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October 1, 2008

Last week Shelf-Awareness, an online daily newsletter for the book industry, carried this thoughtful list of titles providing deeper insight into what's in today's headlines:

As Wall Street waits for a rescue, booksellers and librarians are highlighting titles to help consumers understand how things could go so bad and how the mess might be cleaned up. Quite a few authors anticipated the current crisis. Among the highest-rated, gilt-edged titles:

THE NEW PARADIGM FOR FINANCIAL MARKETS: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, by George Soros (PublicAffairs, $22.95), published in May. Glen Robbe, trade book manager at the Stanford Bookstore, Stanford, Calif., said that the store has "done very well" with the book, which is "designed for lay people who are looking to learn more than what they're getting in newspapers."

THE TRILLION DOLLAR MELTDOWN: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, by Charles R. Morris (PublicAffairs, $22.95), published in March. Praveen Madan, co-owner of the Booksmith, San Francisco, Calif., noted that "with uncanny accuracy, Charles Morris predicted the current crisis and even estimated the magnitude of it. . . . Although the book does get a bit technical in some parts, most of it is written in such a way that even people without an advance finance degree can understand the basics."

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein (Picador, $16), published in paperback in June. Glen Robbe of the Stanford Bookstore called this title "prescient." He called the hardcover book trailer for the book "so compelling that you can't not want to read the book after seeing it."

FINANCIAL SHOCK: A 360-Degree Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis, by Mark Zandi (FT Press, $24.99), published in July.  Chief economist and co-founder of Moody's Economy.com, Zandi "called the mess before it happened," Maureen Montecchio, community relations manager at Barnes & Noble in Devon, Pa., said. "The book is written in layman's terms. As my sister the stockbroker put it to me, 'Even you could understand it.' "

THE SUBPRIME SOLUTION: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It, by Robert Shiller (Princeton University Press, $16.95 ), published in August. Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten of 800-CEO-READ, the business book part of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, commented: "Shiller's work on housing values is well-known and originally established in Irrational Exuberance. This book describes pretty clearly the mortgage crisis we are in and offers some solutions to get out."

I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt., by Addison Wiggin and Kate Incontrera (Wiley, $19.95), published  September 29. Carol Hill, owner of Book Mine, Leadville, Colo., said that this book, written as a companion book to the documentary of the same title released in August, is "very readable, with the obvious advantage that it also provides a picture of where we are today. As the blurb on the back notes, it is 'defiantly nonpartisan,' including interviews with Warren Buffet, Alice Rivlin, Robert Rubin, Ron Paul, Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan and Paul O'Neill among others."

BAD MONEY: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, by Kevin Phillips (Viking, $25.95), published  in April. By the author of American Theocracy and American Dynasty, Bad Money notes that 20% of the economy is based on finance and if it is in trouble, it will have a major effect on the rest of the economy. Oh yes.

BEYOND GREED AND FEAR: Understanding Behavioral Finance and the Psychology of Investing, by Hersh Shefrin (Oxford University Press, $19.95), published last year. This book explains "the behavioral factors that guide the decision-making processes of Wall Street professionals."

For some understanding of the outlook of the current Fed chairman and his predecessor:

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE: Adventures in a New World, by Alan Greenspan (Penguin, $17), published in paperback earlier this month. Robbe of the Stanford Bookstore said that the paperback edition with its new epilogue includes "more information" from the former Fed chairman and "has some important things to say."

Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten of 800-CEO-READ noted that "many are laying the blame [for the crisis] at Mr. Greenspan's feet" and that Greenspan's epilogue outlines "his thoughts on the current crisis."

ESSAYS ON THE GREAT DEPRESSION, by Ben Bernanke (Princeton University Press, $29.95), published in 2004, offers "insight into what the current Fed chairman is thinking" and "reading his perspective on the last event of this magnitude may help understand what he does in this one," Covert and Sattersten noted.

For an understanding of other similar crises:

WHEN GENIUS FAILED: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, by Roger Lowenstein (Random House, $14.95), which first appeared in 2001. Glen Robbe said this story of the 1998 collapse of the hedge fund and the bailout organized by the Fed "foreshadowed what's going on today" and has "a really good narrative."

In a review, Todd Sattersten said that Lowenstein shows "how blind arrogance brought down the company and almost the entire financial system" and offers "a case study for how markets defy formulaic explanation." He added, "this was peanuts compared to the current crisis."

THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (Portfolio, $16), first published in 2003. In a review, Jack Covert of 800-CEO-BOOK wrote with foresight that Enron's failure could happen again "when you have hubris at the CEO level, sales peoples' compensation based on short term success, upper level people totally focused on growth to satisfy short term Wall Street success, an accounting system that supports this concept, and finally an accounting firm that doesn't do a good job of oversight. Add to this a deregulated industry and watch what happens."

A look at how high finance affects people far from Wall Street:

THE BIG SQUEEZE: Tough Times for the American Worker, by Steven Greenhouse (Knopf, $25.95 ), an April book. Aaron Curtis, quartermaster of the buying office at Books & Books in Florida, said the book, which includes suggestions and examples for improving the lot of working-class America, is "not Wall Street specific but very relevant."

Some titles arriving soon will garner a lot more attention than anticipated even a month ago. Among them:

THE PARTNERSHIP: The Making of Goldman Sachs, by Charles D. Ellis (Penguin Press, $37.95), coming October 7. Ellis is an investment banker and longtime strategy consultant to the investment bank that just this week sold a $5 billion stake to legendary investor Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway. Speaking of whom . . .

THE SNOWBALL: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder (Bantam, $35), appeared on Monday. A former insurance industry analyst and managing director at Morgan Stanley, Schroeder had full access to Buffett.

FIXING GLOBAL FINANCE, by Martin Wolf (Johns Hopkins University Press, $24.95). The publisher is just shipping copies of this book, which is by the associate editor and chief economics commentator for the Financial Times.

THE ASCENT OF MONEY: A Financial History of the World, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, $29.95), will be published November 13. Nathan R. Maharaj, category manager at Indigo Books & Music in Canada, says that this and the following book by Michael Lewis "may be the best reading" until a year from now, when, at the earliest, we will begin to see "the best books about the current crisis--the ones that are fundamentally great reading experiences, not just extended newspaper articles."

 

PANIC: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, by Michael Lewis (Norton, $27.95),  will be published December 1. Covert and Sattersten said this book about five recent meltdowns--the crash of 1987, the Russian default, the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble and sub-prime mortgage disaster--is "bound to be brilliant." Lewis wrote Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and more.

BERNANKE’S TEST: Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and the Drama of the Central Banker, by Johan Van Overtveldt (Agate, $26), will be published in January. The book is by a Belgian economist who argues that the mess confronting the Fed chairman was created by his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, and that Bernanke is well prepared for the current crisis.

BAILOUT NATION: How Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, by Barry Ritholtz (McGraw-Hill, $24.95), will be published in January. The title says it all.

 

September 23, 2008

Last night Annette Gordon-Reed came to Politics and Prose to talk about her new book, THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO and for both the book and the store, it was an event with a history.  I had first met Annette Gordon-Reed in 2001 at a very fancy dinner in New York given by Peter Osnos, the publisher of PublicAffairs Books, to honor Vernon Jordan, Annette, and the new memoir Annette had helped Vernon with, Vernon Can Read.

Vernon stood to tell the story about how, several years before, he had wanted to publish a memoir and although Vernon could read, Vernon couldn’t write, and he decided he would need some professional help.   So one Sunday afternoon he came to Politics and Prose to browse the shelves of our African-American section to look for a potential collaborator, and he carried home with him Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.  Last night Annette resumed the story, relating a telephone call from a man who said his name was Vernon Jordan, V-E-R-N-O-N and he was a lawyer who needed some help in writing a memoir. He went on to tell her that he had just read her new book about Sally Hemings that he had bought at Politics and Prose and was convinced that she was the best possible person to help.  Somewhere along the way Vernon Jordan must have done a lot of sugar-talking because Annette was already knee-deep in and fairly obsessed with the research for her new book, yet she put that aside for a couple of years to work on Vernon Can Read.
 
Last night Annette told this personal story and I talked about what an historic marker I feel her book, The Hemingses of Monticello, has created.  In 1802 a journalist, James Callendar, publicly charged that Thomas Jefferson had kept a slave, Sally Hemings, as a “concubine” and had fathered children by her. Periodically for the next 200 years these same allegations appeared, and it became a full-time industry for the establishment of white male American History teachers to strike them down.  Dumas Malone, the most revered Jefferson scholar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his six-volume biography of Jefferson, staunchly maintained the impossibility of any sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings because it would be inconsistent with Jefferson’s  moral character. Joseph Ellis, whose biography of Jefferson, American Sphinx, was awarded the National Book Award, likewise summarily dismissed the allegations as having no basis in fact, “a tin can tied to Jefferson’s reputation.” In 1998 DNA testing confirmed the likelihood of Jefferson paternity of at least one of the Hemings children, and Joseph Ellis has since done a lot of backsliding.  There is even a quotation from Ellis on the jacket of The Hemingses of Monticello: “[Gordon-Reed] demonstrates conclusively that we must put aside Gone with the Wind forever and begin to study Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”  
 
 When I introduced Annette Gordon-Reed last night, I told the audience that I hoped they would recognize the accomplishment and courage of our author, who persisted in challenging a white male history establishment that for 200 years refused to even entertain the possibility of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and a slave, and who won awards and prizes for such a stance, while Annette’s earlier Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings received mostly scathing reviews from the male historians until the DNA discovery.  
 

September 18, 2008

A new biography of Roald Dahl, THE IRREGULARS, highlighting the wartime years he spent in Washington, is a wonderfully colorful accounting of an otherwise checkered life. Recruited by the famous Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, whose code name was Intrepid, Dahl charmed and seduced a flock of rich and/or beautiful and/or powerful young Washington figures, including Clare Booth Luce and Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, who was also having an affair with Ian Fleming. Part of Roald Dahl's spying mission was to report all such pillow talk as well as to manufacture useful rumors. Beyond the bedrooms, Dahl was a frequent guest of Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park and the White House and a regular guest at the dinner parties frequently given at Evelyn Walsh McLean's mansion, Friendship. Being a good spy, Dahl faithfully relayed to his superiors—including Isaiah Berlin—the political and diplomatic gossip from cocktail conversations with the power elite. Despite such shaky espionage operations, the intelligence network, officially known as British Security, succeeded in securing America's support in the British war effort.

Jennet Conant, the author of this new biography, has done all her homework well. While noting that spies are "notoriously unreliable narrators,” she has nevertheless had access to a treasure trove of papers. She has previously written about Alfred Loomis in Tuxedo Park and Robert Oppenheimer in 109 East Palace and both books have well showcased her research and writing skills.

August 28, 2008

I've so much enjoyed the poet Donald Hall's new memoir, UNPACKING THE BOXES (Houghton Mifflin, $24), but it's not for everyone.  I'm rating it PG-60.  Under that age you're much too young to appreciate such a richly lived life. Hall recounts his childhood on a New Hampshire dairy farm, moves through his first summer at Bread Loaf as a sixteen-year-old, where he met Robert Frost, and goes on to Harvard where he studied poetry with John Ciardi.  Two of his fellow students there were Edward Gorey and Frank O'Hara. About Ciardi, Hall says, "As his wealth increased so did his girth, while his poetry and his literary reputation lapsed downward."  Hall loves to gossip and his little asides contribute to the delight of this book. A year at Christ Church ("the party school”) in Oxford expanded his literary circle to include George Plimpton, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin.  In the later part of his life he married poet Jane Kenyon, some 20 years younger than he.  She died much too young, in her forties, of leukemia, and in  the latter part of his book he writes about grief with the same elegance and pathos that Joan Didion does in The Year of Magical Thinking. 

August 20, 2008

With September on the horizon, the fall books are just beginning to come in. Last week I grabbed a copy of a new book I had been waiting for, MS. HEMPEL CHRONICLES, out of a Harcourt box.  This is a new work of fiction by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum who was a National Book Award finalist for her earlier novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping.  Bynum teaches writing at the University of California, but nothing prepared me for how funny and endearing her portrait of Beatrice Hempel is.  If I tell you that Ms. Hempel is a middle school English teacher, please don't lose interest. You will never meet anyone so funny, so tough, and perhaps jaundiced as Ms. Hempel is in dealing with a classroom of adolescents. I frequently have a let-down feeling that a new book is less than it was cracked up to be, but in this case my expectations were surpassed.

I can't leave August without telling you about my great find, my nomination for the best summer sleeper,

TOUCHING HISTORY: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies over America on 9/11.  The book is written by Lynn Spencer, a first-time author, Duke graduate, and commercial pilot.  To call this book riveting would be an understatement. After I started reading it, I struggled to stop for meals and sleep.  It's awfully unsettling, too: the rumors and the chaos in the skies from lack of communication or inaccuracy of information are hard to fathom.  Those of us watching CNN that day knew more than the control towers and the FAA knew.  Lynn Spencer does a tremendous job of recreating the confusion of all the flight crews grasping to understand what was happening.  I'll be giving many copies of this as gifts at holiday time, the perfect book for those who are not necessarily good readers.

In the News:Shuja Nawaz,author of the recent book, CROSSED SWORDS: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, appeared the other  night on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, along with Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars, to talk about the implications of Musharref’s resignation.  Nawaz's book remains the best background reading available for Pakistan’s internal affairs.

 

Paul Theroux's pan-Asian journey, as recounted in GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR, provided him a preview of the trouble to come in Georgia.  Traveling through Tbilisi and Gori, Theroux describes the population as "Russiaphobic, mildly discontented, riven by dissent over the breakaway province of Abkhazia."  Whatever the hostility, it was well reciprocated by the Russians, who had recently cut off Georgia’s supply of natural gas during one of the severest winters in memory.  Paul Theroux will speak about Ghost Train to the Eastern Star on Tuesday, September 23, 7 p.m. at P&P.

August 13, 2008

This past weekend, I picked up a book from our front display shelves that looked just right for a short weekend—182 pages. Carla and I had selected the title to be put up front, faced out, when we placed the initial order, but that was back in June, and I have no recollection of this title or author because my attention now is focused on a steady stream of sales reps who are selling books that will not arrive until sometime between January and April 2009, when I also will probably have no recollection of having selected them. We are always operating in three time zones: the present, what we have on the shelves; the future, those books we’ve ordered and that will arrive when they are published; and the past, books that we ordered some time ago, in larger quantities than our customers wanted, and that we are now returning.

But I'm digressing.  My choice of a weekend book was not arbitrary. I was relying on some prescreening done by Henry Holt, a Mercedes-quality publisher with a long track record of top-quality books, both fiction and non-fiction. The title of this book that kept me reading, and rereading, over the weekend is THE LIMITS OF POWER,

subtitled, "The End of American Exceptionalism," and it's written by an author whom I have not previously been familiar with, although he came to Politics and Prose in 2005 to talk about his then-new book, The New American Militarism.  His name is Andrew J. Bacevich and he graduated from West Point, served in Vietnam in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. Currently he is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

At the close of every chapter I read, I put another name on my list of people  to give this book to—not to evangelize, not to politicize, but just to add another perspective on American History since the end of the Cold War.  His publisher describes him as a conservative but Bacevich doesn't pull any punches when evaluating the presidents since the Cold War, and Reagan and George W.  are the targets of his harshest shots.

The most mind-stretching part of Bacevich's fresh perspective on political, social, and military history since the '50s is his evocation of the work of Reinhold Neibuhr. Neibuhr was a prominent theologian and activist,  but, more importantly, he was a thoughtful and clear-headed social critic, writing in the ‘30s into the ‘70s.   As Bacevich writes, Neibuhr, a “prophet…warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history’—born of a peculiar combination of arrogance and narcissism—posed a potentially mortal threat to the United States."  Contrast this with a quote from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, which Bacevich describes as the prevailing view in the Bush adminstration after 9/11: "We have two choices.  Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live.  We choose the latter." 

Bacevich describes America currently as being in both political and military crisis, a situation stemming from a changed personal definition of liberty.  Freedom, he says,is now "just another word for many things left to buy."  Coupled with this is the "gross incompetence of those who preside over the federal apparatus, [which] is appalling and unacceptable.  Although our all-volunteer army carries with it the American public's choice, it removes service from public duty and just pays others to do it for us, like mowing the lawn.  The senior American military leadership has been woefully lacking since the end of the Cold War, most recently in Iraq."

Bacevich makes very clear that these problems have existed for the last five decades under both Democrats and Republicans, and he warns against the delusion of imagining that any presidential candidate will accomplish decisive action on any of the major crises addressed during the campaign.  It's a very sobering and cautious assessment of America's role in the world today, and it's not a pretty picture, but this is a book that will stimulate your thinking.

August 7, 2008

The grand master of travel writing, Paul Theroux, has a new account of an old journey. Thirty-three years ago Theroux traveled the classic trains of literature: the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian Express, the Mandalay Express, and many more, on an epic journey that he recounted in The Great Railway Bazaar. Some three decades later that book remains in print. GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR, his 13th volume of travel writing, recounts a journey in which Theroux had planned to retrace his Railway Bazaar steps, to see how the world had changed, and how he had changed, too.

Some of the most momentous changes were reflected as logistical problems: turmoil in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan prevented Theroux from repeating those legs of his journey. However, a massive engineering event, the excavation of the channel tunnel, allowed his train to transverse the English Channel in just 22 minutes.

For me, although he doesn't belabor the point, Theroux's appeal lies in his awareness of and reflection upon the parallels between our periodic geographical meanderings and our lifelong  journeys into our own interior. While he writes that so many writers have never revisited their past journeys,  he also writes of  "the way the unvisited past is always looping in your dreams."   In the end, he decides that he needs to understand the natural transformation of the earth, which he describes as decay, and the natural transformation within himself,  a journey of aging that will end in darkness but which has led him to the fourth-dimension insight that arrivals and departures are synonymous.

I enjoyed this book tremendously.  Whether Theroux is writing about local color, grousing about bores in the dining car, or incredulously describing a stroll through the  flourishing red-light district of Singapore, where the watchful government eye winks at alcohol, tobacco, and prostitution, very little escapes his radar.

July 30, 2008

Going on vacation? Traveling by car? If you're the one behind the wheel, you'll probably curse all the crazy drivers out there, but, surprise!—they may be cursing you, too. Recent studies have revealed that most drivers, when asked to compare themselves to "average drivers," inevitably answered that they were better than that. The reason for this imbalance in perceptions of driving proficiency may be the widespread condition called "metacognition," meaning we are incapable of realizing how unskilled we are.

I learned all this in a fascinating new book called TRAFFIC: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), written by a Brooklyn journalist with a 2001 Volvo, Tom Vanderbilt. He includes lots of little conversational bits, such as that in the New York of 1867, there were more pedestrians killed by horses (about four a week) than are killed by automobiles today. Or this: the legendary traffic commissioner of New York in the ‘60s, Henry Barnes, observed in his memoir that "traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a physical and mechanical one."

If you have started making a mental list in the last two minutes of all the bad drivers you know, into whose hands you can put this book, starting with your spouse and your children, go first to Chapter Two : Why You're Not as Good a Driver as You Think You Are. In a 2006 survey, significantly higher numbers of people believed that, "if I ruled the road, it would be a better place," than was the case in 1982. Vanderbilt cleverly discusses how most drivers fail to learn from their mistakes (tickets or accidents). The ticket is usually dismissed as bad luck or a bad cop, and the simple labeling of collisions as "accidents," implies blamelessness. You'll find lots of good information as well as lots of enjoyment in Traffic, and if Vanderbilt has succeeded in delivering his message, you'll reflect on it rather than urging it on all the bad drivers you know.

July 24, 2008

I'm almost finished reading Jane Mayer's superb new book, THE DARK SIDE, and on many pages I'm running into other authors who have already shared their books at Politics and Prose: Ron Suskind, Tyler Drumheller, Peter Bergen, Seymour Hersh, Michael Scheuer, Richard Clarke, and Steve Coll. Mayer is extremely well versed in all that has been written about Guantánamo detainees and adds a sordid mass of damning details to all that we've known before. If you are following this week's detainee military tribunal of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, you'll be interested to know that this high-profile, lead-off defendant was dismissed by the Bush Administration, according to The Dark Side, as "some two-bit driver for Bin Laden." Jane Mayer will be here to talk about her new book on Thursday evening and we should have a lively discussion in light of the military judge's ruling this week that confessions elicited with force and/or coercion will not be admitted into evidence.

 

 

July 17, 2008

Ethan Canin spoke Monday night, and read from his new book, AMERICA AMERICA. Although modest in manner, he is a tremendous speaker and reader. Ron Charles, writing in the Washington Post’s “Book World,” opined, “We’ve waited a long time for a worthy successor to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and it couldn’t have arrived at a more auspicious moment than this season of potentially epochal political change.” (To read more of this review, click here.) Canin unabashedly revealed that he had never read Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel, but that the review had aroused his curiosity sufficiently that he is reading it now.

I remarked in introducing Ethan Canin that Corey Sifter, the narrator in his new novel, reminded me of Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, a character made so haunting by Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. Again, and with good humor shared by all, Ethan Canin confessed he had neither read the book nor seen the movie. Nevertheless, even without all these possibilities of influence by other writers, I think his new novel, America America is stunning, the best fiction I’ve read this summer. We had the large audience that Canin deserves last night and I hope his book will find him new fans.

 

July 10, 2008

On June 25 we had a packed store to hear the Washington-based Pakistani journalist Shuja Nawaz talk about his new book, CROSSED SWORDS: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within. Widely praised as a definitive study, this book is absolutely essential in understanding domestic politics within Pakistan as well as Pakistan’s foreign relations, especially with the United States and Afghanistan. This newly published book is already number two on the bestseller list in India.

Barbara Crossette, the former South Asia Bureau Chief for the New York Times, says about Crossed Swords that "this exceptionally authoritative book, rich in insider history, could not have come at a better time as a key to understanding the underlying power structures of Pakistan as it struggles to find its place in the world." Another prominent Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, describes his colleague's book as the "most well-researched and lucidly written book of its kind." The Economist has already featured Crossed Swords (for the review, click here), and in the near future The New York Review of Books will carry a review by William Dalrymple, who has already praised the book for its timeliness and significance.

General Pervez Musharraf, Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto, they're all here among the dramatis personae who appear in this gripping historical narrative filled with conspiracies, deceptions, and assassinations. When I introduced Shuja Nawaz's talk here at the store, I said I thought this was a very important book, and each day when I read the newspaper, I sense its still-growing importance.

June 11, 2008

This past Saturday we had one of my favorite journalists writing about Islamic extremists, Ahmed Rashid, who came to talk about his new book, DESCENT INTO CHAOS: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Rashid, who lives and works in Lahore, has spent 30 years reporting on Central Asia, and what has always made his books so interesting is his direct witness to most of the events, and his interviews with key political players inside and outside the world of Muslim extremism. Rashid, who speaks passionately about his subjects and weeps at their untimely deaths, has obviously developed nerves of steel to report from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where warlords have their private fleets of tanks and warfare is stratified by generation. There are some elders on camels but most of the Afghan tribesmen and Taliban wage war in fleets of hundreds of pickup trucks or motorbikes. The amounts of money that change hands to pay for all this mechanized mayhem is unbelievably huge; Ismael Khan, an Afghan warlord, earned three to five million dollars a month in customs revenue from opium. In the course of this book, the CIA hands out hundreds of millions to fighters who seem to be extremely flexible, siding where the money is.

Rashid is passionate about how the United States in general, and the Bush administration in particular, has squandered every opportunity to dampen Muslim rage, and as a result, he reports, an immense hatred of America permeates every level of Pakistan society. Moreover, relations between the U.S. military and the Pakistan army, critical allies in the war on terror, are at their worst point since 9/11. Despite the bleakness of Central Asia that Rashid describes, this is an interesting and important book for all readers who want more understanding of the stakes in the war on terror.

June 5, 2008

Barbara Carpenter looks at former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan's memoir at Politics and Prose in Washington. (By Alex Wong -- Getty Images)

What a week we've had! Bush press secretary Scott McClellan's new exposé,
WHAT HAPPENED, was not supposed to go on sale until June 2, but a Politico journalist bought the embargoed book from a Washington bookstore (not us) and scooped it online last Wednesday, May 28. Immediately, we were inundated by calls from reporters trying to find a copy of the book. Until about noon we honored the embargo, but then a call came from Public Affairs, McClellan’s publisher, that they had dropped the embargo date and we could sell the book. For the next few days cameramen and reporters—everyone from Swiss TV to the Associated Press—were all over the place here. You may have seen the picture in the Washington Post showing the book on sale on our front table; the New York Times and National Public Radio also carried stories about the McClellan book’s sales at Politics and Prose. In the midst of all this frenzy, don't lose sight of Scott McClellan's author talk here, next Tuesday at 7 p.m.

In addition to selling McClellan this past week, we were also deeply involved with Benchgate, the firestorm caused by our plaintive email last week about the District inspector telling us that the 12-year-old bench was illegal and had to go. So many of our loyal customers rallied in support, calling us, calling the District Building, and attempting to email Advisory Neighborhood Comissioner Winstead.

There was one surprisingly bright spot, a telephone call from the District of Columbia explaining that we need to have a permit for the bench and detailing the steps we need to take to get that permit. Councilwoman Mary Cheh dropped by to offer her assistance in applying for a permit. And now, because we are in the permit process, THE BENCH IS BACK. Thanks to everybody who gave their support for an island of ambiance on Connecticut Avenue.

May 29, 2008

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, I started reading Elizabeth Strout's OLIVE KITTERIDGE, which was a huge mistake, as it tied up the rest of the holiday, but a magnificent pleasure, as it was a book I couldn't put down. It's not a novel, so there is no compelling plot to keep you turning pages. Rather, Olive Kitteridge is a character who appears in each of the 13 short stories and weaves them all together, and it was my fascination with Olive that kept me glued to the book. Olive, a woman in her seventies with a husband and grown son, lives in the Maine coastal town of Crosby, a small community where all the residents' lives tend to overlap; some of these figures pop up in several stories as bit players, just like neighbors wandering in from next door.

Olive is a good, crusty Maine stalwart who can always skip the pleasantries, and with world-weary and hard-won wisdom and/or cynicism, cut right to the chase. Her battlefields encompass adult children, in-laws, steps, plus errant members of the community of Crosby. It was a frequently recurring wonder of mine in reading Olive Kitteridge how Elizabeth Strout, who is barely fifty, knows so well the mostly unspoken, and often unspeakable, running opinions about the goings on in Crosby. But there is another side to Olive, an empathetic and compassionate self, one that hungers to be needed and has the capacity to experience hope.

Read it, you'll love it.

May 21, 2008

Last summer I had a marvelous trip visiting archeological sites around the Black Sea, accompanied by an engaging archeologist whose name was Fred Hiebert. Fred invited me to have dinner with him one night so that he could tell me all about the upcoming National Gallery exhibit and its companion book, AFGHANISTAN: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul. He was so knowledgeable and so enthusiastic that it seemed like there would never be enough time to hear all about these new discoveries. Now Fred Hiebert is going to be unveiling that exhibit next week, the amazing discovery of Silk Road treasures thought forever lost, and his book, published by National Geographic, has just come into the store. It's gorgeous, as well as humbling, to see the artifacts of the cultural riches of Afghanistan's ancient civilization.

One of the other travelers on this trip kept a journal of our daily activities, something I wish I had had the self-discipline to do. If you're interested in the details, click here.

May 14, 2008

Last week the Council on Foreign Relations awarded the silver medal of the prestigious Arthur Ross Book Award to Trita Parsi for TREACHEROUS ALLIANCE a book that I read and promoted last summer, a very readable and informed analysis of the secret dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. A few of our customers took me to task for what they felt was an anti-Israel position.  When I passed this by Trita Parsi, he said he felt confident that there was no anti-Israel bias, because the book carried a positive quote from Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s former foreign minister ("brilliant interpretation"). 

The gold medal went to Paul Collier's THE BOTTOM BILLION, a study of why the world's poorest fifty countries have failed to benefit from traditional development programs. The Council on Foreign Relations Ross Book Award is given each year to the most significant book on international affairs.

In Memoriam: A note in my mailbox this morning signals the end of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. From Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "As of now, Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary."  Oxford currently sells the 20 volumes for $995, but the entire set is available on a single CD from Oxford for $295.  Most likely, at some point the value of the existing print sets will increase, just like another cultural artifact, the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

April 30, 2008

William Warner, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his book  BEAUTIFUL SWIMMERS: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay, died this past week peacefully in his sleep. Willy, as we knew him, was a true bookman with an ever-present curiosity, who pursued good writing in both fiction and non-fiction.  Until the past year he had been a frequent customer at Politics and Prose; always, when he was here, he was immediately noticeable as the most dapper and gentlemanly customer in the store.  And along with his sartorial splendor, he was unfailingly friendly and polite with all the booksellers and consistently modest about all his achievements. At Christmastime, Willy would arrive with his two daughters, Alexandra and Georgie, to load up on books for the whole extended family, and then they would stay for a sandwich in our coffeehouse downstairs. Alexandra reports that her father maintained a high-quality standard of life right up until the time he died.  This last week he had gone to his weekly exercise class and had a picnic on the Canal with his grandchildren. 

My favorite of Willy's books is Into the Porcupine Cave and Other Odysseys: Adventures of an Occasional Naturalist. It's typical of Willy, whose love of nature permeated his entire life, to low-ball the title with "occasional naturalist."  I could hear Willy's voice in every sentence of these ten essays, rambling through varied adventures in his life.  Kirkus Reviews described them as "elegant, low-profile, life shaping events in the outdoors."  When the  book was published in 1999, we featured Willy for an event in the store, and then sold hundreds of copies at what we call "offsites," a charmless word for bookselling outside of the store.  It was impossible to read any part of his musings without thinking of yet another person to buy his book for.

Everyone here at Politics and Prose will miss him.  His family is scheduling a memorial service for later in May.

April 16, 2008

We had two “perfect storms” this past week, Steve Coll talking about
THE BIN LADENS the same week that he had the lead piece in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” and Cokie Roberts, two days after she had been honored at the Library of Congress as a Living Legend—one of nine, and the only woman, to receive that award.

Another thing I loved this past week was the family side of three of our events: Roger Mudd brought a son and grandchildren; Steve Coll came with his wife, Susan (the author of three novels that we have hosted her for at P&P), along with his children. Cokie brought along her mother, the always gracious Lindy Boggs, most recently our ambassador to the Vatican and, before that, a member of Congress from New Orleans after her husband Hale’s plane disappeared in Alaska. Lindy Boggs, as well as Cokie, is a direct descendant of one of the LADIES OF LIBERTY at the center of Cokie’s new book, Dolley Madison.

Today, Tuesday, Cokie, at the invitation of President and Mrs. Bush, will be riding with them on the trip out to Andrews Air Force Base to greet Pope Benedict. Lindy Boggs will meet with him later in his visit. One of the true pleasures of our time at Politics and Prose is the amount of “family” we have accumulated over the years, not only with our booksellers, but also with so many of our customers and authors.

Posted April 9th, 2008

We had a wonderful event for poet Jane Shore and her new collection, A YES-OR-NO ANSWER, on Saturday evening with many members of the local poetry community turning out. One little-known patch at Politics and Prose are the seven shelves downstairs filled with remaindered bargain poetry. There's a large range of poets, from Homer to Edward Hirsch, Donald Justice, Richard Wilbur, Jorie Graham, and many more. The hardcovers sell for around $5.98.

And while you are downstairs, take a look at the remaindered children's books.

There's Conn Iggulden's DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS on 3 CDs, originally priced at $24.95, now for sale at $11.98; Terry Pratchett's HAT FULL OF SKY, a hardcover book originally $16.99, now $7.98; and Sarah Weeks's JUMPING THE SCRATCH, a hardcover book originally selling for $15.99, now $4.98. Birthday parties, school libraries, camp trunks—I can think of many, many places where these reasonably priced and popular titles are perfect fits.

Posted April 2nd, 2008

Saturday we had an impressive talk by Charles Lane about his new book,
THE DAY FREEDOM DIED, the story of the Colfax Massacre, which took place on Easter Sunday in 1873.  The incident had all but disappeared from history until Lane started on lengthy research in order to write this book.  One of our booksellers here at Politics and Prose graduated from high school in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1970, and has no recollection of the massacre being taught in any American History course. Colfax is 15 minutes away from Alexandria. At least 80 black American men, former slaves, were brutally murdered in just a few hours by white vigilantes from Grant Parish, Louisiana.  Today there still stands a monument to the three white men killed that day :”the Heroes…Who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.”  I like to think of Charles Lane’s book as a tribute to all those who lost their lives not only in the massacre, but due to other brutalities that took place during “Reconstruction.”  One of the strengths of Lane’s book is how he weaves the narrative of events into the larger judicial and legislative fabric of the nation, ending in an almost complete eradication of any racial justice for African Americans throughout the South by the beginning of the 20th century.

This book has been wonderfully reviewed and deserves a wide audience. Publishers Weekly calls it “lucidly written, thoroughly readable, carefully documented, and impressively coherent.” 

(order an audio cd of this talk here.)

Posted March 26, 2008

When Politics and Prose opened in 1984, we heard many customers talk about a wonderful independent store in Ann Arbor, Michigan; they expressed the wish that we would become like that store: Borders.  In the early’90s Borders became a publicly traded company, and as part of an aggressive national expansion, opened its first bookstore in the Washington area, on Rockville Pike across the street from its present location.  During those first months of its bookselling, large numbers of bibliophiles made the trek out to the Pike to visit this new “book heaven.”  George Will wrote in his op-ed column that, “at last Washington has a world-class bookstore,” and Jonathan Yardley swooned over the breadth of the selection.  News articles described how history professors were in charge of the history sections and scientists were stocking the physics and nature sections.  It all sounded too good to be true.

Several years later, the professors had returned to the classrooms, the scientists to their labs, and Borders booksellers became entry-level retail clerks.  The books that didn’t sell quickly enough to generate revenue were returned to their publishers.  But there was still a hint of quality, until the last several months, when Borders announced plans to actually shrink their inventory.

This past week Borders announced a shift in direction from selling books to selling the whole business.  Rumors in the press suggest that the nation’s second largest book chain may be bought by the nation’s largest, Barnes and Noble, taking Borders from the "book heaven" of 16 years ago to its present "book hell."

What does all of this mean for Politics and Prose?  Not an awful lot.  Our business flattened for the first couple of years of Borders’s presence in the area, but since then it has grown steadily.  Our new general manager, Tracey Filar Atwood, grew up in Ann Arbor and says Politics and Prose now reminds her of Borders then.  We have never been tempted by the allure of corporate imperialism—invading new book markets, slashing prices, demolishing the competition, and then back to business as usual, poor inventory and poor customer service.

One reason we have been so averse to the idea is that we are exposed on a daily basis to the rigors of being a corporate customer.  SunTrust is across the street from us and CVS is next door.  Their customers come in here crying or shaking with rage over the inability to find anyone who works in these businesses that has any discretionary power to address a problem.  So Politics and Prose will stay right here, doing what we do best—providing a top-quality selection of books and first-rate customer service. Yes, we do bookkeeping also, but it hasn’t taken over from our mission to offer enjoyable and/or important books to our customers,

Posted March 19, 2008

IN THE PERIODICALS

Check out the new edition of the New York Review of Books for a long glowing review by Max Hastings of our own Rick Atkinson’s DAY OF BATTLE, his second volume in a three-part history of the Italian campaign in World War II. Also, a long narrative by William Dalrymple, who spoke last year about his monumental biography, THE LAST MUGHAL,  describes  the current political landscape in Pakistan.   Dalrymple  refers to "an important new book" by Pakistani journalist Shuja Nawaz, CROSSED SWORDS: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, which contains much of relevance to today’s events.  I read an advance copy of this new Oxford volume with great fascination.  Nawaz will be speaking at Politics and Prose when the book is released in June.

The New Yorker recently carried an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir  by Honor Moore about her father, the late Bishop Paul Moore, THE BISHOP’S DAUGHTER.  Ten years ago Paul Moore came to Politics and Prose to talk about his memoir, PRESENCES: A Bishop’s Life in the City.  We have several remaindered copies at $9.98, as well as several remaindered copies of Honor’s memoir of her grandmother, THE WHITE BLACKBIRD, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996.  Both books are now out of print.

I read an advance galley of The Bishop’s Daughter last month and I was astounded to learn about a whole new side of Bishop Moore that we had never known in Washington.  It will remain controversial all year long about the literary correctness of Honor Moore’s writing such a revealing memoir of her father’s private life, but I felt that for Honor, who had a long difficult relationship with her father, her discovery of her father’s bisexual nature gave her something through which she could bond with an erstwhile distant presence.

Posted March 5, 2008

Monday night a large crowd packed the store to hear E.J. Dionne talk about his new book, SOULED OUT: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. One of the great delights of running a bookstore, especially a bookstore in Washington, D.C., is watching a political author mature while he absorbs and ruminates on each administration's successes and follies, and I have been an E.J. watcher since the time he became a columnist for the Washington Post in 1993. During this period he has also become a professor at Georgetown University, as well as a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

It's not only that E.J. is so creative in his thought processes, but he also seems to chew on each thought just like a cow on its cud. During that cogitating, E.J. also seems to seek out an abundance of colleagues on whom to test out his ideas. There can't be many people, if any, that E.J. won't allow at the table. A liberal Catholic, he respectfully entertains opinions from Muslims, Jews, etc.—the whole spectrum—even the atheists. If there is one attribute E.J. has that shines on extra wattage, it is his humility in seeking and responding to every possible opinion on whatever is his current subject of interest. But he's no saint. E.J. ended his talk Monday night with a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr: "The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteous in the righteous is to be overcome." And then there was a final coda of his own:" We must realize that self-righteousness is the enemy of righteousness, and that hope is the virtue on which faith and love depend."

(to order a CD of this talk click here.)

Posted January 1, 2008

I spent an enjoyable New Year's Day reading the perfect “resolutions” book, HELPING ME HELP MYSELF, by a quirky and amusing young San Francisco author, Beth Lisick. On January 1st, 2006, Lisick, as she describes it, “decided to pick twelve things I wanted to improve in my life, find the established guru in each field, and devote one month to each of them.” Her first step is a visit to the self-help section of her local bookstore where she finds a good shelf-full of some of the mentors she will select: Suze Orman on money management, Julie Morgenstern on organizing, Stephen Covey on successful work habits, Richard Simmons on exercise, and Deepak Chopra on spiritual development.

Writing that, “one of my hugest annoyances in life is when people act like they know what they're talking about when they don't,” you can just imagine the leap of faith she needs to be a good disciple with an open mind. But that doesn't prevent her from some wonderful observations, like the quote on the jacket of Chopra's latest book, LIFE AFTER DEATH, “a must-read for everyone who will die.”  (Incidentally, Chopra will be coming to Politics and Prose in February for THE THIRD JESUS.) Was 2006 a year of positive change for Lisick? Read the book and you'll be surprised by its ending.

One of the books that Lisick found at her local bookstore was Julie Morgenstern's ORGANIZING FROM THE INSIDE OUT, which has been a staple for years for the organizing experts. This past month, on some of the many lists of “Best Books of 2007,” Peter Walsh's IT’S ALL TOO MUCH kept popping up. Walsh, a professional organizer, says our quest for organization is “a deeply personal  response to the feeling that the rest of the world is out of control.” There are a lot of us who can relate to that, along with the complaint Walsh hears over and over, the dominion of “stuff” and how it saps our lives of so much energy and enjoyment. Reading Walsh's plan for “living a richer life with less stuff” is a great way to begin 2008, and there's more good news—it's a new bargain book at the price of $6.98.

Posted December 11, 2007

At this time last year it seemed like every other phone call was a customer searching for SISTER BERNADETTE'S BARKING DOG: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, but the book was such a sleeper that the publisher was caught short; there were very few copies to be had. This year Harcourt has published SISTER BERNADETTE in paperback ($14.95) with a large enough printing that it should replace last year’s frustration with this year’s satisfaction. This book is the perfect present for all the language lovers.

For any frequent flyers on your list we have found the perfect present: AMERICA FROM THE AIR: A Guide to the Landscape Along Your Route (Houghton, $19.95).  This book is the ideal companion on any transcontinental flights, or shorter, identifying features along the way that are both natural and man-made. The ingenuity of the book design easily guides the passenger though 15 flight corridors which cover the most heavily traveled flight paths in the continental U.S. Best of all, there's a CD included that you can slip into a laptop in flight and use the aerial photos on your monitor to identify the features you are seeing below.

Posted December 4, 2007

Last week Carla and I did an interview for the WETA website’s Author, Author program, talking about our favorite gift ideas for the holidays. The interviews are scheduled to be online next week. Carla posted her choices last week and now here are mine. At the top of my list was Pierre Bayard's HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ, a wonderful send-up of literary pretensions. Near to the top is Nassim Taleb's THE BLACK SWAN, which should appeal to the Blink and Freakonomics crowd who want to think outside of the box. Also along this same line is Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein's PLATO AND A PLATYPUS WALK INTO A BAR: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, and I have just heard that a sequel, ARISTOTLE AND AN AARDVARK GO TO WASHINGTON: Understanding Political Doublespeak, will be published on December 19, just in time for Christmas. Only one novel was on my list, AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND, a whacky, tragic, and reflective look into our love of the written word.

Working down the list, I'm also plugging Oliver Sacks's MUSICOPHILIA, Arthur Schlesinger's JOURNALS, Steve Martin's BORN STANDING UP, and Daniel Walker Howe's WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. Finally, there are two gorgeous gift books this holiday season: David McCulloughs 1776: The Illustrated Edition, and National Geographic's JOURNEYS OF A LIFETIME, an armchair traveler's treasure-trove of 500 spectacular itineraries.

Posted November 27, 2007

This past week I finally got a chance to read Anne Enright's THE GATHERING, the contemporary Irish novel that recently won the esteemed Booker Prize. The prize obviously caught her publisher, Jonathan Cape, off guard, so many of us had to wait several weeks until copies were reprinted. It's a beautifully told story, but very sad; it's also a complicated book that can be interpreted in many different ways, which makes it a good selection for book groups.

In searching for some of the many interpretations of The Gathering, I stumbled upon my greatest cyberspace discovery this year, a wonderful web site: www.themanbookerprize.com. This web site includes a rich archive that stretches back to 1969, the year the Booker Prize was inaugurated, with all sorts of intriguing information about how the judges were chosen and a wide spectrum of opinion regarding the relative merits of the longlists and shortlists. (In August, the posted odds for this past year's Booker were running 3-1 in favor of On Chesil Beach.) But the best thing to click on is "Debate", a treasure trove of readers who loved or hated Booker nominees, and their reasons why, over the past 25 years. Whatever your opinion, you'll find someone here who agrees with you!

My favorite resting spot on this first visit was the narrative of Jamie Byng, the publisher of Canongate Books, about the selection process for an illustrator of the magnificent new edition of Yann Martel's LIFE OF PI. Tomislav Torjanac perfectly captures the mysterious and exotic encounters on this fantastical voyage. I already have selected five recipients for this treasure.

Originally written as an adult novel, Life of Pi was also appealing to young adults, but in this new edition with these glorious illustrations, it's a sure bet for any age, and it's in our Holiday Newsletter, 20 percent off to P&P members.

Posted November 20, 2007

This past weekend I read a book that was so delightful that I can think of at least a dozen people I could give it to for Christmas. Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris and a psychoanalyst, playfully teases our desires to be au courant with the publishing world in this new volume, HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ (Bloomsbury, $19.95). An important addendum: giving this book to someone who actually does not read would be a total waste; the best audience is voluminous readers.

I think that Jay McInerney writing in the New York Times Book Review (see here) approaches this savory treat much more seriously than the author ever intended. Previously, Bayard has written a small treasure called Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? in which he argues that the real killer was someone other than the one fingered by Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot. The most obvious clue to intention in this re-solving the crime is that Pierre Bayard likes to have fun.

Framed with an epigraph by Oscar Wilde, “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so,” Bayard introduces a list of scholarly abbreviations: Op. cit., ibid., followed by UB. SB, and HB (books unknown to me, books I have skimmed, books I have heard about) a new system of notation that he hopes will one day be widely adopted! He then proceeds  to argue that it is not only unnecessary to read books, it is also risky because in choosing one book to read, we have chosen not to read all the other millions of books that have been written. If we must read, skimming is an admirable activity, protecting the reader from getting lost in the details of an enriching experience.

Book groups especially should note Bayard's assertion that it is totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven't read—including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn't read it either. This is all great fun and I think Bayard would completely understand if we skim some of the denser, more Lacanian, chapters in the middle where we face the reader's danger of misunderstanding, which is far worse than not reading at all.

Posted October 23, 2007

Up until about three years ago, we were thrilled when an upcoming author got a mention in the City Paper or Washington Post, but in the last several years a seismic shift has occurred in public relations: it's called Comedy Central. It's amazing that even serious authors, who previously would have hoped for an interview on NPR, now visit Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert to promote their books. In the past month, Chris Matthews, Jack Goldsmith, Al Gore, Garry Kasparov, Paul Krugman, and John Mearsheimer have all risked sitting in the visitor's chair. Chris Matthews got roasted but Paul Krugman was so pleased with his talk with Stephen Colbert that he posted it on his web page. It's certainly an expansion of what we deem as entertainment: terrorist presidencies, corrupt and/or partisan politics, the Israel lobby. Howard Kurtz (he has also just appeared on the Daily Show) does a wonderful job in his new book THE REALITY SHOW in trying to sift through all the massive changes in the media that have taken us from Tom Brokaw (The Greatest Generation) to Jon Stewart, whose audience is growing while libraries are closing. Even Howard Kurtz doesn't know where this all will end.

Posted October 9, 2007

For the last two years Politics and Prose has seen Jon Stewart's AMERICA (The Book) fly out of here at a rapid rate, and today its contender has arrived in the store: Stephen Colbert's I AM AMERICA (And So Can You!). Don't ask me what the title means but maybe we'll find out in all the media appearances Colbert will be doing in the next couple of days: NPR's Fresh Air and All Things Considered, David Letterman, Larry King, and the list goes on and on. Will Carla and I read it? Will we name it one of the best books of 2007? The answer to both questions is no, but we will be happy to sell it to you at 20 percent off to members. We love to sell as many Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as we can because those sales allow us to promote a lot of midlist wonderful fiction and nonfiction whose authors will never be on all the big media shows but deserve to be read and savoured.

Posted September 25, 2007

Over the weekend, feeling the need for a good infusion of humor, I read through Nicole Hollander's new TALES OF GRACEFUL AGING FROM THE PLANET DENIAL, and I haven't laughed so hard since Nora Ephron's I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK. Hollander, who wrote the Sylvia comic strip for many years, has performed some of the material in this book as stand-up comedy and I could almost hear her as I read. 30 is the new 50, and despite the new youthful posture, she discovers in her fifties that she has been holding on to some love affairs way past their sell-by date, wasting valuable years of shelf-life. She gathers her girlfriends to mull over many of life's inequities like airports where men can get a shoe shine but women can't get a manicure. There's such a large arsenal here of Hollander verbal weapons waiting for the right moment to summon. Yesterday I read in the Washington Post that the new Bloomingdales, whose construction has disrupted my neighborhood and my life for two years, has announced its target clientele is women between the ages of 25 and 54, a territory I left some years ago. Maybe they'll stop me at the door unless I invite Nicole to go with me. We can storm the gates, declare that 34 is the new 54, that size 8 is the new 14, and $100 is the new $10. If you're over 50 and you need a laugh, this is a hilarious place to find it.

On a more serious note, there is no better background reading for what is going on at Columbia and the United Nations than Titra Parsi's TREACHEROUS ALLIANCE: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. We have loads of copies.

Posted September 19, 2007

We had a storeful of political junkies on Friday night to hear from John Dean, the White House special counsel to President Nixon, who then became the prosecution's star witness in Watergate. Frank Rich, Sr., raced up to the store right before Dean spoke to remind him of a night long ago in the late sixties when he had offered a ride from a meeting to a young man "who looked like he was nineteen." In the car, that young man told Frank Rich, Sr., that he was the special counsel to Nixon, and, in Frank's words, "I almost crashed into a streetlight!"

John Dean wanted everyone to know that he and Mo, the beautiful young blonde who sat through all his Watergate testimony on television, are still married. Then he launched into a passionate attack on the Bush administration for all that it has done to wreck the concept of constitutional government as we have heretofore known it. Quoting an old friend, John Dean said, "The government is truly broken, particularly in dealing with national security, and another four years, and heaven forbid not eight years, under the Republicans, and our grandchildren will have to build a new government, because the one we have will be unrecognizable and unworkable."

Posted September 12, 2007

An important new book recently arrived in the store: Trita Parsi's TREACHEROUS ALLIANCE: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. I read an advance galley of this book while I was on vacation in August, which was the perfect time—every time I felt I couldn't put it down, I actually had the leisure time to keep on reading. It sometimes reads like a whodunnit: in this case who's deceiving who? This book is so timely because of Parsi's belief that the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, based on faulty premises, have only served to strengthen Iran and squander any possibility of negotiation.

Dr Parsi, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and president of the National Iranian American Council, wrote his doctoral thesis on Israeli-Iranian relations under Francis Fukuyama and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski praises Treacherous Alliance as “a penetrating, provocative, and very timely study that deciphers how U.S. policy in the Middle East has been manipulated both by Iran and by Israel even as relations between these two oscillated between secret collusion and overt collision.”

We have limited signed copies available for purchase right now!

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