The business of books is big business with 172,000 new titles released in 2005 and sales in the United States of about $40 billion. But what makes a book successful? Are there any common characteristics that can spur on sales? As part of the research for "The Making of a Bestseller" Dee Power and Brian Hill, the authors, surveyed over 100 editors and agents to answer those questions.
*Previous Success is the Key Indicator of Future Success *
Editors and agents are in agreement that an author's previous bestselling book is the key factor in determining future success
*Quality of Writing is Paramount*
For writers yet to produce a bestseller, comfort can be taken in that both agents and editors rank quality of writing highly. Great writing wins out. However, there are no hard and fast criteria about what constitutes "great writing." It comes down to subjective judgments made by individuals. Book reviewers may argue that a successful book by the very virtue of its sale's success can not be considered great writing.
*Reviews, Whether Good or Bad, Don't Count*
And speaking of reviews, the survey participants discounted the importance of reviews to nearly last place in sparking sales of a book. This contradicts the advice given to "new" authors that it is critical they get their books reviewed. These results could also indicate that as an author becomes more successful, has built a fan base and has had previous bestsellers, reviews decline in importance.
*Timeliness of Topic is of the Essence*
Old news is bad news when it comes to the subject of a book's topic. Common sense dictates that there isn't much interest in topics that have already been hashed over by the daily news media. Since book production takes from six to 12 months, it's an amazing feat to get a book on a hot topic out to the market at just the right time.
*Word of Mouth and Fan Base*
Readers telling other readers about a fabulous book they've just read has a tremendous impact on success. Book buzz is priceless in the publishing industry. Authors on the upward sales track take their fans seriously.
Friday, December 7, 2007
THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, by Michael Pollan
This book has some very interesting information in it. The main message is that we are using one foodstuff in America in so many ways that it leads to bloat -- too much available cheap processed food, too many calories, exaggerated serving sizes to connote value, and a lack of a food culture strong enough to resist the confusion sown by food marketers. Great points! However, the author suffers from what he decries. What should have been a lean, mean 175 pages turns into a bloated and meandering tome, boring in too many spots, while losing the thread more often than not. Just because words come cheaply, and because people are impressed by (and will presumably pay a higher price for) a large serving of text doesn't mean that it is good for any of us. Yet, there wasn't an editorial culture strong enough at his publisher to fight this off. Shame. If an abridged version ever came out, it would be worth reading. But, the serving size needs to be halved. This is the Big Gulp version of what could have fit in a demitasse.
TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE, by Ann Rule
All Anne Rule books are well researched, written, and interesting. Name one that took you longer than 3 days. This one is no different. While it is great, and the story deserved to be told for the purpose of the memories of the victims, it is not the same intensity as Death By Sunset, 'Stranger..", or Everything She Ever Wanted. This is not due to the writing or research, merely due to the fact that Bart Corbin was just not a very interesting person. He was an egotisical, self-centered man, who thought he could get away with anything. This profile is not rare in true crime novels. Nevertheless, the story is interesting and worth reading.
THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls.
It's probably the most thoughtful and sensitive memoir I can ever remember reading - - told with such grace, kindness and fabulous sense of humor. It's probably the best account ever written of a dysfunctional family -- and it must have taken Walls so much courage to put pen to paper and recount the details of her rather bizarre childhood - - which although it's like none other and is so dramatic - - any reader will relate to it. Readers will find bits and pieces of their own parents in Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Her journey across the country, ending up in a poor mining town in West Virginia and then finally in New York City, is a fascinating tale of survival. Her zest for life, even when eating margarine and sugar and bundled in a cardboard box with sweaters, coats and huddling with her pets, is unbelievably beautiful - - and motivating. If I could give a book ten stars, it would be "The Glass Castle."
Antonement by Ian McEwan
A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolutionBLOOD BROTHERS, by Nora Roberts
In the town of Hawkins Hollow Maryland, three men have been best friends forever. They come from different families but were all born on 7/7/77. In 1987 on their 10th birthday Cal, Gage and Fox set out through the woods to camp at the mysterious location of Pagan Stone. They unleash an evil entity that dates back to 1652 and when they finally leave the woods the next morning, everything has changed. Fast forward twenty years where Quinn, an author who specializes in things that go bump in the night, comes to the town to research what happened 20 years ago and what happens to the town and its inhabitants on 7/7. I am a little disappointed in this story. It's not bad; it's just not that great, either, I wasn't wowed. Blood Brothers is a little reminiscent of the Three Sister Island Trilogy. I like the story premise; I love paranormal fiction, but feel this book is missing something. It failed to hook me like all other Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb books normally do and I think it is because of the characters; I never got that attached to any of them. We have three men bonded by birthdays and deep friendship and then three women, Quinn, Layla and Cybil come along for various reasons. You know eventually they are all going to "couple up" and normally by book one in her trilogies while couple number one is steaming up the pages you can feel the chemistry brewing between couples two and three. It wasn't brewing at all for couple two and it's barely simmering for couple three. I just don't think she gave us a real strong sense of who everyone was and where they are all coming from. Part of the reason why I love Nora books is because of her ability to paint the characters so vividly; normally we know the characters physically, emotionally, personally. I didn't get that with this one. I barely have a physical description in my head for the 6 of them. I don't want to be all negative as it is not a horrible book by any means. I like the plot and think with a little more development I will love the characters. I think Gage and Cybil are going to be fun. I am hopeful that the next two books The Hollow and Pagan Stone will be a little more gripping and engaging. All in all not her best work or start to a series, but it's still a good read.
AN AFFAIR BEFORE CHRISTMAS, by Eloisa James
In a captivating and beautiful story, we find the beautiful, young, and innocent Lady Perdita (Poppy) who has fallen head over heels in love with the handsome Duke of Fletcher, considered the catch of the season. Fletch feels the same for his beautiful Poppy and patiently awaits their wedding day. Little does he realize that the young and innocent Poppy has not been properly prepared for her wedding night, but instead has been controlled by an overbearing mother who has filled her head with unrealistic expectations of marriage and the marriage bed. Fletch experiences a disappointing wedding night, not understanding that Poppy needs tutoring in the ways of passion and marriage. Instead of being patient and instructing Poppy, Fletch distances himself from his beauty and soon an intense love turns to disappointment and severe loneliness for them both. As four years go by, Fletch even considers obtaining a mistress, but all he can think about is his love and desire for Poppy. Besides, he sees all the infidelity and unhappiness around him in society that brings little happiness to those involved. Poppy understands that something is seriously wrong with her marriage, doesn't understand how it can be fixed, and is left heartbroken. How can she bring back the intense love that Fletch had for her at one time? Before the marriage, she always seemed to please him, and since the marriage, everything she does is for Fletch. But that is the sweet Poppy's main problem; pleasing everyone but herself and in so doing, feels she has accomplished nothing but disappointing the man she loves so intensely. Poppy understands the whole society side of being a duchess, but not a thing about being a true wife, especially because, just as her loving Fletch, she sees nothing but unhappiness in society marriages. Poppy makes the ultimate decision in her yearning for happiness in her life. She walks out on Fletch and her overbearing mother, leaving them both behind, and decides she will enjoy her own life and stop trying to please everyone else. It is not until Fletch loses his precious Poppy that he realizes he must woo her back somehow. Unwilling to lose her, Fletch decides to begin an intense seduction of Poppy that has her head and heart spinning, but not impressed. Can Fletch win back the love of his precious Poppy before Christmas? In the masterful writing style of Eloisa James, An Affair Before Christmas is a wonderful sensual sequel to the Desperate Duchesses Series. Adding an interesting depth to this story, the reader gets to revisit some of the secondary characters from the first book, like the infamous rake The Duke of Villiers and the dysfunctional Elijah and Jemma, The Duke and Duchess of Beaumont. Ms. James cleverly allows the reader to revisit these dysfunctional characters in order to emphasize and help the reader fully understand how Poppy and Fletch can become so disillusioned about love. An Affair Before Christmas romance is a delightful read and perfect for a holiday that celebrates true love and happiness.
UPON THE MIDNIGHT CLEAR, by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Upon a Midnight Clear was a great story. The hero and heroine were both strong and devoted. Both also had battered hearts that were drowning in sorrow from past losses. They provided one another with a new reason to hope for the future. Very romantic. My problem with the book was the fact that it was so short. It was 248 pages, but the type was so large it was like reading one of my kids' chapter books for fourth graders. There was only room in the book for one love scene. The couple fell in love in one day... there was no time for them to get to know one another. They met, argued, shared a dream, made love, fought the enemy, won the battle, end of story. All in one day. Very disappointing. This story should have been full length. Aiden was an excellent hero character. Pure hearted, but jaded. A man who gave everything he had to the people he loved, and would have gladly continued to do so. Betrayed by those very same people, he had decided to live in anger rather than suffer from the overwhelming pain of his family's treachery. Leta was terrific as a heroine as well. She was brave, powerful, loyal, and very open about her love for Aiden. After living through the devastation of the loss of her husband and daughter, Leta is grateful for the chance to share such affection again. The god of pain, Dolor, lived and tormented people for centuries. He was an exciting and worthy opponent. Aiden was human, yet he destroyed Dolor without even knowing how he had done it. If Dolor was this easy to kill, he would not have survived for centuries. Killing him off this way made Dolor seem like a joke. In the end, this was an excellent tale that never had a chance to be all it could have... no... all it SHOULD have been. Although these are some of the best characters Kenyon has written for a while, they didn't get to have their stories really fleshed out. There was a bit of the annoying "Oh goody" language that Kenyon has been inserting in her books lately, but not as bad as in Devil May Cry. One word seems to stick in my mind: Disappointing. Not because the story wasn't good, nor because the characters were bad. But because both were so good I hated seeing the whole tale robbed of it's chance to sweep us away on a full fledged paranormal fantasy.
COMFORT AND JOY, by Fern Michaels et al.
"Comfort and Joy" by Fern Michaels. Angie and Josh disagree on everything until they face the truth, encouraged by the loving relationship between his father and her mother who have found each other; that they need to look deeper inside each other's heart.
"A High-Kicking Christmas" by Marie Bostwick. Because she broke her foot, Rockettes dancer Kendra agrees to direct a Yuletides play in Maple Grove, Vermont; she never expected to co-star in a personal production with Pastor Andy and his daughter Thea.
"Suzanna's Stockings" by Cathy Lamb. As she lies in a coma, Suzanna's spirit overhears learning things about her family and friends that make her understand what caring truly is.
"Family Blessings" by Deborah J. Wolf. With her mother's mental state rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer's, Kacey and her family struggle with celebrating Christmas.
Although not entirely upbeat (especially Ms. Wolf's insightful tale) these are four very different yet well written refreshing and inspiring novellas that will have readers thinking what the holiday season means.
"A High-Kicking Christmas" by Marie Bostwick. Because she broke her foot, Rockettes dancer Kendra agrees to direct a Yuletides play in Maple Grove, Vermont; she never expected to co-star in a personal production with Pastor Andy and his daughter Thea.
"Suzanna's Stockings" by Cathy Lamb. As she lies in a coma, Suzanna's spirit overhears learning things about her family and friends that make her understand what caring truly is.
"Family Blessings" by Deborah J. Wolf. With her mother's mental state rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer's, Kacey and her family struggle with celebrating Christmas.
Although not entirely upbeat (especially Ms. Wolf's insightful tale) these are four very different yet well written refreshing and inspiring novellas that will have readers thinking what the holiday season means.
TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL: FALLOUT, by David Michaels
Let me clarify that the Splinter Cell books are not written by Tom Clancy, they are just an idea of his. Be careful, spoilers are listed. This book was well written in my opinion and the author of the book portrayed Sam Fisher's personality well. The book starts out with Sam being tested for a new type of spy work, one that would put him out in the open, in daylight. Of course Sam passes the training phase with flying colors. Shortly after his graduation he finds out that his brother has contracted a deadly chemical, from which there is no cure. Sam's brother dies within days of being exposed to the deadly chemical. With Sam's brother dying at the hands of a very rare and very deadly chemical, the development of this chemical has just become very personal to him. He, Sam, sets out to find who developed the new chemical and for what. During his search for the chemical he comes across a much larger scheme. He, Sam, discovers that the chemical allows a fungas to enhance its ability to absorb the minerals around it, rendering them useless. Sam finds out that this fungas is soon to be released on a large portion of the worlds oil supply. The production of the new chemical, and its potential enhancement of a particular fungas can send the planet back to the dark ages within just a few weeks time.
CHRISTMAS WISHES, by Debbie Macomber
Katherine O'Connor (known as K.O.) adores her five-year-old twin nieces and strongly objects to her sister's plans to dispense with Christmas. Zelda is following the theories of child psychologist Wynn Jeffries, author of The Free Child (and, as it happens, K.O.'s neighbor). K.O. is particularly horrified by his edict to "bury Santa under the sleigh," and she's out to prove that Wynn and his ideas are full of…snow. He's not going to ruin her nieces' Christmas! Too bad the guy's so darned attractive….
RAINY DAY KISSES is a delightful romantic comedy at Christmasor any other time of year!
Seventeen years ago Susannah Simmons was a career girl who knew nothing about babies. But after babysitting her infant niece, Michelle, Susannah learned that one determined and screamingbaby can make the corporate world look like…child's play. Thank goodness for her charming neighbor Nate Townsend. Now he's her charming husband, and Susannah's a mother as well as an aunt. And every Christmas Eve, Michelle tells her cousins how their mom met their dad a story in which she plays a starring role!
RAINY DAY KISSES is a delightful romantic comedy at Christmasor any other time of year!
Seventeen years ago Susannah Simmons was a career girl who knew nothing about babies. But after babysitting her infant niece, Michelle, Susannah learned that one determined and screamingbaby can make the corporate world look like…child's play. Thank goodness for her charming neighbor Nate Townsend. Now he's her charming husband, and Susannah's a mother as well as an aunt. And every Christmas Eve, Michelle tells her cousins how their mom met their dad a story in which she plays a starring role!
THE WIDOW, by Carla Neggers
Abigail Browning's husband Chris was killed four days after their wedding. Seven years later she starts receiving anominous phone calls about his death. Being a homicide detective now, she has gotten nowhere in the past with her husband's murder. Abigail decides to return to Maine, the place where Chris was murdered. No one in the town wants her there, and they don't want her stirring up old memories. The only friends she has there is an old Detective named Lou Beeler, and the hunky neighbor that found her husbands body, Owen Garrison. Abigail continues to get phone calls from a stranger, gets attacked, and has items left on her doorstep that lead her to believe she is getting close to the killer. The book was slow getting started, but the ending was good, and some of the characters really made the book. At least this book had an ending without a lot of loose ends. Good Read!
DAKOTA HOME, by Debbie Macomber.
Have you ever read a book that was so good a second away from it was too long? Dakota Home is one of those books. The second book in the Dakota trilogy is nothing less than five stars.
Maddy, Lindsay Snyder Sinclair's best friend, has moved to Buffalo Valley to make a new home. She meets Jeb McKenna, the town loner. Maddy wants to befriend Jeb but he tries everything to avoid her until Maddy is caught in a blizzard and calls him for help. While being trapped in the storm together for a few days at Jeb's ranch (without electricity) Jeb and Maddy become lovers. Afterwards Jeb realizes he made a mistake in becoming lovers with Maddy because even though he has feelings for her he doesn't think he is the right man for her. They each try to change their feelings for each other while fighting those feelings.
Dakota Home is a great sequel to Dakota Born. Even though it is the second book in the trilogy it stands on it's own so if you haven't read Dakota Born you won't be lost. Ms. Macomber refreshes your memory as to the characters and their background. All of the characters in the first book are in Dakota Home and their stories continue. All of the characters are such ordinary, everyday people that the book is very believable and entertaining at the same time. I was especially drawn to Brandon and Joanie. Their story was very touching and well written. It was very easy to sympathize with them. I would have liked to seen more of them in the book.
Dakota Home is a quick read that will hook you from the start and leave you wanting more!
Maddy, Lindsay Snyder Sinclair's best friend, has moved to Buffalo Valley to make a new home. She meets Jeb McKenna, the town loner. Maddy wants to befriend Jeb but he tries everything to avoid her until Maddy is caught in a blizzard and calls him for help. While being trapped in the storm together for a few days at Jeb's ranch (without electricity) Jeb and Maddy become lovers. Afterwards Jeb realizes he made a mistake in becoming lovers with Maddy because even though he has feelings for her he doesn't think he is the right man for her. They each try to change their feelings for each other while fighting those feelings.
Dakota Home is a great sequel to Dakota Born. Even though it is the second book in the trilogy it stands on it's own so if you haven't read Dakota Born you won't be lost. Ms. Macomber refreshes your memory as to the characters and their background. All of the characters in the first book are in Dakota Home and their stories continue. All of the characters are such ordinary, everyday people that the book is very believable and entertaining at the same time. I was especially drawn to Brandon and Joanie. Their story was very touching and well written. It was very easy to sympathize with them. I would have liked to seen more of them in the book.
Dakota Home is a quick read that will hook you from the start and leave you wanting more!
DEAD OF NIGHT, by J. D. Robb et al
This is a paranormal anthology containing four short stories by four different authors. Eternity In Death by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts) - A vain and spoiled heiress dates a mysterious man who promises her eternity and then ends up draining her of her blood and life. Eve Dallas, top New York homicide Lieutenant, is on the case and is soon drawn into the seedy underground clubs where people play at being vampires, ordering drinks laced with blood. Amy and the Earl's Amazing Adventure by Mary Blaney - An American woman in England is given a coin purported to have magical powers. When she meets an aristocratic Englishmen as interested in her as he is in the coin, they soon find themselves in the early 1800's with a mystery to solve. Timeless by Ruth Ryan Langan - A woman on tour of the castle and Scottish land that has haunted her all her life is whisked away to the 15th century when she lifts up a tapestry oddly familiar to her. The Scottish Laird recognizes her immediately... On the Fringe by Mary Kay McComas - A woman in a marital rut is given a look at what life would have been if she had made some different choices when she discovers her grandmother's magic carpet.
SANTA CRUISE, by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark
The Royal Mermaid is setting forth on her maiden voyage, filled with 400 passengers who received free passage due to good works they performed during the preceding months of the year. Sounds like a cruise made in heaven, right? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not. Not when there's a mystery afoot.Private detective Regan Reilly and her husband Jack, head of the Major Case Squad of New York City, along with Regan's parents --- Nora, a respected mystery writer, and Luke Reilly --- have all joined recent lottery winner and amateur sleuth Alvirah Meehan and her husband Willy as guests on the cruise as a result of Alvirah's charitable contributions.Even before the officially christened "Santa Cruise" can commence, however, things have gone awry. There's been a mix-up on the guest list, and it seems that the ship is a room short of being able to accommodate all of the guests. Cabin assignments are juggled, though, and soon enough everyone is settled satisfactorily in their rooms. Everyone, that is, except for two stowaways.Tony "Bull's-Eye" Pinto, a crime boss, and Barron Highbridge, a white-collar criminal who bilked the unsuspecting out of a fortune, are both using the Santa Cruise as their means to flee the country and therefore avoid punishment for their crimes. When their room is suddenly given to Alvirah and Willy, things take a turn for the worse.Part of what makes the Santa Cruise merry is the 10 Santas who are to dress in costume and mingle with the guests, but even the Clauses aren't feeling the holiday spirit. Especially when two of the costumes go missing and no one knows where they went or what it means.Along with the usual activities available on a cruise, there is to be a special memorial service for the deceased mother of Commodore Randolph Weed, the owner of the ship. He intends to dispose of his mother's ashes at sea, but even that doesn't go quite as planned. Bad publicity and scandal cast serious doubt as to whether or not the Commodore made a wise investment in purchasing and refurbishing the ancient ship known as the Royal Mermaid.In their fourth holiday mystery, Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark, have written a fun book with an interesting cast of characters. The other "do-gooders of the year" are a unique and special bunch who lightens the novel's serious mood. As may be expected, the mystery is solved by the end of the book in a climactic way, and all of the charming characters play a part in it. This is a fast read, and you won't want to put it down until you know whodunit!
THE BANCROFT STRATEGY, by Robert Ludlum
This is as exciting and convoluted as any of the master's thrillers; prior reviewers have detailed the story sufficiently. I'll only add that the plot's twists, turns and surprises continue right on up to the final paragraph in the epilogue. Although I enjoyed the story immensely, I had the sense that the action scenes lacked the "Ludlum Strategy" of realism and credibility [after all, how can many times can one super-agent overwhelm four or more opponents singlehandedly; or one untrained woman knock out two professional killers?]. On checking the book's front pages, I learn that the 'Ludlum Estate' (the author died 12-Mar-01 in Naples, FL) commissioned a "qualified author and editor"; the unanswered question remains whether this book -- prominently displaying Ludlum's name -- is an updated previously unpublished manuscript, a thriller developed from a premortem story outline, or whether the commissioned author wrote this book singlehandedly. If this is indeed an original de-novo piece of writing, then the true author deserves not only a great deal of credit, but ought to publish under his/her own name rather than remain anonymous; s(he) would make a genuine contribution as an independent, skilled and accomplished writer of thrillers. I have the uncomfortable gut sense that this ship may be flying under a false flag ... unless and until the authorship provenance is more fully clarified.
THE MIST, by Stephen King
This adaptation of the Stephen King story (found in Skeleton Crew)is perfect for long car rides. Even more so if you have to drive at night. This story of an inexplicable mist that engulfs a small, New England town has long been a fan favorite and this superb production helps prove why. The screams and cries of pain are startling, the sound effects make this work incredibly, allowing for a real level of fear to develop. The voice acting (for the most part) is amazing. This really isn't an audio book as much as it is audio theater, kinda like the old radio shows. The Mist is an experience that Stephen King fans ought to know, especially if you have ever read the story. Also, Frank Darabont (director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile)has the movie rights to the story. And if this cd doesn't whet your appetite for the film adaptation I don't know what will. A prime example that radio is still a powerful storytelling medium.
THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH, by Ken Follett.
In recent months, PILLARS OF THE EARTH has spread like word-of-mouth wildfire through my circle of family and friends. It has become one of the most talked-about and widely read books among my acquaintances...and for good reason: It's one of the best novels I've ever read.
It all started early this year when we attended a tour of Mont St. Michel in France. Near the end, the tour guide indicated that if we "really wanted to understand" the medieval mind, we should read PILLARS. I had never read any of Follett's books before, but I vaguely recalled him as some sort of espionage writer. Nevertheless, I gave PILLARS a try upon my return to the states, and was thoroughly engrossed.
Anyone who has stared with awe upon the great cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres in France has wondered how they were built, who was responsible, what drove the hearts and minds of these long-ago architectural geniuses who etched the record of their religious conviction literally into stone. PILARS OF THE EARTH brings the era to life, in the decades-spanning tale of the creation of (fictional?) Kingsbridge Cathedral. The characters are real people; full of passions, triumph and tragedy, and their world is as real as if we were breathing their same air.
Any criticism one could air about this book would be a mere quibble compared to the narratives power to entertain, inform, and bring a lost world back into existence. Trust me, you'll always remember PILLARS OF THE EARTH. (After reading it, I've gone on to discover other Follett novels...they've all been wonderful).
It all started early this year when we attended a tour of Mont St. Michel in France. Near the end, the tour guide indicated that if we "really wanted to understand" the medieval mind, we should read PILLARS. I had never read any of Follett's books before, but I vaguely recalled him as some sort of espionage writer. Nevertheless, I gave PILLARS a try upon my return to the states, and was thoroughly engrossed.
Anyone who has stared with awe upon the great cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres in France has wondered how they were built, who was responsible, what drove the hearts and minds of these long-ago architectural geniuses who etched the record of their religious conviction literally into stone. PILARS OF THE EARTH brings the era to life, in the decades-spanning tale of the creation of (fictional?) Kingsbridge Cathedral. The characters are real people; full of passions, triumph and tragedy, and their world is as real as if we were breathing their same air.
Any criticism one could air about this book would be a mere quibble compared to the narratives power to entertain, inform, and bring a lost world back into existence. Trust me, you'll always remember PILLARS OF THE EARTH. (After reading it, I've gone on to discover other Follett novels...they've all been wonderful).
TREASURE OF KHAN, by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler
Ever since it was first published, "Raise the Titanic" has ranked among my favorite heart-pounding action/adventure novels. Now, Clive and Dirk Cussler present the nineteenth Dirk Pitt endurance test, "Treasure of Khan." Like Superman and other fictional heroes, Pitt never leaves behind someone in need or danger, is always gallant to gentleladies (but not necessarily to women up to no good), quips while suffering, and possesses the ingenuity to solve puzzles that stump others. Joining him in "Khan" is the whole gang. Happily, faithful sidekick, Giordino, and Pitt get most of the book space allocated to TFGG (the familiar good guys). The young Pitts -- Summer and Dirk Jr. -- do play a notable role, but aren't as prominently featured as in "Black Wind." That satisfies this reader who wasn't thrilled when these fraternal twins were conjured up a few outings ago, but who is willing to afford them a place in the Dirk Pitt scheme of things as long as they don't usurp their elders. It was also great to see Rudi Gunn have more to do this time around. Too bad Admiral (Vice President) Sandecker got only a cameo. Like all Dirk Pitt novels, "Treasure" follows the proven formula of our heroes tracking down and confronting a wildly rich private citizen of some country (in this case, Mongolia) whose megalomania and perverted use of cutting-edge science and technology are threatening the world's security. Had my druthers, the Cusslers would make their villains two-dimensional at least. It would add some character robustness. But we're talking action/adventure, so I won't quibble too much. As usual, the book begins in the past; in this case, when Kublai Khan ruled. Then we are whisked to China in 1937, where a British Museum representative tries to safeguard some treasures before the invading Japanese arrive. Thereafter the time is just a bit ahead of present day and our minds can buzz about how these blasts from the past will challenge our heroes. The first time we see Dirk Pitt he is aboard a survey ship on Lake Baikal in Russia. This portion of the book is, to my mind, the most engrossing part of the adventure. Not only is there some superduper action (with a very sharp save by Giordino), but the Cusslers manage to pack in a lot of fascinating facts about the real pristine-water lake without losing plot momentum. "Treasure of Khan" isn't great literature (and I doubt anyone would think that's its goal), but it is rousing, adrenaline-pumping fun. Especially since we readers can sit back comfortably and only vicariously chew our nails over 30-feet water walls, Gobi Desert death marches, or ramming drill ships! Enjoy.
WILD FIRE, by Nelson DeMille
Have you ever had to sit through a meeting that you thought would never end? A meeting where staying awake seemed to be a Herculean task? In Wild Fire the bad guys have a meeting near the beginning of the novel. You, the reader, have to sit there and listen to them discuss their plans that go on until page 127. First they can't decide the day of the week for their big event. That takes some pages. Then they can't decide what cities to stage it in. More long discussions ensue. When we finally stagger out of that marathon session we join John Corey and his long suffering wife. She's his FBI boss, and he works for the anti terrorism task force. His response to everything she says (and to what anyone else in the novel says) is a smartass wisecrack. How does she put up with it? Well the two of them talk a lot, and drive around a lot tracking down the Bad People. Well they can't do that 24/7 so they get drunk at night in their hotel. The plot moves along (slowly) until our chatty couple finally meets up with the Chief Bad Person. This happens about 50 pages before the ending of the book, and if you want to save time you can just stop reading the book and go to sleep. Those last 50 pages contain writing that is pure clichéd formula. You know just how everything is going to turn out. It is really totally by the numbers stuff. There are no plot twists and turns, no surprises, just hack writing. Oh yes, when Mr. DeMille runs out of clever dialog he just has his characters say "F*&^% You" to each other. There's a lot of that actually. What can I say? Nelson DeMille is (was?) one of my favorite writers, but this novel has to be one of his poorest works.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
THE ALCHEMIST, by Paulo Coelho.
Dreams, symbols, signs, and adventure follow the reader like echoes of ancient wise voices in "The Alchemist", a novel that combines an atmosphere of Medieval mysticism with the song of the desert. With this symbolic masterpiece Coelho states that we should not avoid our destinies, and urges people to follow their dreams, because to find our "Personal Myth" and our mission on Earth is the way to find "God", meaning happiness, fulfillment, and the ultimate purpose of creation. The novel tells the tale of Santiago, a boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. After listening to "the signs" the boy ventures in his personal, Ulysses-like journey of exploration and self-discovery, symbolically searching for a hidden treasure located near the pyramids in Egypt. When he decides to go, his father's only advice is "Travel the world until you see that our castle is the greatest, and our women the most beautiful". In his journey, Santiago sees the greatness of the world, and meets all kinds of exciting people like kings and alchemists. However, by the end of the novel, he discovers that "treasure lies where your heart belongs", and that the treasure was the journey itself, the discoveries he made, and the wisdom he acquired. "The Alchemist", is an exciting novel that bursts with optimism; it is the kind of novel that tells you that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen. That may sound like an oversimplified version of new-age philosophy and mysticism, but as Coelho states "simple things are the most valuable and only wise people appreciate them". As the alchemist himself says, when he appears to Santiago in the form of an old king "when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true". This is the core of the novel's philosophy and a motif that echoes behind Coelho's writing all through "The Alchemist". And isn't it true that the whole of humankind desperately wants to believe the old king when he says that the greatest lie in the world is that at some point we lose the ability to control our lives, and become the pawns of fate. Perhaps this is the secret of Coelho's success: that he tells people what they want to hear, or rather that he tells them that what they wish for but never thought possible could even be probable.
THE THIRTEENTH TALE, by Diane Setterfield
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is a rich story about secrets, ghosts, winter, books and family. The Thirteenth Tale is a book lover's book, with much of the action taking place in libraries and book stores, and the line between fact and fiction constantly blurred. It is hard to believe this is Setterfield's debut novel, for she makes the words come to life with such skill that some passages even gave me chills. With a mug of cocoa and The Thirteenth Tale, contentment isn't far away.
Pros
The writing is poetic.
The characters are unique.
The story is interesting, imaginative, exciting.
Cons
You will want to drink lots of cocoa while reading (this is only a con for the weight conscious).
Description
Margaret Lea works in her father's book store and is haunted by a loss in her past.
One night Margaret is summoned to the home of the most famous author in England's house to record her autobiography.
Vida Winter, the author, tells a layered tale, with stories within stories, keeping Margaret (and readers) curious.
Guide Review - The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield - Book Review
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is reminiscent of classic British novels, like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. It has tragedy, romance, moors, and dark, stormy nights. In a way, The Thirteenth Tale is a homage to these and all other great works of literature. The power of books and stories is foremost in the novel, and as the main character gets lost in one story, you'll find yourself lost with her in the story within a story (as well as the story surrounding the character's story).
This is not a realistic book. It isn't meant to be. The aura of fairytale lends power and mystery to the writing. While place is utterly important to the book, time is not. I did not try to figure out when the novel was supposed to take place, but it could just as easily have been now as a hundred years ago.
Perhaps all this talk about place, time and story seems roundabout to you. Perhaps you want a synopsis of plot and a straightforward review that tells you what to expect so that you can decide whether to read this book. For those of you who want that from this review...here's what to expect: A good story written by a very good writer about a good story told by a very good writer. Not clear enough? Pick up the book. Setterfield can tell it much better than I can.
Pros
The writing is poetic.
The characters are unique.
The story is interesting, imaginative, exciting.
Cons
You will want to drink lots of cocoa while reading (this is only a con for the weight conscious).
Description
Margaret Lea works in her father's book store and is haunted by a loss in her past.
One night Margaret is summoned to the home of the most famous author in England's house to record her autobiography.
Vida Winter, the author, tells a layered tale, with stories within stories, keeping Margaret (and readers) curious.
Guide Review - The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield - Book Review
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is reminiscent of classic British novels, like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. It has tragedy, romance, moors, and dark, stormy nights. In a way, The Thirteenth Tale is a homage to these and all other great works of literature. The power of books and stories is foremost in the novel, and as the main character gets lost in one story, you'll find yourself lost with her in the story within a story (as well as the story surrounding the character's story).
This is not a realistic book. It isn't meant to be. The aura of fairytale lends power and mystery to the writing. While place is utterly important to the book, time is not. I did not try to figure out when the novel was supposed to take place, but it could just as easily have been now as a hundred years ago.
Perhaps all this talk about place, time and story seems roundabout to you. Perhaps you want a synopsis of plot and a straightforward review that tells you what to expect so that you can decide whether to read this book. For those of you who want that from this review...here's what to expect: A good story written by a very good writer about a good story told by a very good writer. Not clear enough? Pick up the book. Setterfield can tell it much better than I can.
THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy.
“Despite Cormac McCarthy’s reputation as an ornate stylist, The Road represents both the logical terminus, and a kind of ultimate triumph, of the American minimalism that became well-known in the 1980s under the banner of ‘dirty realism’ . . . The Road is a much more compelling and demanding book than its predecessor . . . The new novel will not let the reader go, and will horribly invade his dreams, too . . . The Road is not a science fiction, not an allegory, and not a critique of the way we live now, or of the-way-we-might-live-if-we-keep-on-living-the-way-we-live-now. It poses a simpler question, more taxing for the imagination and far closer to the primary business of fiction-making: what would this world without people look like, feel like? These questions McCarthy answers magnificently . . . [His] devotion to detail, his Conradian fondness for calmly described horrors, his tolling fatal sentences, make the reader shiver with fear and recognition . . . When McCarthy is writing at his best, he does indeed belong in the company of the American masters. In his best pages one can hear Melville and Lawrence, Conrad and Hardy. His novels are full of marvelous depictions of birds in flight, and The Road has a gorgeous paragraph like something out of Hopkins . . . The writing [is] often breathtaking.”–James Wood, The New RepublicI AM LEGEND, by Richard Matheson.
I am Legend is arguably the greatest short horror novel ever written, and its influence on the horror genre has been profound. Stephen King and many other of today's masters rank this book highly in their personal top ten lists of favorites. It is a short novel that can be read in one sitting; it is hard to put down, building in intensity from start to finish. Matheson creates an entirely new type of vampire fiction herein. Transcending the traditional vampire tale, he adds science fiction elements to produce a refreshing new interpretation of Stoker's legend. The most fascinating part of the story is the protagonist's (Richard Neville's) attempts to explain the legendary aspects of the vampire myth in scientific terms. His discovery of a bacterium, which he dubs vampiris, as the true source of vampirism struck me anew reading the novel again after the events of September 11, 2001. Although we only get pieces of the story regarding the outbreak of the vampiric plague, including a reference to bombings, it can easily be seen as the fruits of germ warfare. Neville even conjectures that the Black Death of the Middle Ages was caused by this same vampiris germ, and he extrapolates facts and ideas from that history in his attempts to understand why such defenses as garlic, crosses, and stakes driven into the heart actually are effective against the hordes of undead creatures menacing his own time. He studies academic texts and conducts experiments with the blood of these creatures, which is the means by which he identifies the bacterium. The essence of garlic has no effect on the germ when injected into a blood sample, which initially he is unable to explain, but he later is able to explain garlic's effectiveness. Less scientific tests lead him to conclude that crosses are only effective against "Christian" vampires; the cross has no meaning to for vampires who were once Jews and Moslems, but sacred symbols of those religions, such as the Torah and the Koran, do. All of these scientific tests and speculations are just fascinating.
Neville is essentially the last man on earth, and the loneliness of his situation is the central part of the story. Matheson is able to communicate Neville's emotional feelings vividly, making him very real. We gradually acquire the story of the deaths of Neville's wife and daughter, essentially experiencing the pain he goes through when these memories overcome him. We watch him drink himself into a stupor as each night finds him besieged in his fortified house, surrounded by vampires, including his old friend and neighbor, calling for him to come out. We watch him slowly lose his grip on sanity and come very close to giving up. Then, however, we watch him overcome his depression and courageously fight to live in the nightmare world he is trapped in. The scenes with the dog he finds are full of emotion and really gripped this reader. This is Neville's first contact with nonvampiric life, and his attempts to befriend and help the poor creature (at the same time finally finding a companion) touched me greatly and brought tears to my eyes. His eventual discovery of another human being like himself is also powerful and emotional, although to speak more about this aspect of the story is to risk giving something away to the future reader.
This is a story of one man overcoming all obstacles and fighting to defend his way of life and his very humanity. The novel deals with the human condition, the essential ingredient to effective horror writing. Neville struggles constantly with his doubts and fears, particularly as he commits acts that he would have condemned as barbarous in the time before the plague. His needs for companionship of any kind offer us a clear image of the inner soul of man. By the end of the story, he does indeed become legend, both in his world and in ours.
Neville is essentially the last man on earth, and the loneliness of his situation is the central part of the story. Matheson is able to communicate Neville's emotional feelings vividly, making him very real. We gradually acquire the story of the deaths of Neville's wife and daughter, essentially experiencing the pain he goes through when these memories overcome him. We watch him drink himself into a stupor as each night finds him besieged in his fortified house, surrounded by vampires, including his old friend and neighbor, calling for him to come out. We watch him slowly lose his grip on sanity and come very close to giving up. Then, however, we watch him overcome his depression and courageously fight to live in the nightmare world he is trapped in. The scenes with the dog he finds are full of emotion and really gripped this reader. This is Neville's first contact with nonvampiric life, and his attempts to befriend and help the poor creature (at the same time finally finding a companion) touched me greatly and brought tears to my eyes. His eventual discovery of another human being like himself is also powerful and emotional, although to speak more about this aspect of the story is to risk giving something away to the future reader.
This is a story of one man overcoming all obstacles and fighting to defend his way of life and his very humanity. The novel deals with the human condition, the essential ingredient to effective horror writing. Neville struggles constantly with his doubts and fears, particularly as he commits acts that he would have condemned as barbarous in the time before the plague. His needs for companionship of any kind offer us a clear image of the inner soul of man. By the end of the story, he does indeed become legend, both in his world and in ours.
THE MEMORY KEEPER’S DAUGHTER, by Kim Edwards
Read with both understanding and understatement film and stage actress Martha Plimpton delivers a first rate performance of Kim Edwards's debut novel. Stage trained voices tend to have an added richness, a resonance not found among other audio book readers. Such is the case with Plimpton in this story of a Down's Syndrome child and the two families she binds together. When Dr. David Henry's wife goes into labor during a paralyzing winter storm he is forced to deliver his child. His wife, Nora, is under heavy sedation and he is assisted by Caroline, his nurse. Henry's joy is boundless when he delivers a healthy son and also discovers that he is to be the father of twins. With the birth of his second child, a daughter, he makes an immediate and fateful decision. The child is born with Down's Syndrome so believing that he will spare his wife pain he tells Caroline to immediately take the child to an institution and never reveal what she has done. He tells Nora that their son's fraternal twin died at birth. Caroline is far too kind hearted to obey Henry's orders, so she flees to another city where she raises the daughter, Phoebe. We can never know whether some decisions we make are for good or ill or what effect they will have upon the future lives of those we love. Author Edwards traces the story of this particular family over 25 years as Nora mourns the loss of her baby girl, and a long kept secret is revealed.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, by Cormac McCarthy
'It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?' 'If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.' "Sheriff Bell's deputy says to him. And, yes, what a hell of a mess. 305 pages of a riveting book that I read in almost one sitting. I could not stop reading. The "old man" of the book if there is one, is Sheriff Bell. And his wife, Loretta, is the calming influence. Bell's voice is heard through out this book, in italicized version; we recognize that his down to earth common sense views are sure to calm down the violence that starts on page 4. The first murder, and then the second on page 5 and... The setting is Texas, and the title of the book may be a simile for what is happening in our world and in Texas. Llewellyn Moss, a young cowboy, who works hard for a living and is out hunting antelope, stumbles upon millions of dollars, drugs and 8 dead men in the Texas desert and highland. He does what many of us would do, he takes the money. He understands that his life will never be the same, but it is worth it, isn't it? Money is trouble and Moss is in for as much trouble as anyone could imagine. He has his wife move from their trailer to her mom's to keep her safe. And, Moss, well Moss goes looking for that trouble. And, Zagnorch? Well, find out for yourself. The character that I am intrigued with is Anton Chigurh. We meet him via a murder in which Chigurh goes from being handcuffed by a West Texas county deputy to driving away in his patrol car, splattered with blood. The telling of the murder is so gory, your heart stops but for a second. The heartlessness of Chigurh is burned into our memory, he will allow some of his victims to flip a coin for their life, but that is just as grizzly as the murders. The dignity and honor of Moss is contrasted with the heartlessness of Chigurh. We are rooting for Moss, and we understand this may be a little foolishness on our part. As Sheriff Bell says,the problems with our society now starts with the lack of manners. No one says, yes sir, anymore and it is all down hill from there. The lessons stated and learned in Cormac McCarthy's new book are many. We understand we are in the presence of a literary genius. Such a well written and played out novel. As Sheriff Bell states, "I think if you were Satan and you were settin' around tryin' to think up somethin' that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics." Money is the root of all evil. Millions of dollars may be equitable to evil, but wouldn't we all like to have a chance to experience it? Anton Chigurh may be likened to evil; will we look evil in the face again? Highly recommended.
PINKALICIOUS, by Elizabeth Kann and Victoria Kann.
Pink. Pink. Pink. Is there any such thing as too much pink? ("NO WAY!" says the reviewer who had a hot pink wedding in the late 80s!) Pinkalicious loves pink. She especially loves yummy cupcakes with pink frosting. But, when she eats too many...she turns pink and comes down with a horrible case of pinkititis. The doctor says the cure is to stop eating pink and to eat a steady diet of green foods. YUCK! Can Pinkalicious resist the pink cupcakes sitting on the refrigerator? This picture book sings! The words are delicious and the pictures are gorgeous. Full of pink and lace and crowns, this book is a girly-girl's dream.
FANCY NANCY AND THE POSH PUPPY, by Jane O’Connor
Fancy Nancy definitely has a flair for living! She has that kind of independent spirit you hope every kid will develop and hold on to. Her exuberant, dramatic spirit exudes from this book, from the fancy sparkling cover to each fancy page, and until the fancy, heartwarming end.
FANCY NANCY AND THE POSH PUPPY is not just about wearing fancy dresses and acting glamorous. It's about making decisions and living with the consequences, the support of family members, working out differences, and giving people room to be themselves. It's also about enjoying the life that erupts around independent spirits, and having fun, even when things don't work out as you expected. And lastly, of course, it's about the words.
As in the first Fancy Nancy book, new, exciting words are thrown in to glam up the story, and the pages are packed with fancy details that are both frilly and humorous at the same time. Kids will enjoy the word play, the silly scenes, and of course, all of Nancy's very posh outfits. And, everyone will appreciate the way this story turns out.
From The Book
I am ecstatic. (That's a fancy word for happy.) We're going to get a puppy -- a real one. I hope we get a papillon, like our neighbor's dog. You say it like this: pappy-yawn. In French it means butterfly.
Plot Summary:
When her family decides to get a dog, Fancy Nancy has her own idea of what kind of puppy will fit into her posh lifestyle. Naturally, her sensible, down-to-earth family has other ideas. After sitting for her neighbor's very delicate, glamorous papillon, she learns an important lesson about the value of just being unique.
FANCY NANCY AND THE POSH PUPPY is not just about wearing fancy dresses and acting glamorous. It's about making decisions and living with the consequences, the support of family members, working out differences, and giving people room to be themselves. It's also about enjoying the life that erupts around independent spirits, and having fun, even when things don't work out as you expected. And lastly, of course, it's about the words.
As in the first Fancy Nancy book, new, exciting words are thrown in to glam up the story, and the pages are packed with fancy details that are both frilly and humorous at the same time. Kids will enjoy the word play, the silly scenes, and of course, all of Nancy's very posh outfits. And, everyone will appreciate the way this story turns out.
From The Book
I am ecstatic. (That's a fancy word for happy.) We're going to get a puppy -- a real one. I hope we get a papillon, like our neighbor's dog. You say it like this: pappy-yawn. In French it means butterfly.
Plot Summary:
When her family decides to get a dog, Fancy Nancy has her own idea of what kind of puppy will fit into her posh lifestyle. Naturally, her sensible, down-to-earth family has other ideas. After sitting for her neighbor's very delicate, glamorous papillon, she learns an important lesson about the value of just being unique.
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL: ALL ACCESS, by N. B. Grace
This book is large and looks like a scrapbook. It is put together like a scrapbook done by someone who goes to East High School. Book can be enjoyed in many ways, one of which would be to cut it apart and decorate a bedroom with it. Chock full of memorabilia, just like what kids collect--ticket stubs, notes in lockers, awards, recipes, etc. Something a little different to give as a gift for the HSM fan in your life
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, by Clement C. Moore
There are many different printings of Clement C. Moore's THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS. However, none is as beautifully illustrated as this edition by Mary Engelbreit. Engelbreit has taken the beloved holiday classic, and put a spin on it all her own. Using bright colors, she has created a winter wonderland that takes us through the home of a little mouse, whose house is decorated with various baubles, from jewelry to food, and even pencil stubs. From there we see various depictions of children sleeping in their beds, sugarplum fairies flitting about as they dream; Jolly Old Saint Nick, accompanied by a slew of elves, as he arrives by sleigh to leave gifts for each little boy and girl within the house, and much more. Readers will be delighted to see that Engelbreit has not forgotten the eight tiny reindeer - from Dasher to Dancer, Prancer to Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Donder and Blitzen - each with their own characteristics, from eye color, to fur color, and even to various decorations adorning their antlers. Clement C. Moore's THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS will always be a classic around the holidays. But now that Mary Engelbreit has decided to embellish the Christmas poem with her illustrations, the poem takes on a whole new life. One of imagination and wonder that will please all readers, as they take in the gorgeous illustrations, and share this classic tale with friends and relatives of all ages. A family heirloom in the making!
THE ALPHABET FROM A TO Y WITH BONUS LETTER Z by Steve Martin
This is an excellent book that will keep Mom and Dad interested during those MULTIPLE readings. Steve Martin and Roz Chast have created an extraordinarily clever treatment of the alphabet. Martin's typically off-the-wall humor is evident throughout. His couplets are saturated with alternative useage of each letter and sound of the alphabet. The vocabulary is engaging and stimulating. Chast takes it to a deeper level through often hilarious illustrations and additional vocabulary. You cannot get it all the first time. This book will prompt questions and comments from your child that will result in true conversation. The references to unusual places, animals and literature will encourage your child to explore new things and exercise his or her imagination and curiosity. What other similar book introduces the beatnik or frijoles? "A" is no longer just for "apple." It is for "appendicitis," "acne," and "ampersand." My only reservation is for some of the content. This book includes references to alcohol, and one character shouts the invective, "That's a lousy lie, you lowlife!" Some readers may choose to exercise caution before introducing these concepts during bedtime story time. All-in-all I highly recommend this book for its intellectual stimulation and creativity. This is probably the most unique book of its kind I have ever seen.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE, by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
This book is for the people who know they don't know very much." This comment, in the introduction of The Book of General Ignorance, sets the stage and presents the authors' challenge. I started reading it with a "Who do they think they are fooling" attitude. They made me a convert. This book only gets more interesting as you continue reading it. Some of the knowledge nuggets aren't big secrets, and in fact read as "trick questions," like "What is the tallest mountain in the world?" The trick is, "tallest," not "highest." Got it? Mauna Kea in Hawaii, not Mt. Everest. Then, what is the most dangerous animal that has ever lived? Answer? A mosquito, responsible, the authors say, for the deaths of about 45 billion humans. Of course (and they know this), one mosquito isn't responsible for these deaths, there are many species of mosquitos, and mosquitos really don't (directly) kill anybody. Trick question again. Then there were the questions that didn't hold any surprise at all: "What is the main ingredient of air?" Answer: nitrogen. But it got more interesting. What man-made objects are visible from the moon? None. Many are visible from "space" (a mere 60 miles above the surface of the Earth), but the moon is too far away. What is the biggest thing that a blue whale can swallow? What are violin strings made of? There are so many questions answered, that there is something here for everybody. This is better than Trivial Pursuit, because of the explanations given. This should be an entertaining book on CD to listen to on a long trip, and can easily be turned into a game for adults and kids. So I started reading it with a chip on my shoulder, and the authors made me a believer. Interesting, indeed. The book just kept getting better. And my favorite factoid? What is the longest animal alive today?
OUR DUMB WORLD, edited by Scott Dikkers
Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of The Planet Earth, 73rd Edition features incorrect statistics on all of the Earth's 168, 182, or 196 independent nations. It also features maps, including a fold-out world map at actual size. Readers will learn about every country from Afghanistan, "Allah's Cat Box," to the Ukraine, "The Bridebasket of Europe."
Today's news-parody consumer cannot possibly understand made-up current events without the context of fake world history and geography. That is why "The Onion" is publishing a world atlas: to help us.
Our Dumb World is an invaluable tool for any reader interested in overthrowing a weakened government in East Asia, exploiting a developing nation in Africa, or for directions to tonight's party at Erica's. It is a reference guide to 250,000 of the world's most important places, such as North Korea's Trench of Victory, the Great Human Pyramid of Egypt, and Saudi Arabia's superhighway, the Mohammedobahn.
Today's news-parody consumer cannot possibly understand made-up current events without the context of fake world history and geography. That is why "The Onion" is publishing a world atlas: to help us.
Our Dumb World is an invaluable tool for any reader interested in overthrowing a weakened government in East Asia, exploiting a developing nation in Africa, or for directions to tonight's party at Erica's. It is a reference guide to 250,000 of the world's most important places, such as North Korea's Trench of Victory, the Great Human Pyramid of Egypt, and Saudi Arabia's superhighway, the Mohammedobahn.
CHRISTMAS WITH PAULA DEEN, by Paula Deen
This is Paula Deen at her best - the perfect mix of great recipes and the personality-filled anecdotes that we fans of hers have come to love. I've only made one recipe so far, but I'll tell you that The Best Damn Bluebery Muffin You'll Ever Eat was indeed the best damn blueberry muffin I've ever eaten. I'll be buying more copies to give to my girlfriends who all love preparing for the holidays as much as Paula and I do.
GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS 2008, edited by Craig Glenday
The 2007 edition of the world’s most popular book offers yet another awesome collection of the most incredible feats on Earth. From the greatest adventurers, athletes, medical marvels, and natural—and unnatural—wonders on the planet, to a host of new celebrity record holders in the realm of entertainment, here are thousands of new or updated records, plus countless fascinating facts in every possible area. Did you know . . .The world’s oldest mom is Adriana Emilia Iliescu of Romania. At 66 years and 230 days old, she gave birth by Caesarean section to a daughter, at the Clinical Hospital of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Bucharest.George W. Bush’s second inauguration as president of the United States of America was the most costly ever. Estimated spending for the three-day event was $40 million.And that’s just a hint of what’s inside this extraordinary book. Discover which two long-standing, classic records have finally been broken—and by whom. Enjoy Guinness World Record’s exclusive interviews and stunning photos—and even learn how to become a record breaker yourself. Who knows, you might make it into next year’s book. . . .
THE SECRET, by Rhonda Byrne.
I had never watched an entire episode of Oprah until her program on The Secret. In the promo for the show, Oprah announced that the program would present "the secret" to making more money, losing weight, finding the love of your life, and achieving job success. Who could resist hearing more about such a claim, especially when it is made by the most influential woman in America and touted as the key to all her success? Apparently I wasn't alone. After the show, Oprah's website was overwhelmed, emails poured in, and within hours The Secret had become the best-selling book in the nation.
A week later, while unpacking in a hotel room, I powered up the TV. Oprah and two guests from the week before appeared on the screen, effusive about the transforming power of The Secret. Her website called the episode, "A follow-up to the show everybody is talking about!"
People are not only talking about The Secret, they are buying it. I am writing this review in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and this particular branch has completely sold out of the book—again. Only two days ago—so I am told—a storewide announcement assured a horde of anxious shoppers that another large shipment of the book had arrived and would be brought to the sales floor momentarily. Readers quickly grabbed every copy. Almost impossibly, The Secret is even outselling (at this writing) the final Harry Potter book. And if that weren't enough, the audio edition of the book follows these two as the nation's number-three seller.
The Australian author of The Secret, Rhonda Byrne, introduces the book by admitting, "A year ago, my life had collapsed around me" (p. ix). Through searching for answers in a variety of books new and old, she began to trace what she believed was a common thread in them all. She dubbed it the "Great Secret—The Secret to Life" (p. ix).
Byrne became convinced that this was the key to explaining the success of "the greatest people in history" (p. ix). As she started practicing this secret, Byrne says that her life immediately began to change in ways nothing short of miraculous. She decided to make a video called The Secret to share her discoveries with others. In March of 2006 it was released on the Internet, but soon went to DVD. By late autumn, the phenomenal success of the video placed it on two episodes of Larry King Live. Shortly after, two of the teachers featured on The Secret were guests on Ellen Degeneres' daily TV show. Before Christmas, The Secret DVD had spun off a book by the same title which Oprah Winfrey catapulted to the top of the charts in February of 2007.
The essence of The Secret is "the law of attraction." According to Byrne and the twenty-nine co-contributors whom she quotes extensively, everything in the Universe (which is always capitalized and usually synonymous for "God") vibrates on a particular frequency. When you think in harmony with the frequency of something, you attract it to you. If you think about wealth, you will receive wealth. If you think instead about your debt, you will receive more debt. You attract what you think about; your thoughts determine your destiny.
Byrne restates the law of attraction in various ways: "Nothing [good or bad] can come into your experience unless you summon it through persistent thoughts" (p. 28). "Your thoughts are the primary cause of everything" (p. 33). "Your current reality or your current life is a result of the thoughts you have been thinking" (p. 71). According to the product description on the DVD, "This is The Secret to everything—the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted.
Byrne promises with ironclad certainty: "There isn't a single thing that you cannot do with this knowledge. . . . The Secret can give you whatever you want" (p. xi). By it "you will come to know how you can have, be, or do anything you want" (p. xii).
In the final analysis, The Secret is nothing more than Name It-Claim It, Positive-Confession, Prosperity Theology (without God and the Bible), built on a foundation of New Age self-deification. In other words, the book is just another version of what some TV preachers have taught for decades, namely, if you will sustain the right thoughts, words, and feelings, you will receive whatever you want. But The Secret adds this important twist: your thoughts can bring anything into your life because you are god.
A week later, while unpacking in a hotel room, I powered up the TV. Oprah and two guests from the week before appeared on the screen, effusive about the transforming power of The Secret. Her website called the episode, "A follow-up to the show everybody is talking about!"
People are not only talking about The Secret, they are buying it. I am writing this review in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and this particular branch has completely sold out of the book—again. Only two days ago—so I am told—a storewide announcement assured a horde of anxious shoppers that another large shipment of the book had arrived and would be brought to the sales floor momentarily. Readers quickly grabbed every copy. Almost impossibly, The Secret is even outselling (at this writing) the final Harry Potter book. And if that weren't enough, the audio edition of the book follows these two as the nation's number-three seller.
The Australian author of The Secret, Rhonda Byrne, introduces the book by admitting, "A year ago, my life had collapsed around me" (p. ix). Through searching for answers in a variety of books new and old, she began to trace what she believed was a common thread in them all. She dubbed it the "Great Secret—The Secret to Life" (p. ix).
Byrne became convinced that this was the key to explaining the success of "the greatest people in history" (p. ix). As she started practicing this secret, Byrne says that her life immediately began to change in ways nothing short of miraculous. She decided to make a video called The Secret to share her discoveries with others. In March of 2006 it was released on the Internet, but soon went to DVD. By late autumn, the phenomenal success of the video placed it on two episodes of Larry King Live. Shortly after, two of the teachers featured on The Secret were guests on Ellen Degeneres' daily TV show. Before Christmas, The Secret DVD had spun off a book by the same title which Oprah Winfrey catapulted to the top of the charts in February of 2007.
The essence of The Secret is "the law of attraction." According to Byrne and the twenty-nine co-contributors whom she quotes extensively, everything in the Universe (which is always capitalized and usually synonymous for "God") vibrates on a particular frequency. When you think in harmony with the frequency of something, you attract it to you. If you think about wealth, you will receive wealth. If you think instead about your debt, you will receive more debt. You attract what you think about; your thoughts determine your destiny.
Byrne restates the law of attraction in various ways: "Nothing [good or bad] can come into your experience unless you summon it through persistent thoughts" (p. 28). "Your thoughts are the primary cause of everything" (p. 33). "Your current reality or your current life is a result of the thoughts you have been thinking" (p. 71). According to the product description on the DVD, "This is The Secret to everything—the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted.
Byrne promises with ironclad certainty: "There isn't a single thing that you cannot do with this knowledge. . . . The Secret can give you whatever you want" (p. xi). By it "you will come to know how you can have, be, or do anything you want" (p. xii).
In the final analysis, The Secret is nothing more than Name It-Claim It, Positive-Confession, Prosperity Theology (without God and the Bible), built on a foundation of New Age self-deification. In other words, the book is just another version of what some TV preachers have taught for decades, namely, if you will sustain the right thoughts, words, and feelings, you will receive whatever you want. But The Secret adds this important twist: your thoughts can bring anything into your life because you are god.
MY GRANDFATHER’S SON, by Clarence Thomas.
Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on a distinctly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, may well be the nation's most polarizing legal figure, and so it is only fitting that he has penned a polarizing memoir. In addition to chronicling his amazing journey from crushing poverty in his native Georgia to the nation's highest court, "My Grandfather's Son" is a furious assault on liberalism generally and on what Thomas calls the liberal political elite that sought to derail his confirmation.In his 15 years on the high court, the 59-year-old justice has long since established his once-doubted legal and intellectual bona fides. Yet with an eye on posterity, he seems to crave validation as having deserved his appointment and, more broadly, as a noble man fighting to do the right thing in an often bigoted, deceitful world. As Thomas puts it in his preface, he is rescuing his own history from the "careless hands" and "malicious hearts" of unnamed others.Whether Thomas' much-anticipated memoir will advance this cause is doubtful. Thomas' supporters will cheer his often eloquent and always feisty accounts in which every liberal idea is derided as a foolish "piety" belied by his life experience. But his polemical, score-settling approach is likely only to deepen the enmity of his detractors.Nowhere is this more true than in Thomas' treatment of the he-said / she-said conflagration over Anita F. Hill's charges that he made crude sexual advances toward her. Neither his successful Senate confirmation in 1991 nor the passage of time has mellowed his view of what he then famously decried as a "high-tech lynching." Spewing invective, Thomas depicts Hill as an abrasive, vindictive, politically motivated liar exploited by a "smooth-tongued" liberal "mob" (including a biased press) that was hell-bent on his personal destruction to prevent a more conservative court from overturning Roe vs. Wade. He casts himself as Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly accused of rape in "To Kill a Mockingbird," his favorite book as a youth. (Hill, a professor at Brandeis University, has declined to comment on the book or Thomas' characterization of her as a "mediocre" but ambitious lawyer and "my most traitorous adversary.")Thomas is refreshingly candid about the depths of his suffering, and one comes away with a deep sadness about our broken politics and the ferocious disincentives for anyone to seek high government appointment.Baring emotional wounds, however, is not the same as presenting a convincing case of innocence. Since the confirmation hearings, several careful journalists have shown that he was nothing like the uptight, prudish figure he presented at the time -- someone who could not possibly have talked about pubic hairs and Long Dong Silver. In law school, Thomas was a voracious consumer of pornography with a coarse sense of humor -- and credible evidence exists that his pornographic interest extended much later into his life. Thomas cops to none of this except to note briefly that, from "immaturity," he might have joined in a few discussions of pornography at Yale, when the movie "Deep Throat" and its ilk were mainstream cultural phenomena. Nor does he address others' claims that would seem to corroborate Hill's charge that Thomas made unwanted sexual advances toward her when she worked for him at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.This doesn't necessarily mean that Hill's accusations were true. It does mean that Thomas' sense of outrage is exaggerated and one-sided. He rails against a vast left-wing conspiracy for distorting his true character. Yet the portrait painted by his supporters at the time and now by Thomas was (and is) also false. For all his fury at those who so intrusively investigated him, he has only praise for those who slung the mud at Hill, tarring her with little foundation as journalist David Brock did in describing her as "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty."The risk is that Thomas' polemical rendering of his confirmation fight will overshadow more effective -- and in some ways more important -- parts of his memoir. The enigma of Thomas has always been how a black man growing up in the Jim Crow South, who lived the American dream at least partly due to affirmative action, could be so intractably conservative and so scornful of the very programs from which he benefited."My Grandfather's Son" answers this question powerfully. As the title indicates, Thomas was reared by his grandfather, Myles Anderson, because his father abandoned him as a toddler and his mother hadn't the wherewithal to raise him. To say that Anderson practiced tough love is an understatement. He beat Thomas, denied him sports (despite the boy's athletic prowess) and subjected him at a tender age to hard physical labor. Emotionally remote, Anderson later kicked him out of the house when -- in a major break from his parochial upbringing -- Thomas decided to leave a Missouri seminary college.But as Thomas lovingly recounts, his grandfather taught him self-reliance, tenacity and religious faith. These gave him a resilience and independent spirit that Thomas convincingly credits with allowing him to leave behind the specter of an unproductive and potentially crime-ridden life and, instead, to excel amid widespread bigotry and want.Although Thomas' conservatism emerged after a flirtation with lefty radicalism, the rightward turn follows with perfect logic from the searing emotional lessons of his childhood. He was taught to steel himself against weakness, despise dependency and overcome racism through individual excellence. He did so, brilliantly, to the point where his greatest resentment comes from being the recipient of an unwanted helping hand -- the affirmative action program that helped him gain entrance to Yale. For Thomas, this was not a welcome door-opener, but rather "the soft underbelly of his career," a debasing of his own genuine achievement that encouraged doubts about his abilities.Although Thomas ends the memoir at the moment he is sworn in as a justice, his Supreme Court opinions are a natural extension of the narrative. His jurisprudence is most notable for his virulent opposition to affirmative action (including a rejection of the idea, belied by Thomas' own experience, that minority students learn better in a multi-racial environment), his attack on the constitutionality of New Deal-style social programs and his support for a more active role for religion in public life.This correlation between personal values, political beliefs and constitutional philosophy pose an ironic dilemma for the author. Of all the justices, Thomas has been among the most adamant in insisting that it is wrong for a judge's moral preferences and personal experiences to color his view of the law. Yet the memoir suggests on almost every page that Thomas has followed the opposite approach -- that his legal views appear to be the sum of his life experiences, that he is his grandfather's son both as a man and as a justice. This revelation, perhaps unintended, has the virtue of honesty, but whether it is a cause for celebration or worry depends entirely on where one stands along the chasm that divides our political culture.
SLASH, by Slash with Anthony Bozza.
From one of the greatest rock guitarists of our era comes a memoir that redefines sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll
He was born in England but reared in L.A., surrounded by the leading artists of the day amidst the vibrant hotbed of music and culture that was the early seventies. Slash spent his adolescence on the streets of Hollywood, discovering drugs, drinking, rock music, and girls, all while achieving notable status as a BMX rider. But everything changed in his world the day he first held the beat-up one-string guitar his grandmother had discarded in a closet.
The instrument became his voice and it triggered a lifelong passion that made everything else irrelevant. As soon as he could string chords and a solo together, Slash wanted to be in a band and sought out friends with similar interests. His closest friend, Steven Adler, proved to be a conspirator for the long haul. As hairmetal bands exploded onto the L.A. scene and topped the charts, Slash sought his niche and a band that suited his raw and gritty sensibility.
He found salvation in the form of four young men of equal mind: Axl Rose, Izzy Stradlin, Steven Adler, and Duff McKagan. Together they became Guns N' Roses, one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands of all time. Dirty, volatile, and as authentic as the streets that weaned them, they fought their way to the top with groundbreaking albums such as the iconic Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion I and II.
Here, for the first time ever, Slash tells the tale that has yet to be told from the inside: how the band came together, how they wrote the music that defined an era, how they survived insane, never-ending tours, how they survived themselves, and, ultimately, how it all fell apart. This is a window onto the world of the notoriously private guitarist and a seat on the roller-coaster ride that was one of history's greatest rock 'n' roll machines, always on the edge of self-destruction, even at the pinnacle of its success. This is a candid recollection and reflection of Slash's friendships past and present, from easygoing Izzy to ever-steady Duff to wild-child Steven and complicated Axl.
It is also an intensely personal account of struggle and triumph: as Guns N' Roses journeyed to the top, Slash battled his demons, escaping the overwhelming reality with women, heroin, coke, crack, vodka, and whatever else came along.
He survived it all: lawsuits, rehab, riots, notoriety, debauchery, and destruction, and ultimately found his creative evolution. From Slash's Snakepit to his current band, the massively successful Velvet Revolver, Slash found an even keel by sticking to his guns.
Slash is everything the man, the myth, the legend, inspires: it's funny, honest, inspiring, jaw-dropping . . . and, in a word, excessive.
THE WAR, by Geoffrey C. Ward.
The War, the companion volume to Ken Burns' documentary, looks at first glance like the coffee table book of the season. It is, but only in the sense that, given its size, a coffee table might be the most practical place to read it. And The War, which lands in bookstores this week, should be read by everyone, from high schoolers, many of whom, as Burns points out in his introduction, "think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War," to baby boomers, who think they know what their parents went through.
Unique not only among previous Burns companion volumes but among all books on World War II, The War pursues two main currents: the stories of four American towns during the war years and the bigger picture of both the European and Pacific fronts. The course of the war is never allowed to become too distant a subject. When battles are linked to the lives of the men who served and their friends and family in Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, Minn.; and Sacramento, Calif., history becomes the stuff of personal drama.
Geoffrey C. Ward, prize-winning biographer of Franklin Roosevelt and author of companion volumes for three other Burns films, including The Civil War, handles the historical narrative deftly. What, one wonders, is left to say about this war? The answer is not so much new information as new interpretation.
Ward is tougher than almost any recent historian on the generals and war planners whose decisions were responsible for such massive blunders as the feeble defense of the Philippines in 1942 and the landing at Anzio in Italy in 1944. And the reader will be, too, when men we have come to know die needlessly.
Ward juxtaposes major events with illuminating details. In Mobile, for instance, both country music legend Hank Williams and the father of home-run hero Hank Aaron worked in the same shipyard, the kind of integration that would not have happened if not for the war effort.
But it's the personal side of the book, the stories of the common people from these towns and many others, including Japanese-Americans who went off to fight the Nazis while their parents lived behind barbed wire in interment camps, that pulls the reader in.
Their stories are told through newspaper articles, old photographs, letters to and from the front and, sometimes, most heart-rending of all, home movies that family members have kept for more than 60 years. They are also told, in many instances, by the participants themselves. All of these serve to re-create a time when Americans got their war news from the morning papers and radio rather than television and the Internet.
We find out the fate of soldiers, sailors and airmen as their loved ones find out. Each new death — usually delivered in the form of a Western Union telegram — hits the reader with the jolt of an emotional rifle slug (the reproduction of one such telegram provides one of the book's starkest photos).
Part history, part memoir and part photo album, The War is compelling on many levels. The photographs are a mesmerizing collection of both the war the GIs saw and the changing world they left behind. Many are so upsetting that for a long time they were known only to the men who took them: In the Ardennes Forest, American soldiers try to distinguish between our dead and the enemy in a pile of frozen corpses; in Dresden, a German town destroyed by Allied bombs, dead men, women and children are heaped in piles more than six feet tall; Marines on Okinawa stand around a radio looking stricken as they hear the news that the war in Europe is over. When will their war be over?
Much of The War will hit the uninitiated with a shock. Readers will begin to understand why fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson could never return to his father's farm in Minnesota. "I find there are times when I'm pulled back into the whirlpool," he says. "The intensity of that experience was so overwhelming that you can't let go of it."
Unique not only among previous Burns companion volumes but among all books on World War II, The War pursues two main currents: the stories of four American towns during the war years and the bigger picture of both the European and Pacific fronts. The course of the war is never allowed to become too distant a subject. When battles are linked to the lives of the men who served and their friends and family in Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, Minn.; and Sacramento, Calif., history becomes the stuff of personal drama.
Geoffrey C. Ward, prize-winning biographer of Franklin Roosevelt and author of companion volumes for three other Burns films, including The Civil War, handles the historical narrative deftly. What, one wonders, is left to say about this war? The answer is not so much new information as new interpretation.
Ward is tougher than almost any recent historian on the generals and war planners whose decisions were responsible for such massive blunders as the feeble defense of the Philippines in 1942 and the landing at Anzio in Italy in 1944. And the reader will be, too, when men we have come to know die needlessly.
Ward juxtaposes major events with illuminating details. In Mobile, for instance, both country music legend Hank Williams and the father of home-run hero Hank Aaron worked in the same shipyard, the kind of integration that would not have happened if not for the war effort.
But it's the personal side of the book, the stories of the common people from these towns and many others, including Japanese-Americans who went off to fight the Nazis while their parents lived behind barbed wire in interment camps, that pulls the reader in.
Their stories are told through newspaper articles, old photographs, letters to and from the front and, sometimes, most heart-rending of all, home movies that family members have kept for more than 60 years. They are also told, in many instances, by the participants themselves. All of these serve to re-create a time when Americans got their war news from the morning papers and radio rather than television and the Internet.
We find out the fate of soldiers, sailors and airmen as their loved ones find out. Each new death — usually delivered in the form of a Western Union telegram — hits the reader with the jolt of an emotional rifle slug (the reproduction of one such telegram provides one of the book's starkest photos).
Part history, part memoir and part photo album, The War is compelling on many levels. The photographs are a mesmerizing collection of both the war the GIs saw and the changing world they left behind. Many are so upsetting that for a long time they were known only to the men who took them: In the Ardennes Forest, American soldiers try to distinguish between our dead and the enemy in a pile of frozen corpses; in Dresden, a German town destroyed by Allied bombs, dead men, women and children are heaped in piles more than six feet tall; Marines on Okinawa stand around a radio looking stricken as they hear the news that the war in Europe is over. When will their war be over?
Much of The War will hit the uninitiated with a shock. Readers will begin to understand why fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson could never return to his father's farm in Minnesota. "I find there are times when I'm pulled back into the whirlpool," he says. "The intensity of that experience was so overwhelming that you can't let go of it."
AMERICAN CREATION, by Joseph J. Ellis
Academic fashion determines the way whole generations are educated, and since the '60s, as historian Joseph Ellis slyly remarks, a "hegemonic narrative" has prevailed within the academy, in which race, class, and gender are the privileged categories and the Founding Fathers of the American Republic have all too often been dismissed as the deadest of dead white males -- "racists, classists, and sexists, a kind of rogues' gallery rather than a gallery of greats." Historians have focused their attention, instead, on America's dispossessed: slaves, women, and Native Americans.
But in the last few years, the cultural focus has returned to the Founding Fathers with the appearance of a number of hugely popular new books, including bestselling biographies of Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and Washington. The Founders are back: back with a vengeance, thanks to writers like Ellis himself, whose elegant, balanced books on the Founding era and biographies of Jefferson, Adams, and Washington have done much to return the public's attention to this remarkable group of men and their accomplishments.
Part of the urgent new interest in the founders might be attributable to the attacks currently being made on their greatest achievements, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The significance of habeas corpus, for instance, such a tortured issue today, can best be understood by going back to James Madison and the context within which he pressed for its enshrinement in the new nation's law. Another attraction is the way the Founders, brilliant men by any standards, shine by contrast with our present-day political leaders. As Henry Adams remarked way back in the 19th century, if you looked at all the American presidents panoramically, you would have to conclude that Darwin got it exactly backward.
The question that has always fascinated Ellis -- and so many other historians of the Founding era -- is, "How did they do it?" In American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, Ellis states the case.
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century a former colony of Great Britain, generally regarded as a provincial and wholly peripheral outpost of Western Civilization, somehow managed to establish a set of ideas and institutions that, over the stretch of time, became the blueprint for political and economic success for the nation-state in the modern world…. [These institutions included] representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty, a market economy fueled by the energies of unfettered citizens, a secular state unaffiliated with any official religion, and the rule of law that presumed the equality of all citizens.Posterity has generally deemed these achievements triumphs. But there were blunders at the Founding, too, disasters that might have been averted but were not, causing tragedy and all but tearing the Union to pieces. Most notable among these was the failure to end slavery, or at least to come up with a gradual scheme for emancipation, and the failure to create and enforce a fair settlement with the Native Americans. Ellis takes a close look at both the triumphs and the tragedies, showing us new facets of the familiar stories.
What makes Ellis's work so persuasive is his unwillingness to see the Founders in a simplistic light, either as ideal heroes or as racist villains. They were great men but undoubtedly flawed ones, and none of them has escaped with his reputation unstained. As Ellis remarks, "It is uncommon for the same men who make a revolution also to secure it," and the process of securing it involved compromises that some of the protagonists found nearly unbearable.
In a fascinating chapter on the creation and ratification of the Constitution, Ellis argues that the climax of that particular drama was not the Constitutional Convention of 1787 but the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, which pitted a cast of titans against each other in a bitter fight over federal versus state authority. James Madison and George Washington, backed by Alexander Hamilton, argued in favor of a model in which federal authority would supersede that of the individual states, while George Mason and the great orator Patrick Henry fought for the principal of state sovereignty and a minimum of centralized power. The Henry-Madison debate in June 1788 was, Ellis claims, possibly "the most consequential debate in American history" -- even more so than the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery or the Darrow-Bryan one on evolution.
Eventually, the two sides were obliged to come to a compromise that pleased hardly anyone; in fact, Madison, at that time, felt that he had lost all the major battles and that "the principal of state sovereignty had been qualified but not killed, as he believed it should be." Ellis points out that the solution was a fruitful one in spite of itself, "making argument itself the answer by creating a framework in which federal and state authority engaged in an ongoing negotiation for supremacy, thereby making the Constitution, like history itself, an argument without end." Not quite entirely without end, perhaps; an end of sorts to aspects of the argument would certainly come on the battlefields of the Civil War.
The Antifederalist fear -- some have called it paranoia -- is worth considering. Its spokesmen, from Patrick Henry to its modern proponents, have argued that once in place, the federal government's "relentless expansion of arbitrary power was unstoppable, its tendency toward corruption was inevitable, and its appetite for despotism was unquenchable" -- an anti–Big Government position, in other words. For much of our country's history, this complaint came from the political right; now, though, it is gaining new adherents from the center and left, due to the Bush administration's unprecedented usurpation of power. The argument lives on, it seems.
In two subsequent chapters, Ellis shows how both Madison and Jefferson changed their positions due to the exigencies of political life after 1788. The beginning of the two-party system in 1791 defied everyone's conceptions of what the Constitutional government was supposed to be about, and it was psychologically impossible for Washington and Adams, "the last of a classical breed" and instinctively nonpartisan, to conceive of themselves as party men. But Alexander Hamilton's new fiscal programs led Madison and Jefferson, the southern agrarians, to fear that the Republic was being taken over by a sinister conspiracy of northern bankers and money men: the federal government, they believed, was running amok. Thus was born the Republican Party, with Jefferson at its head and Madison as his right hand.
"Given [Madison's] role as the most prominent Federalist of all in 1787-88, for him to recognize the Antifederalists as the heroic predecessors of the Republicans was akin to having Martin Luther declare his ultimate allegiance to the Vatican," Ellis comments dryly. Jefferson, too, was now displaying protean qualities that would ultimately lead him to defy any sort of political classification. When it became evident, during his presidency, that Napoleon Bonaparte was considering offering the Louisiana Territory for sale, Jefferson displayed his willingness to act unconstitutionally if the occasion demanded. "Throughout the 1790s he had labeled the Federalists 'monarchists' and insisted that any energetic projection of executive power violated republican principles. Now, he had just performed the most aggressive executive action ever by an American president, a projection of executive authority that would stand the test of time as perhaps the boldest in American history. If one wished to acquire an empire, it turned out, one had to become an imperial president."
It is hard to see how the two principal tragedies of the Founding era could have been evaded. Ellis shows us how during his first presidential term Washington, encouraged by Secretary of War Henry Knox, tried hard to create and implement a fair deal for the Native Americans in accordance with the republican principles for which the revolution had been fought. "It would reflect honor on the new government," Knox wrote, "were a declarative Law to be passed that the Indian tribes possess the right of the soil of all lands…and that they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States." Knox and Washington envisioned a series of Indian homelands east of the Mississippi, protected by the federal government, that would eventually become states, but for many reasons -- especially the unstoppable streams of white settlers pouring into the Indian territories -- their efforts ended in debacle. It was a debacle Washington took personally, Ellis tells us, "believing that his signature on the [failed] Treaty of New York was his pledge of honor, as well as the solemn word of the United States government. Both were now being exposed as worthless."
The issue of slavery was, of course, the single most divisive question that faced the Founders. It was almost foreordained that the Constitution would fail to settle it, since there was no possible settlement that the 13 states could have agreed on: the Union would have dissolved before it even existed. But the Founders' failure on this subject went beyond a mere politic silence. As a group they were simply unable to imagine a functional biracial society. The resultant fissures in the newborn Republic were more than evident to the founding generation, but these men chose to push the inevitable earthquake into the future. It is a difficult choice to approve -- but a different course of action would probably have doomed the nascent Republic.
The most interesting aspect of Ellis's take on the Founders and their work is his vision -- a correct one, I think -- of the Union and the Constitution they created as ever-evolving, non-monolithic entities. Ellis's characterization of the Constitution as "an argument without end" has proved to be a just one, as anyone can see by tuning in to the Senate proceedings on C-SPAN today. Showing us the founding era as a series of philosophical conflicts and painful compromises rather than the triumphal progress celebrated in school textbooks makes American history -- and the embattled American present -- more comprehensible, and infinitely more accessible. --Brooke Allen
Brooke Allen is the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers; Twentieth-Century Attitudes; and Artistic License. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, The Nation, and more.
But in the last few years, the cultural focus has returned to the Founding Fathers with the appearance of a number of hugely popular new books, including bestselling biographies of Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and Washington. The Founders are back: back with a vengeance, thanks to writers like Ellis himself, whose elegant, balanced books on the Founding era and biographies of Jefferson, Adams, and Washington have done much to return the public's attention to this remarkable group of men and their accomplishments.
Part of the urgent new interest in the founders might be attributable to the attacks currently being made on their greatest achievements, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The significance of habeas corpus, for instance, such a tortured issue today, can best be understood by going back to James Madison and the context within which he pressed for its enshrinement in the new nation's law. Another attraction is the way the Founders, brilliant men by any standards, shine by contrast with our present-day political leaders. As Henry Adams remarked way back in the 19th century, if you looked at all the American presidents panoramically, you would have to conclude that Darwin got it exactly backward.
The question that has always fascinated Ellis -- and so many other historians of the Founding era -- is, "How did they do it?" In American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, Ellis states the case.
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century a former colony of Great Britain, generally regarded as a provincial and wholly peripheral outpost of Western Civilization, somehow managed to establish a set of ideas and institutions that, over the stretch of time, became the blueprint for political and economic success for the nation-state in the modern world…. [These institutions included] representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty, a market economy fueled by the energies of unfettered citizens, a secular state unaffiliated with any official religion, and the rule of law that presumed the equality of all citizens.Posterity has generally deemed these achievements triumphs. But there were blunders at the Founding, too, disasters that might have been averted but were not, causing tragedy and all but tearing the Union to pieces. Most notable among these was the failure to end slavery, or at least to come up with a gradual scheme for emancipation, and the failure to create and enforce a fair settlement with the Native Americans. Ellis takes a close look at both the triumphs and the tragedies, showing us new facets of the familiar stories.
What makes Ellis's work so persuasive is his unwillingness to see the Founders in a simplistic light, either as ideal heroes or as racist villains. They were great men but undoubtedly flawed ones, and none of them has escaped with his reputation unstained. As Ellis remarks, "It is uncommon for the same men who make a revolution also to secure it," and the process of securing it involved compromises that some of the protagonists found nearly unbearable.
In a fascinating chapter on the creation and ratification of the Constitution, Ellis argues that the climax of that particular drama was not the Constitutional Convention of 1787 but the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, which pitted a cast of titans against each other in a bitter fight over federal versus state authority. James Madison and George Washington, backed by Alexander Hamilton, argued in favor of a model in which federal authority would supersede that of the individual states, while George Mason and the great orator Patrick Henry fought for the principal of state sovereignty and a minimum of centralized power. The Henry-Madison debate in June 1788 was, Ellis claims, possibly "the most consequential debate in American history" -- even more so than the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery or the Darrow-Bryan one on evolution.
Eventually, the two sides were obliged to come to a compromise that pleased hardly anyone; in fact, Madison, at that time, felt that he had lost all the major battles and that "the principal of state sovereignty had been qualified but not killed, as he believed it should be." Ellis points out that the solution was a fruitful one in spite of itself, "making argument itself the answer by creating a framework in which federal and state authority engaged in an ongoing negotiation for supremacy, thereby making the Constitution, like history itself, an argument without end." Not quite entirely without end, perhaps; an end of sorts to aspects of the argument would certainly come on the battlefields of the Civil War.
The Antifederalist fear -- some have called it paranoia -- is worth considering. Its spokesmen, from Patrick Henry to its modern proponents, have argued that once in place, the federal government's "relentless expansion of arbitrary power was unstoppable, its tendency toward corruption was inevitable, and its appetite for despotism was unquenchable" -- an anti–Big Government position, in other words. For much of our country's history, this complaint came from the political right; now, though, it is gaining new adherents from the center and left, due to the Bush administration's unprecedented usurpation of power. The argument lives on, it seems.
In two subsequent chapters, Ellis shows how both Madison and Jefferson changed their positions due to the exigencies of political life after 1788. The beginning of the two-party system in 1791 defied everyone's conceptions of what the Constitutional government was supposed to be about, and it was psychologically impossible for Washington and Adams, "the last of a classical breed" and instinctively nonpartisan, to conceive of themselves as party men. But Alexander Hamilton's new fiscal programs led Madison and Jefferson, the southern agrarians, to fear that the Republic was being taken over by a sinister conspiracy of northern bankers and money men: the federal government, they believed, was running amok. Thus was born the Republican Party, with Jefferson at its head and Madison as his right hand.
"Given [Madison's] role as the most prominent Federalist of all in 1787-88, for him to recognize the Antifederalists as the heroic predecessors of the Republicans was akin to having Martin Luther declare his ultimate allegiance to the Vatican," Ellis comments dryly. Jefferson, too, was now displaying protean qualities that would ultimately lead him to defy any sort of political classification. When it became evident, during his presidency, that Napoleon Bonaparte was considering offering the Louisiana Territory for sale, Jefferson displayed his willingness to act unconstitutionally if the occasion demanded. "Throughout the 1790s he had labeled the Federalists 'monarchists' and insisted that any energetic projection of executive power violated republican principles. Now, he had just performed the most aggressive executive action ever by an American president, a projection of executive authority that would stand the test of time as perhaps the boldest in American history. If one wished to acquire an empire, it turned out, one had to become an imperial president."
It is hard to see how the two principal tragedies of the Founding era could have been evaded. Ellis shows us how during his first presidential term Washington, encouraged by Secretary of War Henry Knox, tried hard to create and implement a fair deal for the Native Americans in accordance with the republican principles for which the revolution had been fought. "It would reflect honor on the new government," Knox wrote, "were a declarative Law to be passed that the Indian tribes possess the right of the soil of all lands…and that they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States." Knox and Washington envisioned a series of Indian homelands east of the Mississippi, protected by the federal government, that would eventually become states, but for many reasons -- especially the unstoppable streams of white settlers pouring into the Indian territories -- their efforts ended in debacle. It was a debacle Washington took personally, Ellis tells us, "believing that his signature on the [failed] Treaty of New York was his pledge of honor, as well as the solemn word of the United States government. Both were now being exposed as worthless."
The issue of slavery was, of course, the single most divisive question that faced the Founders. It was almost foreordained that the Constitution would fail to settle it, since there was no possible settlement that the 13 states could have agreed on: the Union would have dissolved before it even existed. But the Founders' failure on this subject went beyond a mere politic silence. As a group they were simply unable to imagine a functional biracial society. The resultant fissures in the newborn Republic were more than evident to the founding generation, but these men chose to push the inevitable earthquake into the future. It is a difficult choice to approve -- but a different course of action would probably have doomed the nascent Republic.
The most interesting aspect of Ellis's take on the Founders and their work is his vision -- a correct one, I think -- of the Union and the Constitution they created as ever-evolving, non-monolithic entities. Ellis's characterization of the Constitution as "an argument without end" has proved to be a just one, as anyone can see by tuning in to the Senate proceedings on C-SPAN today. Showing us the founding era as a series of philosophical conflicts and painful compromises rather than the triumphal progress celebrated in school textbooks makes American history -- and the embattled American present -- more comprehensible, and infinitely more accessible. --Brooke Allen
Brooke Allen is the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers; Twentieth-Century Attitudes; and Artistic License. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, The Nation, and more.
MUSICOPHILIA, by Oliver Sacks.
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species.
Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people--from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with "amusia," to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds--for everything but music.
Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson's disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer's or amnesia.
Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.
Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people--from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with "amusia," to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds--for everything but music.
Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson's disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer's or amnesia.
Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.
LONE SURVIVOR, by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson.
Four US Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July, 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Their task was to document the activity of an al Qaeda leader rumored to have a small army in a Taliban stronghold. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS made it out alive.
This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history. His teammates fought valiantly beside him until he was the only one left alive, blasted by an RPG into a place where his pursuers could not find him. Over the next four days, terribly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell crawled for miles through the mountains and was taken in by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to keep him safe from surrounding Taliban warriors.
A born and raised Texan, Marcus Luttrell takes us from the rigors of SEAL training, where he and his fellow SEALs discovered what it took to join the most elite of the American special forces, to a fight in the desolate hills of Afghanistan for which they never could have been prepared. His account of his squadmates' heroism and mutual support renders an experience for which two of his squadmates were posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism that is both heartrending and life-affirming. In this rich chronicle of courage and sacrifice, honor and patriotism, Marcus Luttrell delivers a powerful narrative of modern war.
This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history. His teammates fought valiantly beside him until he was the only one left alive, blasted by an RPG into a place where his pursuers could not find him. Over the next four days, terribly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell crawled for miles through the mountains and was taken in by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to keep him safe from surrounding Taliban warriors.
A born and raised Texan, Marcus Luttrell takes us from the rigors of SEAL training, where he and his fellow SEALs discovered what it took to join the most elite of the American special forces, to a fight in the desolate hills of Afghanistan for which they never could have been prepared. His account of his squadmates' heroism and mutual support renders an experience for which two of his squadmates were posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism that is both heartrending and life-affirming. In this rich chronicle of courage and sacrifice, honor and patriotism, Marcus Luttrell delivers a powerful narrative of modern war.
QUIET STRENGTH, by Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker.
Tony Dungy's words and example have intrigued millions of people, particularly following his victory in Super Bowl XLI, the first for an African American coach. How is it possible for a coach--especially a football coach--to win the respect of his players and lead them to the Super Bowl without the screaming histrionics, the profanities, the demand that the sport come before anything else? How is it possible for anyone to be successful without compromising faith and family? In this inspiring and reflective memoir, Coach Dungy tells the story of a life lived for God and family--and challenges us all to redefine our ideas of what it means to succeed. Includes a foreword by Denzel Washington and a 16-page color photo insert.
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