In Collaborate or Perish! former Los Angeles police chief and New York police commissioner William Bratton and Harvard Kennedy School’s Zachary Tumin lay out a field-tested playbook for collaborating across the boundaries of our networked world. Today, when everyone is connected, collaboration is the game changer. Agencies and firms, citizens and groups who can collaborate, Bratton and Tumin argue, will thrive in the networked world; those who can’t are doomed to perish.

No one today is better known around the world for his ability to get citizens, governments, and industries working together to improve the safety of cities than William Bratton. At Harvard, Zachary Tumin has led senior executives from government and industry in executive sessions and classrooms for over a decade, burnishing a global reputation for insight and leadership. Together, Bratton and Tumin draw on in-depth accounts from Fortune 100 giants such as Alcoa, Wells Fargo, and Toyota; from masters of collaboration in education, social work, and the military; and from Bratton’s own storied career. Among the specific strategies they reveal:

• Start collaboration with a broad vision that supporters can add to and make their own
• Rightsize problems, and get value in the hands of users fast
• Get the right people involved—from sponsors to grass roots
• Make collaboration pay in the right currency—whether recognition, rewards, or revenue

Today companies and managers face unique challenges—and opportunities—in reaching out to others, thanks to the incredibly connected world in which we live. Bratton and Tumin provide practical strategies anyone can use, from the cubicle to the boardroom. This is the ultimate guide to getting things done in today’s networked world.

About William Bratton And Zachary Tumin

WILLIAM J. BRATTON is chairman of Kroll, one of Altegrity, Inc.’s three core businesses. Mr. Bratton joined Altegrity in November 2009 after serving as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department for seven years. Prior, he served as chief of the New York City Transit Police and commissioner of the Boston Police Department and the New York City Police Department. A frequent lecturer, writer, and commentator, Bill Bratton is known as one of the world’s premier police chiefs. Mr. Bratton also serves on the Motorola Solutions board of directors. In 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II recognized Bratton with the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).

ZACHARY TUMIN is special assistant to the director and faculty chair of Harvard Kennedy School’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, the most recent of a number of key posts that Mr. Tumin has held at the school. In addition to leading research programs and executive teaching at Harvard, Mr. Tumin served in senior executive roles for industry and government, including as head of public safety for the New York City public schools, on the executive staffs of the Brooklyn District Attorney and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, and as director of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. A frequent lecturer, Mr. Tumin is also author of numerous teaching cases, working papers, reports, and essays.

Editorial Review

It would be hard to argue that collaboration was ever an entirely alien concept in government, business or private spheres. What former Boston, New York City and Los Angeles police chief Bratton (The Turnaround, 1998) and co-author Tumin assert is that technologically up-to-the-moment collaboration is now virtually a matter of survival. Either learn to create shared-goal cyber platforms linking all the players or, as they exclaim in their title, perish! With Bratton drawing on his front-line policing experiences, the authors present a series of highly informative, wide-ranging and frequently unsettling examples showing the rapidly expanding impact of collaboration-enhancing technology. They also suggest techniques for effective collaboration, ranging from right-sizing problems to coercing participation, if it comes to that. Their purpose, they write, is to share the wisdom they have gathered over their 40-year careers from government leaders, top executives, managers, researchers and others. “It is a book that will help you collaborate better,” they write, “and get on with the business of transforming the world as it is into the world that should be”—though they never get around to explaining the exact nature of that world. That it might be repressive, given the immense new powers of top-down control that come with collaboration as the book defines it, never arises as a topic. – Kirkus Reviews

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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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Lamont Williams is a paroled felon looking to turn his life around, working as a street sweeper at a large city hospital and searching for his estranged daughter. Adam Zignelik is a struggling, nontenured professor, paralyzed by looming failure, his life falling apart around him. He discovers a cache of recordings of previously unheard voices reaching out from a horrific past, voices that can both save his career and bring him back to the woman he loves. At the same time, Lamont forges an unlikely friendship with a dying man, who, having lived through those horrors, has a crucially important story to tell and to preserve. The worlds surrounding these two men, their families, their pasts, their potential futures, swirl in and out of history as the forces of the Holocaust, the American civil rights movement, Chicago unions, and New York City racial politics combine in a thrilling cross- generational literary symphony.

The acclaimed author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman weaves the narratives of Lamont and Adam-and their myriad connected friends, lovers, and families-into an ambitious, masterful depiction of the power that memory has over our lives.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Elliot Perlman

Elliot Perlman is the author of The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming and Seven Types of Ambiguity. He also cowrote the award-winning screenplay for a film version of Three Dollars, his first novel. He lives in Australia.

Editorial Reviews

“An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America—and of the terrible events left behind in the old country.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement…. A moving and literate page-turner.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.”
—Booklist (starred review)

A rich, engaging story of New York in Elliot Perlman’s ‘The Street Sweeper’

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

“Netherland” and “Let the Great World Spin,” two of the best novels about New York and Sept. 11, were written by the Irish authors Joseph O’Neill and Colum McCann, respectively. So it seems somehow fitting that the author of “The Street Sweeper,” a wonderfully rich, engaging and multilayered new novel about blacks and Jews in Chicago and New York, would hail from Australia.

I’ve been a fan of Elliot Perlman’s work since his 1998 novel “Three Dollars.” That book and his massive “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (2004) revealed him to be an author of rare erudition and compassion. But “The Street Sweeper” is his boldest work yet and, quite probably, the one that will win him a greater following.

“The Street Sweeper” relates the stories of two men whose lives would at first glance seem to have little to do with each other. Lamont Williams is an African American recently released from prison after having served six years for an armed robbery in which he was only tangentially involved. Adam Zignelik, son of a legendary Jewish civil rights lawyer, teaches history at Columbia University, where his professional and personal lives have stalled. [Read the full article...]

Connecting the Lowly and Mighty in New York

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Any beginning writer could find both instruction and inspiration in Elliot Perlman’s new novel, “The Street Sweeper.” If it were tricked out with commentary in the margins — in fact, now that I’ve finished marking it up, anyone’s welcome to take my copy — it could serve as a textbook on how not to write fiction. At the same time, it gives the lie to those killjoy teachers who tell you that no reputable publisher will touch your work if you don’t learn your craft. This 600-plus-page epic turns out to have only a novella’s worth of story and substance: the rest is repetition, over and over, of basic information about who the characters are, where they are and what’s going on, long expository and hortatory speeches that no real person would ever deliver and the padded, ping-ponging dialogue beloved of amateur writers. “ ‘And your family?’ ‘My family?’ ” “ ‘I’ve always felt kind of . . . fraudulent.’ ‘Fraudulent?’ ”

The laudatory reviews of Perlman’s previous novel, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” compared him to the great Victorian novelists, and the title of his current book may remind old-school readers of Jo, the down-and-out, never-had-a-chance crossing sweeper in “Bleak House.” Perlman shares Dickens’s sympathy for the put-­upon and the disenfranchised, and his fondness for intricate multiplotting — as well as his tendentious planting of improbable hidden connections among his people, giving us to understand that the lowly and the high and mighty are inextricably interdependent. “How tantalizingly small the world was,” Perlman makes one of his characters reflect, as if we needed a reminder of the web of coincidence he’s contrived. His street sweeper is a black ex-con, who’s taken a job with the John Doe Fund (“Ready, Willing and Able”) after being unjustly discharged from his janitorial position at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; he was fired by Sloan-Kettering’s head of human resources, who just happens to have been a childhood friend. Ah, but the sweeper’s cousin (follow me closely here) just happens to be married to the head of the history department at Columbia, where Perlman’s other main character, a Jewish academic about to be denied tenure, just happens to work. [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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Fug You is Ed Sanders’s unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of “total assault on the culture,” to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs.

Fug You traces the flowering years of New York’s downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground’s scrutiny, and leading to Sanders’s arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs–formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called “the world’s oldest living hippie” by Allen Ginsberg)–as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Ed Sanders

Ed Sanders co-founded the Fugs, opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, and appeared on the cover of Life magazine. He is the author of The Family and lives in Woodstock, New York.

Editorial Review

A memoir about the 1960s that reflects the slapdash spirit of that decade’s underground press.

Sanders is a writer of renown and accomplishment—a published poet, author of prize-winning short stories and a controversial account of the Manson Family murders (The Family, 1971)—yet this hodge-podge shows little evidence of such craft. Instead it functions more like an annotated diary, with entries by topic or date rarely longer than a couple of paragraphs, padded with illustrations that function more as historical artifacts than art. Sanders had his fingers in many of lower Manhattan’s counter-cultural pies: He published a mimeographed arts journal with an obscene name, ran an alternative bookstore, helped to found the notorious Yippie anti-party and “levitate” the Pentagon and proselytized for legalized marijuana and mass fornication in the streets. But he remains best known for fronting the Fugs, a notorious rock band of politically minded poets who landed a major-label contract and (amazingly enough) earned Sanders the cover of Life magazine and spots on national TV. The most extended and hilariously engaging part of the book is a transcript from William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, with Sanders joining the conservative host, a clueless academic, and Jack Kerouac, who had become an alcoholic reactionary, in a discussion that Buckley introduced with, “Our topic tonight is the Hippies, the understanding of which we must, I guess, acquire or die painfully.” The entire program was a joke that only Sanders and occasionally Kerouac seemed to get. The matter-of-fact tone through much of the narrative makes it difficult to distinguish satire from delusion. Of the Fugs, he writes, “Some of the songs on our second album are not what is currently known as PC, or politically correct, and we might not now write them in quite the same way, but they were true to the testosterone-crazed era in which they were created.” One might say the same about the book, except that it was written now, about then.

A collection of solid archival material for a better book. – Kirkus Reviews

Present at the Counterculture’s Creation

The New York Times Book Review – January 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

Testifying at the Chicago Seven trial in 1970, Ed Sanders identified himself to Judge Julius Hoffman as a “poet, songwriter, leader of a rock-and-roll band, publisher, editor, recording artist, peace-creep.” He lived in the East Village, which, as he writes in his great-souled memoir of the 1960s, was a “Do-It-Now zone.” The book portrays him doing many things.  Which was the most interesting?

Was it singing with the Fugs, a scabrous, joyous, poetic-satiric, sort-of rock band whose second album — including the songs “Kill for Peace” and “Group Grope” — actually made the Cashbox charts in mid-1966? Was it his poetry, influenced by Charles Olson and Sappho?

Was it his passionate work as a mimeograph publisher and free-speech activist: 13 issues of a hand-printed, hand-stapled, gleefully profane literary magazine published between 1962 and 1965, including the work of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and Norman Mailer, which gained national renown despite its unprintable title? Was it his advocacy to change marijuana laws, his proprietorship of the Peace Eye bookstore (first on East 10th Street, then on Avenue A), his peaceful and creative methods of political protest, his formal studies in classics and Egyptology, his dodging of F.B.I. and police surveillance? [Read the full article...]

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BOILED PEANUTS
A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The Plot Against Hip Hop is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard and security expert D Hunter, suspects there are larger forces at work.

D Hunter’s investigation into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hardcore fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Nelson George

Nelson George is one of the first writers to document hip hop culture, seeing Kool Herc in a Bronx schoolyard in the late ’70s. He would go on to write several award winning books on the subject, including ‘Hip Hop America’ and Russell Simmons’ autobiography ‘Life and Def.’ He directed Queen Latifah in the award winning HBO film, ’Life Support,’ and executive produces VH1′s long running ‘Hip Hop Honors’ broadcast. He can be contacted at www.nelsondgeorge.net.

Editorial Reviews

“George’s prose sparkles with an effortless humanity, bringing his characters to life in a way that seems true and beautiful. The story — and the conspiracy behind it — is one we all need to hear as consumers and creators in the post-hardcore hip-hop world.”
–Shelf Awareness

“Part procedural murder mystery, part conspiracy-theory manifesto, Nelson George’s The Plot Against Hip Hop reads like the PTSD fever dream of a renegade who’s done several tours of duty in the trenches . . . Plot’s combination of record-biz knowledge and ghetto fabulosity could have been written only by venerable music journalist Nelson George, who knows his hip-hop history . . . The writing is as New York as ‘Empire State of Mind,’ and D is a detective compelling enough to anchor a series.”
–Time Out New York

“The Plot Against Hip Hop is a quick-moving murder mystery that educates its audience on Hip Hop’s pioneer generation along the way . . . it is a nostalgic look at a magical and manic moment in time.”
–New York Journal of Books

‘The Plot Against Hip Hop: A Novel’ by Nelson George

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – December 28, 2011 (Excerpt)

Music critic and author Dwayne Robinson, a middle-aged black man, has been murdered with a box cutter, and his friend, D, wants to know whodunit.

When Dwayne shows up at the front door of D Security, D’s office, wearing a bloody beige trench coat and a blue Yankees cap, clutching a cassette tape and mumbling the Biggie lyrics “It was all a dream,” D doesn’t know what to make of it.

To police officers, it looks like a gang initiation. Witnesses, who describe the killers as two slim, tall young men, wearing red doo rags and tracksuits, serve to strengthen the cops’ belief that the Bloods are at fault.

But D isn’t so sure, and the rest of the book follows his journey to find the truth. And it’s an arduous journey complete with a wealthy hip-hop mogul, a “hip-hop cop,” a hip-hop conspiracy theory website, a contentious book manuscript and more deaths.

Author Nelson George definitely knows his hip-hop history. There were plenty of real hip-hop artists’ names used as D’s fictional clients. Hip-hop songs, lyrics, pioneers and pondering about the deaths of rappers Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. were scattered throughout the book. The problem is the book spent too much time reminiscing on old school hip-hop and not enough time making readers care about Dwayne’s death. [Read the full article...]

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High fashion and homeland security clash in a masterful debut.

Boyet Hernandez is a small man with a big American dream when he arrives in New York in 2002, fresh out of design school in Manila. With dubious financing and visions of Fashion Week runways, he sets up shop in a Brooklyn toothpick factory, pursuing his goals with monkish devotion (distractions of a voluptuous undergrad not withstanding). But mere weeks after a high-end retail order promises to catapult his (B)oy label to the big time, there’s a knock on the door in the middle of the night: the flamboyant ex-Catholic Boyet is brought to Gitmo, handed a Koran, and locked away indefinitely on suspicion of being linked to a terrorist plot. Now, from his 6′ x 8′ cell, Boy prepares for the trial of his life with this intimate confession, even as his belief in American justice begins to erode.

With a nod to Junot Diaz and a wink to Gary Shteyngart, Alex Gilvarry’s first novel explores some of the most serious issues of our time with dark eviscerating wit.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Alex Gilvarry

A native of Staten Island, Alex Gilvarry has traveled extensively in the Philippines, where his family is from. He’s the editor of the Web site Tottenville Review, he has been named a Norman Mailer Fellow, and his writing has appeared in The Paris Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Review

A would-be fashion mogul comes to America to pursue the American Dream, only to wind up wearing an orange Gitmo jumpsuit.

Gilvarry’s debut novel aspires to be an allegory about how immigrant ambition has become stifled in the wake of post-9/11 paranoia. The narrator, Boyet Hernandez, arrives in New York City from the Philippines in 2002, eager to pursue a career in haute couture. But the reader knows immediately that his dreams were dashed: The novel is written in the form of a prison memoir, composed at the suggestion of his jailers as he awaits judgment from a military tribunal for allegedly consorting with terrorists. Chapters begin with observations about the camp’s cramped quarters and barely humane regulations, but the story mostly focuses on Boyet (nicknamed Boy) as he makes his slow rise in the fashion world, consorting with models, begging for favors from established designers and hustling for financing. That last effort is what gets him in trouble, because his main patron is a sketchy landlord who possesses a questionable amount of weaponize-able fertilizer. Gilvarry keeps the tone of the story lightly satirical without diminishing the seriousness of Boy’s predicament, and he skillfully captures the frenetic world of striving designers and Brooklyn hipsters. The novel’s chief flaws have more to do with structure than tone. Characters in the story besides Boy rarely become more than strictly functional (a publicist with the unfortunate name of Ben Laden is a thin signifier of law-enforcement ineptitude), and shifting between Boy’s incarceration and Manhattan memories grows repetitive and undramatic until the closing pages. A fashion writer’s faux annotations add little, and his afterword closes the book on a melodramatic note that clashes with Boy’s character.

Gilvarry is a talented writer and observer, but the satirical elements could have been better tailored. – Kirkus Reviews

The Tale of a ‘Fashion Terrorist’

The New York Times Book Review – December 30, 2011 (Excerpt)

THE novelist Alex Gilvarry was in the midst of a fashion emergency. Perusing the racks of Oak, a trendy boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he looked for a sweater to cover up a mustard stain on his plaid shirt. In a few hours, he would speak to M.F.A. students at Hunter College, his alma mater, and he didn’t want to look like a slob.

Unfolding a black sweater by Oak, Mr. Gilvarry, 30, was dismayed to find it cropped above the navel, a style that would not work on his 6-foot-3 frame. Nor would it cover up the mustard. “Oh well, it wasn’t on sale anyway,” he said.

Mr. Gilvarry hasn’t always shopped in boutiques — or worried about stains. A native of Staten Island who grew up shopping at malls, he didn’t much care about his wardrobe until he began writing his first novel, “From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant,” a satire of the fashion world and, improbably, Guantánamo Bay prison that will be published by Viking this month.

“My initial idea was to write about an artist from a superficial world thrown into a political world,” Mr. Gilvarry said. “That’s how I came up with Boy.”

Boy is Boyet Hernandez, the flamboyant Filipino “fashion terrorist” whom Mr. Gilvarry invented and who, he later learned, bears a striking resemblance to the real-life Bryan Boy, a flamboyant Filipino fashion blogger. A rising young designer, the fictitious Boy is mistaken for a terrorist and sent to Guantánamo, where he pens a memoir about the Williamsburg fashion scene, from 2002 to 2006, as well as the Philippines. [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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

As famous for his popular cooking segment on Wake Up America! as for his swank Manhattan bistro, Billy Blessing can add prime murder suspect to his impressive list of accomplishments. Because when one of the network’s top honchos ends up dead, it’s a poisoned serving of Blessing’s coq au vin that’s to blame. Billy knows he’s being framed, but proving it won’t be easy—not with his perky cohost involved in a brass-knuckles contract negotiation, a Mossad agent about to tell all on the air, and a ruthless international assassin arriving in the Big Apple. Now Billy isn’t so much concerned about staying alive in the ratings . . . as just staying alive. For the closer Billy comes to uncovering an international conspiracy, the closer he comes to being canceled—permanently.

About Al Roker and Dick Lochte

Al Roker is known to over thirty million viewers for his work on NBC’s Today show, a role that has earned him ten Emmy awards. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Make Me Stop This Car!: Adventures in Fatherhood. An accomplished cook, Roker also has two bestselling cookbooks to his credit. Al Roker lives in Manhattan with his wife, ABC News and 20/20 correspondent Deborah Roberts, and has two daughters and a son.

Dick Lochte is the author of many popular crime novels including the award-winning Sleeping Dog, named one of “the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century” by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. His crime fiction column ran for nearly a decade in the Los Angeles Times and earned him the 2003 Ellen Nehr Award for Excellence in Mystery Reviewing. He lives in Southern California.

Editorial Reviews

Roker (Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue) teams with Lochte (Sleeping Dog) on a solid, exciting crime novel that revolves around a fictional TV program much like NBC’s The Today Show. Billy Blessing, a New York City celebrity chef who owns a restaurant and does a variety of segments on Wake Up, America!, has just begun filming a reality food show when he becomes a suspect in a murder case after Rudy Gallagher, Blessing’s executive producer on the show with whom he has clashed, dies after eating some poisoned coq au vin from Blessing’s restaurant. When the Manhattan DA shut downs the restaurant and Gallagher’s replacement suspends him from his main television gig, Blessing turns sleuth. The gold standard for investigating network TV skullduggery is still the late William DeAndrea’s Matt Cobb series (Killed in the Ratings, etc.), but snappy prose and well-developed characters will leave readers wanting to see more of Blessing. – Publishers Weekly

Weatherman Roker is the latest celebrity to pen a mystery thriller, and it is a surprisingly engaging one (thanks, in part, to the work of coauthor and genre veteran Lochte). The hero is Chef Billy Blessing, food anchor for the fictional morning show Wake Up America! and owner of a very successful Manhattan bistro. After the mysterious death of one of the network’s executives, Billy’s life takes a dangerous turn. Not only is he suspected of murdering the exec with a poisoned coq au vin but it quickly becomes clear that an international assassin has his sights set on Billy, prompting the chef to do his own investigating. Roker, with the help of Lochte, writes engagingly and, of course, knowledgeably about network television. But his other interests (in food and cartooning, for example) are also seamlessly integrated into the plot. Roker’s trademark humor is in ample evidence, but there is plenty of action, too: a car-chase scene through the Lincoln Tunnel is remarkably vivid and true to life. Good fun for Roker’s followers and cozy fans. - Judy Coon, Booklist

Billy Blessing (The Midnight Show Murders, 2010, etc.), star of Wake Up, America!’s cooking spot, hasn’t entirely made a secret of his former life as William Blanchard, who went to jail for helping his foster father, con man Paul Lamont. But he doesn’t exactly flaunt it either. So when he guest stars on Midday with Gemma along with former Chicago cop Pat Patton, the last thing he wants is for Patton to show up in his hotel room threatening to expose his past. Paul is long deceased, killed on orders from mobster Gio Polvere. Polvere is dead too, killed in a fire. When Patton buys it as well, Billy goes on alert, but what puts him over the top is the death of Larry Kelsto, a comic who was supposed to appear on Gemma with him and Patton until he got bumped because starlet Carrie Sands went on too long about her latest project, an American remake of Gerard Parnelle’s The Thief Who Stole the Eiffel Tower. Now strangers in a van are taking pot shots at Billy and Carrie. Mantata, an art gallery owner with likely ties to Lamont, steps out of the shadows, sending three oddball henchmen to protect him. But can Philippine fashion plate Hiho, jiving Jamaican Trejean and good-old-boy-gone-wrong Dal save Chef Billy from a threat whose source is as mysterious as Mantata himself?

Despite its over-the-top finale, Roker and Lochte’s third is as well-paced and thoughtfully prepared as an Alice Waters tasting menu. – Kirkus Review

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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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

At a pre-wedding party for his daughter Sarah, Moe Prager is approached by his ex-wife and former PI partner Carmella Melendez. It seems Carmella’s estranged sister Alta has been murdered, but no one in New York City seems to care. Why? Alta, a FDNY EMT, and her partner had months earlier refused to give assistance to a dying man at a fancy downtown eatery. Moe decides to help Carmella as a means to distract himself from his own life-and-death struggle. Making headway on the case is no mean feat as no one, including Alta’s partner Maya Watson, wants to cooperate. Moe chips away until he discovers a cancer roiling just below the surface, a cancer whose symptoms include bureaucratic greed, sexual harassment, and blackmail. But is any of it connected to Alta’s brutal murder?

About Reed Farrel Coleman

Called a hard-boiled poet by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan, Reed Farrel Coleman is the former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America. He has published twelve novels in three series, and one stand-alone with award-winning Irish author Ken Bruen. His books have been translated into seven languages, and the Moe Prager character in his current series is one of the most engaging in crime fiction. “His bone-deep world weariness and mordant sense of humor should enthrall lovers of old-school, tough-talking, loner private eyes,” says Booklist.

Reed is a three-time winner of the Shamus Award for Best Detective Novel of the Year. He has also received the Barry and Anthony Awards, and has been twice nominated for the Edgar® Award. He was the editor of the anthology Hard Boiled Brooklyn, and his short fiction and essays have appeared in Wall Street Noir, The Darker Mask, These Guns For Hire, Brooklyn Noir 3, Damn Near Dead, and other publications.

Reed is an adjunct professor at Hofstra University, teaching writing classes in mystery fiction and the novel.

His standalone novel, GUN CHURCH, is exclusive to Audible.com, and his seventh Moe Prager novel (HURT MACHINE) has been winning accolades from the likes of Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and others.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

The Moe Prager Mystery series stands on two fundemental building blocks. One of those blocks comes courtesy of the great William Faulkner who said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” The other comes from Joseph Wambaugh, the man who, in the 1970s, changed crime fiction forever and for better. He said, “It’s not how the detective works on the case, but how the case works on the detective.”

In each book in the series, these are the two forces supplying the fuel to power the engine of the story. This is never more evident than in Hurt Machine, the seventh installment in the series. Moe, now in his mid-sixties, is faced with the best and worst life has to offer. His daughter Sarah, Moe’s only child with his late wife Katy, is on the verge of marriage. Yet two weeks before the wedding, he discovers that there’s a cancer growing in his stomach that will probably kill him. Add to this the arrival–after a painful divorce and a ten-year absence–of Moe’s second wife and former PI partner, Carmella Melendez, asking him to take on a controversial and wildly unpopular case. If ever there was a setup to explore the past and to see how a case works on the detective, this is it.

Moe is forced to battle two antagonists in Hurt Machine: the person or persons trying to prevent him from discovering the truth about the case and the cancer. All the time, Moe can hear the clock ticking away the remaining minutes of his life. When the end is near, the past comes alive in a way it never has before. So it is for Moe. – Amazon.Com Review

Last Exits in Brooklyn

The New York Times Book Review – December 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

Nobody knows a man better than his ex-wife. So Moe Prager’s ex-wife, Carmella, is wise to this veteran private eye, accepting the fact that no matter how many times he marries, his first love will always be Brooklyn. “When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk,” she tells him in HURT MACHINE (Tyrus, $24.95; paper, $15.95), Reed Farrel Coleman’s latest book in a series heavily saturated with local color. Since Prager has recently been told he has stomach cancer, that day may come sooner than Carmella thinks. But this stubborn old shamus is determined to do two things before his ashes are consigned to the sands of Coney Island: Attend his daughter’s wedding, and find the person who murdered Carmella’s older sister, Alta.

Alta Conseco and Maya Watson, emergency medical technicians with the New York Fire Department, became pariahs after walking away from a dying man who was stricken at a trendy Manhattan bistro. Although Alta’s death was clearly a retribution killing, her fellow E.M.T. (surely the murderer’s next target) refuses to offer any explanation for their behavior. This silent treatment forces Prager to do exactly what we want him to do: Travel the length and breadth of the city talking to cops, firemen, gangsters and restaurateurs in their picturesque natural habitats. [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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

A decade after her death, Pauline Kael remains the most important figure in film criticism today, in part due to her own inimitable style and power within the film community and in part due to the enormous influence she has exerted over an entire subsequent generation of film critics. During her tenure at the New Yorker from 1967 to 1991 she was a tastemaker, a career maker, and a career breaker. Her brash, vernacular writing style often made for an odd fit at the stately New Yorker.

Brian Kellow gives us a richly detailed look at one of the most astonishing bursts of creativity in film history and a rounded portrait of this remarkable (and often relentlessly driven) woman. Pauline Kael is a book that will be welcomed by the same audience that made Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution and Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls bestsellers, and by anyone who is curious about the power of criticism in the arts.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Brian Kellow

Brian Kellow is the features editor of Opera News, where his column “On the Beat” appears monthly. He is the author of Ethel Merman: A Life and The Bennetts: An Acting Family and coauthor of Can’t Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell. He has also written for Opera, Playbill, and Travel & Leisure among others. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

“Kael was a master at interpretation, and this book is a highly successful interpretation of the storied critic….A must-read for any devotee of film; compellingly written and recommended for all libraries.” — Library Journal

“Kellow performs biographical magic, telling her story mostly through her most famous (and notorious) reviews of some of the landmark films of the ’60s and ’70s.” —Kirkus

“For a biography to do justice to a complex personality and a great mind such as Kael’s, extensive research must be matched by acute perception. That requirement is fully, even joyously, met here….Kellow fleshes out these major stages as well as formative minor ones in a greatly revelatory portrait that will stand as the definitive one.” — Booklist

“Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark,” by Brian Kellow

The Washington Post Book Review – December 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

When we were in high school, my friend Carl and I used to await her dispatches the way the Hebrews awaited tablets from Sinai. Every other week, we rushed to People’s Drug and grabbed a New Yorker off the newsstand and read her latest review on the spot — savoring the smart, profane, feisty music of her sentences. We loved Pauline Kael because she made us feel smarter and saner — more alive.

And in a weird way, I think, sexier. The titles of her collections were no accident: “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “I Lost It at the Movies,” “Reeling.” Kael practiced an erotics of criticism. You could disagree with her — you had no choice at times — but you couldn’t love or want or need movies more than she did.

I’ve already used more dashes than usual. That’s her doing, too.

Her fellow critic David Thomson once theorized that she would have given up everything to play one great scene in a movie. But what casting director would have taken the chance? She was diminutive, unglamorous, quick to argue. An unorthodox Jewish childhood (some of it spent on a chicken ranch in Petaluma, Calif.) led to philosophy studies at the University of California at Berkeley and then a long period of struggle that only in retrospect looks like apprenticeship: dead-end jobs, a daughter born out of wedlock, a bad marriage, doomed attachments to gay men. [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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Short-listed three times for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai explores time and transformation in these artful novellas

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai’s characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.

Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spider’s web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings—as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.

About Anita Desai

ANITA DESAI is the author of Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Clear Light of Day, and Diamond Dust, among other works. Three of her books have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Desai was born and educated in India and now lives in the New York City area.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“In three ensnaring novellas of consummate artistry and profoundly disquieting perceptions, master storyteller Desai reflects on the transforming power and devastating limitations of art… Desai’s provocative and mysterious tales of displacement trace the reverberations when the dream of art collides with crushing reality.” - -Booklist

“…poignant and wry…a deft exploration of the limits people place on themselves by trying to cling to the past.” -Kirkus Reviews

“This collection leaves an indelible impression of the conflicts and ambitions found in a region riddled with conflict.” –Publishers Weekly

Anita Desai on Longing and Striving

The New York Times Book Review – December 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

Sometimes a mango is just a mango. This is rarely the case in Indian novels, where mangoes tend to be luminescent orbs dangling in steamy air, glistening with sweetness, sex and Being itself, waiting to be plucked, caressed, birthed. Either that or they’re muddy and rotten and piled high on a dirty road, surrounded by rancid garbage, rank cooking fires, beggar children and grinning, greasy swindlers. In other words, mangoes in India’s literary fiction are much like India in literary fiction: distinguished by pleasing aromas or permanent anarchy, if not some chutneyed combination.

For almost five decades, Anita Desai’s writing has avoided this easy trafficking in the delicious and malicious. She has instead created a body of work distinguished by its sober, often bracing prose, its patient eye for all-telling detail and its humane but penetrating intelligence about middling people faced with middling prospects. Whether in India, Mexico or America, Desai’s characters tend to be easy marks for new possibilities — for something, anything, other than life as it is. This vulnerability leads to promising experiences, which often become fresh disappointments. For a writer so taken with such arrangements, the best results are minor-key masterpieces; the lesser efforts are melancholy suffocations. Both outcomes are evident in the three novellas that make up her new collection, “The Artist of Disappearance.” [Read the full article...]

Desai’s ‘Disappearance’: Three Tales Of Art And Time

NPR Book Review – December 10, 2011 (Excerpt)

Anita Desai’s new collection of stories, The Artist of Disappearance, reads a bit like three symphonic movements in a minor key. They’re three novellas, set in modern India, where the past is giving way. In one story, a government official inspects the forgotten treasures left behind in a fated mansion. In another story, a translator becomes a little too creative; and in the third, a man living in solitude finds his world upset by roving visitors.

There are no car chases or explosions — just the drama of people confronting themselves. Desai, has written more than a dozen novels and collections, and has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. She talks with NPR’s Scott Simon about the origins of her three stories.

In “Museum of Final Journeys,” a civil servant is called in to appraise an old collection of antiquities. They are not works of art per se — there are globes and travel posters, stuffed birds and lizards, masks, daggers, scrolls, bells and clocks long broken. The civil servant calls it a “gloomy storehouse of abandoned, disused, decaying objects”; he says he wishes to “break free and flee.” [Read the full article...]

Solitary Lives, Abruptly Interrupted

The New York Times Book Review – January 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

The crumbling, all but abandoned manor house as symbol of a social order in distress: the English may have invented that notion, but their former colonial subjects in India have also proved adept at employing it as a literary device. In the three novellas that make up “The Artist of Disappearance,” Anita Desai uses it twice, in differing circumstances and locations, but to the same convincing and plaintive effect.

Ms. Desai’s main themes in her new book are decay and disappointment, retreat and regret, so that choice seems highly appropriate. Since the publication of her first novel, “Cry, the Peacock,” nearly 50 years ago, she has often offered portraits of a certain kind of Anglicized urban bourgeoisie or rural landed gentry struggling for meaning against illusions, and “The Artist of Disappearance,” though barely 150 pages, fits neatly into that distinguished body of work.

In “The Museum of Final Journeys,” which opens the book, we’re in the lush, green east of plantations left idle by the emergence of plastic as a substitute for jute. Ms. Desai’s unnamed narrator, “a mere subdivisional officer in the august government service,” is not unlike the protagonist of George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”: a callow bureaucrat charged with administering a rural district whose people and customs he does not understand, and unhappy with the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him. [Read the full article...]

The Ayurvedic Healer

by Joy J. Kaimaparamban

Set in the intriguing atmosphere of India in the early 20th century, full of mysticism, love, compassion, and political drama, The Ayurvedic Healer tells the story of Madhavan Namboodiri, a physician practicing an ancient medical science, and his enduring love for Rosilie. By healing the underprivileged, regardless of their civilian and religious status, touching the untouchables, he follows his beliefs and disobeys the rules of his society. His life story is set in the background of India’s struggle for freedom, the communist revolt in the Southern State of Kerala, social advancement, and the emergence of new societies. The Ayurvedic Healer sweeps the reader into an exotic place and time, rendering an intimate experience through sharing Madhavan Namboodiri’s life and love.

Joy J. Kaimaparamban is not only a passionate story teller. He envisions people and events, past or present, in his native India as material for unwritten works. These visions and the ability to transform them into fascinating stories about his country is a trademark of his novels. [More information...]

The Ayurvedic Healer ia available through Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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In this deluxe commemorative edition, LIFE’s editors focus on the publication’s achievements more tightly than they ever have before: This is truly the best of everything LIFE has accomplished. In these pages are the best war photos ever taken for LIFE; the best photo essays ever to grace our pages (including the works of Capa and Parks and Smith); the loveliest pictures from Hollywood (in fact, the best pictures of Marilyn Monroe ever taken by such as Halsmann, Eisenstaedt and her dear friend Milton Greene), the best sports pictures, the funniest pictures we ever ran. The best pictures from the space race, and the most significant pictures to the human race, including Lennart Nilsson’s “Life Before Birth.”

This is a premium volume of LIFE, and beyond its 200-plus pages, which include a review of every LIFE cover ever published, there is, included here, the ultimate premium: The first-ever LIFE issue, with the Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam on the cover, reprinted in its entirety, at actual size (which was really big 10 1/2″ x 14″) and able to be detached.

We’ve come a long way: We, you, those places, LIFE itself. This book tells, and celebrates, that voyage.

About the Editors of Life

The editors at LIFE vigorously carry on the traditions of excellence in photography, in journalism, and in telling the story of our country and our world which began with LIFE magazine in 1936 by founding editor and publisher, Henry R. Luce. They have published books on a broad range of subjects, including New York Times bestsellers One Nation, LIFE Picture Puzzle and The American Journey of Barack Obama.

The Look of Life

The New York Times Book Review – December 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

The frenzy that usually erupts when a new iPhone hits stores — wild anticipation, long lines, jacked-up resale prices — was more than matched 75 years ago in the exuberant public reaction to the launching of an innovative (how quaint it sounds today) print magazine. When the first issue of Life appeared on Nov. 23, 1936, the 200,000 newsstand copies sold out within 24 hours, leaving disappointed customers and vendors clamoring for more. Defying expectations in the midst of the Depression, the magazine’s circulation rapidly soared to nearly two million readers.

In his definitive biography, “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,” Alan Brinkley vividly describes how Luce was inspired to create this glossy photography publication. (The idea and title had been suggested by his future wife, Clare Boothe, among others.) Life depicted an upbeat can-do vision of America, so much so that Brinkley says the magazine’s sensibility of “amiable positiveness” was reflected in idyllic and picturesque photos of even the poor and downtrodden. With a mandate to educate and entertain a mass audience, the magazine subsequently became renowned for its influential war coverage, chronicling the horrors of World War II and the heartbreak of Vietnam, and glamorous shots of movie stars at work and play.

Now comes “75 Years: The Very Best of Life,” a coffee-table behemoth weighing nearly seven pounds, featuring unforgettable photo­graphs (Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous kiss, “V-J Day, Times Square, New York City, 1945”) as well as never-before-published photos from the archives. Thanks to the magazine’s legacy as a high-paying photographers’ showcase (the contributors include Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks and Mary Ellen Mark), the book is a visual treat, offering up stunningly beautiful images that evoke smiles (a mischievous shot of a snow monkey) and haunting photojournalism that provokes tears (the gaunt visages of Holocaust survivors, the corpses of American soldiers on a New Guinea beach in 1943). [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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

More than 120 contact sheets selected by some seventy Magnum photographers or their estates: a definitive book on how the best photographs are created and edited.

Contact sheets unveil the story of what went into a photograph. Was it the outcome of what a photographer had in mind from the outset? Did it emerge from a diligently worked sequence? Was the right shot a matter of being in the right place at the right time? Here, for the first time, are the best contact sheets created by Magnum photographers. They reveal the creative methods, strategies, and editing processes used by some of the acknowledged greats of photography, from legends such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt to Magnum’s latest generation, including Jonas Bendiksen, Trent Parke, and Alec Soth.

Events, places, and people from over seventy years of history are contained in Magnum’s contact sheets, including the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, Che Guevara by René Burri, the Paris riots of 1968 by Bruno Barbey, Malcolm X by Eve Arnold, and New York street scenes by Bruce Gilden.

With supporting texts by the photographers or by those selected by the estates of deceased Magnum members, and ancillary material such as press cards, notebooks, and filed captions, this landmark publication provides a depth of understanding and a critical analysis of the backstory to a photograph.

About Kristen Lubben

Kristen Lubben is the Associate Curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her books include Susan Meiselas: In History, Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, and Magnum Contact Sheets.

The Magic of Magnum

The New York Times Book Review – December 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

It’s not often that a lavish coffee-table book comes trailing equally lavish doubts about the wisdom of its existence. “It’s generally rather depressing to look at my contacts,” Elliott Erwitt tells Kristen Lubben, the editor of MAGNUM CONTACT SHEETS (Thames & Hudson, $150), a magnificent compendium of raw images from the photography cooperative. “One always has great expectations, and they’re not always fulfilled.” Henri Cartier-­Bresson, a Magnum founder, so hated the idea of someone pawing through his outtakes that he once bragged about throwing out his negatives “in the same way as one cuts one’s nails.” Contact sheets “are mostly a waste of money,” the photographer Leonard Freed once declared, though he added: “Because it is a waste of money, I love them.”

Lubben’s book, which reproduces over 120 contact sheets from some 70 photographers, provides plenty for the technically minded to ponder. For more casual readers paging through without a loupe in hand, it brims with fascinating context. Eve Arnold’s meeting with Joan Crawford for a Life magazine portrait session in the 1950s began with an intoxicated Crawford stripping naked and ordering Arnold to start shooting. (“Love and eternal trust always,” the actress said later, after Arnold handed over the transparencies.) In an only slightly more hair-raising encounter, Carl de Keyzer recalls being set on by Klansmen at a Texas cross-burning in 1991, only to realize they just wanted him to take souvenir shots with their cameras. [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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Bradford Morrow’s stories have garnered him awards such as the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes and have given him a devoted following. Now gathered here for the first time is a collection of his finest, gothic tales.

A young man whose childhood hobby of collecting sea shells and birds’ nests takes a sinister turn when he becomes obsessed with acquiring his brother’s girlfriend, in “The Hoarder” (selected as one of the Best American Noir Stories of the Century). An archeologist summoned to attend his beloved sister’s funeral is astonished to discover it is not she who has died, but someone much closer to him, in “Gardener of Heart.” A blind motivational speaker has a crisis of faith when he suddenly regains his sight, only to discover life was better lived in the dark, in “Amazing Grace.”

In all of these stories, readers will find themselves enthralled and captivated by one of the most potent voices in contemporary American fiction.

About Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow‘s novels include The Diviner’s Tale, Giovanni’s Gift, and Trinity Fields, and co-edited with David Shields The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death. The recipient of numerous awards, he founded and edits the literary journal Conjunctions and is a professor of literature at Bard College. He lives in New York City.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

Conjunctions founding editor Morrow (The Diviner’s Tale), creates beautifully dark and soulfully intimate stories in his first collection, featuring characters who, though hardly citizens of virtue, reveal their true colors with little remorse. Each tale is told close at hand, with first-person narrators drawing the reader into their confidence, making readers complicit in shadowy inner workings that they don’t completely understand. A man who enjoys collecting trinkets sets his sights dangerously on his brother’s girlfriend in “The Hoarder.” A blind man, in “Amazing Grace,” regains his sight only to realize that the enlightened life he had imagined for himself is actually shrouded in darkness. After misplacing his mind, a man finds that, “whereas before he was dependable (had been with the same accounting firm for fifteen years, was the star shortstop on their interleague softball team), he now became not just unreliable, but entirely unpredictable,” in “Mis(Laid).” In the sinister “Tsunami,” a wife and mother relays the details of her unraveled marriage, remaining matter-of-fact: “This story doesn’t get any better, so if you wanted to stop here I certainly wouldn’t blame you. I can even tell you what happens so you won’t have to bother.” Morrow’s stories are hauntingly honest and linger in the consciousness. – Publishers Weekly

A teenage boy obsessively (and surreptitiously) photographs his older brother’s girlfriend. An electrical worker who turns motivational speaker after he’s blinded in an accident miraculously regains his sight and discovers that life was better when he couldn’t see. A young wife prone to fugue states is at the center of a series of murders that involve her husband, her children, and her husband’s lover. A teenage boy murders his grandmother’s male friend, whom he believes to be a Martian landed on Earth as part of the invasion that captivated the country in Orson Welles’s broadcast of War of the Worlds—and no trace of the body can be found. What links all these dark tales from Morrow (The Diviner’s Tale) is that the main characters live in the shadowland where normalcy and mania and at times even depravity meet. VERDICT Hanging on the voices of their narrators—at once fascinating in their fixations and repelling in their twisted logic—and mixing elements of Southern gothic and noir, these powerful tales will linger in the reader’s mind. —­Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA for Library Journal

Grim Tales of Clarity and Chaos

The New York Times Book Review – December 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

Bradford Morrow’s work has won him acclaim, but this inescapably grim collection of stories may not bolster that reputation. Here’s a taste of what his readers will encounter.

The 15-year-old narrator of “The Hoarder” — quick to call himself “a weird little bastard” — collects things in order, partly, to mitigate the lack of love and stability in his childhood. Each time the family moves, he takes an equal pleasure in dismantling and destroying his hoard of shells, birds’ nests or butterflies. Soon this impulse to control and demolish extends to humans. The scene in which he murders his hated older brother is no less shocking because you’ve seen it coming. Acquiring his brother’s girlfriend as a trophy, he drives her off into the sunset — and you find yourself remembering the fate of all his previous collections.

In the book’s title story, two children, haunted by the brother their mother miscarried one Christmas long ago, are driven by signs from beyond the grave to torture and kill a dog, then a young boy. So their obsession with this “blackened holiday fetus” becomes the impetus for an increasingly unnerving tale whose power lies in the half-suggested and the deliberately unsaid. “We hurt things that didn’t deserve hurt,” the narrator insists in his spookily numb monotone. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Almost 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 ‘stranger’ 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.

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From Leonardo’s drawings of grotesque heads to contemporary prints lampooning American politicians, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a vast but largely unknown collection of caricatures and other satirical works. This handsome book offers 165 examples, dating from about 1500 to the present, that reflect the age-old tradition of using exaggeration and humor to convey personal, social, or political meaning. The selection of images is notably broad, ranging from the elevated to the rudely humorous: renowned writers and decidedly unhygienic cooks; elegantly dressed noblemen and victims of outrageous fashion fads; Napoleon as a tidy Lilliputian and Boss Tweed as a bloated Roman emperor.

Stressing the continuity of certain artistic approaches, Infinite Jest examines the development of the genre across centuries and cultures. The essential visual components of caricature are discussed and illustrated, as are recurring motifs, including exaggerated faces and bodies, people depicted as animals or objects, and processions of bizarre figures. One section is devoted to social satire (eating and drinking, gambling, fashion, several of the Seven Deadly Sins), another to various aspects of political life (British, French, Mexican, and American). Artists as diverse as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, Thomas Rowlandson, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, and Al Hirschfeld contribute their distinctive talents to this fascinating, informative, and very amusing volume.

About Constance C. McPhee and Nadine M. Orenstein

Constance C. McPhee is an Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nadine M. Orenstein is a Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The History of Caricature

The New York Times Book Review – December 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

Nobody’s sure who invented the caricature. It might have been Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of “bizarre heads” led his admirers to the realization that distorted aspects of physiognomy could serve a satirical purpose more directly than strict representation, or soINFINITE JEST: Caricature and Satire From Leonardo to Levine (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University, $45), by the Met curators Constance C. McPhee and Nadine M. Orenstein, suggests. “Scholars still puzzle over the function of these drawings, which appear to have had a comic intent,” Orenstein deadpans in her commentary on an etching of a pair of grotesque heads copied from Leonardo. Or it might have been some kid who noticed that if you draw somebody’s nose and chin bigger it looks pretty funny.

This book — whose title seems inspired by the kind of logic that would call a collection of morning landscapes “The Sun Also Rises” — serves as the catalog to an exhibition at the Met that runs through March 4. It surveys caricature from the 15th century onward, although it tapers off with the years when printing technology began opening up the field. It includes only half a dozen images from the past 60 years or so, including a dead-on 2008 piece by the Dutch artist Siegfried Woldhek that constructs George W. Bush’s frowning face out of six downward-trending arrows on graph paper.

McPhee’s introduction proposes that the artwork collected here has nothing to do with contemporary cartooning and caricature since it was “usually conceived with greater seriousness of purpose.” That’s arguable at best — and, in any case, there’s not much formal distance from Louis-Léopold Boilly’s realistically textured lithographs of grimacing, slightly-more-grotesque-than-life faces to the contemporary caricaturist Drew Friedman’s work, or from the woozy 17th-century “Satire on an Artist’s Studio” scribbled by somebody in Guercino’s circle to an Ed Koren cartoon in The New Yorker. [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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Playing with the form he created in his trailblazing debut novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick once again sails into uncharted territory and takes readers on an awe-inspiring journey.

Ben and Rose secretly wish their lives were different. Ben longs for the father he has never known. Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his mother’s room and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out alone on desperate quests to find what they are missing.

Set fifty years apart, these two independent stories–Ben’s told in words, Rose’s in pictures–weave back and forth with mesmerizing symmetry. How they unfold and ultimately intertwine will surprise you, challenge you, and leave you breathless with wonder. Rich, complex, affecting, and beautiful–with over 460 pages of original artwork–Wonderstruck is a stunning achievement from a uniquely gifted artist and visionary.

About Brian Selznick

In addition to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick is the illustrator of the Caldecott Honor winner, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, and the New York Times Best Illustrated Walt Whitman: Words for America, both by Barbara Kerley, as well as the Sibert Honor Winner When Marian Sang, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, and numerous other celebrated picture books and novels. Brian has also worked as a set designer and a puppeteer. When he isn’t traveling to research and talk about his work all over the world, he lives in San Diego, California, and Brooklyn, New York.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

In a return to the eye-popping style of his Caldecott-award winner, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick’s latest masterpiece, Wonderstruck, is a vision of imagination and storytelling . In the first of two alternating stories, Ben is struck deaf moments after discovering a clue to his father’s identity, but undaunted, he follows the clue’s trail to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. Flash to Rose’s story, told simultaneously through pictures, who has also followed the trail of a loved one to the museum–only 50 years before Ben. Selnick’s beautifully detailed illustrations draw the reader inside the museum’s myriad curiosities and wonders, following Ben and Rose in their search for connection. Ultimately, their lives collide in a surprising and inspired twist that is breathtaking and life-affirming. –Seira Wilson, Amazon.Com Review

In ‘Wonderstruck,’ A Child’s-Eye View Of New York

NPR Book Review – September 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by author and artist Brian Selznick, was an odd hybrid: a picture book for older children; the first YA novel to win the Caldecott Medal for children’s book illustration; a kind of proto-graphic novel for kids interested in the intersection of text and image.

It was also fabulously successful at conjuring up a world of wonder inside the walls of the Montparnasse railway station in 1931; with its combination of a propulsive written story and big, beautiful, full-page illustrations, it was best experienced in a rush, like some forgotten film from the early days of cinema. Indeed, movies were at the heart of the book, and so it’s not surprising that movie lover Martin Scorsese has directed an adaptation, Hugo, which comes out in November.

Selznick’s follow-up, Wonderstruck, is a slower, more ruminative book, less intricately constructed than Hugo Cabret but gentler in spirit. Once again, Selznick alternates text with pencil illustrations; this time the text tells one story while the pictures tell another, though at the end the stories intersect nicely.

In the illustrations, we see a lonely girl, Rose, who sets off on an adventure in New York City in 1927. In words, we read about an orphan boy, Ben, who travels from Minnesota to New York 50 years later in search of his father, and winds up hiding inside the American Museum of Natural History. [Read the full article...]

‘Wonderstruck’: A Novel Approach To Picture Books

NPR Book Review – September 13, 2011 (Excerpt)

It’s not often that a writer can illustrate his own books, but Brian Selznick is that rare find. He began his career as an artist collaborating with authors on children’s books. But he gradually realized that he wanted to tell his own stories in both words and pictures — and to do that, Selznick invented a unique narrative device.

Wonderstruck is both a novel and a picture book, a form Selznick first experimented with in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, when he had the idea of telling a story in much the same way that film does.

“I thought: Is there a way of combining what the cinema can do with panning, and zooming in and out, and edits, and what a picture book can do with page turns, and what a novel does?” Selznick says.

Selznick’s illustrations work like a camera, zooming in on details and following his characters around as they move through the world. In the beginning of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the reader follows a boy through a grate in the wall, down a hallway, to an old man in a toy booth who sees a clock, and behind the number 5 in the clock, there’s the boy … (Click here to see that opening sequence of drawings.)

In Wonderstruck, Selznick wanted to take this narrative experiment a step further. “I had this idea to try to tell two different stories,” he says. “What if I told one story just with pictures, and then told a completely different story that was set 50 years later with words? And then had these two separate stories weave back and forth until they came together at the end?”

Wonderstruck is the story of Rose and Ben, a young boy and girl who live years and worlds apart. By the end of the book, the reader learns they have a special connection. But from early on, they have one thing in common: She is deaf, and he loses his hearing when he is struck by lightning. [Read the full article...]

A Deaf Boy’s New York Quest

The New York Times Book Review – September 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

Sequels and seconds-in-a-series are as often as not better than the starter volume, and yet it seems incumbent upon us all to doubt them anyway. “Through the Looking Glass” is an incomparably better book than its predecessor — its chess-problem structure more ingenious; its nonsense poems far more inspired — but we still say “Alice in Wonderland” and always shall when we refer to Carroll’s world. Freshness of vision is in all departments of life an aesthetic category not to be sneezed at.

All of which is a necessarily elaborate way of saying that Brian Selznick’s new book, “Wonderstruck” — engrossing, intelligent, beautifully engineered and expertly told both in word and image — cannot entirely escape the force field or expectations set up by his 2008 Caldecott winner, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” “Hugo Cabret” was one of those rare books — Chris Van Allsburg’s tale “The Polar Express” is the last that comes to mind — that strike imaginations small and large with a force, like, well, thunder. Neither graphic novel nor illustrated book, its composite of storytelling forms seemed derived from the storyboards of some lost Czech genius of the silent film era rather than anything evident in other books. (Martin Scorsese has adapted it into a film to be released this fall.)

Though not a sequel of matter, “Wonderstruck” is very much a sequel of method, and a test of it. Can Selznick’s black-and-white chiaroscuro spell-making be transported or extended beyond the European fin de siècle setting that seemed essential in its first appearance? [Read the full article...]

‘Hugo’ author Brian Selznick in a ‘Wonderstruck’ mind-set

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – November 24, 2011 (Excerpt)

So here’s Brian Selznick, on a Friday afternoon in Culver City, standing in the vestibule of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a grin of anticipation on his face. It was, after all, this storefront museum — “the museum as performance art,” Selznick calls it — that inspired “Wonderstruck,” his most recent novel for middle readers, which takes place, in part, at New York’s Museum of Natural History and plays with the idea of the museum as what was once known as a wonder cabinet: a collection meant “to fill you, literally, with wonder, in the old-fashioned sense of amazement and awe.”

That’s the ethos of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which walks a line between fact and fiction, displaying both invented and authentic artifacts, challenging our sense of believability, asking how far we are willing to go.

“What’s thrilling,” Selznick says, as he begins to walk through the museum, stopping at exhibit after exhibit, “is that what’s true and what isn’t true, it’s all the same. They’re all fascinating stories, and they all move you in some way. It makes you think about that term, cabinet of wonders, and what wonder means. If a museum’s job is to inspire you, this place does that job.”

There’s a metaphor in this, for Selznick is very much in the business of wonder himself, creating books that challenge our notions of how fiction (for young readers or otherwise) is supposed to work. His 2007 novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” which won a Caldecott Medal and was a National Book Award finalist, introduced an innovative strategy for blending words and images, interweaving narrative and picture sequences to tell two sides of a single story, in which an orphan, living in a Paris train station at the dawn of the 1930s, forges an unlikely friendship with the pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès. [Read the full article...]

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CRIMSON DAWN

Book One of the Darklife Saga by Ronnie Massey

Two Women Hunting A Rogue Vampire

Vampire Valeria Trumaine must confront old demons and face new possibilities as she struggles to bring a rogue vampire to justice. Her best friend and powerful Sidhe princess, Irulan, joins the hunt. Valeria will find that Irulan’s motives for keeping her safe are not what she thinks. And soon she is faced with an undeniable attraction that makes her question everything she knew about herself.

CRIMSON DAWN by Ronnie Massey is not just another vampire novel. Yes, the story line includes the favorites of all young adults – plus those who stayed young-at-heart – such as vampires, werewolves, witches, and fairies, but they represent a framework that is seamlessly incorporated in a captivating story that is well worth to be characterized as extraordinary. [Read More...]

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

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“Bond’s fabulosity is matched by a trenchant wit, and [V's] over-the-top stories are smartly edged with politics, sexual or otherwise.”—The New York Times

Recently hailed as “the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation” in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir.

With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that his first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being “different,” Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.

Singer, songwriter, and Tony-nominated performance artist Mx. Justin Vivian Bond is an Obie, Bessie, and Ethyl Eichelberger Award winner. As one half of the performance duo Kiki and Herb, Bond has toured the world, headlining at Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and starring in a Tony nominated run on Broadway, Kiki and Herb Alive on Broadway. His film credits include a role in John Cameron Mitchell’s featureShortbus. Bond is currently releasing a record, Dendrophile, and is writing a play with Sandra Bernhard.

Editorial Reviews

“Reading Tango is like listening to your favorite eccentric cousin or auntie tell you hair-raising tales of innocence lost and found, friendships forged of adversity, and bullies bewildered by their own perversity. Justin spins a one-of-a-kind story that you won’t be able to put down.”
—Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

“Tango should be in the hands of every child who can read, and of every adult who cares about that child.”
—Michael Warner, author of The Trouble with Normal

“When I say Justin Vivian Bond is a true original, what I mean is, Justin doesn’t resemble anyone else on the face of the planet. When I say Justin Bond is touched by genius, I mean exactly that.”
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

Review

Largely stripped of any sense of celebrity (Mx. Bond is, after all, an award-winning singer, songwriter, and performer), Tango focuses on the experiences of Justin’s childhood, inviting us into a world of innocence, awkwardness, and confusion to which any reader can relate. Told in a casual, almost conversational style, this is a memoir that truly hits home – even if it sometimes hits harder and deeper than we may always be comfortable with.

Powerful and motivating, even (or, perhaps, especially) when uncomfortable, Tango is the story of the kind of childhood that I suspect is more common than most people would like to think. The sexual experimentation between adolescents may be too much for some readers, and the violence between them too much for others, but you can’t truly appreciate the “luxury of normality” that Mx. Bond has achieved without first understanding where v came from.

My only complaint about the book is that it’s too short, and ends rather abruptly, but it is the tale of a childhood, not a life, and not a career. Hopefully, the lovely Mx. Bond has another story inside vself, one that we’ll get to share. Until then, however, Tango serves not just as an entry in the “It Gets Better” theme of literature, but of a welcome glimpse into vs origins. – Sally, Amazon.Com Customer Review

A Schoolboy Wearing Lipstick

The New York Times Book Review – September 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

Hilton Als, a writer for The New Yorker, probably did Justin Vivian Bond a disservice by contributing the preface to Bond’s novella-length childhood memoir, “Tango.” That’s not to say that the preface is bad — quite the opposite. It is poetic and affecting, and it features revealing descriptions of Bond, a transgender singer-songwriter and performance artist with a fervent following among New York City’s avant-garde. “Justin Vivian has learned to dance with V’s self,” Als writes, “to wear the heels and the suit that fit V’s being, all cut and formed to suit V’s soul, having earned it as so many of us earn it, through being brutalized and suppressed and sometimes through love, too.” (“V” is Bond’s preferred, gender-free pronoun.)

The preface falters only when Als claims that Bond’s memoir “hardly needs an introduction.” “Tango” is a promising but uneven book in dire need of an introduction, a narrative structure and an editor. Als’s beautifully written preface serves only to make the memoir’s shortcomings, from its inconsistent writing to its skim-the-surface introspection, all the more blatant by comparison.

The book’s faults are a shame, because the 48-year-old Bond can at times be a funny and thoughtful narrator, guiding us through his childhood in Hagerstown, Md., where he fell asleep every night “imagining that I would wake up the next morning with a closet full of 1940s evening gowns.” Bond fans will probably find much to like in this memoir, including a dozen or so laugh-out-loud passages and some touching descriptions of growing up as a “trans child.” (He was fond of wearing his mother’s frosted pink lipstick to school. When she put a stop to that, Bond says that he went to school “defeated, disappointed and bland.”) [Read the Full Article...]

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Within days after September 11, 2001, William Langewiesche had secured unique, unrestricted, round-the-clock access to the World Trade Center site. American Groundis a tour of this intense, ephemeral world and those who improvised the recovery effort day by day, and in the process reinvented themselves, discovering unknown strengths and weaknesses.

In all of its aspects–emotionalism, impulsiveness, opportunism, territoriality, resourcefulness, and fundamental, cacophonous democracy–Langewiesche reveals the unbuilding to be uniquely American and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and ingenuity in the face of disaster.

Editorial Reviews

Langewiesche had unrestricted access to Manhattan’s Ground Zero during the post-September 11 cleanup, and his triptych of articles (originally published in the Atlantic Monthly) takes readers through what became known to its denizens as the Pile, from the moment of destruction to the departure of the last truckload of rubble from the ruins a little less than nine months later. He gives a calm, precise account of the air traffic controllers trying to understand what was happening to the hijacked planes and explains precisely how the towers collapsed. The stars of the rest of this story are people one doesn’t usually read about: administrators, engineers and construction workers in charge of the cleanup-a process in which, as Langewiesche describes it, order emerged from chaos by the sheer force of will of those in charge. One such outsize personality is David Griffin, a demolition expert who drove up from North Carolina, bluffed his way onto the restricted site, and quickly wound up in a position of authority. There’s also a frank account of the tensions between police and firefighters at Ground Zero. Most fascinating, though, Langewiesche takes readers right inside the smoking Pile, as he joins workers on dangerous underground expeditions to see whether the slurry walls that keep out the Hudson will hold, or whether freon might be leaking from underground refrigerators. This is a genuinely monumental story, told without melodrama, an intimate depiction of ordinary Americans reacting to grand-scale tragedy at their best-and sometimes their worst. – Publishers Weekly

Originally serialized in the Atlantic, Langewiesche’s inside account of the dismantling of the Trade Center site is a masterpiece of compression, a sober look at an emotionally loaded operation and a subtle rendering of the territorial battles between police, fire fighters and construction crews that were only heightened by the tragedy. Langewiesche was on the rubble from the beginning, and his observations — understated, reflective and insightful — remind us of the power of work to root us amid horror, as well as the courage involved in doing what needs to be done. – Chicago Tribune

Review

William Langewiesche is a superb writer. I had read one of the three articles on the Trade Towers he had written for the Atlantic Monthly and was stunned by the insight and honesty of what he had observed and been a part of while at ground zero. I could not wait to get my hands on this book to read his entire account.
Mr.Langewiwsche brings us the story of what happens in the days after the Trade Towers collapsed. He has made it clear that there is a distinction between what happened on September 11th, and during the rescue and recovery phase. I have heard him in an interview on NPR radio saying that all the people on September 11th were heros. Absolutely. Many died trying to save others. The true focus of his book is what happened to the people left in the aftermath, left to do the clean up of such a horrendous tragedy, left to deal with the wave of emotional devastation and loss. Some rode the wave admirably, and some did not.
What makes this work so special is the very way the author lets us see the humaness of the people working in the disaster site. We are all a mixture of good and bad, hero and coward, recognition seeker and recluse. Langewiesche brings those characteristics to the front of his story. He took me into a world that I fear we will see more of. Great, unthinkable tragedy, and our response to staggering loss.
Human beings still have to deal with their strengths and weaknesses, even when the world turns upside down. We all hope that our better sides will come shining through in the event of a catastrophe. This book is a blue print to make sure that happens. It focuses on the ways we are great– taking risks to save others, working tirelessly day and night, and on ways we are not–petty turf wars, insensitive pride and self rightousness.
I have noticed that friends I have given this book to have very strong reactions to it. They either love the book, or find the writers’ story offensive. They were bothered by the image of a fire truck filled with stolen Gap blue jeans, of firefighters searching for lost brothers ignoring the civilian dead, and of battles over which group got to dig for bodies in different areas. One friend thought that any bad bahavior reported about the Trade Tower clean up was anti-American. I disagree. I think the writing shows how resiliant and strong Americans are and I think it shows us how human we are. In war, there are all kinds of reactions and responses, some admirable and some not. In this work, I found a guide to decide what kind of person I want to be should another tragedy fall on us. One of the finest pieces of writing I have read. Could not recommend highly enough. – Margaret E. Chung, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Here is New York was founded in response to the events of September 11, and to the flood of images that resulted from it. The idea was simple: to present images of the event by as many different people and from as many different perspectives as possible. In the days following September 11, the organizers asked for pictures and were inundated with slides, negatives, prints, and digital files from photographers of every description, not only top photojournalists and other professionals, but rescue workers, firemen, police officers, school children, and amateurs of every kind. In order to underline that it was the images themselves that mattered, rather than their makers, the photographs were all digitally scanned, printed out in exactly the same format, and hung from wires without attribution or frames in a Soho storefront in downtown Manhattan.

The book Here is New York will be the most comprehensive and authentic document of what occurred. It will bear witness to what seemed unimaginable, memorialize the people who perished and the rescue workers who served so heroically. Most of all, the book will be a testimony of people speaking directly to each other about their fears, their emotions, and their desire for community. This desire is one of the strongest by-products of the horrible events of September 11. It is also what distinguishes Here is New York from any and all other books about the event.

Proceeds from the sale of the images and the book benefit The Children’s Aid Society’s WTC Relief Fund. To date, Here Is New York has donated over $600,000.00 to the Society. The democratic nature of the exhibiton has allowed it to expand to simultaneous exhibitions including shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago; and The Daytona Beach Community College’s Southeast Museum of Photography. To continue to express the magnitude of this event and expound upon the democratic message of this project, exhibitions will be mounted simultaneously throughout the world this summer and fall to memorialize September 11th. The exhibitions will open in London, Tokyo, Zurich, Arles, as well as several other American locations including Washington, D.C. The pictures communicate where words are insufficient, each tells one part of this tragic story.

The Here Is New York exhibition has been featured in all of the major New York newspapers and by many local and national television networks, including CBS, PBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and National Geographic, Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O’Donnell, Dateline, and 60 Minutes . International press from the following countries have covered the exhibition: the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, and Japan. The book Here is New York will receive extensive press coverage as well.

Editorial Reviews

On September 25, 2001, an exhibition opened in a previously vacant storefront in SoHo, perhaps 20 blocks from Ground Zero. Photographer Peress, who had been photographing the city for the New Yorker, Michael Shulan (who owned the building where the exhibit started) and two friends decided to hang pictures of the city by anybody and everybody who submitted them. The exhibition attracted thousands of submissions, and many thousands more visitors, and has toured in the U.S. and Europe, including stops at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. The slip-cased, 12″ 8 1/4″ book presents 720 color and 160 duotone (and mostly full-page) portraits of the city in crisis, with crisp printing and no captions. While many of the images may resemble those seen repeatedly over the past year, this assemblage feels direct without being voyeuristic. If it is heavy on the flags, it is because the city was festooned at the time, and the pictures convey an array of different responses, personal and political, to the tragedy. This book really does, in Whitman’s words, contain multitudes. – Publishers Weekly

This book grew out of an exhibit and sale of photographs of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center disaster. The exhibit began when Michael Shulan taped a photograph of the towers in a vacant Soho shop window. A friend encouraged him to post more photos and on September 25 the gallery opened for a supposed three-week run. Months and thousands of pictures later, the project included a Web site and the publication of this book. Like the show itself, this book contains pages of uncaptioned photographs, almost 1000 of the more than 5000 photos submitted by some 3000 photographers. “Anybody and everybody” brought photos; those chosen for publication were selected “to give the most coherent sense of the whole.” The book opens with approximately 170 black-and-white photos; the hundreds that follow are in color. The pictures vary in composition, in viewpoint, and both in camera angle and type of equipment used. Some are macabre, some eerie, some border on the tasteless, and a few are beautiful. The book concludes with the most breathtaking and evocative piece in the entire collection-a two-page color photo of the upper reaches of the Twin Towers thrusting upward through a sea of clouds.
Dori DeSpain, Fairfax County Public Library, VA for School Library Journal

Review

This is it. At this writing (August 26 2002),
“Here is New York” is the book that best
captures the 9/11 attack on the U.S. at
the World Trade Center and the immediate
and ongoing effects on those of us in New York City.

This book is not a souvenir.
It is not an editorial summary.
It is not an exploitation.

It is shattered glimpses of the reality
that we New Yorkers lived, simply presented.
This is what was and is.

Except for an introduction describing how
the photographs were collected, the entire
book is just photographs. Just photographs.
And the book is as thick as a Manhattan phone
book.

Each photograph is given an entire page or
double page spread. Each is meticulously
reproduced so that you can study the details
of what is going on. You can read the faces
of people in them. There are no captions.
The photos speak for themselves. Virtually
every one of them is profound.

After all, there really are no words for this.

Look at the details. There are no ordinary
photographs here. If you think a photograph
is ordinary,you are missing something important;
look again.

There are nearly a thousand photographs, most
never before published. They communicate an
intimacy of meaning that I have seen no where
else. The whole project is stunning; the order
and format of the photographs in this book
offer a depth of experience that cannot be
duplicated in other media.

Please know: the wreckage photographs are the
best I’ve seen, yet even at the size of a full
page they cannot convey the scale and depth and
constant danger of “Ground Zero.”

There was far more going on than even this city
full of cameras could capture. Some still goes on.
And much is still going on inside ourselves.
No book, no media, can bring it all together.
But this book is more than a sum of its parts
and delivers more than I thought possible.

I offer my highest praise.

Indeed, here is New York, U.S.A.

- A Customer, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Stan Green is a New York City Homicide Detective who has seen better days. As his family life threatens to disintegrate and his work partner disappears, he is assigned to the most shocking case of his career-a strange and remarkably violent murder. Stan must look into the crime alone. He finds just one witness, a neurologically disabled recluse who sees through the souls of others as demonic hallucinations. As more murders occur, and he drifts further from his family and friends, Stan’s suspicion and rage escalate. Soon he realizes that the deaths fall into the pattern of a serial killer–and starts to believe that his witness is not at all insane, but terrifyingly perceptive . . .

Editorial Review

“Last night I finished the best crime novel I have read in the last year — an advance reading copy of Dave Zeltserman’s book A Killer’s Essence, which will be published by Overlook Press in September. The story line was superb as well as the characters . . . [Zeltserman] nailed the atmosphere of New York City and Brooklyn. There is no question that our customers will love this book. And there is no question that I want a copy for my collection, when this comes out.” –Dave Kanell, co-owner Kingdom Books in Vermont

About the Author

Dave Zeltserman was born in Boston and educated at the University of Colorado. A former software engineer, he is the author of nine horror and crime novels including The Caretaker of Lorne Field and A Killer’s Essence. He and his wife live in the Boston area. Visit davezeltserman.com.

In ‘A Killer’s Essence,’ a writer at top of his game

Boston.Com Book Review – September 1, 2011 (Excerpt)

Dave Zeltserman has had to put himself in the shoes of any number of disreputable types in his estimable noir novels – hit men, out-of-control cops, old coots who think they’re saving the world by weeding a field. Now, in “A Killer’s Essence,’’ comes the ultimate in empathizing with the dark side. Zeltserman, who lives and dies with the Red Sox, creates a protagonist who – the horror – is a Yankees fan.

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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 & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

We The Animals, Justin Torres’s sparse debut novel–at just 125 pages–is brimming with delicate stories of family, of growing up, of facing reality, and of delaying it. Narrated by the youngest son of a Puerto Rican father and white mother from Brooklyn raising their three young sons in upstate New York, the novel is comprised of vignettes detailing moments spent in the eye of the ferocious bubble of home. Torres paints a large picture through diminutive strokes, evoking envy for the couple’s passion and fear for just how easily that passion turns to rage. The brothers wrestle, fight, cry, and laugh as their family is torn and repaired over and over again. Torres’s prose is fierce, grabbing hold of the reader and allowing him inside the wrenching, whirlwind of a life lived intensely. –Alexandra Foster, Amazon.Com Review

Editorial Reviews

“The best book you’ll read this fall…WE THE ANIMALS, a slim novel – just 144 pages — about three brothers, half white, half Puerto Rican, scrambling their way through a dysfunctional childhood, is the kind of book that makes a career….Torres’s sentences are gymnastic, leaping and twirling, but never fancy for the sake of fancy, always justified by the ferocity and heartbreak and hunger and slap-happy euphoria of these three boys. It’s a coming-of-age novel set in upstate New York that rumbles with lyric dynamite. It’s a knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape. Torres is a savage new talent.” – Esquire

“a novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt. Written in the voice of the youngest of three boys, this partly autobiographical tale evokes the cacophony of a messy childhood – flying trash-bag kites, ransacking vegetable gardens, and smashing tomatoes until pulp runs down the kitchen walls. But despite the din the brothers create, the novel belongs to their mother, who alternates between gruff and matter-of-fact – ‘loving big boys is different from loving little boys – you’ve got to meet tough with tough.’ In stark prose, Torres shows us how one family grapples with a dangerous and chaotic love for each other, as well as what it means to become a man.” – O, the Oprah Magazine

“In language brilliant, poised and pure, We the Animals tells about family love as it is felt when it is frustrated or betrayed or made to stand in the place of too many other needed things, about how precious it becomes in these extremes, about the terrible sense of loss when it fails under duress, and the joy and dread of realizing that there really is no end to it.” —Marilynne Robinson

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Reader Review

Reading Justin Torres’s WE THE ANIMALS, I couldn’t help but think of Sandra Cisneros’s THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET. In fact, my hunch is that this is Torres’s version of that book moved to Brooklyn and written from the point of view of a boy. From vignette to vignette, you piece together the picture, until finally, at 125 slim pages, your editors consider it enough to be coined a “novel.” No, Torres does not surpass his mentor, but he has his poetic moments. Sometimes these moments fail and become “workshop” moments, wherein you sense the lineage (in this case, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, among others) of the author and how it makes the words smell of the writing workshop copying machine, but other times the writing actually comes alive.

In the beginning we are introduced to a dysfunctional family (de rigueur these days) consisting of a wife-beating Puerto Rican dad (“Paps”), an unpredictable white mother (“Ma”) and the Three Musketeers (the boys — at the book’s beginning, ages 7 to 10). The ages are not insignificant. As the tone and voice of this book is often wise and clever, one begins to wonder how the young narrators manage it. I realize that authors often claim it is the “voice of wisdom looking back,” but the dialogue portions were a bit advanced, too, and — in the “narrative dream” — what was said then was said then.

Early on, Torres utilizes the third person “we” point of view, accenting just how close these brothers are and how they behave (well, mostly misbehave) almost as a single entity. They witness their parents engaging in activities and violence that most of us do not, then show the effects in their own behaviors, all as you’d expect. This is Torres’s slant and what gives the book its charm.

Later in the book, however, the author shifts to a first-person point of view, written from the voice of the youngest son. This boy, in the last few vignettes, undergoes a dramatic change that really turns the whole novel upside down. Now instead of a garden variety, coming-of-age-in-a-violent family, we have another type of coming of age tale which, I guess, would be a spoiler to reveal. Suffice it to say that Torres waited too late into the book to spring it on us and should have written maybe 50 additional pages allowing for a more logical transition. As it is, it seems out of the blue, dumped on the reader, and the behavior of the family seems even more bizarre than its admittedly low standards would lead us to expect. Meaning? I didn’t buy it. It was too much and too abrupt, jolting me out of the narrative dream as efficiently as a pothole.

That said, you can emphasize the book’s efforts along the way and enjoy it for those moments where the narration sings. Torres is adept at anaphora (repeated beginnings of sentences) and cascading participial phrases, making his well-punctuated sentences dance in creative ways at times (much like Paps who, in one vignette, tries to teach the boys how to mambo like a real Puerto Rican). All in all, a mixed bag and, in the end, a missed opportunity. Still, one could do worse than to have Sandra Cisneros as a role model. In this case, the student shows that work remains to be done — in future books. – Ken C., Amazon.Com Customer Review

Grasping the Secrets of Being an Adult

The New York Times Book Review – September 1, 2011 (Excerpt)

Dusk seems to be descending forever on the boys at the center of “We the Animals,” a slender but affecting debut novel by Justin Torres. As porch lights go on, and the other kids shamble home to chores and homework, the unnamed narrator and his brothers prowl the blighted streets of their rural hometown in upstate New York like stray dogs sniffing out their next meal or a new bit of trouble. At home the rising of the moon brings a mother’s absence — she works the night shift at the brewery — and a father’s frustration, which is relieved only by violence inflicted on whomever is at hand.

“We the Animals,” the kind of sensitive, carefully wrought autobiographical first novel that may soon be extinct from the mainstream publishing world, is mostly written in the first person plural, a tricky gambit that calls attention to itself immediately (as it did in Joshua Ferris’s best-selling novel of cubicled anomie, “Then We Came to the End”). But the device doesn’t impede our engagement with Mr. Torres’s spare, haunting story of a boy scrabbling toward wisdom about the adult world and his place in it.

“We” are the three sons of a mixed-race couple, Ma and Paps, who met in Brooklyn in their youth before moving upstate, presumably in search of economic opportunity that hasn’t materialized. He is Puerto Rican; she is white. She was just 14, he 16 when she became pregnant; they had to take a bus to Texas so they could marry legally. (One of Mr. Torres’s few literary tics is a slight overuse of the semicolon in the early chapters; perhaps it’s catching?) [Read the full article...]

‘We The Animals’ Delivers A Fiery Ode To Boyhood

NPR Book Review – September 3, 2011 (Excerpt)

Justin Torres’ debut novel is a welterweight champ of a book. It’s short but it’s also taut, elegant, lean — and it delivers a knockout.

It’s called We the Animals and it tells the story of three boys growing up in upstate New York. Their parents started having babies as teenagers in Brooklyn and they work hard to support their family — Ma on a brewery’s night shift while Paps drives a truck and does odd jobs. They’re poor, and the boys always seem to be scrambling: for more food, more attention and a little more joy.

Both the boys and their parents smack each other brutally — and rely on each other utterly. Their story is told in a series of scenes that burst open like exploding stars, full of violence and light.

Torres, who also grew up in upstate New York, tells NPR’s Scott Simon that the book is very loosely based on his own childhood experience.

“I have two brothers; my mother worked in a brewery; my parents were teenagers when they started having kids,” he says. “But the incidents are fiction. I wanted to make myth out of family; I wanted to get to an emotional truth that I think fiction can really deliver.”

And We the Animals definitely delivers. The brilliantly compressed novel reads as though Torres has been writing it his whole life, or at least his whole writing life. [Read the full article...]

Justin Torres’s ‘We the Animals’ marks a new literary voice

The Washington Post Book Review – September 12, 2011 (Excerpt)

It’s rare to come across a young writer with a voice whose uniqueness, power and resonance are evident from the very first page, or even the very first paragraph. It does happen every once in a while, though. And it’s happened again, just now, with the publication of “We the Animals,” a slender, tightly wound debut novel by a remarkable young talent named Justin Torres.

From the first of its 128 pages — all of which can be read in one sitting, as they undoubtedly will be in many instances — readers, even those who don’t go on to love everything about the book, will have little choice but to conclude that they are hearing something new, something strong and something very self-assured.

The unnamed narrator of “We the Animals” is the youngest of three brothers who, while spaced a few years apart, are each beginning to navigate the mine-laden pathway out of childhood and into pre-adolescence. To say that this trio is “tight-knit” is insufficient: They are in almost every sense a collective, eating together, sleeping together, bathing together, and together absorbing their father’s abuse and their mother’s manic-depressive outbursts. What binds them is the natural talent for mayhem that is the birthright of bored and largely unattended young brothers — that and their shared bewilderment at their station as the half-white, half-Latino children of hot-tempered Brooklynites trans­planted to semi-rural Upstate New York. [Read the full article...]

‘We the Animals’ by Justin Torres

The Boston Globe Book Review – September 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

Vulnerability within a family can be tricky business. Parents must fail only just enough for their children to know they’re real. So many of us can remember when we first saw our fathers cry or when our mothers turned unreachably private, if only for that moment. When they fought, we saw them as individuals with discernable motives and separate desires; and even when they made up, they retained traces of their discrete identities. Faultless parenting, in the end, doesn’t make for much emotional transparency.

Justin Torres’s debut novel, “We the Animals,’’ is a svelte little book, but in it is proof after proof that domestic distress can inspire compassion in its young witnesses, a worthier goal than a false sense of familial infallibility. “We wanted more’’ opens the first chapter. “We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry.’’ The novel’s unnamed 6-year-old narrator speaks for himself and his two older brothers: “We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight.’’ The voracity – material but also emotional – is what animates most of the book’s prose. “We the Animals’’ is rich in tactile detail and sensory recollection. Crumbs are licked up; torsos are tickled; ditches are dug in the pouring rain. Torres has done here what all good novelists who exploit memory do: He has surveyed his entire childhood and extracted its most pigmented impressions. [Read the full article...]

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss 

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Stuart Martin Berry has only three months left to find a publisher for his first novel. In a desperate attempt to reach his goal he leaves his home to live in New York. His wife has given him free rein to do whatever it takes to get a book deal. Her only request was not to give her any details on how he got there. If he fails he will be forced to give up his dream of being a famous writer and take a regular forty hour a week job. For Stuart this is sufficient motivation to start a three month adventure full of sex, lies, and deceit, without losing focus of the ultimate goal. When he finally reaches the finish line, he has evolved and become a top expert in the publishing world.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

American Male Prostitute is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children—and points the way to reversing that failure.

Brill’s vivid narrative—filled with unexpected twists and turns—takes us from the Oval Office, where President Obama signs off on an unprecedented plan that will infuriate the teachers’ unions because it offers billions to states that win an education reform “contest”; to boisterous assemblies, where parents join the fight over their children’s schools; to a Fifth Avenue apartment, where billionaires plan a secret fund to promote school reform; to a Colorado high school, where students who seemed destined to fail are instead propelled to college; to state capitols across the country, where school reformers hoping to win Obama’s “contest” push bills that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

It’s the story of an unlikely army—fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats—squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works for the adults but victimizes the children.

Class Warfare is filled with extraordinary people taking extraordinary paths: a young woman who goes into teaching almost by accident, then becomes so talented and driven that fighting burnout becomes her biggest challenge; an antitrust lawyer who almost brought down Bill Gates’s Microsoft and now forms a partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates to overhaul New York’s schools; a naïve Princeton student who launches an army of school reformers with her senior thesis; a California teachers’ union lobbyist who becomes the mayor of Los Angeles and then the union’s prime antagonist; a stubborn young teacher who, as a child growing up on Park Avenue, had been assumed to be learning disabled but ends up co-founding the nation’s most successful charter schools; and an anguished national union leader who walks a tightrope between compromising enough to save her union and giving in so much that her members will throw her out.

Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.

Editorial Reviews

“Education in America is THE national imperative of the 21st century and Steven Brill has done a brilliant job of taking us through the complexities, trials and triumphs, failures and food fights that define the struggle to get it right. We all have a stake in the outcome and owe it to succeeding generations to get involved. Class Warfare is the road map to what that means.” –Tom Brokaw, journalist and author of The Greatest Generation

“Steven Brill’s Class Warfare is hard-hitting, illuminating, and inspiring. It’s also as fast-paced and gripping as a thriller. His vivid accounts of great teachers at work—and his play-by-play of the battle to remove the obstacles put in front of them by their own union—opened my eyes and changed my outlook about the possibilities for American education. A must-read call to action for all thinking Americans, especially parents.” –Amy Chua, Yale Law Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall

“Class Warfare inspires! This is a unique and critically important story about true heroes in America who against great odds are making a real difference. More than this, Brill’s work sheds important light on the savage educational disparities faced by low-income communities across the country and through his work he trumpets what should be a call to action by all of us. Brill is brilliant in his writing and his work will inspire and fortify all those struggling with the challenges of education in America.” –Cory A. Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ

Review

A White House commission issued an alarming report documenting the state of our public schools in 1983. Titled ‘A Nation at Risk,’ it found that average SAT scores dropped over 50 points in the verbal section and nearly 40 points in the math section during the period 1963-80, only one-third could solve a math problem requiring several steps, and on international tests American students never placed first or second – instead they were last seven times. Since then teaching has become the largest single profession in the U.S. (3.2 million public school teachers, about one for every 100 Americans) and inflation-adjusted per-pupil funding has more than doubled, while outcomes have improved very little, we still have a 25% dropout rate, and American pupils ranked 22nd in science, 17th in reading, and 31st in math in the most recent international comparisons. ‘Class Warfare’ tells of significant recent efforts to improve America’s education, including President Obama (‘Race to the Top’), Florida’s new pupil-testing/teacher-evaluation program, Bill and Melinda Gates (Gates Foundation), Joel Klein (New York City Schools Chancellor), Wendy Kopp (‘Teach for America’), David Levin (KIPP), and Michelle Rhee (Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor).

Author Brill’s realization of the need for substantial change came in 2009 when he toured a New York City ‘rubber room’ where 15 teachers spent their days doing nothing while earning full pay and benefits. About 600 others were similarly occupied in other city locations – all accused of misconduct or incompetence and awaiting resolution of charges, a process that usually took 3 – 5 years and rarely resulted in dismissal.

Traditionally, policymakers have attempted to raise the quality of teaching by adding hurdles for those seeking to enter the profession. Once hired, districts typically do very little additional screening – tenure is awarded as a matter of course to almost all after 2-3 years of teaching, very few are discharged, and no financial incentives are provided to improve. (Most districts increase teacher pay for additional course hours, mostly in education – however, little/no relationship has been found between these courses and pupil achievement.)

New York City public school teachers’ contract is 167 pages long – mostly about job protection and what teachers can and cannot be asked to do during their 7 hour/day, 179-day year. Only one formal observation/term is allowed for their annual evaluation and union representatives insist the teacher receive advance notice. The city’s schools spent an average $19,358/pupil in 2009-10, even more if teacher pensions were fully funded. Cost/teacher rose from $63,022 in 2002 to $110,551 in 2009 – helped considerably by Mayor Bloomberg’s desire to avoid confrontation prior to his 3rd run for office. When Klein left, little/no progress had been made on the ‘rubber room’ issue – processing was speeded up but very few were fired, some resigned for a payoff, and most went back to the classroom or reassigned to ‘paid reserve.’ The ‘good news’ is that, after adjusting for state-level test changes and the composition of NYC SAT test-takers, pupil achievement improved significantly.

Michelle Rhee closed 23 schools, fired 36 principals, and cut about 121 office jobs her first year. She then got the right to fire anyone for non-performance, as well as pay-for-performance – in exchange for 20% pay raises and bonuses of $20-$30,000 for ‘strong student achievement.” She fired 226 teachers (about 5%) and warned 737 others. Meanwhile, Mayor Fenty (her protector) was voted out of office – not surprising in an area where 38% of adults work for government and not likely sympathetic to those challenging government workers.

What are the lessons from these reform efforts? 1)Neither more money nor more technology are the answer. (The latter conclusion per Bill and Melinda Gates.) 2)Teacher certification has very little impact (no statistically significant difference) on pupil performance. Good teachers, however, can make a much greater difference – the difference in pupil achievement between the 75th percentile and 25th percentile teacher is about ten percentile points in a single year (10X the difference between certified and non-certified teachers), per analysis of Los Angeles pupils in grades three-five. (The black-white achievement gap nationally is about 34 percentile points.) 3)Being an effective teacher is very demanding and can burn out the individuals involved. 4)Public school reforms are likely to be stopped through politics – eg. California (Gov. Brown replaced 7 of 11 members of the State Board of Education – all reformers, one with a former union lobbyist; the reformer Education Superintendent was defeated the same year by a union-supported candidate), San Diego, Washington, D.C. 6)Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ reform program, aimed at encouraging rewarding teachers according to pupil gains, has been drowned out by traditional education support during his administration. 7)Colleges of education are mostly palaces of academic sophistry. How else can one explain their almost non-existent impact on pupil performance?

Bottom-Line: Brill provides a dash of reality for those in the ‘more money is better’ group. However, it isn’t difficult to also realize that efforts to reform public education are accomplishing little overall. The ‘bad news’ about “Class Warfare” is that Brill omits the disappointing overall data about charter schools – considerable evidence indicates they’re not much better, if at all, than the regular public schools. Then there’s the evidence of wide-spread cheating (especially in Washington, D.C.) that created early hopes for the success of reforms. Real answers are to be found in Asia, where pupils are much more motivated, work longer, and probably have higher IQs to begin with – per other researchers. – Loyd E. Eskildson, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Steve Brill’s Report Card on School Reform

The New York Times Book Review – August 18, 2011 (Excerpt)

Steven Brill is a graduate of Yale Law School and the founder of Court TV, and in his new book, “Class Warfare,” he brings a sharp legal mind to the world of education reform. Like a dogged prosecutor, he mounts a zealous case against America’s teachers’ unions. From more than 200 interviews, he collects the testimony of idealistic educators, charter school founders, policy gurus, crusading school superintendents and billionaire philanthropists. Through their vivid vignettes, which he pieces together in short chapters with titles like “ ‘Colorado Says Half of You Won’t Graduate’ ” and “A Shriek on Park Avenue,” Brill conveys the epiphanies, setbacks and triumphs of a national reform movement.

Some of his subjects, like Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, are by now household names; others, like Jon Schnur, an adviser to the Clinton and Obama administrations, are more obscure. But in Brill’s telling, they have all come, over some two decades, to distrust or denounce the unions and to promote the same small set of reforms: increasing the number of charter schools and evaluating and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures that rely heavily on student test scores.

Throughout, Brill reminds us he’s just an objective reporter. Disinterested, however, is not how he comes across. He recounts an educator’s motto to “teach like your hair’s on fire.” For most of the book, Brill writes like his hair is on fire. His sympathies clearly lie with the unions’ most adamant critics, like Michelle Rhee, the controversial former superintendent of the District of Columbia public schools, and Joel Klein, the combative ex-chancellor of the New York City system.

I say this as someone whom Brill might pick for a jury pool. I taught for three years in New York as a charter member of Teach for America and had my own run-ins with the union. (An article I wrote, which praised Kopp’s then-­fledgling organization and made some of the same criticisms Brill does, angered my union representative.) This fall, my daughter will be attending public school, and I’ll be teaching at a private, reform-­minded urban academy in New Jersey. [Read the full article...]

Advertisement

AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Stuart Martin Berry has only three months left to find a publisher for his first novel. In a desperate attempt to reach his goal he leaves his home to live in New York. His wife has given him free rein to do whatever it takes to get a book deal. Her only request was not to give her any details on how he got there. If he fails he will be forced to give up his dream of being a famous writer and take a regular forty hour a week job. For Stuart this is sufficient motivation to start a three month adventure full of sex, lies, and deceit, without losing focus of the ultimate goal. When he finally reaches the finish line, he has evolved and become a top expert in the publishing world.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

American Male Prostitute is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

In Wendy and the Lost Boys bestselling author Julie Salamon explores the life of playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s most expertly crafted character: herself. The first woman playwright to win a Tony Award, Wendy Wasserstein was a Broadway titan. But with her high- pitched giggle and unkempt curls, she projected an image of warmth and familiarity. Everyone knew Wendy Wasserstein. Or thought they did.

Born on October 18, 1950, in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish Jewish immigrant parents, Wendy was the youngest of Lola and Morris Wasserstein’s five children. Lola had big dreams for her children. They didn’t disappoint: Sandra, Wendy’s glamorous sister, became a high- ranking corporate executive at a time when Fortune 500 companies were an impenetrable boys club. Their brother Bruce became a billionaire superstar of the investment banking world. Yet behind the family’s remarkable success was a fiercely guarded world of private tragedies.

Wendy perfected the family art of secrecy while cultivating a densely populated inner circle. Her friends included theater elite such as playwright Christopher Durang, Lincoln Center Artistic Director André Bishop, former New York Times theater critic Frank Rich, and countless others.

And still almost no one knew that Wendy was pregnant when, at age forty-eight, she was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital to deliver Lucy Jane three months premature. The paternity of her daughter remains a mystery. At the time of Wendy’s tragically early death less than six years later, very few were aware that she was gravely ill. The cherished confidante to so many, Wendy privately endured her greatest heartbreaks alone.

In Wendy and the Lost Boys, Salamon assembles the fractured pieces, revealing Wendy in full. Though she lived an uncommon life, she spoke to a generation of women during an era of vast change. Revisiting Wendy’s works-The Heidi Chronicles and others-we see Wendy in the free space of the theater, where her many selves all found voice. Here Wendy spoke in the most intimate of terms about everything that matters most: family and love, dreams and devastation. And that is the Wendy of Neverland, the Wendy who will never grow old.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About the Author

Julie Salamon is the author of Hospital, about Maimonides Hospital, as well as The New York Times bestseller The Christmas Tree; the true-crime book Facing the Wind; the novel White Lies; the film classic The Devil’s Candy; a family memoir, The Net of Dreams; and Rambam’s Ladder. Previously a reporter and critic with The Wall Street Journal, she has also written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Republic.

And Now, Wendy Gets Her Chronicles

The New York Times Book Review – August 17, 2011 (Excerpt)

Wendy Wasserstein had a contract to write her memoir when she died, in 2006. The question she had asked herself, putting off the job, was: Could she “reach that kind of depth?” The more obvious question for those acquainted with this Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright: Was there anything left to tell?

Yes, as it happens. In “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” Julie Salamon’s shrewd, gripping biography, the gap between the public rendition of a life and how it was actually lived is shown at times to be startlingly wide. A friend of Wasserstein’s once said to her, “You were born into great material,” a polite way of saying your family is crazy. In fact, Wasserstein enjoyed ties to several rambunctious tribes. As presented by Ms. Salamon, a former critic for The New York Times, she is both an unavoidable product of the family Wasserstein and of the theatrical family she chose for herself. And while her plays and essays were based on personal history, they were, it turns out, just a fraction of the story. As Frank Rich, her great friend and a former theater critic and columnist for The Times, wrote after her death, “How could the most public artist in New York keep so much locked up?”

Ms. Salamon suggests these things run in the family. When Wasserstein won the Pulitzer in 1989, for “The Heidi Chronicles,” she was 39 and still very much at the mercy of her mother, Lola Wasserstein. She hovers in the biography like a shadow subject, charming to outsiders with her theatrical hustle and zany style sense (she liked to wear a dance leotard under a fur coat), less so to Wendy, her youngest daughter, whom she inflated with ambition and undermined with criticism. Walking down the street together, Lola Wasserstein might point to the crowd and inform her daughter, “They are all looking at you and thinking, ‘Look at that fat girl.’ ” [Read the full article...]

‘Wendy’ Shines Spotlight On Beloved Playwright

NPR Book Review – August 17, 2011 (Excerpt)

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein belongs to that rare group of beloved writers (which also includes Nora Ephron and Anne Lamott) who make readers feel as if they’re talking to them personally, like intimate friends. When she died of lymphoma in January 2006, at 55, the overflow crowd at her memorial service in Lincoln Center’s 1,080-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater was packed not just with scores of close friends (many as famous as she was), but with mourners who knew her only through her work — including Uncommon Women and Others, The Heidi Chronicles (which won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award), The Sisters Rosensweig and the funny and touching personal essays collected in Bachelor Girls and Shiksa Goddess. Yet these people grieved as if they had lost a dear friend.

With Wendy and the Lost Boys, Julie Salamon — a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal who has published numerous nonfiction books but no prior biographies — has written the perfect biography for Wasserstein’s legions of fans, a book as entertaining and personable as its subject. She underscores how the playwright, a “quintessential baby boomer, part of the generation captivated and characterized by Peter Pan,” carefully manipulated her own narrative, revealing different aspects of herself to different people, using “humor as a dodge, intimacy as a smoke screen.” [Read the full article...]

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Stuart Martin Berry has only three months left to find a publisher for his first novel. In a desperate attempt to reach his goal he leaves his home to live in New York. His wife has given him free rein to do whatever it takes to get a book deal. Her only request was not to give her any details on how he got there. If he fails he will be forced to give up his dream of being a famous writer and take a regular forty hour a week job. For Stuart this is sufficient motivation to start a three month adventure full of sex, lies, and deceit, without losing focus of the ultimate goal. When he finally reaches the finish line, he has evolved and become a top expert in the publishing world.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

American Male Prostitute is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The idea spawned after reading the New York Times on April 29, 2009, “Hans Holzer, Ghost Hunter, Dies at 89.” Hans Holzer was an Austrian-born, American pioneering paranormal researcher and author. He wrote well over 100 books on supernatural and occult subjects. What caught my attention was his conclusion that “the other side” is very much like this side, only with more red tape. The dead who wish to return to earth have to get permission from “spirit guides”, then wait in a queue and register with a clerk.

As I said, the idea of a novel did not make it. Nevertheless, after more than two years, I felt inclined to engage into some research on Hans Holzer.

Hans Holzer

Hans Holzer (January 26, 1920 – April 26, 2009) was an Austrian-born, American pioneering paranormal researcher and author. He wrote well over 100 books on supernatural and occult subjects for the popular market as well as several plays, musicals, films, and documentaries, and hosted a television show, “Ghost Hunter”.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Career

Holzer was born in Vienna, Austria. His interest in the supernatural was sparked at a young age by stories told to him by his uncle Henry. He went on to study archaeology and ancient history at the University of Vienna but sensing that war was imminent, his family decided it was unsafe to stay in Austria and left the country for New York City in 1938. He studied Japanese at Columbia University and, after studying comparative religion and parapsychology, claimed to have obtained a Ph.D. at a school called the London College of Applied Science. He went on to teach parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology.

His extensive involvement in researching the supernatural included investigating The Amityville Horror and some of the most prominent haunted locations around the world. He also worked with well-known trancemediums such as Ethel Johnson-Meyers, Sybil Leek, and Marisa Anderson. Holzer has been credited with creating the term “The Other Side” (already in use, however, in nineteenth century spiritualism) or in full “The Other Side of Life”. He is also sometimes credited with having coined the term ghost hunter, which was the title of his first book on the paranormal published in 1963. However, an earlier book by Harry Pricepublished in 1936 was titled Confessions of a Ghost Hunter.

Holzer believed in life after death and the existence of ghosts, spirits, and “stay behinds”. Ghosts were, according to him, imprints left in the environment which could be “picked up” by sensitive people. Spirits were intelligent beings who could interact with the living; while “stay behinds” were those who found themselves earth-bound after death. He also believed in reincarnation and the existence of “levels of consciousness”. He was a vegetarian, then a vegan for most of his life.

The Amityville Horror

Holzer’s most famous investigation was into The Amityville Horror case. In January 1977, Holzer and spiritual medium Ethel Meyers entered 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Meyers claimed that the house had been built over an ancient Native American burial ground and the angry spirit of a Shinnecock Indian Chief – “Rolling Thunder” – had possessed the previous occupant, Ronald Defeo Jr., driving him to murder his family. Photographs taken at the scene revealed curious anomalies such as the halos which appeared in the supposed images of bullet marks made in the original 1974 murders. Holzer’s claim that the house was built on Indian sacred land was, however, denied by the local Amityville Historical Society and it was pointed out that it was the Montaukett Indians, and not the Shinnecocks, who had been the original settlers in the area. However, Indian burial sites have been found all over Long Island, including Amityville, so no one has been able to confirm or deny the burial of an Indian chief on or near the 112 Ocean Avenue property. Holzer went on to write several books about the subject, both fiction and non-fiction.

Source: Wkipedia.com

Hans Holzer, Ghost Hunter, Dies at 89

The New York Times – April 29, 2009 (Excerpt)

Hans Holzer, whose investigations into the paranormal took him to haunted houses all over the world, most notably the Long Island house that inspired “The Amityville Horror,” died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Alexandra Holzer.

Mr. Holzer — who wrote more than 140 books on ghosts, the afterlife, witchcraft, extraterrestrial beings and other phenomena associated with the realm he called “the other side” — carried out his most famous investigation with the medium Ethel Johnson-Meyers in 1977. Together they roamed the house in Amityville, in which a young man, Ronald DeFeo Jr., had murdered his parents and four siblings in 1974.

The house had become notorious after its next owners claimed to have been tormented by a series of spine-chilling noises and eerie visitations, set forth in the best-selling 1977 book “The Amityville Horror: A True Story,” written by Jay Anson.

After Ms. Johnson-Meyers channeled the spirit of a Shinnecock Indian chief, who said that the house stood on an ancient Indian burial ground, Mr. Holzer took photographs of bullet holes from the 1974 murders in which mysterious halos appeared.

Mr. Holzer went on to write a nonfiction book about the house, “Murder in Amityville” (1979), which formed the basis for the 1982 film “Amityville II: The Possession”; he also wrote two novels, “The Amityville Curse” (1981) and “The Secret of Amityville” (1985). [Read the full article...]

Hans Holzer

The Telegraph – May 1, 2009 (Excerpt)

Hans Holzer, who passed over to the other side aged 89, was a celebrated “ghost-hunter” and author of numerous books about the paranormal, including Murder at Amityville (1979) – the basis for the film Amityville II: The Possession (1982), the low-budget sequel to The Amityville Horror (1979).

Holzer described himself as an academic parapsychologist and took his calling extremely seriously. There were, he explained, three “dirty words” in his vocabulary: belief, disbelief and supernatural. “Belief is the uncritical acceptance of something you can’t prove,” he explained. “I work on evidence”.

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Today’s publishing world is divided into two principle sections. First, there is the exclusive pool of traditional publishers, and, second, the help-yourself shark tank represented by the so-called vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers have a significant edge over traditional publishers in regards to brutality, business sense, and profitability. They ruthlessly pursue the infinite supply of aspiring writers who, in turn, are rejected by traditional publishers or literary agents. Ironically, in the world of traditional publishing, authors are rejected not necessarily due to lack of talent. Vanity publishers accept everybody and everything. No questions asked. Just pay your bill, but don’t come crying to them when you can’t sell a copy of your book.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Fred Brounian and his twin brother, George, were once co-CEOs of a burgeoning New York City software company devoted to the creation of utopian virtual worlds. Now, in the summer of 2006, as two wars rage and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, George has fallen into a coma, control of the company has been wrenched away by a military contracting conglomerate, and Fred has moved back in with his parents. Broke and alone, he’s led by an attractive woman, Mira, into a neurological study promising to give him “peak” experiences and a newfound spiritual outlook on life. As the study progresses, lines between the subject and the experimenter blur, and reality becomes increasingly porous. Meanwhile, Fred finds himself caught up in what seems at first a cruel prank: a series of bizarre emails and texts that purport to be from his comatose brother.

Moving between the research hospitals of Manhattan, the streets of a meticulously planned Florida city, the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the uncanny, immersive worlds of urban disaster simulation;  threading through military listserv geek-speak, Hindu cosmology, the maxims of outmoded self-help books and the latest neuroscientific breakthroughs, Luminarium is a brilliant examination of the way we live now, a novel that’s as much about the role technology and spirituality play in shaping our reality as it is about the undying bond between brothers, and the redemptive possibilities of love.

Editorial Reviews

“Luminarium is dizzyingly smart and provocative, exploring as it does the state of the present, of technology, of what is real and what is ephemeral. But the thing that separates Luminarium from other books that discuss avatars, virtual reality and the like is that Alex Shakar is committed throughout with trying, relentlessly, to flat-out explain the meaning of life. This book is funny, and soulful, and very sad, but so intellectually invigorating that you’ll want to read it twice.” — Dave Eggers

“This fascinating, hilarious novel, though set in the past, is the story of the future: technology has outlapped us, reality is blinking on and off like a bad wireless connection,  the ones we love are nearby in one sense, but far away in another. Yet at the book’s galloping heart, it’s the story of what one man is willing to go through to find—in our crowded, second-rate space—something like faith. This novel is sharp, original, and full of energy—obviously the work of a brilliant mind.” — Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

“[A] penetrating look at the uneasy intersection of technology and spirituality…Shakar’s blend of the business of cyberspace and the science of enlightenment distinguishes the novel as original and intrepid…Shakar’s prose is sharp and hilarious, engendering the reader’s faith in the novel’s philosophical ambitions. Part Philip K. Dick, part Jonathan Franzen, this radiant work leads you from the unreal to the real so convincingly that you begin to let go of the distinction.”—Publishers Weekly

Reader Review

I don’t know, but neither do I know whether fictional realism is spiritualism. Or, are they both make-believe? Maybe nothing is real – except video game worlds. I’m not sure the story’s three brothers, George, Fred and Sam, know either. The problem is that they may think they do. It’s hard to get a consensus since one of them is in a coma.

I remember when coming-of-age novels were written about younger people. Now, it seems, they are being written about people who should have come-of-age years (if not decades) ago. Here, we have Fred. Fred is a twin to George. George is the brother in a coma. Fred wants to take care of George. The rest of the family aren’t like Fred or George. Maybe at least one family member actually grew up on schedule. Maybe not.

But, the one who may be mature wants to live in a retirement community decades before reaching retirement age – or is it not a retirement community at all? Should we care? Combine this family with a few other players; mix in some post-modern, new-age, presence (pseudo or not) and just plain family dysfunction; and you have enough material to start any number of self-help programs.

I truly enjoy literary fiction. I enjoy books that don’t have a single gunfight. I enjoy character studies. I enjoy cerebral excursions. But, I require something to happen somewhere in the pages of a four-hundred plus page novel. What happens here doesn’t seem to actually “happen” as much as it fails to “not-happen”.

Even with its faults, Luminarium was interesting. Taking place in 2006 with lots of references to 9/11, it immerses the reader in the continuing after effects of that day. But, it also questions the virtual world and the place of people in it. In the midst of all that, there is some strange stuff. Quite a bit, actually.

Shakar wrote the novel “The Savage Girl”. It was a study of the consumer society. This is a study of the place of the mind in the modern world, in all its incarnations. It is for those who don’t mind doing some thinking, questioning and doubting while they are reading. – Dick Johnson, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Review: ‘Luminarium’ by Alex Shakar

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – August 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

In the summer of 2006, Fred Brounian’s prospects are dim. He ruefully describes himself as “an ex-CEO refugee from a hostile takeover with a brother in the hospital.” To be exact, it’s his identical twin, George, who’s comatose in the hospital. Fred is lonely, directionless, and broke.

The twins and their younger brother Sam had been on top of the world after creating Urth, an early virtual reality program or “online utopian dreamworld” based, they proudly boasted, on “real physics.” Urth should have made them rich, and thus free to continue innovating for the good of humankind. Instead, “A week before 9/11, they’d had all the financial backing they needed. A week after, they had none.”

Shakar could be writing about himself. His first novel, “The Savage Girl,” a scouring investigation into the rampant commercialization of the 1990s, earned him an impressive advance, followed by exalted critical praise. But when the book was released a week after 9/11, it was lost in the surge of grief, fear and rage. Now, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Shakar returns with an even more powerful and profound novel, marked by an involving and canny mix of metaphysics, morality, comedy, and romance.

Fred is a classic well-intentioned bumbler. Trapped in a purgatory of hope and dread as he haunts the hospital, waiting for any hint of consciousness in his twin and guiding light, he signs up for an experimental treatment with New York University’s department of neural studies in which the brain is subjected to “mild but complex electromagnetic impulses.” Soon he is seated in an old, ratty vinyl recliner with a strangely modified motorcycle helmet on his head, tended to by Mira, a “quirkily hot science nerd chick” and a character with significant secrets. [Read the full article...]

Living the Varieties of Virtual Experience

The New York Times Book Review – September 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

In the first lecture from “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” entitled “Religion and Neurology,” William James criticizes as “simple-minded” what he calls “medical materialism,” the system of thought that “finishes up St. Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic” or that “snuffs out St. Teresa as an hysteric, St. Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.” Such thinking, James said, isn’t strictly wrong, but extremely wrongheaded, since all thoughts and feelings, including those of the medical materialists themselves, are “organically conditioned” and thus equally prey to being dismissed. James concluded that St. Paul very likely did have a seizure, but that this had no bearing on the spiritual significance of his visions, which needed to be judged pragmatically, by the extent to which they offered “delight” or “good consequential fruits for life.”

In the century since James’s death, medical materialists have multiplied, their ranks swollen by countless evolutionary psychologists who think they can “explain” the belief in God by tracing the mechanism by which it became a cornerstone of human behavior. A few writers, like Marilynne Robinson, invoke James in their responses to these arguments, but given his importance to the history of American thought and his particular relevance to this debate, his name is heard with surprisingly little frequency. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘Luminarium’

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – September 24, 2011 (Excerpt)

In all the clutter of the Internet — that endless library, endless strip mall, endless portal for self-diagnosis, pornography or opportunities for stalking your ex — isn’t it possible that somewhere the secret to bliss exists?

There it is, the directions for freedom from the self and its torments. You might stumble on it after 16 clicks through ad farms, deserted Myspace pages and circa 2000 blogs.

The fantasy of ferreting out truth in the whorls of information available to us is explored in Alex Shakar’s grandly ambitious second novel, “Luminarium.” Weighing in at more than 400 pages, the story is centered on twin brothers Fred and George Brounian (the latter cancer-ridden and in a coma) and on restless searches for meaning in several realms: some physical and mapped, others more abstract.

It’s a brilliant book dogged in its pursuit of disassembling human experience in hopes of finding the essence, or at least an astoundingly prismatic view. At times, “Luminarium” gets ensnared in its tireless revolutions of plot and philosophical roving, but Shakar is fearless in what existential thread he will follow — the bigger the concept, the bigger his bite.

The Internet and its virtual realities is one of those concepts fruitfully mined, but the thorniest and most rewarding of all is spirituality. As a pony-tailed Reiki master named Guy sums it up for Fred: “Four thousand religions. Two hundred nations. Six billion people. All defending what doesn’t exist.” But it doesn’t stop us from trying to find the right one, even skeptics like Fred, who joins a neurotheological study that promises to reproduce “the ‘peak’ experiences commonly associated with spiritual awakening.” [Read the full article...]

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A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Today’s publishing world is divided into two principle sections. First, there is the exclusive pool of traditional publishers, and, second, the help-yourself shark tank represented by the so-called vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers have a significant edge over traditional publishers in regards to brutality, business sense, and profitability. They ruthlessly pursue the infinite supply of aspiring writers who, in turn, are rejected by traditional publishers or literary agents. Ironically, in the world of traditional publishing, authors are rejected not necessarily due to lack of talent. Vanity publishers accept everybody and everything. No questions asked. Just pay your bill, but don’t come crying to them when you can’t sell a copy of your book.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

The race to make the first nonstop flight between the New York and Paris attracted some of the most famous and seasoned aviators of the day, yet it was the young and lesser known Charles Lindbergh who won the $25,000 Orteig Prize in 1927 for his history-making solo flight in the Spirit of St. Louis. Drawing on many previously overlooked sources, Bak offers a fresh look at the personalities that made up this epic air race – a deadly competition that culminated in one of the twentieth century’s most thrilling personal achievements and turned Charles Lindbergh into the first international hero of the modern age.

• Examines the extraordinary life and cultural impact of Charles Lindbergh, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, and his legendary trans-Atlantic flight that captured the world’s imagination
• Explores the romance of flying during aviation’s Golden Age of the 1920s, the enduring mystique of the aviator, and rapid technological advances that made for a paradigm shift in human perception of the world
• Filled with colorful characters from early aviation history, including Charles Nungesser, Igor Sikorsky, René Fonck, Richard Byrd, and Paul Tarascon

History and the imagination take flight in this gripping account of high-flying adventure, in which a group of courageous men tested the both limits of technology and the power of nature in pursuit of one of mankind’s boldest dreams.

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As the little silver monoplane sloshed down the unpaved, rain-soaked runway on the morning of May 20, 1927, many of the silent onlookers remembered the fireball that ended the previous attempt to cross the Atlantic from this same Roosevelt Field strip. The Spirit of St. Louis, carrying obscure Midwestern pilot, Charles Lindbergh, and more than one and a half tons of gasoline, barely cleared the telephone lines at the runway’s end, and thoughts turned to the acclaimed French fliers Charles Nungesser and FranÇois Coli, who had disappeared over the ocean less than two weeks earlier. One spectator muttered what many were thinking: “We’ll probably never see the poor guy again.” The furious international competition to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris had already claimed six lives. Would there be an unlucky seventh?

In The Big Jump, award-winning author Richard Bak takes you back to the glorious era when every pilot was a daredevil and every flight was a near-death experience. Here you’ll meet the most colorful and intrepid airmen of the age, the pilots, engineers, and designers who would lift aviation out of its infancy, and some unsavory characters who sought fame and fortune through the efforts of others.

This gripping account of the deadly contest that captured the world’s imagination and culminated in one of the twentieth century’s most thrilling personal achievements draws on many previously overlooked sources to take a fresh look at the men, technologies, and media frenzy that made it happen. It offers compelling portraits of René Fonck, the fastidious French “ace of aces” whose heroics did little to offset his grating personality; the brilliant but chronically broke Igor Sikorsky, whose giant three-engine biplane “should” have been first across the Atlantic; Commander Richard Byrd, whose celebrated Arctic exploits seemed to make him a shoo-in for the prize; and Clarence Chamberlin, a gifted seat-of-the-pants pilot who would forever feel cheated out of glory by the machinations of his mercurial partner, Charles Levine.

But it was “The Lone Eagle,” a modest young man who craved solitude as much as he did adventure, who would become the icon of the new “air age.” Bak traces Lindbergh’s career from his early days as a barnstorming aerial stuntman, crackerjack military flier, and airmail pilot through his carefully planned and perfectly executed transatlantic crossing. The author offers a memorable account of the unprecedented response to Lindbergh’s flight and how the newly minted hero coped with the universal and often mindless idolatry: the seemingly endless string of parades, speeches, awards, and banquets; the countless letters, telegrams, and gifts; and the massive, adoring crowds. Ironically, Bak reveals, Lindbergh’s reluctance to bask in glory only enhanced his image as an incorruptible “fair-haired Apollo” and added to his already suffocating fame. In an age of unrestrained “ballyhoo,” the shy, handsome Lindbergh unwillingly became the biggest celebrity on the planet.

Complete with scores of rare photos and new revelations about some of the obscure figures from the early days of aviation, The Big Jump is must reading for Lindbergh fans, aviation buffs, and anyone who loves an epic tale of true adventure well told.

Lindbergh’s historic flight, and what led to it

The Boston Globe Book Review – August 11, 2011 (Excerpt)

It was a contest. Be the first to fly from New York to Paris. Win the $25,000 Orteig Prize, named for a French shepherd turned Manhattan hotelier. Gain celebrity beyond measure. Pilot yourself into history, and mythology. We know who won that contest, of course. But the winning was only part of the story. The competition may be the most compelling chapter.

Advertisement

AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Today’s publishing world is divided into two principle sections. First, there is the exclusive pool of traditional publishers, and, second, the help-yourself shark tank represented by the so-called vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers have a significant edge over traditional publishers in regards to brutality, business sense, and profitability. They ruthlessly pursue the infinite supply of aspiring writers who, in turn, are rejected by traditional publishers or literary agents. Ironically, in the world of traditional publishing, authors are rejected not necessarily due to lack of talent. Vanity publishers accept everybody and everything. No questions asked. Just pay your bill, but don’t come crying to them when you can’t sell a copy of your book.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Guest Reviewer: Nathaniel Philbrick on “1493″ by Charles C. Mann

Source: Amazon.Com

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Stand; In the Heart of the Sea, which won the National Book Award; Sea of Glory, winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize; and Mayflower, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history and one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year. He has lived on Nantucket since 1986.

I’m a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous book 1491, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that it’s anything but exhausting to read.

With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchangeand, I’m proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, “globalized” entity.

Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose “southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple.”

We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.

Editorial Reviews

“Charles Mann expertly shows how the complex, interconnected ecological and economic consequences of the European discovery of the Americas shaped many unexpected aspects of the modern world. This is an example of the best kind of history book: one that changes the way you look at the world, even as it informs and entertains.” -Tom Standage, author of A History of the World in Six Glasses

“In 1491 Charles Mann brilliantly described the Americas on the eve of Columbus’s voyage. Now in 1493 he tells how the world was changed forever by the movement of foods, metals, plants, people and diseases between the ‘New World’ and both Europe and China. His book is readable and well-written, based on his usual broad research, travels and interviews. A fascinating and important topic, admirably told.” - John Hemming, author of Tree of Rivers

“In the wake of his groundbreaking book 1491 Charles Mann has once again produced a brilliant and riveting work that will forever change the way we see the world. Mann shows how the ecological collision of Europe and the Americas transformed virtually every aspect of human history. Beautifully written, and packed with startling research, 1493 is a monumental achievement.” -David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

Review

Charles Mann knows how to write. He also knows how to make history interesting and come alive.

The title “1493″ refers to all that time since Christopher Columbus, for whom Mann has had a fascination with, first discovered the new world. With that new discovery came changes and exchanges that have transferred the world. The great trade routes that developed from the new American continent to Europe and Asia–The Columbian Exchange– created both beneficial and devastating results and altered what people ate around the world.

The changes most of us learned about in high school social studies classes: new diseases were introduced into the indigenous peoples of the Americas and many died. Columbus came looking for gold and silver but found also sugar, corn, tobacco, beans, tomatoes and so much more. Coffee, chocolate, rubber all followed. The Spaniards in turn brought in the horse and sheep and we all know the legend of the horse in the American West.

Little did Columbus realize, Mann states, that he and the men who followed to America began what was known as globalization. Coveted items were used as trading items for other equally coveted items. Wars were fought over these items because every monarchy wanted to have the most power over the control of earth’s resources, and this thirst for power spilled into Asia as well.

There may not be too much new to learn from Mann’s book. I had been aware of the “Columbian Exchange” but terms such as”Homogenocene” and the dawn of globalization is new to me. Mann then uses his writing and research skills to create detailed and interesting chapters to show how the movement of animals, plants and humans have created new species, varieties and that this movement was not always bad. If a killer disease kills off the rubber plantations in Brazil, for instance, there will still be rubber trees to support economic needs growing in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Like Mann says in the book by quoting one of his sources “The Industrial Revolution would not have happened without three things: steel, fossil fuel and rubber.” I’d add human ingenuity to that triage.

Another skill that makes this book great reading is that Mann traveled to all his places to see the area for himself. This book is full of photographs of historical figures, old trade routes (plus nearly 100 pages of notes), and places he has been to. This makes the book read faintly like an imbedded travel book with history as the reason. Normally travel books that mesh with historical subjects don’t always work so fluidly; this book does. And while many books often just focus on the Americas and Europe, Mann correctly includes a lot of footage about China and other Asian countries, proving that even the once reclusive Chinese and Japanese can not continue to thrive without the rest of the world. This makes the evidence of the effects of globalization more impressive.

History and science buffs would like this book. It’s a hard one to put down because the reader wants to learn more about the ecological version of globalization. – CGScammell, Amazon.Com Customer Review

In ’1493,’ Columbus Shaped A World To Be

NPR Book Review – August 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

“In fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” goes the old elementary school rhyme.

But it was Columbus’ activities in the years that followed, says writer Charles C. Mann, that really created the new world. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, his journey prompted not only the exchange of information — but also of food, animals, insects, plants and viruses between the continents.

“It was a tremendous ecological convulsion — the greatest event in the history of life since the death of the dinosaurs,” says Mann. “And this underlies a huge amount of history learned in schools: the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the rise of the West — all of these are tied up in what’s been called the ‘Columbian exchange.’”

Mann writes about the changed world after Columbus’ voyage in 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, a sequel to his 2006 pre-Columbian history, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. He tellsFresh Air‘s Terry Gross that almost nothing we consider locally grown was, in fact, native to the Americas.

“There’s absolutely nothing in my garden that originated within 1,000 miles of my house,” he says. “Tomatoes originated in Mexico. Basil came from Italy. Onions came from Europe. I live in Massachusetts. There’s absolutely nothing in there from New England.” [Read the full article...]

Seeds, Germs and Slaves

The New York Times Book Review – August 19, 2011 (Excerpt)

“There’s a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds,” Dr. Pangloss says at the end of Voltaire’s “Candide.” “If you hadn’t been caught up in the Inquisition, or walked across America . . . you would not be here eating candied fruit and pistachio nuts.”

“True,” Candide answers. “But now we must tend our garden.”

Voltaire would have loved Charles C. Mann’s outstanding new book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.” In more than 500 lively pages, it not only explains the chain of events that produced those candied fruits, nuts and gardens, but also weaves their stories together into a convincing explanation of why our world is the way it is.

Going one better than Voltaire, Mann’s book opens in a garden as well as closes in one. The first is Mann’s own in Massachusetts; the second, a Filipino family plot in Bulalacao. Despite being half a world apart, the two gardens grow many of the same plants, hardly any of which are native to either place. This, Mann tells us, is the hallmark of the ecological era we live in: the “Homogenocene,” the Age of Homogeneity.

“1493” picks up where Mann’s best seller, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not. [Read the full article...]

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Stuart Martin Berry has only three months left to find a publisher for his first novel. In a desperate attempt to reach his goal he leaves his home to live in New York. His wife has given him free rein to do whatever it takes to get a book deal. Her only request was not to give her any details on how he got there. If he fails he will be forced to give up his dream of being a famous writer and take a regular forty hour a week job. For Stuart this is sufficient motivation to start a three month adventure full of sex, lies, and deceit, without losing focus of the ultimate goal. When he finally reaches the finish line, he has evolved and become a top expert in the publishing world.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

American Male Prostitute is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.