Gearing up for fall

No dilly-dallying: let’s get right to the important stuff. VegNews has a rave review of Skinny Bitch: Bun in the Oven (Running Press, 9780762431052) in the September/October issue: “Bursting with smarts and their classic sense of humor … With this sassy new tome, the authors give pregnant women everywhere a whole new reason to eat healthy….an entertaining read even if you’re not preggers, but it makes the perfect gift for a friend who is.” Keep in mind, there isn’t much else out there on vegan pregnancy. And even if you (or your customers) happen to be among the few who do not subscribe to VegNews (for shame!), consider that People Magazine has a feature in next week’s issue. And not for nothing has Running Press’s Craig Herman received marketing awards: there’s an arrangement now for Warner Bros. Home Video to release a trio of workout videos based on the Skinny Bitch brand, the first two of which will land this coming December. It is our understanding that WHV will be looking to package the DVDs to mimic the Skinny Bitch books, and it’s quite possible that the packages will be a DVD and a book bundle. One is called Skinny Bitch Fitness Bootcamp and the other is called Skinny Bitch Fitness: Body. Both DVDS will be 60 minutes and feature authors Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin performing the exercises. Warner Home Video is the supplier for those – unfortunately, I can’t fill the orders you’re sure to have. But we will cross market in each others’ packages. The empire grows!

The conventional wisdom is that Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times doesn’t like anything… so we were particularly pleased to see her strong endorsement of Farnaz Fassihi's Waiting for an Ordinary Day: the Unraveling of Life in Iraq (PublicAffairs, 9781586484750): “Powerful...[T]he volume’s intimate portraits of ordinary Iraqis, combined with its forthright account of what it was like to be a reporter covering the war, leave us with a devastating sense of the fallout that the American invasion and occupation have had on civilians’ daily lives.” You can read the full review at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/books/02kaku.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=farnaz%20fassihi&st=cse&scp=1

Not to get bogged down in Iraq or anything, but Linda Robinson will appear on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” on Wednesday to discuss Tell Me How this Ends: General Petraeus and the Search for a Way out of Iraq (PublicAffairs, 9781586485283). This follows the excerpt that appeared two weeks ago in US News and World Report. This weekend Ms. Robinson will have an essay in the Washington Post “Outlook” section, and CSPAN will air Brian Lamb’s interview. We also know that the book has been assigned for review in the New York Times Book Review – there will be good visibility on this, especially as people start to think about what to do now that the surge has surged.

Of course, it looks like the paramount election issue is the economy. I’ve mentioned before the terrific praise we’ve seen for Peter Gosselin’s High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families (Basic, 9780465002252). To which you can now add The Washington Post Book World’s recent review: “You might not expect a book on economic policy to be a page-turner, but Peter Gosselin’s High Wire is just that…Gosselin shows, in frightening detail, how our lives as Americans have become riskier over the last few decades.” A review is still to come in the New York Review of Books…and depending on how the campaign goes, maybe a lot more.

If you’re looking for something both a bit hipper and a bit more optimistic, you can turn to Lisa Chamberlain’s Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction (Da Capo, 9780786718849). She has been making the rounds of NPR affiliates in the past couple weeks, and will be a guest on the nationally syndicated show “To the Best of Our Knowledge” on September 14. Sandra Tsing Loh calls Ms. Chamberlain “A Suzy Orman for the Deconstructionist set, Chamberlain is witty, brainy, fabulous. A necessary addition to any collapsing IKEA bookshelf.” And in the next couple of weeks Newsweek will feature the book in their “Enterprise” supplement.

You’ve probably heard by now that shortly after she became mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, the current Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin tried to fire her town librarian; the offense, it seems, was a reluctance to ban some books. A well-timed story, I thought, considering that Banned Books Week is coming so soon (FYI: September 27-October 4 -- http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.cfm). It also got me thinking of Rick Wartzman’s Obscene in the Extreme: the Banning and Burning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (PublicAffairs, 9781586483319). Booklist has high praise in the current issue: “This case study of an attempt to censor John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath exposes the wrongheadedness of censorship in a way that more theoretical arguments often fail to do… This is a skillfully written, passionate book… Wartzman has really done his homework, and he tells the story dramatically, using character and dialogue to propel the narrative.” Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Scott Martelle pointed out that the book covers far more than censorship: “In these current times of bubbles and bursts, foreclosed-upon homes and entire industries confronting their own mortality, it’s good to have a fresh history such as this to remind us of what has gone on before, and to assure that the times will indeed change—eventually…. A skillfully drawn reminder of the human toll of deep poverty, intolerance and the unfettered whims of those who control the purse strings.” A big tour is in the works, up and down the coast, with an upcoming NPR appearance, and advertising in the NCIBA holiday catalog. Mr. Wartzman will even be at the NCIBA trade show – come by the Author Reception to say hello!

You’d expect that if anyone were to review Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier’s America Between the Wars: 11/9 to 9/11 (PublicAffairs, 9781586484965) it would be Foreign Affairs, and you’d be right: they called it “splendidly illuminating.” But even the Charleston Post & Courier says this is a book “you should have on your desk this summer”: “A wonderfully illuminating and timely expose…. It’s an eyebrow-raising, jaw-dropping, albeit entertaining review of the political climate and policy dynamics of an era in which politicians and statesmen clumsily joggled to define the nature of America’s role in an unprecedented global paradigm.”

It might not be your market…but then again it might: On December 7, Patrick Henry Hughes, author of I Am Potential: Eight Lessons on Living, Loving, and Reaching Your Dreams (Da Capo, 9780738212982) will perform and speak at the world-famous mega-church, the Crystal Cathedral, in Garden Grove, CA, at their 9:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. services. The former will be broadcast nationally on “The Hour of Power” television program on December 21, and they’ll mention the book (and flash the cover art) at least twice. The show is seen by 2 million viewers in the U.S. and Canada on Trinity Broadcasting Network and Lifetime TV (as well as local stations like California’s KCAL). As for the non-theists among you, recall that Mr. Hughes will have appeared on the Today Show on October 27.

Time for another hand-sell recommendation: have a look at Tycoon’s War: How America’s Richest Man Invaded a Country to Overthrow America’s Most Famous Military Adventurer, by Stephen Dando-Collins (Da Capo, 9780306816079). The Wall Street Journal just plain loved it: “A fascinating window into an era when the rules of industrial capitalism were in their infancy and gunboat diplomacy was standard operating procedure… Dando-Collins tells this tale well, bringing the events and the personalities to vivid life. The book reads almost as a densely detailed screenplay treatment for a hell of a movie…A terrific read.” You can see the full review at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122005706156685241.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. And I know not a lot of folks out here are likely to have seen the review in the Augusta Metro Spirit, but it’s an indication of how appealing the book is: “A classic story of conflict, desire, and the strive for success at all costs…Packed from cover to cover with greed and suspense, this book resonates with a contemporary America buried in a struggling economy where the rich buy yachts while the rest struggle to fill gas tanks…A gem of a tale.”

Matthew Goodman’s forthcoming The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (Basic, 9780465002573) is shaping up to be a sleeper – initial orders on this were modest, awaiting the read, but I can now say: it’s terrific. We just received a great advance blurb from Edwin G. Burrows, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham and author of our forthcoming Forgotten Patriots: “The Sun and the Moon is flat-out fascinating—not only for its brilliant reconstruction of one of the great newspaper hoaxes of the nineteenth century, but also for the Dickensian characters who populate its pages, each more outlandish and outrageous than the other.” And Kirkus agrees, giving it a starred review: “A delightful recounting of ‘the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism.’… Goodman consistently entertains with his tale of press manipulation, hucksterism and the seemingly bottomless capacity for people to believe the most outrageous things. Absolutely charming.” Like I said, most orders were low…but please consider bumping this one up: you’ll like it, and it’ll sell. I’m all out of galleys at the moment, but am expecting a new supply soon – let me know if you’d like me to send you one.

And since I mentioned it: Edwin Burrows’s Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (Basic, 9780465008353) was another book I loved selling this season, and the finished product does not disappoint. “In this tour-de-force of relentless research, keen interpretation, and elegant prose,” says Barnet Schecter, “Burrows has given us an engrossing, dramatic narrative that is also the definitive account of a monumental tragedy unknown to most Americans. By refusing to recognize captured Americans as legitimate prisoners of war, and despising them as ‘damn’d rebels,’ the British created a climate in which their commanders’ and jailers’ worst instincts had free reign, leading to atrocious suffering and possibly half of all American fatalities during the Revolutionary War. It’s a harrowing tale about the defiance of international norms of humanity, which speaks pointedly to the present.” And Ark of the Liberties author Ted Widmer agrees: “In Forgotten Patriots, Edwin Burrows has unearthed a treasure trove of history, in some cases literally. This vivid and compelling study shows that the P.O.W. is hardly a new phenomenon, but goes back to our origins as a nation.”

Curtis Roosevelt’s memoir Too Close to the Sun: Growing up in the Glorious Shadow of Franklin and Eleanor (PublicAffairs, 9781586485542) met with some befuddled stares when I presented it…but consider, if you will, what historian Joseph Persico has to say: “No one living today has had as intimate a personal relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt as his grandson, Curtis Roosevelt. Curtis was the favorite of FDR’s numerous grandchildren. He spent formative years living in the White House, a firsthand witness to history and the ever-fascinating relations among the Roosevelts. He is, fortunately, also enormously perceptive and articulate about the times and the people with whom he grew up.” It’s astounding how every season brings another Roosevelt book or 3; I feel confident saying none will have the perspective of this one.

Keep an eye out for A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam (PublicAffairs, 9781586484873). We just got a nice blurb for it from Michael Kinsley: “Alex Beam’s A Great Idea At the Time is a hilarious tale about academia, commerce, and middle class intellectual insecurity in mid-twentieth-century America. In Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, Beam has a comic character on the level of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. This would be one of the best campus novels in a generation, except that it’s all true.”

We’re still waiting on promised features in Greek America and Hellenic Voice, but in the meantime The Weekly Standard had a fantastic review of Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 (Basic, 9780465011193), calling it an “energetic and terrifically readable narrative of the events… Giles Milton’s account, by reason of its forthrightness, its brilliant use of hitherto-unseen archival Levantine sources, its feeling for the day-to-day life of the city, and its devastating quest for the hidden truth, seems also to lay to rest some of the ghosts of that shocking and shameful event.”

Let me take a moment to thank you again for your help keeping Scott McClellan’s What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception (PublicAffairs, 9781586485566) out there. Convention season has meant still more national attention for Mr. McClellan: “Fresh Air” re-aired their interview, and there were new reviews in the LA Times and on Politico.com. Even Stephen Colbert could no longer ignore the story, inviting Mr. McClellan to the Report just last week. Mr. McClellan’s next scheduled stop is “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday. He should be a good interview these days, considering the theme at the Republican National Convention seems to be “Washington is Broken.” Gee, I wonder who to blame for that.

As I made the rounds this season, I heard a lot of hesitation about how well the big gift books would do in the current straitened economic climate. I hear you. At the very least I can say that we’re working hard to get the word out about our marquee gift book, You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, by Richard Schickel and George Perry (Running Press, 9780762434183). Mr. Schickel will appear on “CBS Sunday Morning” on September 21, to discuss his book and the companion documentary. The next day he is slated to appear on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” The documentary will run as a five-part “American Masters” special on most PBS stations, beginning September 23. And we will be advertising in the SCIBA holiday catalog. I’ve seen the finished product, and I think it’s fair to say that it came out very well indeed – altogether gorgeous, and a lot of book for $50.

But if your cinephiles don’t have the scratch for such a large and magnificent gift, you can perhaps entice them with a paperback original: The B List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love (Da Capo, 9780306815669). On October 13, co-editor David Sterritt will be on “Talk of the Nation” for the full second hour to discuss B movies. The first trade review is in – not a publishing trade, but a cinema trade: Editor’s Guild Magazine calls it “A tome that will set nicely on the shelf beside your movie collection and provide rewarding reading as a supplement to the film viewing experience.” You don’t have to be a guild member to agree.

If you happen to be watching network television tomorrow, you’ll see “Stand Up to Cancer,” a one hour TV special to be broadcast on all three networks, simultaneously and commercial-free, hosted by Katie Couric, Charles Gibson, and Brian Williams. Errol Morris interviewed Robert Schimmel for the program about how cancer has affected his life – a subject he’s treated at length in Cancer on $5 a Day (Chemo Not Included) (Da Capo, 9780738211589). Later this year or early next Mr. Schimmel will have a new, one-hour special on Showtime. Even before then, though, it’s possible he’ll win the SCIBA award for best non-fiction book of the year. Talk about building momentum….

The New Republic recently featured a lengthy review of books about the crisis in Darfur (sadly still relatively ignored by politicians in this country). It leads with The Devil Came on Horseback by Brian Steidle with Gretchen Steidle Wallace (PublicAffairs, 9781586485696), calling it “the best written of the Darfur memoirs and the most politically astute.” That was nice to see, even if no one is really paying attention.

Ishmael Reed is mixing it up for Mixing it Up (Da Capo, 9781568583396): he has an essay in the August issue of Oakland Magazine, and got a strong review in the East Bay Express. But he’s not going to stop there! He’ll be appearing on the syndicated program “West Coast Live” (produced by San Francisco’s KALW) on September 13, and is part of the inaugural Berkeley Arts & Letters Series with an appearance scheduled for October 22.

Just about every science publication in the known four dimensions has committed to reviewing The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces by Frank Wilczek (Basic, 9780465003211), but the first words of praise to hit newsstands will be found in The Economist. It’s complicated stuff, and I think merits quoting the review at length: Mr. Wilczek “engages in a riveting dialogue with nature, using experiments and hypotheses as questions. He draws on recent developments in the special theory of relativity, quantum field theory and quantum chromodynamics (which accounts for the behaviour of quarks and which won Mr. Wilczek the Nobel prize in 2004) to arrive at a satisfactory answer about the origin of mass. In the process, he broaches some probing questions about the ultimate structure of physical reality, and about the prospects for a unified theory that would account for all its seemingly disparate aspects. The book offers not just some striking answers, but also a peek at the creative process that produces them. At its heart lies the continual tension between new consequences derived from existing mathematical formulae, their novel physical interpretations and the search for their discernible manifestations.” The result is “a thrilling read. In an endnote Mr Wilczek warns that the nitty gritty of quantum field theory is not for sissies. Nor is this book. But readers who are both doughty and patient will be rewarded with a glimpse of physics at its quirkiest and most illuminating.”

Let me include a strong word of praise for a small book (in terms of its likely market), but one I quite valued (and one I wish had a bigger market): MichaelAxworthy’s A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind (Basic, 9780465008889) has been getting very solid reviews, including one recently in ForeWard Magazine: “Readers are likely to share this reviewer’s sense that a fragmentary knowledge of Persian history suddenly, with the author’s engaging help, approaches a rounded picture—one well worth enlarging. It is hard to imagine a better treatment of Persia within a single volume than this.”

I don’t really see Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, by Jeffery Meyers (Basic, 9780465045716) having a gigantic audience either, alas; but my word is it getting strong endorsements, including advance praise from that notorious malcontent (and terrific writer) Paul Theroux: “This is a superb book, not only an intellectual history of one of English literature's greatest and most restless minds, but to me an incomparable portrait of a man who was physically an oddity and a marvel. Dr Johnson with his tics and his appetites and his lopsided wig is depicted with the full-blooded gusto he deserves.” Or the renegade anti-theorist Frederick Crews: “Jeffrey Meyers’s Samuel Johnson is the strongest of his many books. Its portrait of Johnson and his London is Hogarthian in its unsparing detail, but the grotesquerie is overmatched by Meyers’s sympathy for a writer whose handicaps and sorrows threatened his sanity at every turn. Too often, Johnson has been misperceived as a sententious bully. Meyers shows us, instead, a man whose wisdom sprang from misfortune, from a heroic will to prevail, and from intimate compassion with the wretched of the Earth.”

Although I could go on recommending books all day, I’ll stop after only one more: it should come as not surprise that we’ve been able to get some good advance praise for Between the Covers: the Book Babes’ Guide to a Woman’s Reading Pleasures by Margo Hammond and (Portland’s own) Ellen Heltzel (Da Capo, 9780738212296). Certainly some of the authors praised in its pages could be counted on to offer a recommendation, right? Okay, so it’s a structurally debased currency. Still I ask you to consider someone who struck me as an unlikely blurber, Andrei Codrescu: “I wouldn't normally and publicly praise a book I'm in, but in the case of these enthusiastic readers who devour books as if they were gorgeous and smart lovers, I'm making an exception. Any reader will be swept away by this swift and useful guide through life's dilemmas through literature. These two guides have read deeply and widely and their sure touch translates into practical and pleasurable uses for books. Trust them, they'll fix you right up, and they are cheaper than shrinks.”