Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), a pioneering anti-Nazi docudrama by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr.; I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a sensational true tale of “a Hollywood girl in Naziland!”; and Professor Mamlock (1938), an anti-Nazi film made by German refugees living in the Soviet Union.

Doherty also recounts how the disproportionately Jewish backgrounds of the executives of the studios and the workers on the payroll shaded reactions to what was never simply a business decision. As Europe hurtled toward war, a proxy battle waged in Hollywood over how to conduct business with the Nazis, how to cover Hitler and his victims in the newsreels, and whether to address or ignore Nazism in Hollywood feature films. Should Hollywood lie low, or stand tall and sound the alarm?

Doherty’s history features a cast of charismatic personalities: Carl Laemmle, the German Jewish founder of Universal Pictures, whose production of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) enraged the nascent Nazi movement; Georg Gyssling, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, who read the Hollywood trade press as avidly as any studio mogul; Vittorio Mussolini, son of the fascist dictator and aspiring motion picture impresario; Leni Riefenstahl, the Valkyrie goddess of the Third Reich who came to America to peddle distribution rights for Olympia (1938); screenwriters Donald Ogden Stewart and Dorothy Parker, founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; and Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Bros., who yoked anti-Nazism to patriotic Americanism and finally broke the embargo against anti-Nazi cinema with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).

About Thomas Doherty

Thomas Doherty traces a powerful historical narrative as Hollywood’s treatment of European fascism dramatically changes with the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 marks a significant advance in our understanding of the American film industry in the 1930s and also in our appreciation of a wide range of films and filmmaking practices, revealing Hollywood as a social and geopolitical force.

Film No Evil - ‘Hollywood and Hitler,’ by Thomas Doherty

The New York Times Book Review – May 23, 2013 (Excerpt)

Sixty-eight years after the collapse of the Thousand Year Reich, Nazis remain a persistent presence on American screens. With their eye-­grabbing iconography, they provide easy cartoon villains for action films (“Inglourious Basterds”), add moral import to dubious melodramas (“The Reader”), fuel entire cable channels with documentary reconstructions of their crimes and on rare occasions motivate actual works of art.

But as Thomas Doherty forcefully establishes in his wide-ranging and brightly written new book, “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939,” Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at the time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good. Doherty, a film historian and professor of American studies at Brandeis University, points out that a great majority of American studios went out of their way to avoid any mention of the ominous political developments in Germany from the moment of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until well into 1939, when the outbreak of war in Europe had come to seem inevitable.

The motivation was largely commercial: the studios, with one important exception, did not want to risk the loss of a major European market by offending Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, whose censors decided which foreign films would be shown in Germany. [Read the full article...]

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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.

Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s.  Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war.  Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents.  With Cold War rhetoric reaching a fever pitch in 1982, the ten-year-old girls write letters to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov asking for peace.  But only Jenny’s letter receives a response, and Sarah is left behind when her friend accepts the Kremlin’s invitation to visit the USSR and becomes an international media sensation.  The girls’ icy relationship still hasn’t thawed when Jenny and her parents die tragically in a plane crash in 1985.

Ten years later, Sarah is about to graduate from college when she receives a mysterious letter from Moscow suggesting that Jenny’s death might have been a hoax.  She sets off to the former Soviet Union in search of the truth, but the more she delves into her personal Cold War history, the harder it is to separate facts from propaganda.

You Are One of Them is a taut, moving debut about the ways in which we define ourselves against others and the secrets we keep from those who are closest to us.  In her insightful forensic of a mourned friendship, Holt illuminates the long lasting sting of abandonment and the measures we take to bring back those we have lost.

About Elliott Holt

Elliott Holt’s short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, and Bellevue Literary Review. She won a 2011 Pushcart Prize and is the runner-up of the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. A graduate of the MFA program at Brooklyn College, where she won the Himan Brown Award, she has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop and Yaddo. She is a former contributing editor at One Story magazine and a former copywriter, who has worked at advertising agencies in Moscow, London, and New York. She currently resides in her hometown of Washington, D.C.

Editorial Review

Holt’s short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize, and she was runner-up for the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. Our narrator and protagonist is Sarah Zuckerman. After Sarah’s older sister’s death from meningitis, her parents’ marriage never recovers. Sarah needs a friend, and when the Joneses move in next door, she gets her wish. Jenny Jones’ family is an advertisement for a particular form of American domestic happiness, and the outgoing Jenny is an advertisement for herself. It is the early ’80s, the deepest chill of the Cold War, when Sarah begins a letter to Yuri Andropov, then leader of the Evil Empire. Jenny writes too, and Andropov replies to her. Jenny becomes a media darling, joins the popular clique at school, and leaves Sarah and her morose mother alone with their sorrows. A few years later, Jenny and her parents die in a plane crash. This fact of Jenny’s disappearance, and the conspiracies surrounding it, define Sarah’s life (Sarah’s mother establishes a Jenny Jones foundation). After college, Sarah travels to Russia in response to a note from Svetlana. Svetlana, apparently, is the girl standing next to Jenny in all the photos from Jenny’s visit as a child ambassador to the USSR. We never stray far from Sarah’s cramped perspective, and this tries the reader’s patience, as Sarah offers platitudes in place of insight. – Kirkus Reviews

Cold War, Cooled Heart - ‘You Are One of Them,’ by Elliott Holt

The New York Times Book Review – May 24, 2013 (Excerpt)

“The first defector was my sister.”

o begins Elliott Holt’s first novel, “You Are One of Them,” and don’t you want to keep reading? This book, inspired by the story of Samantha Smith, the American schoolgirl who wrote to the Soviet premier Yuri Andropov in 1982, and asked if he intended to start a nuclear war, has the momentum of a mystery but is, more essentially, a consideration of how we are haunted by loss.

The narrator, Sarah Zuckerman, thinks of defection not just in the sense of leaving one’s country for its enemy but also as a metaphor for abandonment. Her sister, who dies at age 4, is a defector, and her father, who divorces her mother and returns to his native England, is another. So too is her mother, who vanishes into debilitating anxiety and an obsession with nuclear disarmament. Defection provides the novel with a thematic framework, but Sarah’s fixation on it also works as a neat piece of subtle, cumulative characterization, revealing her tendency toward martyrdom: by dying, divorcing or struggling with unhappiness, her loved ones betray her.

Sarah’s major unresolved loss is that of her childhood best friend, Jennifer Jones. In 1982, Sarah and Jennifer, 10-year-olds in Washington, write letters to Andropov asking him for peace. The letters are Sarah’s idea, but only Jennifer receives a response from Andropov — and an invitation to visit the Soviet Union and see for herself that the Russian people don’t want a war. Jennifer becomes a media sensation, and her friendship with Sarah deteriorates. Two years later, Jennifer and her parents are killed in a plane crash over the ocean. Their remains are never found. [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Eye of the Storm comes a vivid, visceral tale of childhood friendship and sexual awakening from beyond the echoes of World War II.

Sydney, Australia, 1942. Two children, on the cusp of adolescence, have been spirited away from the war in Europe and given shelter in a house on Neutral Bay, taken in by the charity of an old widow who wants little to do with them. The boy, Gilbert, has escaped the Blitz. The girl, Eirene, lost her father in a Greek prison. Left to their own devices, the children forge a friendship of startling honesty, forming a bond of uncommon complexity that they sense will shape their destinies for years to come.

Patrick White’s posthumously discovered novel, The Hanging Garden, which represents the first part of what was intended to be his final masterpiece, is a breathtaking and important literary event. Seamlessly shifting among points of view, and written in dazzling prose, Patrick White’s mastery of style and highly inventive storytelling will transport you as the work of few writers can.

About Patrick White

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and raised in Australia. He became the most revered figure in modern Australian literature, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. He died in September 1990.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Trouble Down Under - ‘The Hanging Garden,’ by Patrick White

The New York Times Book Review – May 24, 2013 (Excerpt)

The most cross-grained of writers, Patrick White went out of his way to mention, in acknowledging his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, that a newspaper had labeled him “Australia’s most unreadable novelist.” He wore the insult with pride. It did not mean he wasn’t Australia’s greatest novelist — which he knew he was. But White was never loved by his countrymen, who found his outspoken views of them and their homeland unpalatable. Australia, White said, proved you could recycle excrement. It’s hard to forgive a remark like that. More so as White used a blunter term than “excrement.”

“The Hanging Garden” has been, hitherto, a genuinely unreadable work in that it was among the last things White wrote, at a period in his life when his health (but not his mind) was failing. He finished only a third of the narrative and gave instructions to his executors that the unrevised manuscript should never be published. White’s prohibition has been defied, 23 years after his death, and we can now read the long fragment. The plot, as we have it, is simple. It is 1942. Two children have been sent from war-torn Europe to the safety of Australia. They are, in that country’s slang term, “reffos” — admitted as refugees but not welcomed as guests. [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey—especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade French fries amid the roar of the Cyclone roller coaster. There is also the lure of the world’s biggest salt-water pool, complete with divers whose astonishing stunts inspire Toni, despite her mother’s insistence that girls can’t be high divers.

But a family of dreamers doesn’t always share the same dreams, and then the world intrudes: There’s the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor, which hits home in ways that will split the family apart; and perils like fire and race riots in the park. Both Eddie and Jack face the dangers of war, while Adele has ambitions of her own—and Toni is determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to each other—and to Palisades Park—until the park closes forever in 1971.

Evocative and moving, with the trademark brilliance at transforming historical events into irresistible fiction that made Alan Brennert’s Moloka’i andHonolulu into reading group favorites, Palisades Park takes us back to a time when life seemed simpler—except, of course, it wasn’t.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Alan Brennert

ALAN BRENNERT grew up in Edgewater, New Jersey, at the foot of the Palisades. He won an Emmy Award in 1991 for his work as a writer-producer on  L.A. Law, and was nominated for two other Emmy Awards as well as a Golden Globe. He won a Nebula Award for his story “Ma Qui.” The author of the national bestsellers Moloka’i, a “Bookies” award–winner for Book Club Book of the Year, and Honolulu, winner of Elle‘s Lettres 2009 Grand Prix for Fiction, he lives in Sherman Oaks, California.

Editorial Review

As Brennert (Molokai, 2003, etc.) opens his tale, with its plentiful shaggy-dog moments, we find something approaching Eddie Stopka’s idea of paradise: a swimming pool “packed with hundreds of swimmers, the beach overrun by sunbathers and toddlers wielding toy shovels.” A few pages and years later, and Eddie’s world has been transformed: The Great Depression has wiped happiness from the land, and he’s taken to riding the rails—though, careful as ever, isn’t actually as broke as his fellow hobos. Eddie is nothing if not goal-oriented, and he makes his way back to the shore and talks his way onto the crew, promising that he’s “torn down Ferris wheels and put ‘em back up again.” One thing leads to another, and in time, Eddie’s a dad—though therein lies a story that’s not shaggy in the least. As the years roll by, Eddie and his offspring face a changing world in which—gasp—African-Americans expect to enter the park and—gasp—Richard Nixon takes national office. For all its exotic setting, Brennert’s tale is a universal one, pointing to the travails of family life. But there are differences between the lives of his characters and ours: As one stunt diver says, smiling, of a particularly stunning feat, “Ah, that’s nothing. Wait’ll you see me do it when I’m on fire.” – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: Alan Brennert’s nostalgia-laced ‘Palisades Park’

The Washington Post Book Review- May 22, 2013 (Excerpt)

“Palisades Park,” the new novel by Alan Brennert, belongs to a genre we might call “nostalgia fiction.” Unlike historical fiction, nostalgia fiction gets its retrospective fabric on the cheap, purchasing it by the decade rather than by the century; ultimately, it’s much less interested in examining the contexts of epochal events than it is in affirming the biases of readers who go around insisting that everything was better back in the day.

Perhaps fittingly for a story set largely in an amusement park, Brennert’s novel glides right by some of the most pivotal moments in 20th-century American history — the Great Depression, World War II, the birth of the civil rights movement — like a mechanized gondola floating past painted scenes in a tunnel of love. There’s not much time for reflection. Instead, the point of this ride is to re-create a soothingly familiar, morally comprehensible, relatively recent past. And the key to achieving it, apparently, is to flash-distill that past until practically all that’s left are tiny details triggering warm memories.

Over the several decades we follow the Stopka family — married New Jerseyans Eddie and Adele and their children, Antoinette and Jack — we will never, no matter what other complaints we might wish to air, be able to say that Brennert didn’t do enough to set the scene. Restaurants and drugstores and comic-book stores aren’t simply described; their names, as well as the names of their owners, are given (and, in some cases, their addresses provided). [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.

Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.

Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanches storms his homestead and brutally murders his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to life among the Comanches, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, becoming the chief’s adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men—which complicates his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized nor fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong—a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.

Intertwined with Eli’s story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father’s drive for power, and Jeannie, Eli’s great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man’s world.

Philipp Meyer deftly explores how Eli’s ruthlessness and steely pragmatism transform subsequent generations of McCulloughs. Love, honor, even children are sacrificed in the name of ambition as the family becomes one of the richest powers in Texas, a ranching-and-oil dynasty of unsurpassed wealth and privilege. Yet, like all empires, the McCulloughs must eventually face the consequences of their choices. Harrowing, panoramic, and vividly drawn, The Son is a masterful achievement from a sublime young talent.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer is the author of the critically lauded novel American Rust, winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was an Economist Book of the Year, a Washington Post top ten book of the year, and a New York Times Notable Book. He is a graduate of Cornell University and has an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow. A native of Baltimore, he now lives mostly in Texas.

Editorial Review

As the first child born in the new Republic of Texas, or so it’s said, Eli McCullough fills big shoes. Yet he stands in the shadow of his older brother, who reads books and has a strange attachment to his sister—one that will be cut short when Comanches descend and, in a spree worthy of Cormac McCarthy, put an end to all that: “My mother had not made a sound since I woke up, even with the arrows sticking out of her, but she began to scream and cry when they scalped her, and I saw another Indian walking up to her with my father’s broadax.” Years living in semicaptivity with the Comanches teaches Eli a thing or two about setting goals and sticking to them, as well as a ruthlessness that will come in handy when he begins to build a cattle empire and accrue political power. His son is less deft; caught up in the cross-border upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, he finds himself out of place and adrift (“You’re a big man,” says one ranch hand to him, “and I don’t see why you act like such a small one”) and certainly no favorite of his ever-demanding father. Meyer’s sophomore novel deftly opens with entwined, impending deaths across generations, joining tangled stories over three centuries, the contested line between the U.S. and Mexico, and very different cultures; if sometimes it hints of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Ferber’s Giant, it more often partakes of the somber, doomed certainty of Faulkner: “There had been one grandson everyone liked, who had loved the ranch and been expected to take it over, but he had drowned in three feet of water.” – Kirkus Reviews

Philipp Meyer’s ‘The Son,’ reviewed by Ron Charles

The Washington Post Book Review – May 21, 2013 (Excerpt)

In 2009, as the Great Recession was still dragging on, a young man from Baltimore published his first novel, a devastating story about the human costs of industrial ruin. The Post named Philipp Meyer’s “American Rust” one of the top five novels of the year. The New Yorker included Meyer on its list of the 20 best writers under 40. And he won a Guggenheim fellowship.

What a pleasure it is now to see Meyer confirm all that initial enthusiasm with a second book that’s even more ambitious, even more deeply rooted in our troublesome economic and cultural history. With its vast scope — stretching from pre-Civil War cowboys to post-9/11 immigrants — “The Son” makes a viable claim to be a Great American Novel of the sort John Dos Passos and Frank Norris once produced. Here is the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development.

At 561 pages, “The Son” is a long novel that bears its weight with athletic confidence. The story rotates chapter by chapter through three distinct voices, members of the McCullough family born about 50 years apart. That triptych structure is demanding — for author and reader — but as these blazing testimonies begin to fuel one another, they burn even hotter. [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.

Addictions to iphones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and sex are taking over our lives.

Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control. Damian Thompson, who has himself struggled with a range of addictions, argues that human desire is in the process of being reshaped. Shunning the concept of addiction as disease, he shows how manufacturers are producing substances like ipads, muffins and computer games that we learn to like too much and supplement tradition addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling. He argues that addictive behaviour is becoming a substitute for family and work bonds that are being swept away by globalisation and urbanisation.

This battle to control addiction will soon overshadow familiar ideological debates about how to run the economy, and as whole societies set about “fixing” themselves, the architecture of human relations will come under strain as never before.

The Fix offers a truly frightening glimpse of the future and is essential reading for fans of Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’, Oliver James’s ‘Affluenza’ and Francis Wheen’s ‘How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World’.

About Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is a recovering alcoholic who continues to wrestle with an addiction to collecting Classical CDs. He’s the editor of the Daily Telegraph blogs, a lead columnist in print in the Saturday Telegraph, used to be the director of the Catholic Herald and has been described by the Church Times as a ‘blood-crazed ferret’.

Editorial Review

Saturday Telegraph lead columnist Thompson (Counterknowledge, 2008) hammers home a twofold thesis: that the “twelve step” model of addiction as disease, endorsed by therapists and others, is inaccurate in addressing the wide spectrum of compulsive desire as seen by brain science and, more disturbingly, that numerous forces are harnessing this misconception for profit by using innovation and marketing to make elements of modern life more subject to dependency, from pornography to smartphone apps. Although he acknowledges his own youthful struggle with alcohol abuse, he wisely balances the memoir aspects with a wider look at research and the views of others; this, and his generally wry voice, gives his discussion of troubling issues a deft rather than a lugubrious tone. Thompson excels at teasing out the addictive patterns forced upon us in ordinary life, beginning with casinos and strip clubs, and he makes shrewd cultural cross-connections: “Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: it provides a reliable, dirty hit that relieves misery and boredom.” When he examines such disparate phenomena as the migration patterns of new synthetic drugs, the abuse of attention deficit drugs by students, the revenue-generating tricks present in electronic pastimes like “Farmville” or “World of Warcraft,” and the popularity of hard-core porn on the iPads of adolescents, he sees technology as a common culprit, creating “the quickening of desire….Most of us [now] face an intensity of temptation that we can only intermittently resist.” The author blends science, personal experience,and witty and bemused commentary into a convincing take on compulsive behaviors that many readers will recognize: “it’s as if someone or something has sneakily moved the boundaries of your self-control.” – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: ‘The Fix,’ by Damian Thompson

The Washington Post Book Review – May 21, 2013 (Excerpt)

The subtitle of the “The Fix — How Addiction Is Taking Over Your World” — sounds like lively hyperbole until you crack the cover of this fleet-footed, frighteningly up-to-date tome on all manner of compulsive habits. But British journalist Damian Thompson backs it up.

He speaks in a voice that’s deceptively casual, disclosing his own demons — from alcohol to zopiclone — throughout the book. After reading the first 50 pages, you may feel that his take on addiction is superficial and a bit self-centered. But by the end, after you’ve been pulled through a whirlwind of anecdotes, interviews and studies, he has built an argument with real force and substance.

Addiction, as Thompson lays it out, is motivated by two forces: the strong force exerted upon us by the feeling of pleasure (the brain’s opioid system) and the even stronger force exerted by desire (the dopamine system). In the wild, under conditions of scarcity, these cravings and mental rewards kept homo sapiens alive in a hostile, mostly barren environment. But under conditions of plenty — or obscene excess — these same brain mechanisms leave us open to being overwhelmed by sugary foods, pornography, drugs, massively multi-player online role-playing games and, well, you name it. Whatever your weakness, there’s a business that knows how to exploit it with calculated insight into the quirks, rituals and features that define addiction. [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

Only four men survived the plane crash. The pilot. A politician. A cop… and the criminal he was shackled to.

On an icy night in October 1984, a commuter plane carrying nine passengers crashed in the remote wilderness of northern Alberta, killing six people. Four survived: the rookie pilot, a prominent politician, a cop, and the criminal he was escorting to face charges. Despite the poor weather, Erik Vogel, the 24-year-old pilot, was under intense pressure to fly. Larry Shaben, the author’s father and Canada’s first Muslim Cabinet Minister, was commuting home after a busy week at the Alberta Legislature. Constable Scott Deschamps was escorting Paul Archambault, a drifter wanted on an outstanding warrant. Against regulations, Archambault’s handcuffs were removed-a decision that would profoundly impact the men’s survival.

As the men fight through the night to stay alive, the dividing lines of power, wealth, and status are erased, and each man is forced to confront the precious and limited nature of his existence.

About Carol Shaben

Carol Shaben won two Canadian National Magazine Awards -a Gold Medal for Investigative Reporting and a Silver Medal for Politics and Public Interest-for articles that highlighted the subject of this book.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

National Magazine Award–winning journalist Shaben’s debut has at its center a stranger-than-fiction, cinematic sequence: the injured survivors—the pilot, a politician, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and his prisoner, a fugitive drifter—hanging on to life together overnight in subzero temperatures. The politician, Larry Shaben, Canada’s first Muslim Cabinet minister, was the author’s father. Fortunately, this personal connection only amplifies Shaben’s determination to reconstruct the incident and its aftermath from all four survivors’ perspectives. She places the crash in the context of the shaky standards of the commuter air industry. Her meticulous account first focuses on the survivors’ back stories: She portrays the pilot as well-meaning but guilty of error under pressure (including flying into bad weather with no co-pilot and incomplete instrumentation). The most compelling character arc is that of the drifter, who rescued his captor from the wreckage and was instrumental in keeping the others alive. He was hailed as a hero, yet his life continued on a dark downward spiral, while the cop he saved left the force for a spiritual quest. On top of all this, Shaben also follows the formidable rescue effort quickly mounted by the hardy rural Canadians. Though the book’s propulsive pace slackens in the final sections, dealing with the crash’s aftermath—blame was showered on both the airline’s corner-cutting and on the luckless young pilot, who was frank about his errors and faced a long redemption—this is a complex, chilling narrative rendered with depth and precision, engaged in both its characters and the larger social moment (the crash led to recommendations for commuter air reform, not always followed in the years since). – Kirkus Reviews

After Crashing In Canadian ‘Abyss,’ Four Men Fight To Survive

NPR Book Review – May 21, 2013 (Excerpt)

On the night of Oct. 19, 1984, Erik Vogel was uneasy about flying. It was snowing; his plane’s de-icer and autopilot weren’t working; and his co-pilot had been bumped to fit one more passenger on his 10-seater. But the young pilot was behind schedule and he felt like his job was on the line, so he took off, as he did most days, shuttling between the remote communities that dot the Canadian wilderness.

Author Carol Shaben tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep what happened next: “He’s hearing these chunks of ice coming off the props and banging like rocks against the fuselage. And he made a calculation error. He thought he was past the high point, but there was another rise of land, 2,500 feet, and he hit that top of that rise.”

The plane crashed through a bank of trees, and as the fuselage plowed into the ground, broken bits of plane sheared off the roof like a sardine can. Six people died in the crash, and four men emerged from the wreckage: Vogel; Shaben’s father, politician Larry Shaben; a prisoner, Paul Archambault; and Scott Deschamps, the police officer who was escorting Archambault.

The men spent a frozen night shrouded by clouds and forest, wondering if they’d ever be found. Carol Shaben’s new book,Into the Abyss, describes their struggle to survive. She and Deschamps discuss how a forest can be short on wood and how the survivors’ lives changed after their rescue. [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

Big Brother is a striking novel about siblings, marriage, and obesity from Lionel Shriver, the acclaimed author the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin.

For Pandora, cooking is a form of love. Alas, her husband, Fletcher, a self-employed high-end cabinetmaker, now spurns the “toxic” dishes that he’d savored through their courtship, and spends hours each day to manic cycling. Then, when Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at the airport, she doesn’t recognize him. In the years since they’ve seen one another, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: It’s him or me.

Rich with Shriver’s distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: an issue both social and excruciatingly personal. It asks just how much sacrifice we’ll make to save single members of our families, and whether it’s ever possible to save loved ones from themselves.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver’s novels include The New Republic, the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the Orange Prize winner We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Review

Pandora, the narrator of this smartly turned novel, is a happily settled 40-something living in a just-so Iowa home with her husband and two stepchildren and running a successful business manufacturing custom dolls that parrot the recipient’s pet phrases. Her brother, Edison, is a New York jazz pianist who’s hit the skids, and when he calls hoping to visit for a while, she’s happy to assist. But she’s aghast to discover he’s ballooned from a trim 163 to nearly 400 pounds. Edison can be a pretentious blowhard to start with, and his weight makes him an even more exasperating houseguest, clearing out the pantry, breaking furniture and driving a wedge in Pandora’s marriage. So Pandora concocts a scheme: She’ll move out to live with Edison while monitoring his crash diet of protein-powder drinks. The book is largely about weight and America’s obesity epidemic; Shriver writes thoughtfully about our diets and how our struggle to find an identity tends to lead us toward the fridge, and she describes our fleshy flaws with a candor that marks much of her fiction. But the book truly shines as a study of family relationships. As Pandora spends a year as Edison’s cheerleader, drill sergeant and caregiver, Shriver reveals the complex push and pull between siblings and has some wise and troubling things to say about guilt, responsibility and how what can seem like tough love is actually overindulgence. The story’s arc flirts with a cheeriness that’s unusual for her, but a twist ending reassures us this is indeed a Shriver novel and that our certitude is just another human foible. – Kirkus Reviews

Exclusive First Read: ‘Big Brother’ By Lionel Shriver

NPR Book Review – May 21, 2013 (Excerpt)

Lionel Shriver doesn’t shy away from hot-button topics. Her breakout novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, from 2003, was about the mother of a teen who kills seven classmates in a school massacre (it was made into a film with Tilda Swinton). Her 2010 novel, So Much for That, which took aim at the American health care system, was nominated for the National Book Award. Big Brother is a comedic take on obesity; its warmhearted tone and nuanced portrayal of family dynamics make for a lively read. The narrator, Pandora, is a 40-something entrepreneur and former caterer. Her tidy home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she lives with her husband, Fletcher, and his two children, is a happy one until her older brother, Edison, comes for an extended visit, trailing chaos and heartbreak in his outsized wake. This exclusive selection — which might as well have been titled “We Need to Talk About Your Brother” — introduces the main characters and the surprising turn that kicks the plot into gear. Big Brother will be published June 4. [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the films The Social Network and 21—comes the larger-than-life true tale of a group of American college buddies who brilliantly built a billion-dollar online poker colossus based out of the hedonistic paradise of Costa Rica.

One problem: the U.S. Department of Justice was gunning for them. . . .

Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, acclaimed author Ben Mezrich’s Straight Flush tells the captivating rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world, on par with some of the behemoths of the Internet. At its height, Absolute Poker was an online empire earning more than a million dollars a day, following savvy business strategy and even better luck. Its founders set up their operations in the exotic jungle paradise of Costa Rica, embracing an outrageous lifestyle of girls, parties, and money.

Meanwhile, the gray area of U.S. and international law in which the company operated was becoming a lot more risky, and soon the U.S. Department of Justice had placed a bull’s-eye on Absolute Poker. Should they fold—or double down and ride their hot hand? Impossible to put down, Straight Flush is an exclusive, never-before-seen look behind the headlines of one of the wildest business stories of the past decade.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Ben Mezrich

Ben Mezrich graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991. Since then he has published twelve books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Accidental Billionaires, which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network, and Bringing Down the House, which has sold more than 1.5 million copies in twelve languages and became the basis for the Kevin Spacey movie 21. Mezrich has also published the national bestsellers Sex on the Moon, Ugly Americans, Rigged, and Busting Vegas. He lives in Boston.

Editorial Review

Before the passing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, the world of online poker was like the Wild West: virtually lawless and flush with easy cash for those audacious enough to grab it. By bringing the casino table into the American living room, top-grossing sites like PokerStars and PartyPoker were able to rake in massive amounts of money. AbsolutePoker, the site hatched among the frat brothers, was right there with the online poker kings, earning its principals staggering sums of money in an incredibly short period of time. While largely nondescript collegiate types, the characters represent the kind of youthful American archetypes that engenders them with empathy. Before long, the frat boys had successfully established their online outpost in the jungles of Costa Rica and were signing up new subscribers almost faster than they could comprehend. Predictably, they also began driving too fast, drinking too much and sleeping with way too many women. Still, thanks to the author’s mostly adept hand, they essentially remain the same sympathetic dreamers they were before their worlds started to turn increasingly nightmarish. As the author gleefully hurtles the hapless band of entrepreneurs into that final hairpin turn on the highway, readers are left to wince, the RPMs of this rapid-fire narrative running high in the red. The reportage takes on added significance given the fact that the college crew’s final cards have yet to be played. – Kirkus Reviews

Hey, We’ll Be Rich! Uh oh, They Passed a Law. Now We’re Going to Jail!

The New York Times Book Review – May 22, 2013 (Excerpt)

What ethically challenged billionaire would not welcome the journalistic cosseting of Ben Mezrich? With each new book, Mr. Mezrich becomes increasingly adept at how to use his kid gloves. He is expert at making up conversations he did not hear, sexing up parties he did not attend, pumping up the thrills of getting rich quick and playing down the legal liabilities of characters who may have done a teeny bit of innocent law-bending or moral compromising on their ways to the top.

If he has a single favorite sentence, it is this, best savored slowly: “Billionaires.” If that needed a follow-up, which it doesn’t, his heightened version is: “Billionaires. Was it really possible?” Sometimes it is very possible, as in the case of Mark Zuckerberg, whose story Mr. Mezrich both tarnished and faked in “The Accidental Billionaires,” the basis for the film “The Social Network.” Sometimes, as in his last book, “Sex on the Moon,” the climber gets busted before those billions are in reach.

In “Straight Flush,” Mr. Mezrich’s latest, the characters are a group of ambitious fraternity brothers who create an online gambling business called Absolute Poker. One, Brent Beckley, has gone to federal prison. Another, Scott Tom, is not technically fleeing criminal charges because he has not left Antigua since the business hit the skids. But he remains trapped offshore. [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

In the Louvre museum hangs a portrait of a middle-aged man with long dark hair, a mustache, and heavy-lidded eyes, and he is dressed in the starched white collar and black coat of the typical Dutch burgher. The painting is now the iconic image of René Descartes, the great seventeenth-century French philosopher. And the painter of the work? The Dutch master Frans Hals–or so it was long believed, until the work was downgraded to a copy of an original. But where, then, is the authentic version located, and who painted it? Is the man in the painting–and in its original–really Descartes?

A unique combination of philosophy, biography, and art history, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter investigates the remarkable individuals and circumstances behind a small portrait. Through this image–and the intersecting lives of a brilliant philosopher, a Catholic priest, and a gifted painter–Steven Nadler opens up a fascinating portal into Descartes’s life and times, skillfully presenting an accessible introduction to Descartes’s philosophical and scientific ideas, and an illuminating tour of the volatile political and religious environment of the Dutch Golden Age. As Nadler shows, Descartes’s innovative ideas about the world, about human nature and knowledge, and about philosophy itself, stirred great controversy. Philosophical and theological critics vigorously opposed his views, and civil and ecclesiastic authorities condemned his writings. Nevertheless, Descartes’s thought came to dominate the philosophical world of the period, and can rightly be called the philosophy of the seventeenth century.

Shedding light on a well-known image, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter offers an engaging exploration of a celebrated philosopher’s world and work.

About Steven Nadler

Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His books include “Rembrandt’s Jews”, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; “Spinoza: A Life”, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award; and “A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age” (Princeton).

Editorial Review

Nadler (Philosophy/Univ. of Wisconsin; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, 2011, etc.) believes that Descartes “belongs as much to the intellectual culture of the Dutch Golden Age as he does to the grand history of Western philosophy whose development he so strongly influenced.” Feeling politically constrained in France, Descartes moved to Holland to work, but his philosophy aroused controversy and opposition in Dutch universities as well. Nadler situates the French philosopher’s life in its Dutch context and frames the narrative with an investigation into a few portraits of Descartes. One was supposedly painted by Frans Hals and is in Copenhagen. The author demonstrates that there may be a possibility that one of Descartes’ friends commissioned the portrait from Hals as a memento prior to the philosopher’s 1649 departure on a visit to the queen of Sweden. This would have been from the period he lived in the village where he wrote the Discourse on Method and Principles of Philosophy. The friend was the Catholic priest Augustijn Alsten Blomart, who lived in the city of Haarlem, just south of Descartes’ country-village home. Blomart, as Nadler shows, was well-integrated into contemporary Dutch literary, artistic, scientific and political circles. Hals also lived and worked in Haarlem. Nadler discusses the extant portraits of the philosopher, as well as their provenance and what is known of the context in which they were produced. He also provides a chronological summary of Descartes’ philosophical works in relation to their Dutch context. – Kirkus Reviews

Steven Nadler’s riveting detective work sheds a light on the Dutch Golden Age

The Washington Post Book Review – May 15, 2013 (Excerpt)

Over the past 20 years, Steven Nadler, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has established himself as this country’s leading authority on the philosophical thought of 17th-century Europe. He has written a major biography of Spinoza, edited scholarly works about Malebranche, been a Pulitzer finalist for “Rembrandt’s Jews,” and taken up, in “The Best of all Possible Worlds,” the arguments of Leibniz and his contemporaries about that most troubling of all theological questions: the problem of evil. Why does God allow the innocent to suffer?

Much of Nadler’s work exemplifies what the French call “haute vulgarisation,” high-level popularization. You don’t need to have aced Epistemology 101 to understand his books; you just need to pay close attention to his clear, patient exposition. In “The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter,” Nadler has, moreover, written his most inviting book yet.

Given its subtitle, “A Portrait of Descartes,” one would naturally expect an account of the life and thought of this key modern philosopher. But that subtitle is actually a sly pun. The great Dutch artist Frans Hals — famous for such portraits as “The Laughing Cavalier” and the bibulous old woman known as Malle Babbe — actually painted Descartes. There’s a well-known canvas in the Louvre, now generally thought to be a copy of a lost original, and a somewhat rougher, but very similar portrait in Copenhagen. This book examines the intersection of Hals, Descartes and the priest Augustijn Alsten Bloemaert, who might have brought the philosopher and painter together. [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.

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.

That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty.

While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Mary Louise Roberts

Mary Louise Roberts is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siècle France and Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1918–1928.

The Dark Side of Liberation

The New York Times Book Review – May 20, 2013 (Excerpt)

The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American G.I.’s were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light.

In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.”

This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity. [Read the full article...]

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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.

“I LIKE YOUR history pieces about famous local guys, but what about the gals?” a friend asked me.

She was right, apart from the really big noises like Agatha Christie and Lady Nancy Astor it is difficult to find a mention of those unsung heroines who have somehow dissolved into the past.

So looking into the archives I discovered several extraordinary ladies who have made their mark in the Devon and particularly Torbay here in South Devon.

I was particularly taken by Emily and Edith Skinner – often referred to as the misses Skinner, who had the inspiration to open an enterprising and unusual holiday home for working women on the downs at nearby Babbacombe.

In those days, when mostly men were the providers, woman were hard-pressed to maintain an independent and dignified status – especially in the large cities – and because of their exhausting work their health often suffered, nervous breakdowns leading to extreme poverty ensued, there being no such thing as social security hand-outs.

The Skinner sisters were very aware of the difficulties given to their sex and aimed to do their bit to help the plight of underprivileged women everywhere.

By giving women the opportunity to breathe in the proclaimed healthy air of Torbay and a jolly good holiday break at reasonable cost, their reputation grew through mentions in newspapers, magazines articles and advertisements directed to women nationwide.

And they called their residence Ferny Bank, described as ‘A house of rest for women in business’ ranging from shop-girls, dressmakers, milliners, employees in business houses, post and telegraph clerks etc. Established in 1878/79 the business soon took off big time and in order to meet demand an extension was built enabling the sisters to accommodate up to seventy women who received all the attention, comfort and good food they could muster.
It seems too the sisters who lived in a property nearby called regularly to keep in touch via their ‘matron’ who was in charge – a motherly figure whom many of the women could approach given any particular problem – and Emily, the elder sister, saw to it that any member of the opposite sex was strictly kept at bay and any contact whatsoever had to be sanctioned by her.

Certainly no male visitors were permitted which seemed to be accepted – that the visiting female fraternity were contented just to share a holiday with their own sex. Although no doubt, and reading between the lines of articles written both in The Argosy and Library magazines, in 1883/87 there were one or two who broke the rules, seemingly clever enough not to be noticed, for if they were they would have been obliged to find alternative accommodation which, given the reasonability of the tariff, would have been nigh impossible.

But the harsh rules seemed to be accepted generally without question for nothing but praise is recorded in those lengthy articles, when two London business women at the end of their tether, returned after their holiday refreshed and ‘sane.’ And of course special acknowledgement was given to the ‘wonderful misses Skinner’.

Country drives and boating parties were arranged for the visitors. Two boatmen only were allowed to take out the ladies – elderly men of ‘unblemished respectability’ whose characters were known to the Misses Skinner, and of course, the charabanc driver.

At that time Arthur Hyde Dendy was hiring out his bathing machines on both Paignton and Babbacombe beaches, and during the changing procedure, lookouts were on hand to ensure there were no peeping toms nearby.

The elegant house with the beautiful Tower still exists – and given a little imagination – one can possibly understand just how different it was then, when horse drawn charabancs operated from Torre station transporting the excited ladies to and from their destination.

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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 unforgettable novel about finding a lost piece of yourself in someone else.

Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.

About Khaled Hosseini

With more than ten million copies sold in the United States of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, and more than thirty-eight million copies sold worldwide in more than seventy countries, Khaled Hosseini is one of most widely read and beloved novelists in the entire world. The Kite Runner spent 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted as a #1 New York Times bestseller, remaining in the #1 spot for fifteen weeks, and spending nearly an entire year on the bestseller list. Hosseini is a Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

It begins powerfully in 1952. Saboor is a dirt-poor day laborer in a village two days walk from Kabul. His first wife died giving birth to their daughter Pari, who’s now 4 and has been raised lovingly by her brother, 10-year-old Abdullah; two peas in a pod, but “leftovers” in the eyes of Parwana, Saboor’s second wife. Saboor’s brother-in-law Nabi is a cook/chauffeur for a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul; he helps arrange the sale of Pari to the couple, breaking Abdullah’s heart. The drama does nothing to prepare us for the coming leaps in time and place. Nabi’s own story comes next in a posthumous tell-all letter (creaky device) to Markos, the Greek plastic surgeon who occupies the Kabul house from 2002 onwards. Nabi confesses his guilt in facilitating the sale of Pari and describes the adoptive couple: his boss Suleiman, a gay man secretly in love with him, and his wife, Nila, a half-French poet who high-tails it to France with Pari after Suleiman has a stroke. There follow the stories of mother and daughter in Paris, Markos’ childhood in Greece (an irrelevance), the return to Kabul of expat cousins from California and the Afghan warlord who stole the old village. Missing is the viselike tension of the earlier novels. It’s true that betrayal is a constant theme, as it was in The Kite Runner, but it doesn’t work as a glue. And identity? Hosseini struggles to convince us that Pari becomes a well-integrated Frenchwoman. – Kirkus Reviews

Siblings’ Separation Haunts In ‘Kite Runner’ Author’s Latest

NPR Book Review – May 19, 2013 (Excerpt)

There was a time around 2003, before e-books and e-readers, when it seemed that everywhere you turned — in an airport, on a bus or anywhere people read — people were lost in The Kite Runner. An epic tale set in Afghanistan, the book sold more than 7 million copies in the U.S. and catapulted the author, Khaled Hosseini, onto the global literary stage.

Hosseini followed that success with another book about his homeland, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which also became a best-seller.

Six years later, Hosseini has written a third heart-wrenching tale, set in Afghanistan, California, Paris and the Greek islands. And The Mountains Echoed is a story about family — specifically the siblings Abdullah and Pari, separated at a young age.

Hosseini talks with NPR’s Rachel Martin about the image that inspired the book, the pressures of success and why he considers all his novels love stories. [Read the full article...]

Siblings Haunted by the Past, and by Afghanistan’s Cycle of Misery

The New York Times Book Review – May 20, 2013 (Excerpt)

Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, “And the Mountains Echoed,” may have the most awkward title in his body of work, but it’s his most assured and emotionally gripping story yet, more fluent and ambitious than“The Kite Runner” (2003), more narratively complex than “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2007).

“Mountains” spans several generations and moves back and forth between Afghanistan and the West. (Mr. Hosseini says the title was inspired by William Blake’s poem “Nurse’s Song: Innocence,” which refers to hills echoing with the sound of children’s voices.) It grapples with many of the same themes that crisscross his early novels: the relationship between parents and children, and the ways the past can haunt the present. And it shares a similar penchant for mapping terrain midway between the boldly colored world of fable and the more shadowy, shaded world of realism.

In “The Kite Runner” and “Suns,” this could yield some soapy, melodramatic plot twists and characters who were very, very good or very, very bad. “Mountains,” too, has more than its share of contrivance and sentimentality, but Mr. Hosseini’s narrative gifts have deepened over the years, enabling him to anchor firmly the more maudlin aspects of his tale in genuine emotion and fine-grained details. [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.

A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.

The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet’s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.

The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer’s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About George Packer

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and two other works of nonfiction, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, andThe Village of Waiting. His play, Betrayed, ran off-Broadway for five months in 2008 and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. His most recent book is Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade. He lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Review

“I am the empire at the end of the decadence.” Thus said the French poet Mallarmé. Packer describes the decline of America from a very specific time: If you were born half a century ago, around 1960, then, he writes, “you watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape.” While forces are picking away at the pillars that still stand (Social Security, public education, privacy, etc.), and while only money seems to matter, the author offers the tiniest comfort in the thought that America has declined and fallen before. Still, this decline seems steeper than those others, save for the Civil War. Among his subjects are the city of Tampa, Fla., which once “was going to be America’s Next Great City” but is mired in stagnation and desperation, and a struggling, no-longer-aspirational factory worker named Tammy, one of whose co-workers sagely observes, “Most people wouldn’t survive in a factory. Mitt Romney would die in a week.” Against these depressed landscapes and people, Packer juxtaposes a few who are doing a bit better: Raymond Chandler, “a drinker” whose lapidary stories of blue-collar America have become classics; Oprah Winfrey, empire builder; and Colin Powell, empire builder of another kind. Packer’s repetitive structure—a chapter on Tammy followed by one on Tampa followed by other pieces—hammers home the point that all is not well in America and not likely to get better soon, the promise of “acres of diamonds in Greenville [N.C.]” notwithstanding. – Kirkus Reviews

Stories Of Hope Amid America’s ‘Unwinding’

NPR Book Review – May 19, 2013 (Excerpt)

According to New Yorker writer George Packer, there used to be a kind of deal among Americans — a deal in which everyone had a place.

“People were more constrained than they are today, they had less freedom,” he says, “but they had more security and there was a sense in which each generation felt that the next generation would be able to improve itself, to do better.”

But over the last generation, that deal has come undone. As Packer explains it, “many Americans feel that they’re all alone, that no one is going to help them and that, in a way, there’s a kind of unfairness at play in our society where elites seem to do better and better and ordinary people who might have once even thought of themselves as middle class, struggle more and more. That’s what’s unwound in my adult lifetime.”

And that’s what Packer explores in his new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. It’s filled with vignettes and profiles of famous and ordinary American lives. He joins NPR’s Rachel Martin to discuss the book’s characters and how he first became aware of the unwinding trend. [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.

Mo Hayder has for years been a master of chilling, seamlessly-plotted thrillers that keep the reader glued to the page long after lights out, and fresh off of winning the Edgar Award for Best Novel for Gone, Hayder is at the top of her game. Her latest novel, Poppet, is Hayder at her most terrifying: a gripping novel about the search for a dangerous mental patient on the loose.

Everything goes according to procedure when a patient, Isaac, is released into the community from a high security mental health ward. But when the staff realize that he was connected to a series of unexplained episodes of self-harm amongst the ward’s patients, and furthermore that he was released in error, they call on Detective Jack Caffery to investigate, and to track Isaac down before he can kill again. Will the terrifying little effigies Isaac made explain the incidents around the ward, or provide the clue Caffery needs to predict what he’s got planned?

Mo Hayder is renowned for conjuring nightmares that sink under the skin, and in Poppet she has delivered a taut, unbearably suspenseful novel that will not let readers go.

About Mo Hayder

Mo Hayder has worked as a filmmaker, Tokyo nightclub hostess, and English language teacher. She is the winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Novel for Gone and the 2011 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award for outstanding body of work. She is also the author of Birdman, The Treatment, The Devil of Nanking, Pig Island, Ritual, Skin, andHanging Hill. She lives in England.

Editorial Review

Senior nursing coordinator AJ LeGrande never expected moonlight and roses at Beechway, but the recent toll has been disturbing indeed. Four years after Pauline Scott, an anorexic patient who was convinced someone was sitting on her chest, was found dead, another patient, Zelda Lornton, has died 12 days after cutting herself, and something has encouraged Moses Jackson, not a patient to be trifled with, to scoop out his own eye. Suspicion naturally falls on Isaac Handel, who’s been committed to Beechway since killing his parents 15 years ago. But once AJ calls in Caffery (Hanging Hill, 2012, etc.), it’s already too late to question Isaac, who’s been unaccountably transferred to a group home from which he promptly vanishes. Even more menacing is the possibility that the cause of all this mayhem is The Maude, the ghost of a dwarf whose death over a century ago may not have kept her from continued malevolence. AJ, besotted by his recent discovery that distant, oh-so-proper Beechway director Melanie Arrow is quite the firecracker between the sheets, is hardly in the best place to make sense of the web of delusions and violence past and present. And Jack’s investigation is hampered by the fact that two different players are covering up two different crimes on behalf of two different siblings. So it’ll be something of a miracle if the mystery can be solved at whatever human cost. – Kirkus Reviews

Mo Hayder’s ‘Poppet’ takes nuanced, compelling look at evil

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – May 17, 2013 (Excerpt)

Since introducing Detective Inspector Jack Caffery 14 years ago in “Birdman,” Mo Hayder has written some of the grisliest crime fiction in recent memory. Caffery’s cases in London and, later, in Bristol’s Major Crime Investigation Team, have included the murder and bizarre postmortem autopsies of women by a surgically trained serial killer, abducted children and sadistic African rituals. That’s enough evil to keep readers awake long after the cases are solved.

But not all evil is so easily dispatched, in life or in DI Caffery and his colleague Sgt. Flea Marley’s universe. As Hayder’s skills have evolved, so has the manner in which she depicts evil — less sensationally and, ironically, more frighteningly, recalling in the process a line from a W.H. Auden poem: “Evil is unspectacular and always human/ And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

Nowhere is Hayder’s portrayal more nuanced and compelling than in “Poppet,” the sixth entry in the series. Parallel plotlines form the backbone of the novel. One involves the strange occurrences at the Beechway High Security Unit, a psychiatric hospital that had been a 19th century workhouse and a poorhouse for the homeless before its present incarnation. [Read the full article...]

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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.

New York Times bestseller and acclaimed author Jennifer Finney Boylan returns with a remarkable memoir about gender and parenting, including incredible interviews discussing gender, how families are shaped, and the difficulties and wonders of being human.

A father for ten years, a mother for eight, and for a time in between, neither, or both (“the parental version of the schnoodle, or the cockapoo”), Jennifer Finney Boylan has seen parenthood from both sides of the gender divide. When her two children were young, Boylan came out as transgender, and as Jenny transitioned from a man to a woman and from a father to a mother, her family faced unique challenges and questions. In this thoughtful, tear-jerking, hilarious memoir, Jenny asks what it means to be a father, or a mother, and to what extent gender shades our experiences as parents. “It is my hope,” she writes, “that having a father who became a woman in turn helped my sons become better men.”

Through both her own story and incredibly insightful interviews with others, including Richard Russo, Edward Albee, Ann Beattie, Augusten Burroughs, Susan Minot, Trey Ellis, Timothy Kreider, and more, Jenny examines relationships with fathers and mothers, people’s memories of the children they were and the parents they became, and the many different ways a family can be. Followed by an Afterword by Anna Quindlen that includes Jenny and her wife discussing the challenges they’ve faced and the love they share, Stuck in the Middle with You is a brilliant meditation on raising – and on being – a child.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Jennifer Finney Boylan

JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN is the New York Times bestselling author of twelve books, including She’s Not There and I’m Looking Through You. She is also a regular contributor to Conde Nast Traveler and the op/ed page of the New York Times and a professor of English at Colby College in Maine. She has served on the judging committee of the Fulbright Scholars, administered by the US Department of State.

Editorial Review

Best-selling author Boylan (English/Colby Coll.; I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, 2008, etc.) started out life as a boy named James. She began cross-dressing as a young teen and kept her struggles with gender identity a secret throughout her adolescence and young adulthood. As James, Boylan believed that if a woman could love her deeply enough, she “would be content to stay a man.” She eventually did marry and became the father of two boys. But when Boylan turned 40, she knew that she had to make “the thing [she] felt on the inside visible” to the world and decided to undergo the painful process of gender transition. Remarkably, the woman she married decided to stay rather than seek “the love of some nice man,” and her two sons accepted her as their parent with little difficulty. Boylan knew that she and her family had been “very lucky” to be able to maintain strong, loving relationships with each other throughout her strange and difficult journey. The more she embraced her new identity and life, however, the more she found herself questioning received notions of mother- and fatherhood. In an effort to broaden her understanding of these and related issues, Boylan talked to fellow writers (including Augusten Burroughs, Edward Albee and Ann Beattie), former students and others from across the straight-trans-gay spectrum about their experiences with marriage, family and parenting; she includes these interviews in what she calls “Time Outs” from her memoir. This informal investigation and her touchingly funny and always candid story work together to reveal the book’s ultimate truth: that “to accept the wondrous scope of gender is to affirm the vast potential of life in all its messy, unfathomable beauty.” – Kirkus Reviews

‘Stuck in the Middle’ offers a singular perspective on parenting

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – May 16, 2013 (Excerpt)

Jennifer Finney Boylan was the father of two young boys, a devoted husband, a keyboard player in bar bands, the author of three published novels, and an English professor in Maine when she began the process that would make her outwardly — anatomically and socially — the woman she felt she had always been on the inside. Her book about life before, during and after that transition, “She’s Not There” (2003), made her a guiding star for many transgender readers: Here was somebody who made all the changes she needed and, despite all the growing pains, got to keep most of her life.

Ten years later, Boylan is still married to the same woman, still teaches at Colby College and still rocks out in some of the same bars. She’s also become a nationally prominent advocate for transgender people, appearing, for example, on Oprah Winfrey‘s television show, and she’s still close to her sons. (The older one, Zach, starts college this fall.)

“Stuck in the Middle With You” is Boylan’s third memoir, and her first to focus on parenthood — on motherhood, fatherhood and the putative difference, which Boylan is almost uniquely positioned to know. (The entertaining second memoir, 2008′s “I’m Looking Through You,” remembered her teen years in Philadelphia, growing up in a supposedly haunted house.) [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

Colin Broderick grew up in Northern Ireland during the period of heightened tension and violence known as the Troubles. Broderick’s Catholic family lived in County Tyrone –the heart of rebel country. In That’s That, he brings us into this world and delivers a deeply personal account of what it was like to come of age in the midst of a war that dragged on for over two decades.  We watch as he and his brothers play ball with the neighbor children over a fence for years, but are never allowed to play together because it is forbidden. We see him struggle to understand why young men from his community often just disappear. And we feel his frustration when he is held at gunpoint at various military checkpoints in the North. At the center of his world—and this story—is Colin’s mother. Desperate to protect her children from harm, she has little patience for Colin’s growing need to experience and understand all that is happening around them. Spoken with stern finality, “That’s that” became the refrain of Colin’s childhood.

The first book to paint a detailed depiction of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, That’s That is told in the wry, memorable voice of a man who’s finally come to terms with his past.

About Colin Broderick

COLIN BRODERICK was born in Birmingham, England, but raised Irish Catholic in the heart of Northern Ireland. He has a four-year-old daughter and lives in Manhattan.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Although he was born in England, Broderick (Orangutan, 2009) spent his formative years in Northern Ireland, where battles between the British Army and the Irish Republican Army echoed the more general strife of Protestant loyalists and anti-crown Catholics. Broderick’s father was a hardworking Irishman who kept the family in fairly comfortable lower-middle-class circumstances, while his mother was a stereotypically strict Catholic matriarch. Although Broderick intersperses snippets of nightly newscasts detailing the latest atrocities committed in the name of either Protestantism or Catholicism, this ongoing war rarely touched his immediate family directly, apart from the occasional harassment by British soldiers at border checkpoints. Most of the memoir offers more typical material about a kid discovering drink, sex and drugs in the way most adolescents do. Nevertheless, Broderick developed a deep hatred for the British and Protestant loyalists, falling into the cycle of blind prejudice that had been getting people of both faiths senselessly killed for years. Broderick’s anti-English fervor and Irish patriotism are believable enough at first. But when he casually describes turning 18 and heading to London to work in construction, it’s hard to understand why he didn’t see living and working in England as compromising his principles. Once in London, he obtained a fake birth certificate and signed up for the dole; the highlight of his stay was hitting on the girlfriend of a dangerous gang bigwig and getting roughed up, which sent him back to Ireland fearing for his life. Broderick’s rite-of-passage rebelliousness hardly inspires the sympathy evoked by Brendan Behan’s prison autobiography, Borstal Boy (1958) or Frank McCourt’s account of his hard-knock life, Angela’s Ashes (1996). – Kirkus Reviews

‘That’s That’: A Memoir Of Loving And Leaving Northern Ireland

NPR Book Review – May 18, 2013 (Excerpt)

Colin Broderick’s first book, Orangutan, told the story of the 20 years — at least, as he could remember it — of being drunk, drug addicted and often desperate struggling to make his way as an Irish immigrant to New York.

His latest book might have been even harder to write: It’s about what got him here to America. That’s That is his chronicle of life as the second-eldest in a family of six children in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, during the modern-day “Troubles”: parochial rivalries, British rule, IRA bombings, and an almost weekly death toll, during which Broderick and his friends were trying to grow up.

“First of all, when you think about growing up in basically the middle of a war, you sort of, like the child of abuse, will accept what’s happening as being normal,” Broderick tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “You don’t walk around thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re at war.’ ” [Read the full article...]

Advertisement

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 Roberts Court, seven years old, sits at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Through four landmark decisions, Marcia Coyle, one of the most prestigious experts on the Supreme Court, reveals the fault lines in the conservative-dominated Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.

Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation’s highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the U.S. Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action.

Marcia Coyle’s brilliant inside account of the High Court captures four landmark decisions—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began—the personalities and conflicts that catapulted them onto the national scene—and how they ultimately exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United campaign case. Most dramatically, her analysis shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups are strategizing to find cases and crafting them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority.

The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat at the struggle to lay down the law of the land.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Marcia Coyle

Marcia Coyle is the Chief Washington Correspondent for The National Law Journal. A lawyer and journalist, Coyle has covered the Supreme Court for nineteen years. She regularly appears on PBS’s NewsHour. Her work has earned numerous national journalism awards, including the George Polk Award for legal reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for outstanding investigative reporting, the Scripps Howard Foundation Award for environmental reporting, and the American Judicature Society’s Toni House Journalism Award.

Editorial Review

Along with her credentials as a lawyer, Coyle brings 25 years of reporting on the high court to this careful unpacking of select, enormously consequential, 5-4 decisions, supplying useful and colorful context about the litigants, lawyers, politics and legal precedent. She’s especially good on the maneuvering of various special interest groups to identify, frame and shepherd particular cases through the legal system, all with a hopeful eye toward eventual Supreme Court review. These ingredients come together most successfully in her smooth discussion of the right to bear arms at issue in Heller, the most important Second Amendment case ever, her handling of two cases emerging from the racial diversity plans of school boards in Louisville and Seattle, and her treatment of the widely controversial Citizens United, where free speech and campaign finance law collided. Perhaps the court’s recent momentous ruling on the Affordable Health Care Act accounts for the deficiencies of this least-satisfying chapter. There’s a richer story to tell, and Coyle doesn’t appear to have all the goods. Otherwise, this is the best popular account so far of the Roberts-led court, about the varied background and clashing philosophies of the justices, the careful crafting of arguments to secure five votes, the court’s continually shifting center of gravity and the peculiar burden that rests with the chief justice. Coyle clearly disapproves of the court’s conservative bent, but she gives all sides a fair, respectful hearing and demonstrates her own reverence for the institution. – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: ‘The Roberts Court’ by Marcia Coyle

The Washington Post Book Review – May 16, 2013 (Excerpt)

As the Supreme Court prepares to decide the fate of affirmative action, voting rights and same-sex marriage by the end of June, interest in the ideological and institutional fault lines among the justices remains high. Ever since Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took the helm in 2005, a series of books and articles have examined the court in partisan terms. The standard narratives, which tend to be politically polarized, paint the conservative majority either as a group of ideologues eager to impose their policy preferences on a divided nation or as a group of principled jurists struggling to resist judicial activism on the left.

Now comes Marcia Coyle with “The Roberts Court,” an account that largely avoids these oversimplified extremes. The great strength of Coyle’s book is the depth and balance of her reporting. She interviewed several justices on background and one, Antonin Scalia, on the record. She also interviewed the lawyers and litigants on both sides of the four highest-profile cases of the Roberts era — involving affirmative action in public schools, gun rights, campaign finance and health care. By allowing all the participants to speak in their own voices, she gives us a nuanced sense of how conservative and libertarian lawyers strategically litigated these cases and transformed the law.

As Coyle puts it, “All four landmark Roberts Court decisions had at their inception very smart and talented conservative or libertarian lawyers who, when necessary, handpicked the most sympathetic clients for their lawsuits, strategized over the best courts in which to file, and with an eye toward their ultimate target — an increasingly friendly and conservative Supreme Court — framed the winning arguments.” [Read the full article...]

‘The Roberts Court’ captures an important transformation

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – May 17, 2013 (Excerpt)

At his confirmation hearings for the position of chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr. parried skeptics with a reassuring metaphor: “Judges are like umpires,” he memorably testified. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical to make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role.”

Advertisement

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. They will be fully connected to the digital world, far better at carrying out online tasks than we are. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings. Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh follows each glimpse into the robotic future with an examination of the underlying technology and an exploration of the social consequences of the scenario.

Each chapter describes a form of technological empowerment — in some cases, empowerment run amok, with corporations and institutions amassing even more power and influence and individuals becoming unconstrained by social accountability. (Imagine the hotheaded discourse of the Internet taking physical form.) Nourbakhsh also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

About Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

Illah Reza Nourbakhsh is Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also directs the Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. He is a coauthor of Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (MIT Press).

Book review: ‘ Robot Futures’ by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

The Washington Post Book Review – May 17, 2013 (Excerpt)

When I’m reincarnated, I want to come back as a robot. Being a human again, or a poodle, or a goldfish, will seem so sadly biological. Robots, on the other hand, will have all the fun — at the very least, juggling a dozen balls, seeing around corners and walking up walls on sticky feet — if you believe the picture of the world offered by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh in his new book, “Robot Futures.”

I got the sense that Nourbakhsh, though apparently still human, has gone over to the robot side. Indeed, he has fathered quite a few, including a seven-foot-tall tour guide for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and a super pogo stick that rockets riders ridicuously high into the air. He has developed three-dimensional robotic vision and devised a navigational strategy that helps robots wander indoors without getting lost. Nourbakhsh, who heads a lab at Carnegie Mellon devoted to advancing human-robot interaction, gave us a hint of where the world is heading as co-author of an earlier book, “Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.”

In “Robot Futures,” he reveals the social forces and technology propelling us toward a robotic-enhanced life and turns a sensitive eye on the complex human issues that lie ahead. Robots will make ever-larger leaps past their blood-and-guts parents; their connection to the Internet will pack them with information no mortal can contain, and their minds will make independent decisions thanks to artificial intelligence. They will see us, hear us and respond to us; they will recognize a face, understand a firm handshake and perceive our smiles. But their presence in our offices, factories and homes, in stores and on sidewalks, will force humans to confront a difficult era of adaptation. “We have invented a new species,” Nourbakhsh writes, “and the question that remains is, how will we share our world with these new creatures, and how will this new ecology change who we are and how we act?” [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

A rallying cry for revolutionizing democracy in the digital age, Citizenville reveals how ordinary Americans can reshape their government for the better. Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, argues that today’s government is stuck in the last century while—in both the private sector and our personal lives—absolutely everything else has changed. The explosion of social media, the evolution of Internet commerce, the ubiquity of smart phones that can access all the world’s information; in the face of these extraordinary advances, our government appears increasingly irrelevant and out of touch.

Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with thinkers and politicians, Newsom’s Citizenville shows how Americans can transform their government, taking matters into their own hands to dissolve political gridlock even as they produce tangible changes in the real world. When local Web designers wanted to prevent muggings in Chicago and Oakland, they created innovative crime-mapping tools using public police data. When congressional representatives wanted citizens’ input on new legislation, they used interactive blogging tools to invite public comments and changes. When a town in Texas needed to drum up civic engagement, officials invented a local digital “currency” to reward citizens for participating in government—making small-town politics suddenly as fun and addictive as online games such as Farmville. Surveying the countless small advances made by ordinary Americans in reinventing government for the twenty-first century, Newsom unveils a path for American prosperity and democratic vitality.

Newsom explains how twenty-first-century problems are too big and too expensive for the government simply to buy solutions; instead, Americans must innovate their way out. Just as the post office and the highway system provide public infrastructure to channel both personal and private enterprise—a platform upon which citizens can grow—so too could a modern digital government house the needs, concerns, information, and collaboration of an enlightened digital citizenry.

A vision for better government that truly achieves the ancient goal of commonwealth and a triumphant call for individuals to reinvigorate the country with their own two hands, Citizenville is a timely road map for restoring American prosperity and for reinventing citizenship in today’s networked age.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Gavin Newsom

GAVIN NEWSOM is the forty-ninth lieutenant governor of the State of California, following two terms as mayor of San Francisco. He was the youngest mayor of San Francisco elected in more than a hundred years. Previously, Newsom founded fifteen small businesses in the San Francisco Bay area after graduating from Santa Clara University. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and their two children.

Editorial Review

Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, reflects fondly on his mayoral terms and his efforts to accelerate the learning curve for an often bogged-down city government operating “on the cutting edge—of 1973.” As founder of an impressive array of small Bay Area businesses, the author understands the power and influence technology can wield—but how to harness and channel it to engage smart, forward-thinking consumers with their respective bureaucracies? Overcoming governmental “technophobia” is key to bridging that gap, but disinterest, privacy concerns and procurement costs are also roadblocks. Newsom cites many affirmative initiatives on data sharing, governmental transparency and numerous interactive applications like QR codes or his “Citizenville” gaming concept. While conducting research, the author came into contact with a host of technologically savvy professionals, from software pioneers and hyperproductive tech executives to fellow entrepreneurs and even George Clooney, who laments the death of individual privacy. Newsom’s pitch for a compulsory donation system to co-fund government projects or the concept of incentivizing to gain more rapid solutions is certainly progressive. An idea to offer $1 billion to the innovator of a cure for a constantly morphing disease like AIDS, however, comes off like a lofty campaign promise. Still, the book remains fresh and lively with Newsom emerging as a persuasive, if fast-talking, progressive proponent focused on how best to “radically rethink the relationship between citizens and government.” – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: ‘Simpler’ by Cass Sunstein and ‘Citizenville’ by Gavin Newsom

The Washington Post Book Review – May 17, 2013 (Excerpt)

If government did not exist, we would have to invent it. And then we’d have to reinvent it, because it would be lousy and everyone would hate it.

Since the founders chucked the Articles of Confederation, Americans have been reinventing government, reimagining structures and rules, tinkering to make their union just a little less imperfect. These projects get caught up in the political fights of their times, of course — as in the late 1940s, when President Harry Truman’s Hoover Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch became a battleground between conservatives bent on dismantling the New Deal and liberals intent on preserving it. (Truman and the liberals won.)

But these constant reinvention attempts also reflect the intellectual and management fads of their eras. Years from now, I suspect, we’ll look back with a sort of time-capsule nostalgia at Gavin Newsom’s “Citizenville”and Cass Sunstein’s “Simpler.” These new manifestos on reinventing government perfectly capture the twin cultural and social-science obsessions of the early 21st century: the networking power of social media and the explanatory power of behavioral economics.

Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, writes with the faith of the first guy in line outside the Apple store. Americans are more disengaged than ever from their government and political leaders, yet they’re totally into their smartphones and Facebook friends. So if technophobe governments and politicians would just embrace these technologies and platforms, democracy would be renewed. Newsom calls this, in a burst of creativity, “Government 2.0.” [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment.

She can’t settle in. She’s tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she spent with her father in a dilapidated house upstate. When she learns devastating new information about that past, Constance’s fragile psyche suffers a profound shock. Her marriage, already tottering, threatens to collapse completely. Frightened, desperate and alone, Constance makes a disastrous decision, then looks on as her world rapidly falls apart. Her only consolation, as the city swelters in an interminable heat wave, is the friendship of Sidney’s son Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself.

The story of a marriage in crisis and a family haunted by trauma, Constance is also a tale of resilience and loyalty, and of the moral inspiration that can lead even the most lost of souls back to the light.

About Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Asylum, Martha Peake, Port Mungo, Trauma, and Spider, adapted into a 2002 David Cronenberg film. Born in London, McGrath lives in New York.

Editorial Review

McGrath’s hyperanalytical approach to traumatic family relationships runs deep. Constance Schuyler, a cool, iconic blonde in a Hitchcock-ian mold, lives in New York. At a literary party, she meets her future husband, Sidney Klein, 20 years her senior and an intellectual professor. He’s smart and analytical, and it doesn’t take him long to learn of Constance’s scarred relationship with her father, Morgan Schuyler, a doctor who lives up the Hudson in a quirky and depressing home called Ravenswood. (Think Manderley.) Although Constance seems to hate her father and tries to get away from him, her marriage to Sidney suggests she’s looking for a father replacement (repetition compulsion complex, she wonders?). Constance’s kid sister also comes to New York and gets involved with cocktail pianist Eddie Castrol. Iris is much more comfortable with her sexuality than Constance, but the older sister breaks up the relationship, leaving Iris to moon about and feel sorry for herself. Then, over one Christmas vacation, Morgan drops a bombshell—he’s not really Constance’s father. Her real father is the husband of the housekeeper, and he committed suicide—or perhaps was thrown under a train—shortly before Constance was born. In another strange psychological and erotic twist, Constance turns to Eddie for a brief but intense sexual relationship. Throughout the novel, McGrath moves us from Constance’s to Sidney’s point of view, sometimes lurching the novel forward by having them use the same words to characterize what’s happening in their lives. – Kirkus Reviews

Are You My Father? - ‘Constance,’ by Patrick McGrath

The New York Times Book Review – May 17, 2013 (Excerpt)

At a party in 1960s Manhattan, a beautiful blonde named Constance meets a professor of poetry many years her senior. After a brief and not especially rigorous courtship, she agrees to become his wife. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, this psychologically fragile young woman — whose emotional and sexual frigidity is strongly signposted right from the start — seems trapped and unhappy, resisting her husband’s apparently good-hearted attempts to make her feel loved and secure. Meanwhile, across town, her sister, Iris — equally beautiful and blond, but with a disheveled, bohemian promiscuity and a deliciously described aptitude for “being not withholding with the cleavage” — is engaged in an affair with a man who plays the piano in the bar of a shabby hotel. When Constance is introduced to this married “lush” from Miami, his very presence so unsettles and (she imagines) repulses her, that she persuades him to break off his affair with Iris. Who promptly falls apart.

In different (and differently complex) ways, both sisters are on the run from the past: the lingering death of their mother and their uneasy relationship with a charismatic and domineeringly chilly father who still lives in Ravenswood, the “falling-down house” that is the family home in the Hudson Valley. It doesn’t take long for Constance’s husband, Sidney, to deduce that her volatile, fractured relationship with her father is what lies at the heart of her “tricky psyche.” The question is, why? And can anything be done about it? [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

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

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

When Walter Mosley burst onto the literary scene in 1990 with his first Easy Rawlins mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress—a combustible mixture of Raymond Chandler and Richard Wright—he captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of readers (including future president Bill Clinton). Eleven books later, Easy Rawlins is one of the few private eyes in contemporary crime fiction who can be called iconic and immortal. In the incendiary and fast-paced Little Green, he returns from the brink of death to investigate the dark side of L.A.’s 1960s hippie haven, the Sunset Strip.

We last saw Easy in 2007’s Blonde Faith, fighting for his life after his car plunges over a cliff. True to form, the tough WWII veteran survives, and soon his murderous sidekick Mouse has him back cruising the mean streets of L.A., in all their psychedelic 1967 glory, to look for a young black man, Evander “Little Green” Noon, who disappeared during an acid trip. Fueled by an elixir called Gator’s Blood, brewed by the conjure woman Mama Jo, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual, and emotional resurrection, but peace and love soon give way to murder and mayhem. Written with Mosley’s signature grit and panache, this engrossing and atmospheric mystery is not only a trip back in time, it is also a tough-minded exploration of good and evil, and of the power of guilt and redemption. Once again, Easy asserts his reign over the City of (Fallen) Angels.

About Walter Mosley

WALTER MOSLEY is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. Always Outnumbered was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley’s first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

That climactic car crash didn’t kill Easy, but it left him weak as a kitten and prone to disturbing dreams of past and future. Only repeated drafts of Gator’s Blood, the home brew cooked up by healer Mama Jo, allow Easy to escape the ministrations of martinet nurse Antigone Fowler and take to the streets again. As usual, his mission is straightforward—to find Evander Noon, whose mother, Timbale, is a friend of Easy’s dangerous best bud Mouse Alexander—but his path is winding. His information takes him to Lula Success’ brothel, where Evander dallied before leaving in the company of Maurice Potter. Coco, a prostitute born Helen Ray, leads Easy to Evander, who’s been kidnapped by three gangsters and tied to a tree, and the pair, acting swiftly, free Evander and bring him home to his mother. But the conflicts that made those thugs snatch Evander obviously haven’t been resolved by his rescue. In order to protect the wayward young man, Easy will have to find the links between insurance giant Proxy Nine, oil company TexOk, and the likes of sneak thief Charles Rumor and all-around nasty operator Haman Rose. Mosley is much more interested in bringing these characters and the social forces they represent to life than in connecting the dots. The result works better as anthropology than mystery, with barely a teaspoon of plot to a monstrous deal of aphorism. – Kirkus Reviews

Easy Rawlins Is Alive, Or Is He?

NPR Book Review – May 15, 2013 (Excerpt)

I’ve been following Easy Rawlins since reading Devil in a Blue Dress in the ’90s. That’s a lot of time to give to a character. And as I read Little Green, I realized that I hadn’t been following Easy, the character, all these years. In the past I was more invested in other parts of the stories.

I had enjoyed the cases Easy solved, and the way his creator Walter Mosley laid out Los Angeles and the complicated relationship between whites, blacks and Latinos in post-World War II California. I loved Easy’s adopted family, his friendship with Raymond “Mouse” Alexander (who is always Don Cheadle when I picture him) and his complicated romantic relationship with Bonnie.

But, Easy is — or was — too cup-half-empty for me. There isn’t a lot of joy inside him. “You look at the world and see what’s there,” one character says to him.

This book changed all that for me.

As Little Green opens, Easy is waking up from a two-month-long semicoma after drunkenly driving his car over a cliff in 2007′sBlonde Faith. Everyone — even Mosley — thought he was dead. Mouse was making arrangements for his funeral. But not so fast: Like Easy says, the world keeps on turning. And Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is alive. He is alive.

No sooner than he opens his eyes, Easy’s given a case to solve: find a young man who went to the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood one night and didn’t return. His mama wants him home. [Read the full article...]

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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 triumphant return to the characters that launched his career two decades ago, Tom Drury travels back to Grouse County, the setting of his landmark debut,The End of Vandalism. Drury’s depictions of the stark beauty of the Midwest and the futility of American wanderlust have earned him comparisons to Raymond Carver, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Auster.

When fourteen-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother who deserted him seven years ago, he finds himself out of his league in a land of magical freedom. He does new drugs with new people, falls in love with an enchanting but troubled equestrienne named Charlotte, and gets thrown out of school over the activities of a club called the New Luddites.

Back in the Midwest, an ethereal young woman comes to Stone City on a mission that will unsettle the lives of everyone she meets—including Micah’s half-sister, Lyris, who still fights fears of abandonment after a childhood in foster care, and his father, Tiny, a petty thief. An investigation into the stranger’s identity uncovers a darkly disturbed life, as parallel narratives of the comic and tragic, the mysterious and everyday, unfold in both the country and the city.

About Tom Drury

Tom Drury is also the author of The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams, The Driftless Area, and The Black Book. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Mississippi Review, and he has been named one of Granta’s “Best Young American Novelists.”

Editorial Review

Some of them we’ve met before in Hunts in Dreams (2000) and The End of Vandalism (1994): Charles, Joan, Lyris and Micah. The action is split among small Midwest towns and Los Angeles. Charles, now known as Tiny, had a plumbing business which has since failed. His ex-wife, Joan, has moved to LA and has a juicy role in a TV show. Stepdaughter Lyris has moved into town to shack up with a young newspaper reporter. Joan re-appears to claim 14-year-old Micah and move him to the coast. She’s going to take another stab at this mothering business; or is she just playing a role? These departures leave Tiny in an empty nest. Out of loneliness, he starts stealing boxes from the loading docks of big-box stores. That’s kids’ stuff compared to Jack Snow’s criminal enterprise. Jack is an ex-con shipping fake Celtic artifacts from a warehouse. It’s his bad luck to be tracked down by Sandra Zulma, his old childhood playmate. Sandra is now cuckoo, lost in a Celtic fantasy world, but with the single-minded energy of the mad, she is looking for a rock that Jack may own. Also on Jack’s trail is Dan, once the sheriff but now working for a detective agency, though he hates the sleaze. He and his wife, Louise, are emblems of decency; their private sorrow is the loss of a daughter at birth. Meanwhile, in LA, Micah is experimenting with drugs and girls, while Joan is making the leap to the big screen and sleeping with the screenwriter. The second half includes a murder and a divorce; Micah, overwhelmed, calls his half sister Lyris, who flies out to help. There’s no plot or protagonist, but a fine percussive beat sweeps the reader along. – Kirkus Reviews

West Meets Midwest In Tom Drury’s Quirky ‘Pacific’

NPR Book Review – May 15, 2013 (Excerpt)

There are novels you read to find out what happens next, and novels you read to linger in the moment. Tom Drury’s new book,Pacific, falls squarely in the second category. Drury started writing about the inhabitants of fictional Grouse County in 1994, in The End of Vandalism, and continued with 2000′s Hunts in Dreams. But to call Pacific a sequel implies that you need to read the first two installments to fully invest in this slight, beguiling third. You don’t. Plot takes a back seat to sharp observations and deadpan wit in Drury’s work, and Pacific can easily stand alone.

Micah Darling, age 14, has spent the past seven years living with his father, Tiny, in semirural Grouse County, located in an unnamed Midwestern state. Tiny earns a living doing odd jobs, like ripping pews out of an old church, and for kicks steals the occasional TV. As the novel begins, Micah is preparing to leave for Los Angeles to live with his mother, Joan, an actress on a TV show called Forensic Mystic. With this opening move, Drury establishes the split-screen narrative that will continue until the last pages of the book. Roughly half of the action unspools in expensive Hollywood restaurants and Beverly Hills mansions, the other half in the bedraggled heartland Micah left behind, with its fragrance of “tobacco, motor oil, gravel dust, things like that.” Drury doesn’t even try to stitch the pieces of the novel together. He juxtaposes the two worlds, tells his low-key stories and lets readers make any connections. [Read the full article...]

Aberrations and Apparitions - Tom Drury’s ‘Pacific’

The New York Times Book Review – May 17, 2013 (Excerpt)

Here’s a paragraph you might find a little strange: “Micah had ridden three times, got thrown once. He found horses hard to read. Their thoughts might go back to the beginning of horse time, or they might be afraid of a candy wrapper on the ground. He was wary of anything that big that bit.”

This is from “Pacific,” the new book by Tom Drury, a major figure in American literature, author of a string of novels without a dud in the bunch, and the kind of writer some people just don’t get. I like his oddball but easygoing rhythm — “ridden three times, got thrown once.” I like his take on the everyday vernacular — “hard to read” — which he often moves into contexts that feel wrong but fit right, like “horses.” I like his occasional bouts of absurdity — “the beginning of horse time” — that often bump up against something deep and abstract. I like the specificity of his eye — that “candy wrapper on the ground” — that grounds his more far-flung stretches. And a sentence like “He was wary of anything that big that bit” just pleases me. It sounds good and it’s hilarious. “Big that bit!” I just read it out loud again and it cracked me up. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

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

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

Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and 1960, Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel architecture became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s changed how we eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western civilization was packaged into the Great Books.

Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel’s oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance, it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Chicago School of Television, and the improvisational Second City whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American entertainment.

Despite this diversity, racial divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaos—both constructive and destructive—of this period was set into motion by the second migration north of African Americans during World War Two. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban planners tried to design away “blight” with projects that marred a generation of American cities. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that came at a terrible cost—monolithic housing projects for the black community and a new kind of self-satisfied provincialism that sped the end of Chicago’s role as America’s meeting place. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Thomas Dyja

Thomas Dyja is the author of three novels and two works of nonfiction. He also worked as an editor. A native of Chicago’s Northwest Side, he was once called “a real Chicago boy” by Studs Terkel.

Editorial Review

One reason: Until the very end of the 1950s, most people traveling from coast to coast did so by way of Chicago, where they changed trains and often spent a little layover time. On January 25, 1959, all that changed when transcontinental air service was inaugurated between New York and Los Angeles, making Chicago and the rest of the land “flyover country”; as Dyja laments, “the newly minted ‘jet set’ would never need to change trains in Chicago again.” Nevertheless, Chicago remained an innovator on several cultural and commercial fronts, the home of Playboy magazine and Chess Records, even as it settled into the strange boss politics of Richard Daley, whose rise to power Dyja carefully records. Daley wielded that power in ways that a modern tyrant might envy, using what came to be known as “The Machine” to capture the minority vote that had become important by the 1950s after the explosive growth of the nonwhite population as a result of immigration and internal migration. However, writes Dyja, it was just one node of power, the other two central ones being the Catholic Church and organized crime, all working against each other as they “protected their power above the needs of the people they served.” In the end, Los Angeles and other cities stole much of Chicago’s thunder, and Chicago “never became the city it could have been, the city it should have been.” – Kirkus Reviews

A Time When Things Started in Chicago - ‘The Third Coast,’ a History of Chicago by Thomas Dyja

The New York Times Book Review – May 16, 2013 (Excerpt)

“The Third Coast” is an odd title for Thomas Dyja’s engrossing, wide-angled cultural history of Chicago in the middle of the 20th century.

Although the book is subtitled “When Chicago Built the American Dream,” calling Chicago “The Third Coast” is patronizing, implying that only seaboard cities count; worse, it badly misses the point about a metropolis whose inland location is central to its identity. “Chicago, in the center of the continent, was the keystone” to the nation, Mr. Dyja writes, the place at the edge of the prairies where the railroads met and the cattle were carried for slaughter at the hands of the masses of blacks and Europeans who migrated there. Looking primarily for work, Chicagoans arrived without a taste for the pizazz of New York or Los Angeles, desiring only to be, in a word Mr. Dyja uses time and again, “regular.”

So Mr. Dyja and his publishers seem to have settled on the title merely to suggest that from 1932 to 1960 Chicago had a cultural impact on the nation at least as great as any United States coastal city. “The American way of life in the postwar world was a product of Chicago,” he argues, “from the steel in its new Miesian skyscrapers to its sacks of golden crispy McDonald’s French fries.” [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.

In May 2012, bestselling author Neil Gaiman stood at a podium at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts to deliver the commencement address. For the next nineteen minutes he shared his thoughts about creativity, bravery, and strength: he encouraged the students before him to break rules and think outside the box. Most of all, he encouraged the fledgling painters, musicians, writers, and dreamers to make good art.

This book, designed by renowned graphic artist Chip Kidd, contains the full text of Gaiman’s inspiring speech. Whether bestowed upon a young artist beginning his or her creative journey, or given as a token of gratitude to an admired mentor, or acquired as a gift to oneself, this volume is a fitting offering for anyone who strives to make good art.

About Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman was awarded the Newbery and Carnegie Medals for The Graveyard Book. His other books for younger readers include Coraline (which was made into an Academy Award-nominated film) and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (which wasn’t). Born in England, he has won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Neil Gaiman Turns His Grad Speech Into ‘Good Art’

NPR Book Review – May 14, 2013 (Excerpt)

A year ago, writer Neil Gaiman told the graduating class at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts that life is sometimes hard — that things will go wrong in love and business and friendship and health, and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And that the best thing an artist can do at those times is to “make good art.”

That commencement speech became a hit on the Web and has now been adapted into a small book, titled, appropriately, Make Good Art.

When the unexpected happens, Gaiman says, “I think you’re absolutely allowed several minutes, possibly even half a day to feel very, very sorry for yourself indeed. And then just start making art.”

In the 1990s, Gaiman tells NPR’s Neal Conan, he had spent several years working on a TV series in the U.K., and when it came out, it was met with “deafening silence — people didn’t really like it very much.”

But he put all of his upset and frustration about that failed series —Neverwhere — into writing a book, he says.

“And what’s lovely is, over the years since then, the book has gone on to become this much-loved thing. And, actually, a couple of months ago, the BBC did a fantastic adaptation of the novel on the radio starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Sir Christopher Lee … James McAvoy, these fantastic actors. And I thought, OK. You know, 15 years later, the thing fixed itself. The wheel turned.” [Read the full article...]

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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.

In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children.

Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings is available through Amazon.Com and its Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, the Apple Bookstore, and any other good bookstore.