimes in Africa, the Balkans and other hot spots during the last two decades. The savagery of the slaughters, mutilations, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence leaves nothing to the imagination.

Much of the media coverage and scholarly treatments of the violence depict diversity as civilization’s downfall. The pessimistic thesis of Samuel Huntington in “The Clash of Civilizations,” first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993, has resonated for two decades, spreading a mind-numbing presumption of hopelessness about life on a crowded Earth.

But this presumption invites a challenge, which Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac have delivered in “Pax Ethnica.” As veteran scholar-journalists and, it so happens, husband and wife, Meyer and Brysac journeyed to five ethnically diverse societies on three continents to discover what works as antidotes to conflicts among peoples.

What a great idea. This book should inspire wandering spirits to discover other ethnically harmonious cities and regions and spread the word: “reasonable accommodation” can work, gloriously. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The surprising truth behind Barack Obama’s decision to continue many of his predecessor’s counterterrorism policies.

Conventional wisdom holds that 9/11 sounded the death knell for presidential accountability. In fact, the opposite is true. The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief assumed—endless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and more—are the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority. But these new powers have been met with thousands of barely visible legal and political constraints—enforced by congressional committees, government lawyers, courts, and the media—that have transformed our unprecedentedly powerful presidency into one that is also unprecedentedly accountable.

These constraints are the key to understanding why Obama continued the Bush counterterrorism program, and in this light, the events of the last decade should be seen as a victory, not a failure, of American constitutional government. We have actually preserved the framers’ original idea of a balanced constitution, despite the vast increase in presidential power made necessary by this age of permanent emergency.

About Jack Goldsmith

Jack Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University. From October 2003 to June 2004 he was assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

From the beginning, the Bush administration viewed the 9/11 attacks not merely as a crime, but as an act of war, justifying the full deployment of the president’s powers as head of the U.S. military. From this increasingly controversial premise flowed a series of aggressive and much-criticized counterterrorism measures: the military detention of terror suspects and the device of military commissions to prosecute them, the unchecked discretion to choose among a variety of forums for trying terrorists, the construction of the so-called “black site” prisons around the world, the targeting and killing of enemy suspects, the liberal use of rendition, the increased surveillance at home and abroad and the enhanced interrogation techniques to elicit intelligence. How is it that three years into the succeeding administration virtually all talk about “shredding the Constitution” has vanished, that these bitterly decried practices have either been only marginally curtailed or even expanded? Goldsmith (The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, 2007, etc.), a former Bush Justice and Defense Department attorney, rejects the cynical explanation that it’s all politics, a case merely of the vocal left giving a pass to the Obama administration. Rather, he insists that our system of checks and balances is working just fine, if not precisely in the way the framers imagined, to curb the predictable wartime excesses of the executive branch. Yes, to some extent since 9/11, the congress, courts and establishment press have caught up, reining in the president, but Goldsmith points to something unprecedented in our history: the emergence of what he terms the “presidential synopticon,” the many watchers of the executive branch—lawyers, inspectors general, human-rights activists—aided by new information technologies and the Internet and empowered by law to limit unilateralism, require accountability, force reform and help generate a consensus about legitimate practices. – Kirkus Reviews

Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 by Jack Goldsmith and Democracy’s Blameless Leaders: From Dresden to Abu Ghraib, How Leaders Evade Accountability for Abuse, Atrocity, and Killing by Neil James Mitchell

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Many people expected a sharp change in America’s approach to counterterrorism when Barack Obama became president. But as Obama approaches the end of his first term, the continuities between the framework he inherited from President Bush and his current policies are more striking than the differences.

It is true that Obama ended the CIA’s secret detention program and overturned a series of legal guidelines on interrogation, but in practice the Bush administration had already moved away from the use of “black sites” and more extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. On Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the use of military commissions, and targeted killing of terrorist suspects away from any conventional battlefield, Obama has largely maintained and even expanded his predecessor’s approach.

One of Jack Goldsmith’s aims in his new book, “Power and Constraint,” is to explain this apparently surprising outcome. Goldsmith — a conservative legal scholar who headed the Office of Legal Counsel for a time under the Bush administration — argues that Obama has been unable to shift U.S. counterterrorism policy very far because, by the time he took office, it was already pitched at the center of gravity of American political society. According to Goldsmith, it is misleading to portray Bush’s “war on terror” as an illustration of unbridled presidential power. Although the Bush administration set out to expand the scope of executive action in the field of national security, it was ultimately forced back by a framework of checks and balances built into the American political system. The restrictions imposed on Bush and his officials were frustrating, but the policies that emerged enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and collective endorsement that made it hard for the new administration to abandon them. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

From the American and British counter-insurgency in Iraq to the bombing of Dresden and the Amristar Massacre in India, civilians are often abused and killed when they are caught in the cross-fire of wars and other conflicts. In Democracy’s Blameless Leaders, Neil Mitchell examines how leaders in democracies manage the blame for the abuse and the killing of civilians, arguing that politicians are likely to react in a self-interested and opportunistic way and seek to deny and evade accountability.

Using empirical evidence from well-known cases of abuse and atrocity committed by the security forces of established, liberal democracies, Mitchell shows that self-interested political leaders will attempt to evade accountability for abuse and atrocity, using a range of well-known techniques including denial, delay, diversion, and delegation to pass blame for abuse and atrocities to the lowest plausible level. Mitchell argues that, despite the conventional wisdom that accountability is a ‘central feature’ of democracies, it is only a rare and courageous leader who acts differently, exposing the limits of accountability in democratic societies. As democracies remain embroiled in armed conflicts, and continue to try to come to grips with past atrocities, Democracy’s Blameless Leaders provides a timely analysis of why these events occur, why leaders behave as they do, and how a more accountable system might be developed.

About Neil James Mitchell

Neil James Mitchell is Professor of International Relations in the School of Public Policy at University College London and author of Agents of Atrocity: Leaders, Followers, and the Violation of Human Rights in Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

“Neil Mitchell’s provocative new book, Democracy’s Blameless Leaders, should be must reading for those concerned about the operation of democracy and the accountability of its leaders.In a series of probing case analyses of human right atrocities committed by those from the United States, Britain, and Israel over the decades, Mitchell deftly shows how leaders often escape accountability for such actions.To the extent that accountability occurs, the “fall guy,” an individual at a lower level of responsibility, not the leaders, takes the blame.His conclusions are equally revealing—why democratic polities, whether parliamentary or presidential systems, often find it difficult hold their leaders more accountable for such actions.”-James M. McCormick,author of American Foreign Policy and Process

“Although accountability lies at the heart of the ideal of democracy, leaders rarely accept blame for human rights violations. The Bush administration famously dismissed the abuses at Abu Ghraib as a result of ‘a few bad apples,’ deflecting blame to the individual soldiers involved, and denying any responsibility for the actions. This insightful book is essential reading for all scholars interested in agency and incentives in the use of violence.”-Kristian Skrede Gleditsch,author ofAll International Politics Is Local

Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 by Jack Goldsmith and Democracy’s Blameless Leaders: From Dresden to Abu Ghraib, How Leaders Evade Accountability for Abuse, Atrocity, and Killing by Neil James Mitchell

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Many people expected a sharp change in America’s approach to counterterrorism when Barack Obama became president. But as Obama approaches the end of his first term, the continuities between the framework he inherited from President Bush and his current policies are more striking than the differences.

It is true that Obama ended the CIA’s secret detention program and overturned a series of legal guidelines on interrogation, but in practice the Bush administration had already moved away from the use of “black sites” and more extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. On Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the use of military commissions, and targeted killing of terrorist suspects away from any conventional battlefield, Obama has largely maintained and even expanded his predecessor’s approach.

One of Jack Goldsmith’s aims in his new book, “Power and Constraint,” is to explain this apparently surprising outcome. Goldsmith — a conservative legal scholar who headed the Office of Legal Counsel for a time under the Bush administration — argues that Obama has been unable to shift U.S. counterterrorism policy very far because, by the time he took office, it was already pitched at the center of gravity of American political society. According to Goldsmith, it is misleading to portray Bush’s “war on terror” as an illustration of unbridled presidential power. Although the Bush administration set out to expand the scope of executive action in the field of national security, it was ultimately forced back by a framework of checks and balances built into the American political system. The restrictions imposed on Bush and his officials were frustrating, but the policies that emerged enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and collective endorsement that made it hard for the new administration to abandon them. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

The definitive account of North Korea, its veiled past and uncertain future, from the former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council

Though it is much discussed and often maligned, precious little is known or understood about North Korea, the world’s most controversial and isolated country. In The Impossible State, seasoned international-policy expert and lauded scholar Victor Cha pulls back the curtain, providing the best look yet at North Korea’s history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive personality cult that empowers them. He illuminates the repressive regime’s complex economy and culture, its appalling record of human-rights abuses, and its belligerent relationship with the United States, and analyzes the regime’s major security issues—from the seemingly endless war with its southern neighbor to its frightening nuclear ambitions—all in light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il’s recent death.

How this enigmatic nation-state—one that regularly violates its own citizens’ inalienable rights and has suffered famine, global economic sanctions, a collapsed economy, and near total isolation from the rest of the world—has continued to survive has long been a question that preoccupies the West. Cha reveals a land of contradictions, one facing a pivotal and disquieting transition of power from tyrannical father to inexperienced son, and delves into the ideology that leads an oppressed, starving populace to cling so fiercely to its failed leadership.

With rare personal anecdotes from the author’s time in Pyongyang and his tenure as an adviser in the White House, this engagingly written, authoritative, and highly accessible history offers much-needed answers to the most pressing questions about North Korea and ultimately warns of a regime that might be closer to its end than many might think—a political collapse for which America and its allies may be woefully unprepared.

About Victor Cha

Victor Cha is the former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, where he served as an adviser to the president from 2004 to 2007. The recipient of two Outstanding Service Commendations during his tenure at the White House, Cha is also the award-winning author of Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle and Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs,International Security, and Political Science Quarterly, among other journals. Cha currently holds the D. S. Song Chair in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Cha (Foreign Service/Georgetown Univ.; Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, 2008, etc.) first visited North Korea during George W. Bush’s second term with then-governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson to try to defuse nuclear-testing tensions. The author was amazed at the chasm between party haves and everybody else, confirming all that he knew about the authoritarian country. Cha aims to get at some of the pressing questions since Kim Jong-il’s death and the succession of the utterly unknown younger son, Kim Jong-un—e.g., what happened to this once-vigorous dictatorship, and why does the populace do nothing about it? How can the West know so little about what really goes on there? For Cha, the key that unlocked the regime’s secrets was its nostalgia for the good old days of the 1950s and ’60s, when China and the Soviet Union were bolstering North Korean industry and military, while the South was still an agrarian backwater. American aggression during the Korean War left a lasting bitterness, and while the South was grappling with American ambivalence toward its leaders, the North under Kim Il-sung embraced the ideology of juche, or self-reliance, and the cult of the Great Leader. As a result, writes Cha, the North Koreans are simply too oppressed to revolt—not to mention the devastating effects from “Olympic envy” of trying to catch up to Seoul’s 1988 hosting, and the terrible famine of the mid ’90s. The author looks closely at the Kim family, the terrible economic decisions that plunged the country into poverty, the shocking gulag system, its paranoid nuclear proliferation program and the tenuous relations with South Korea. – Kirkus Reviews

“The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future” by Victor Cha

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Victor Cha can’t easily forget the desolation he encountered on his first visit to North Korea. “As the plane taxied on the tarmac, there was no flight traffic to be seen,” he writes in “The Impossible State.” The fields were “barren and gray,” and during the long drive to his lodgings, he saw only one tractor; he soon discovered that there was no BlackBerry service to distract him from the diplomatic mission he was on for the George W. Bush White House. Officially he was in Pyongyang to press for the return of the remains of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action from the Korean War. While the elusive country reveals little of itself to visitors who are carefully monitored by minders, Cha delivers an up-close, insightful portrait of this “land of contradictions.”

Cha’s extensive years writing on U.S. policy in Asia for a variety of journals and his service on the National Security Council in the Bush administration give him a rare perspective on North Korea’s past and present. He draws upon this expertise to assert his central thesis that the state newly installed leader Kim Jong-Un has inherited is “not sustainable.”

In order to understand the future of North Korea, Cha begins with its relatively more prosperous past during the Cold War years when the country had reliable heating and electricity and a growing high-tech industry bolstered by the patronage of China and the Soviet Union. In contrast, South Korea struggled under a corrupt government and poverty, remaining primarily an agrarian society. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Lewis Chopik has just graduated from Columbia University. Having been dumped by his girlfriend and in flight from the pressures exerted by his ambitious professor father, Lewis returns to Wichita in search of respite at the home of his New-Ager mother, Abby. But when Abby picks Lewis up from the airport, she reveals that she’s starting a storm-chasing business and indulging a polyamorous lifestyle. Another unexpected arrival is Seth, Lewis’s bi-polar younger brother, who shows off a new tattoo on his chest: In Loving Memory of Seth Chopik.

About Thad Ziolkowski

Thad Ziolkowski is the author of Our Son the Arson, a collection of poems, and a memoir, On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003. In 2008, he was awarded a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure and Index. He directs the Writing Program at Pratt Institute. Wichita is his first novel.

Editorial Review

Lewis Chopik has come home to Wichita to lick his wounds. The young graduate (Columbia, summa cum laude) should be buoyant, but he’s been dumped by his girlfriend, who’s traded up to snag a Rhodes Scholar. And he’s being badgered by his father Virgil, a Columbia professor and part of a formidable clan of academics, to pursue his studies, an unwelcome prospect. All his divorced mother Abby wants is for him to be happy. However, any hope of peace and quiet back home dissolves when his 20-year-old brother Seth appears. He’s been on a downward spiral since age 14, when a morning-glory trip convinced him death was an attractive destination. Since then he’s been tentatively diagnosed as bipolar; briefly married to a stripper in San Francisco; and almost killed by fellow street punks. He fits right in at Abby’s. His indulgent mom has always provided “havens for oddballs,” while busying herself with New -Age projects and a succession of “lifetime companions.” Her latest companion is unhappily sharing her with Bishop, a genial university chemistry teacher who’s cooking up “designer psychedelics” in Abby’s basement; he’s also helping her set up her latest project: storm-chasing with a New -Age twist. There’s never a dull moment in a novel which fires us up with snappy and often very funny dialogue; Seth, deranged but smart (those Chopik genes), takes down anyone in earshot with gleeful malice. The central relationship is that between the two brothers; Lewis loves Seth dearly but is powerless to slow his descent. They will be ejected from a bowling alley and a biker bar; after Seth’s frightening rant in a graveyard, Lewis realizes he must be committed. Then the whole gang takes off after a tornado—for Seth, the perfect solution. – Kirkus Reviews

Prairie Dust - ‘Wichita,’ a Novel by Thad Ziolkowski

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Near the end of “Wichita,” Thad ­Ziolkowski’s first novel, the protagonist recalls a line from Rilke: “You are not surprised at the force of the storm — you have seen it growing.” It’s a passing reference; the character, Lewis, neither dwells on the line nor mentions the poem it comes from, “Onto a Vast Plain.” But Ziolkowski is an accomplished poet, and it’s not hard to see Rilke’s great poem about grief as the secret heart beating through this charming, smart and ­devastating book.

The novel begins with Lewis’s return to his mother’s home in Wichita, Kan., from New York, where he has just graduated from Columbia. His pompous professor father, Virgil, expects him to attend graduate school, though Lewis is unsure of his next step. His girlfriend has left him, and his divorced, eccentric mother, Abby — who invests in one “multilevel marketing” scheme after another — has “half-­facetiously” suggested he return to “the healing powers of the Great Plains,” where she has begun a storm-chasing business.

Lewis is not the only one returning home. His younger brother, Seth, is supposed to be away at an “art school/spa for the wealthy,” working as a groundskeeper and modeling for drawing classes. But when Lewis and Abby pull into the driveway, Seth is there, “waving his arms in the middle of the street as if flagging down a car on a country road.” On Seth’s collarbone is “a swath of new-tattoo bandage, which glows faintly in the dusk.” His presence is electric. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The definitive history of American postwar liberalism, told through the lens of those who brought it to life.

Liberalism stands proudly at the center of American politics and culture. Driven by passion for social justice, tempered by respect for the difficulty of change, liberals have struggled to end economic inequality, racial discrimination, and political repression. Liberals have fueled their cause with the promise of American life and visions of national greatness, seeking to transform the White House; the halls of Congress, the courts, the worlds of entertainment, law, media, and the course of public opinion. Bestselling author, journalist, and historian Eric Alterman, together with historian Kevin Mattson, traces the history of liberal ideals through the lives and struggles of fascinating personalities. The Cause tells the remarkable story of politicians, intellectuals, visionaries, activists, and public personalities battling for the heart and soul of the nation.

The first full-scale treatment of postwar liberalism, The Cause offers an epic saga driven by stories of grand aspirations, principled ambitions, tragic flaws, and the ironies of history of the people who fought for America to live up to the highest ideals of its history.

About Eric Alterman

Eric Alterman is Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. A columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Best, he is senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, the Nation Institute, and the World Policy Institute. The author of eight previous books, including the national bestseller What Liberal Media?, Alterman is the winner of the George Orwell Award, the Jack London Literary Prize, and the Mirror Award for media criticism. A graduate of Cornell, Yale, and Stanford universities, he lives with his family in Manhattan.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Before the book was finished, Mattson (Contemporary History/Ohio Univ.;“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country, 2009, etc.) left the partnership with the Nation contributor Alterman (Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama, 2011, etc.), who wrote the final draft. A chronicle of liberalism’s successes and failures, the text travels the labyrinthine road from the New Deal to the rise (and fall) of unionism, the theorists of the 1940s and ’50s (Dean Acheson, George Kennan), the battle against McCarthyism and the failures of Adlai Stevenson, whom Alterman writes helped create the notion of the effete intellectual. The author then charts the rise of the Kennedys, the tragic assassinations of the ’60s, civil rights and Lyndon Johnson, Betty Friedan and the feminist movement, the campaign and electoral failures of Eugene McCarthy, McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. Alterman pauses often to visit relevant cultural history—the emergence of influential journals, Mailer’s writing, DeVoto’s criticism, Elia Kazan’s films, Cheever’s stories, the various liberal contributions of actor Sidney Poitier, novelist William Styron, filmmaker Oliver Stone and—in a long section—rocker Bruce Springsteen. Alterman points out continually how liberals have often been their own worst enemies—failing to stand up to the violence of the far left in the ’60s, fearing being branded “anti-American” in the face of war (Iraq), failing to confront the Tea Party and the ever-more-rightward GOP. Unfortunately, Alterman too often quotes others and only rarely flashes the scimitar wit he displays in the Nation. - Kirkus Reviews

Loving Liberals - ‘The Cause,’ by Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The trouble with liberals, Robert Kennedy complained in 1964, was that they were “in love with death” — they romanticized failure, finding greater nobility in losing the whole loaf than in winning half of it. In the years since then, liberals have not only lost a lot of loaves but have acquired a mess of other troubles, among them the difficulty of getting anyone to admit to being a liberal. To wear the label today seems an act of defiance, much as members of the gay rights community have appropriated, from their antagonists, the epithet “queer.” Liberalism — for decades (centuries, even) the prevailing philosophy in American political life — has become the creed that dare not speak its name, except late at night on MSNBC.

Enter Eric Alterman, defiant to the last. In 2008, this columnist and media critic published a handbook called “Why We’re Liberals,” a crisply written and emphatically argued retort to the Coulters, Hannitys and others for whom liberalism is a strain of fascism, totalitarianism, socialism and overmothering (why choose?). Alterman’s new book, “The Cause,” written with an assist from the historian Kevin Mattson, is something of a companion volume: a history of liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to the present. (Mattson’s role is a bit ambiguous; in the book’s acknowledgments, Alterman credits him with providing “raw material.”) [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again.

Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no fear of snakes—and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap?

Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.

About Paul Theroux

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include A Dead Hand and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

As a young man, Ellis Hock loved teaching in Malawi for the Peace Corps, happiest years of his life. (Theroux did a hitch there; see his early novel Jungle Lovers.) Then he had to return to suburban Boston to run the men’s-clothing store he’d inherited. Thirty-five years later, the store and his marriage having failed, he returns to Malawi for a nostalgia-induced vacation. He’s warned on arrival that people are hungry and only want money, but he heads into the bush with a bagful of it, another mzungu (white man) who knows best. Malabo, the remote riverbank village where he’s remembered as the mzungu who helped build the school and clinic, gives him a warm welcome, but Hock’s disillusion sets in fast. The school is a ruin; the visiting doctor is a quack; AIDS is rampant; requests for money are constant. The villagers keep him under surveillance at the direction of the headman Manyenga, who is all smiles and lies. One bright spot is his reunion with Gala, the woman he loved, and the presence of her 16-year-old granddaughter Zizi, who waits on Hock and is fiercely loyal to him. The snakes, too, are a blessing. They terrify the villagers, but Hock handles them fearlessly, using them as protection once he realizes he is being held captive. He makes three escape attempts. The second takes him downriver into Mozambique. There Hock runs into a community of starving but deadly children and a food drop, horribly bungled by white Westerners; these scenes are devastating. All his escapes are foiled by the formidable Manyenga. The suspense is enriched by Theroux’s loving attention to local customs and his subversive insights. As Hock weakens in body and spirit, Zizi just grows stronger. Could she be his savior?  - Kirkus Reviews

Retracing His Steps - ‘The Lower River,’ a Novel by Paul Theroux

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The central character in Paul Theroux’s latest novel, “The Lower River,” is an American named Ellis Hock who decides to return to Africa after an absence of almost 40 years. Life in his own country has become tiresome and frustrating, but there’s a village in Malawi where, during his Peace Corps days, Hock had once been happy and useful. He wants to be useful again. So he prepares to say goodbye to his failing men’s wear store in Medford, Mass., along with his embittered ex-wife and his grasping, heartless daughter.

Before Hock has even left the United States, he hears about a woman in a nearby town who takes her rock python to bed with her. This python has been behaving oddly, flattening itself beside its owner, stretching the length of her sleeping body. Hock knows what’s going on: the snake is getting ready to eat her. What he doesn’t know is that this is a portent of what will happen to him: he’s about to be consumed by the people in the village he once loved. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

In the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Johanna Skibsrud’s new book, nine loosely connected and hypnotic stories introduce an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that the man is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car, realizing too late that he’s made a grave mistake. A Canadian girl and her French host stumble on the one story that transcends their language barrier. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life—these are life-defining moments that weave throughout the everyday lives of the remarkable characters in this book. Time and again they find themselves confronted with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. In This Will Be Difficult to Explain Skibsrud has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.

About Johanna Skibsrud

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two collections of poetry. The Sentimentalists, her first novel, won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Relationships remain unexpressed or rest in not-quite-connected small family knots in Skibsrud’s dreamy yet searching fictions—e.g., “The Limit,” in which an absent father reaches out to his stranger-daughter. Reminiscence features often, as in “Clarence,” recounting a newspaper photographer’s use of a childhood episode to revive his subject, the oldest man in the county. The stories offer glimpses of France, Canada and the Midwest, yet the landscapes seem desolate and are often visited by death, like the suicide of a son in “French Lessons” or the casually mentioned murder in “Signac’s Boats.” These two stories are also connected via the character of Martha, an American in Paris who falls in love there, but even on this subject Skibsrud’s approach is cerebral, almost abstract. “Cleats,” another story in the Martha/Paris sequence, is more concrete, tracing the feelings behind an abandoned marriage, although it too is driven by the ineffable. And the closing tale, “Fat Man and Little Boy,” is one of several striving to capture a flash of understanding for which words seem scarcely adequate. – Kirkus Reviews

Things Left Unsaid - ‘This Will Be Difficult to Explain,’ by Johanna Skibsrud

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

“I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” a dying man says to his daughter in Grace Paley’s “Conversation With My Father.” He asks that she, like Maupassant or Chekhov, create “recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” The nine stories in Johanna Skibsrud’s first collection, “This Will Be Difficult to Explain,” could have been written with this mandate in mind. In them, young women stumble through summer jobs abroad, wives toy with leaving their husbands, and fathers labor to communicate with sullen teenage daughters. Her characters live in South Dakota and California, in unnamed suburbs, rural towns and far-flung capitals that, if unrecognizable in detail, are familiar in mood. What links these stories, aside from a handful of recurring characters, is their fascination with the mundane, with the instances in which the known becomes foreign or the everyday exposes a sinister architecture.

After writing two books of poetry, Skibsrud became a literary sensation in her native Canada when her first novel, “The Sentimentalists” — an understated, semiautobiographical account of an aging Vietnam veteran’s relationship with his daughter — won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the country’s top literary award, and became a national best seller. As in “The Sentimentalists,” father-­daughter relationships figure prominently in Skibsrud’s stories. Narratives mirror the post-traumatic flashbacks of the novel, hopscotching among associative memories and moving forward while looking back. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

An engaging narrative about an incredible, life-giving organ and its imperiled modern fate.

Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it’s sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with breast cancer, even among men. What makes breasts so mercurial—and so vulnerable?

In this informative and highly entertaining account, intrepid science reporter Florence Williams sets out to uncover the latest scientific findings from the fields of anthropology, biology, and medicine. Her investigation follows the life cycle of the breast from puberty to pregnancy to menopause, taking her from a plastic surgeon’s office where she learns about the importance of cup size in Texas to the laboratory where she discovers the presence of environmental toxins in her own breast milk. The result is a fascinating exploration of where breasts came from, where they have ended up, and what we can do to save them.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Florence Williams

Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, and her articles and essays have been widely anthologized. Breasts was named a finalist for the 2011 Columbia/Nieman Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Williams lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Editorial Review

According to Outside editor Williams, breasts are the proverbial canaries in the coalmine, warning us of environmental damage that may be causing early puberty, breast-milk contamination and other maladies. “Breasts are an ecosystem,” she writes, “governed by long-evolved functions, migrating molecules, and interconnected parts.” Williams buoys her arguments by interviewing a host of scientists, surgeons, breast-implant candidates and even former Marines who believe they have developed breast cancer from drinking tainted water at the Camp Lejeune base. In the name of science, she also volunteered for experiments, “detox[ed]” from processed foods and personal-care products and sent her breast milk to a lab to test for flame-retardants. The author peppers these encounters with accessible information on how breasts evolved, how they develop and, tragically, how they can go wrong. While Williams excels at making complex science understandable to an educated lay audience, some of her conjectures come across as hyperbole, as she decries “modern times” in which we are “marinating in hormones and toxins” without considering some of the ways in which chemistry has led to better living. Her conviction that childbearing and lactating protect women from breast cancer may alienate women who either can’t or don’t wish to have children. One senses that she is proud of herself for refusing even an Advil after giving birth and for eating organic food and climbing mountains, but this slightly smug tone detracts from the otherwise valuable evidence she presents. – Kirkus Reviews

Just What’s Inside Those Breasts?

NPR Book Review – May 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

When writer Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she read a research study about toxins found in human breast milk. She decided to test her own breast milk and shipped a sample to a lab in Germany.

What came back surprised her.

Trace amounts of pesticides, dioxin and a jet fuel ingredient — as well as high to average levels of flame retardants — were all found in her breast milk. How could something like this happen?

“It turns out that our breasts are almost like sponges, the way they can soak up some of these chemicals, especially the ones that are fat-loving — the ones [that] tend to accumulate in fat tissue,” Williams tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “Unfortunately, the breast is also masterful at converting these molecules into food in the way of breast milk.”

Learning that breasts soak up lots of chemicals made Williams wonder just what else was going on with breasts. A lot, as it turns out. In her new book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, Williams offers her take on — among other things — why breasts are getting bigger and developing earlier, why tumors seem to gravitate toward the breast, and how toxins from the environment may be affecting hormones and breast development.

She says many of those toxins, including the flame retardants found in her breast milk, may come from ordinary household items like couches and electronics, which often contain flame retardants. Some animal studies have shown that certain types of flame retardants interact with hormone levels. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

In this revealing social history, one remarkable White House dinner becomes a lens through which to examine race, politics, and the lives and legacies of two of America’s most iconic figures.

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with the First Family. The next morning, news that the president had dined with a black man—and former slave—sent shock waves through the nation. Although African Americans had helped build the White House and had worked for most of the presidents, not a single one had ever been invited to dine there. Fueled by inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, and even vulgar songs, the scandal escalated and threatened to topple two of America’s greatest men.

In this smart, accessible narrative, one seemingly ordinary dinner becomes a window onto post–Civil War American history and politics, and onto the lives of two dynamic men whose experiences and philosophies connect in unexpected ways. Deborah Davis also introduces dozens of other fascinating figures who have previously occupied the margins and footnotes of history, creating a lively and vastly entertaining book that reconfirms her place as one of our most talented popular historians.

About Deborah Davis

Deborah Davis is the author of six narrative non-fiction books, including the upcoming The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy, the authorized history of twenty-five years of the landmark television show and its legendary host (Abrams, 2011) and Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation, which tells the story of the remarkable event that ignited a racial storm, divided the country, and threatened to topple two of America’s greatest men (Atria/S&S). Her other works include Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X (Tarcher/Putnam, 2003), the story behind the legendary John Singer Sargent painting that propelled the artist to international renown but condemned his subject to a life of public ridicule; Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball (Wiley, 2006), which transports readers to the Oz-like splendor of New York in 1966, where Capote, at the pinnacle of his fame, threw himself the party to end all parties; The Secret Lives of Frames: 100 Years of Art and Artistry (Filipacchi Publishing, 2007), a history of the picture frame, the beautiful, hardworking, and frequently overlooked Cinderella of the art world; and Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America (Wiley, 2009), a colorful history of the fabled city from its first colonists to its new millennium millionaires. She has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Magazine Antiques, and Art and Antiques. Prior to becoming an author, she was a story editor and story analyst for several major film companies, including Warner Bros. Miramax, and Disney. Davis lives with her husband in Montclair, New Jersey and is the mother of two children.

Editorial Review

It was a typical gesture for the impulsive Roosevelt, who had been made vice president in hopes that his progressive ideals would wither in the largely impotent position. But the assassination of William McKinley made Roosevelt president, and the Republican establishment’s nightmares began. Washington was the embodiment of the rags-to-riches American dream, an ex-slave risen to become the head of the Tuskegee Institute. Davis (Gilded: How Newport Became America’s Richest Resort, 2009, etc.) weaves together the two men’s biographies with a portrait of their era—simultaneously a time of immense progress and widespread bigotry. Roosevelt was convinced that the nation’s growth required African-Americans to take a fuller role in national affairs; he also saw the black vote in the South as a key ingredient of Republican power. Shortly after assuming the presidency, he began quietly to consult Washington on political appointments in the South. The dinner seemed a natural outgrowth of that relationship, and it went smoothly enough. However, after an Atlanta reporter wrote about it, the South erupted in fury; a line had been crossed. The dinner became an excuse for lynchings and other racial persecutions and led to a cooling of what had been an important working relationship. Some progressive blacks, including W.E.B. Du Bois, criticized the dinner as setting back racial relations. On the other hand, Scott Joplin used it as the theme of an opera, A Guest of Honor. Davis gives a clear overview of race relations in the closing decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, with plenty of additional detail on the times. – Kirkus Reviews

Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Shocking’ Dinner With Washington

NPR Book Review – May 14, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited African-American educator Booker T. Washington, who had become close to the president, to dine with his family at the White House. Several other presidents had invited African-Americans to meetings at the White House, but never to a meal. And in 1901, segregation was law.

News of the dinner between a former slave and the president of the United States became a national sensation. The subject of inflammatory articles and cartoons, it shifted the national conversation around race at the time.

NPR’s Neal Conan talks with Deborah Davis, author of Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation about the dinner that she believes changed history. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

While we will never be able to predict the next earthquake, terrorist attack, or market fluctuation, nature can guide us in developing security systems that are not purely reactive but proactive, holistic, and adaptable. From the tidepools of Monterey to the mountains of Kazakhstan, Sagarin takes us on an eye-opening tour of the security challenges we face, and shows us how we might learn to respond more effectively to the unknown threats lurking in our future.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Rafe Sagarin

Rafe Sagarin is a marine ecologist and environmental policy analyst at the University of Arizona. Among his many accolades, Sagarin is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship to support his work on natural security, and he was a Congressional Science Fellow in the office of U.S. Representative Hilda Solis. Sagarin has taught ecology and environmental policy at Duke University, California State University Monterey Bay, and University of California, Los Angeles. His research has appeared in Science, Nature, Foreign Policy, and other leading journals, magazines, and newspapers. He lives with his family in Tucson.

Editorial Review

Sagarin (Environmental Policy/Univ. of Arizona) identifies adaptability as the key to survival in an uncertain world. Improvised responses to threats—the “hillbilly armor” U.S. troops adopted to defend against roadside IEDs—are a clear example. A key point is that natural selection operates not just in the wild but in modern asymmetrical warfare, where lightly armed insurgents take on large professional armies. The high casualty rate among insurgents is a selective pressure; the stupid and incompetent are killed off, and those who survive are better equipped to fight on—as the Taliban has done in Afghanistan. The author argues that dedicated task forces are less effective at problem solving than independent groups seeking answers to a specific challenge. Redundant features, which efficiency experts hate, aid survival by preserving vital information, and cooperation and exchange of information among organisms in the same environment is a major tool for increased security. Sagarin cites cooperation among Middle East countries, bitter rivals in many ways, that helped slow the spread of H1N1 in 2009-10. Even the apparently irrational “sacred truths” of religious minorities can be turned to assets in the survival of larger groups, by such simple means as athletics. The author is sometimes too abstract in his approach. However, when gives real-life examples, either from nature or from human society, the points are usually convincing, and he provides plentiful documentation. – Kirkus Reviews

Lessons In Counterterrorism From The Octopus

NPR Book Review – May 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 2002, Rafe Sagarin was working in Washington, D.C., as a science adviser. It wasn’t long after the Sept. 11 attacks, and Sagarin started paying attention to the security measures on Capitol Hill.

“I’d watch these other Capitol Hill staffers and I noticed that they’d just put their hand over the keys in their pockets so they didn’t have to waste 30 seconds putting it on the conveyer belt though the security screening — and that didn’t set off the alarm when they did that,” Sagarin tells host of weekend All Things Considered Guy Raz.

“It just made me think, adaptable organisms” — like terrorists — are “going to figure out a way to get around this,” he says.

So Sagarin, a marine ecologist, turned to what he knew. His new book, Learning from the Octopus, tells how we can learn from organisms in nature to improve our security systems. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Catherine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.

As she begins to piece together the clockwork puzzle, she also uncovers a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a nineteenth-century Englishman, Henry Brandling, who traveled to Germany to commission it as a magical amusement for his consumptive son. But it is Catherine, nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in Henry’s story. And it is the automaton, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

About Peter Carey

PETER CAREY is the author of eleven previous novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

The latest from the renowned and prolific Carey (Parrot and Olivier in America, 2010, etc.) is too fanciful to pass as realism yet too inscrutable for parable or fable. Though all of it (or at least half of it) concerns a grieving woman’s attempt to re-engage with life after the death of her married lover, the prevailing spirit is comedic, even whimsical, rather than tragic. And the prevailing metaphor is that of clockwork, the mechanical precision of the museum where she serves as a curator, with “a considerable horological department, a world-famous collection of clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up engines,” a place where “for years I thought clockmaking must still any turmoil in one’s breast. I was so confident of my opinion, so completely wrong.” To keep protagonist and occasional narrator Catherine from going haywire, her supervisor assigns her an archival task: to study the diaries of a man who had commissioned a mechanical duck for his ailing son more than a century earlier. Some chapters are all Catherine, some are from the diaries of Henry and his adventures with the mechanical duck, and some mix the two, though the reader must make leaps of conjecture to connect the writing of Henry and the response from Catherine. Then the plot thickens, as it appears that the circumstances surrounding her affair were more complicated than Catherine had realized, and she comes to suspect that the pages she reads were written specifically for her: “He anticipated someone would watch him through the wormhole, that was clear. He wrote for that person.” While reading about the attempts to construct a mechanical duck that would appear animated, practically alive, Catherine feels herself turning into a machine: “Ingest, I thought, digest, excrete, repeat.” – Kirkus Reviews

‘The Chemistry Of Tears’ And The Art Of Healing

NPR Book Review – May 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

Peter Carey’s dazzling new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, encompasses heartbreak, the comfort of absorbing work, the transformative power of beauty and the soul of an old machine. If you’ve never read the Australian-born, two-time Booker Prize–winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang — or, most recently, Parrot and Olivier in America — his 12th novel is a terrific introduction to his work. Once again, Carey demonstrates an artful ability to capture a two-way interplay between past and present that is part historical, part fanciful and completely wonderful.

The day after BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, Catherine Gehrig, a tall, elegant, 40-something London museum conservator specializing in horology — clocks and windup automatons — learns of the sudden death of her beloved, miserably married lover. Because their blissful 13-year affair was a secret, there is no one she can turn to in her grief. Her boss, a friend of her darling Matthew who condoned their relationship, sets her up with a new project in the museum’s isolated annex, away from prying eyes. He hopes the complex reassembly of a magnificent, mid-19th century automaton of a silver swan will distract and buoy her. He also provides a phenomenally able if unbalanced young assistant, whose spying presence Catherine resents from the get-go. Catherine and the pretty girl lock into exquisitely rendered terse, tense battles over the import and control of their project. [Read the full article...]

The Mechanics of Loving and Grieving

The New York Times Book Review – May 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

Peter Carey has said that he worked backward to create his latest novel, “The Chemistry of Tears.” He assembled an inventory of seemingly unrelated elements that intrigued him, then found ways of stitching them together. On top of it all, he added an eerie sensuality: “I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labor at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells.” That heady blend of sex and death is almost enough to keep the seams from showing.

Mr. Carey’s wild hybrid novels are always intriguing, sometimes transporting, never ordinary. But concocting a narrative out of found objects can be forced and awkward. In the case of “The Chemistry of Tears,” the mixture winds up more mystifying than magical, and all too easy to resist.

Among this book’s ingredients: Engines. Automatons. The BP oil spill. Fairy tales. Charles Babbage, the 19th- century inventor and mathematician who conducted groundbreaking experiments with computing machines. Horology. Cuckoo clocks. A city with a layout shaped like a wheel. And a little German boy who was a child when much of this two-tiered book takes place, but whose name, Benz, still resonates in the auto industry today. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Robert Sheckley was an eccentric master of the American  short story, and his tales, whether set in dystopic city­scapes, ultramodern advertising agencies, or aboard spaceships lighting out for hostile planets, are among the most startlingly original of the twentieth century. Today, as the new worlds, alternate universes, and synthetic pleasures Sheckley foretold become our reality, his vision begins to look less absurdist and more prophetic. This retrospective selection, chosen by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich, brings together the best of Sheckley’s deadpan farces, proving once again that he belongs beside such mordant critics of contemporary mores as Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, and Thomas Pynchon.

About Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) was born in New York City and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey. He joined the army shortly after high school and served in Korea from 1946 to 1948. Returning to New York, Sheckley completed a BA degree at New York University and later took a job in an aircraft factory, leaving as soon as he was able to support himself by selling short stories. In the 1950s and ’60s his stories appeared regularly in science-fiction magazines, especiallyGalaxy, as well as in Playboy and Esquire. In addition to the science fiction for which he is best known, Sheckley also wrote suspense and mystery stories and television screenplays; from 1979 to 1982 he was the fiction editor of Omnimagazine. Sheckley traveled widely, settling for stretches of time in Greenwich Village, Ibiza, London, and Portland, Oregon. Many of Sheckley’s more than fifteen novels and roughly four hundred short stories have been translated and four have been adapted for film. In 2001 he was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“The late Sheckley was known for a dark satirical style that keeps some of the more dated material in this retrospective collection fresh….Editors Lethem and Abramovich provide an insightful introduction but otherwise let the individual stories stand on their own.”   —  Publishers Weekly

“Mr. Sheckley—as might be expected of a writer who can wring praise from as diverse a group of peers as Kingsley Amis, Harlan Ellison, John le Carre and J. G. Ballard—has an engagingly madcap manner all his own.” —The Wall Street Journal

A master of satirical science fiction

The Washington Post Book Review – May 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

Let’s say you are a devoted fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s books, love the sardonic comeuppance stories of John Collier and Roald Dahl, own all of Edward Gorey’s little albums and enjoy watching reruns of “The Twilight Zone.” Where else can you find similar instances of sly, macabre wit, of such black-humored, gin-and-tonic fizziness in storytelling?

The answer may be unexpected: among the many masters of satirical science fiction and fantasy. Robert Sheckley — to whom we’ll turn in a moment — is certainly a leading example, but there are others: Avram Davidson, for one, and William Tenn and John Sladek. For example, in Sladek’s “Tik-Tok” — something of an homage to the English cult movie “Kind Hearts and Coronets” — the courteous robot-protagonist starts his steady climb to wealth, social success and a shot at the presidency by not only murdering a little girl but blithely getting away with it. And not just any little girl. A blind little girl.

Something similar occurs at the beginning of Sheckley’s “The Monsters,” one of the stories in “Store of the Worlds.” The opening scene brilliantly exemplifies Sheckley’s understated, dryly humorous voice, while also providing a writing-class lesson in how to surprise and hook a reader:

“Cordovir and Hum stood on the rocky mountaintop, watching the new thing happen. Both felt rather good about it. It was undoubtedly the newest thing that had happened for some time. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

Greg Campbell, coauthor of the bestselling Flawless and Blood Diamonds, presents a compelling, close-up investigation of a hot-button topic: America’s schizophrenic attitude to the legalization of pot.

Campbell, a suburban father whose biggest vice is a cold beer, seems like the last person who would grow weed in his basement. But his attitude changed in 2009, when his home state of Colorado led the nation in mainstreaming medical marijuana. Watching with fascination as above-board and financially thriving dispensaries popped up everywhere, Campbell wondered, “Why not me?” Pot, Inc. chronicles Greg’s journey into DIY ganjapreneurialism, as he learns how to cultivate marijuana, examines America’s often unduly harsh laws, and unearths ignorance about pot’s centuries-old therapeutic value–ignorance the government is desperate to maintain. Along the way, he also gains a very personal insight into the drug’s medicinal value that shapes his opinion about legalization.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Greg Campbell

GREG CAMPBELL is the author of Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (a Denver Post, Globe & Mail, and Library Journal bestseller), Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones (the source material for the Leonardo DiCaprio movie of the same name), and The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary. Campbell is also an award-winning journalist whose his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal Magazine, The Economist, The San Francisco Times, Paris Match, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. He lives in Fort Collins, CO.

Three books on illegal, or not, drugs

The Washington Post Book Review – May 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

Pot, Inc. (Sterling, $22.95), by Greg Campbell, author of “Blood Diamonds,” is a brisk, clear-headed survey of a complicated topic. That the author managed to write this evenhanded book while running a small (and arguably legal) grow operation in his Colorado home is a testament to his skill as a reporter. Campbell begins with the so-called “Obama Memo,” released by the Justice Department in late 2009. The memo signaled to many users and ganjapreneurs that marijuana would be tolerated by the federal government and therefore was on its way to some form of legalization. The confusion that followed paved the way for an expansion of medical marijuana use and raucous political debate from the city-council level on up. Campbell weaves in a fascinating history of the drug in the United States, including the legal and political story of how marijuana came to be classified as a Schedule I narcotic — more dangerous and less useful than Schedule II drugs such as cocaine and opium. Campbell is a friendly skeptic, largely convinced of pot’s benign nature, but he’s willing to subject the culture of idealists, dropouts, mercenaries and outright criminals that surround it to a healthy dose of sunshine. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”

Then fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons’ parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents’ arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents’ robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Richard Ford

Richard Ford is the author of the Bascombe novels, which include The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day—the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—and The Lay of the Land, as well as the short story collections Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina Ford.

Editorial Review

This is Ford’s first novel since concluding the Frank Bascombe trilogy, which began with The Sportswriter (1986), peaked with the prize-winningIndependence Day (1995) and concluded with The Lay of the Land (2006). That series was for Ford what the Rabbit novels were for Updike, making this ambitious return to long-form fiction seem like something of a fresh start, but also a thematic culmination. Despite its title, the novel is as essentially all-American as Independence Day. Typically for Ford, the focus is as much on the perspective (and limitations) of its protagonist as it is on the issues that the narrative addresses. The first-person narrator is Dell Parsons, a 15-year-old living in Montana with his twin sister when their parents—perhaps inexplicably, perhaps inevitably—commit an ill-conceived bank robbery. Before becoming wards of the state, the more willful sister runs away with her boyfriend, while Dell is taken across the border to Canada, where he will establish a new life for himself after crossing another border, from innocent bystander to reluctant complicity. The first half of the novel takes place in Montana and the second in Canada, but the entire narrative is Dell’s reflection, 50 years later, on the eve of his retirement as a teacher. As he ruminates on character and destiny, and ponders “how close evil is to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil,” he also mediates between his innocence as an uncommonly naïve teenager and whatever wisdom he has gleaned through decades of experience. Dell’s perspective may well be singular and skewed, but it’s articulate without being particularly perceptive or reflective. And it’s the only one we have. In a particularly illuminating parenthetical aside, he confesses, “I was experiencing great confusion about what was happening, having had no experience like this in my life. I should not be faulted for not understanding what I saw.” – Kirkus Reviews

‘Canada,’ by Richard Ford

The Washington Post Book Review – May 15, 2012 (Excerpt)

Toni Morrison, John Irving and now Richard Ford.

The month of May is turning into a catwalk of America’s greatest senior novelists. Ford’s new book is the best of the lot, though, a magnificent work of Montana gothic that confirms his position as one of the finest stylists and most humane storytellers in America.

He’s well known, of course, for his Frank Bascombe trilogy, whose second volume,“Independence Day,” won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. As rich and durable as John Updike’sRabbit quartet and Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series, the Bascombe novels are an insightful chronicle of middle-class life, infused with the economic and cultural anxieties of the late 20th century.

Now, Ford has left the suburbs of New Jersey two thousand miles away and delivered his most elegiac and profound book. “Canada” may strike recent fans as a departure, but it’s actually a return to the plains of his first celebrated story collection,“Rock Springs” (1987). Here in Great Falls, Mont., the author lays out a tale of one unexceptional family’s disintegration.

“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.” [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.