from The Buffalo News

Having books in the home encourages reading and the lifelong love of learning.

Books for Kids drive is changing lives

Margaret Sullivan 

In my childhood home, my mother was in charge of birthday presents and what went under the Christmas tree. And she did it thoughtfully and well, month after month, year after year.

My father, by contrast, rarely got into the gift-giving business. But one Christmas when I was in high school, he came up with a spectacular present for his word-happy daughter: A full set of Shakespeare’s plays — four volumes, bound in red leather. More than three decades later, the books are within my line of vision, on the top shelf of a bookcase in my office. Nowthat was a gift with enduring value.

Two of the best possible gifts for children, I’m convinced, are the love of reading and the presence of books in the home. This is true now, in the Internet Age, every bit as much as it was in the 1970s when I got to know “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.”

In fact, it may be more valuable now than ever, since reading develops a child’s attention span, balancing the effects of the fast-flickering digital world that 21st century children increasingly live in.

Seeing my own children — both teenagers now — reading for pleasure has been one of the great satisfactions of motherhood for me. That’s because I know it has helped them, making them better students, more informed citizens and more interesting people.

I have no doubt that adult success is tied closely to childhood reading. This is true whether a child grows up in an affluent suburb or the inner city. It’s probably more important for those who lack other advantages.

But not every parent, and not every child, has the opportunity to make books — especially one’s own books — a part of everyday life.

In Buffalo, the nation’s second-poorest city, many families simply don’t have the money to buy books. Trips to the public library are wonderful, of course, and irreplaceable. But so is the presence of books that are owned by the family, or better yet, the child.

Study after study has shown that having books in the home encourages reading and the lifelong love of learning.

That’s where an effort called Books for Kids comes in.

[ click to read full article at The Buffalo News ]

From the Los Angeles Times

BOOK REVIEW

‘Bonk’ by Mary Roach

The scientific exploration of human sexuality.

By Tara Ison

April 20, 2008

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
by Mary Roach

W.W. Norton: 288 pp., $24.95

What Mary Roach won’t do for a book! In her delicious “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” Roach hung out with severed heads in a dissection lab, sniffed around a body farm (more politely known as a forensic anthropology facility) and studied smashed corpses donated for automobile-crash research — all to aid her investigation of an aspect of existence most of us prefer to ignore.

Now, in “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,” Roach has chosen a topic that is perhaps the antithesis of death: our sexual physiology and psychology. Like “Stiff,” “Bonk” (almost interchangeable titles, no?) is rich in dexterous innuendo, laugh-out-loud humor and illuminating fact. It’s a compulsively readable, informative history of the scientific inquiry into the hows and wherefores of engorged tissues and sweaty palms, from Leonardo to Kinsey and on to Annie Sprinkle, including coverage of “artificial coition machines,” panda porn, the challenges of conducting sex studies in Islamic countries and the workings of the orgasm in people with spinal cord injuries.

She details gender bias in research and language (such as the longtime male-dominated debate between the “vaginocentrists” and the pro-clitoral orgasm team), but she too often glosses over the tragic effects of misguided “treatments.” The profit-seekers or perpetrators of scientific sexual brutalities (such as Leo Stanley’s experimental testicular grafts of animal gonads into San Quentin inmates in the 1920s) often get off easy. And for a writer so conscious of the power of language, her discussion of “clitoridectomies” as the treatment for female “hysteria” up to the 1950s, with no mention of the continuing crisis of female genital mutilation, is too determinedly apolitical.

Beware, too, the queasy-making or cringe-inducing sequences. There wasn’t a sentence in “Stiff” that made me squirm, but Roach’s needles-and-tubes descriptions of Dr. Gen-Long Hsu’s surgical treatments for erectile dysfunction were hard to bear.

[ click to read complete review at the LA Times ]

From the Los Angeles Times

BOOKS

Young authors embrace the thought process

Leading a contemplative literary life isn’t dead even in these hectic times. Just ask Nathaniel Rich, left, Keith Gessen and Ed Park.

By Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK — Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the ’40s and ’50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?

Those are questions three reasonably young men are asking now in much-awaited first novels that emerge over the next few weeks. Each novelist takes a very different position toward rendering literary life in a city where bohemian writers have been forced out by hedge-fund guys. And each co-edits a journal that is proud, almost defiant about its print status — in a nation where the image has been replacing the word for at least half a century now, and even some well-funded publications are in free-fall.

Outside of a few college towns, perhaps, it’s hard now to embrace the cerebral unapologetically without a sense of irony, of operating a bit out of time. But that didn’t stop Keith Gessen and some Ivy League-educated friends from launching, in 2004, the ambitious and pugilistic journal n+1, which was greeted by some as a kind of knowing, intellectual stunt. “Oh, no,” Gessen, who has heavy brows and a wide Russian mouth, said one recent evening. “It wasn’t a joke.”

That first issue was dedicated mostly to outlining what it opposed. “We were against the New Republic, we were against McSweeney’s, we were against the war, we were against exercise,” Gessen continued, sitting in a dive bar on the Upper West Side, where he once lived in an illegal sublet before decamping for Brooklyn, like most of the city’s other literati. ” And to this day we’re against many things.”

At this point he’s kidding, but he’s a serious guy: His journal is dedicated first and foremost, he said, to bringing “a fighting spirit” back to a conflict-averse literary culture.

The Moscow-born Gessen, 33, may be the end of the line, the last of the bold, hungry, text-based thinkers, a throwback to the heyday of Dissent, the quarterly at which he once toiled. His semi-autobiographical novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” came out last week to mostly strong reviews. His journal, meanwhile, takes what might be called the hard-line position on intellectual life: We don’t need more creativity, it says, we need more rigorous argument and political commitment. With Nathaniel Rich, a Paris Review editor whose surreal novel, “The Mayor’s Tongue,” came out last week, and Ed Park, the Believer co-founder and author of the upcoming “Personal Days,” which takes the glamour entirely out of the world of literary journalism, Gessen shows the pleasures and perils of taking ideas seriously in a city attuned more to Dow Jones than Irving Howe.

[ click to read full article at the LA Times ]

from the New York Times

April 27, 2008

Hardcover Fiction

[ click to view list at NYTimes.com ]

from Publishers Weekly

Music as Memoir

Life stories with a backbeat.

by Mark Rotella — Publishers Weekly

 In a poem set to music by his lover Benjamin Britten, W.H. Auden implored the patron saint of music, “Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions/ To all musicians, appear and inspire.”

Or as Nikki Sixx, bassist and songwriter for heavy metal band Mötley Crüe, acknowledges inspiration in his bestselling memoir, The Heroin Diaries: “I remember Iggy and the Stooges’ song ‘Search and Destroy’ reaching out from my speakers to me like my own personal anthem.”

And the authors of books on music—be they history or critical analysis, biography or autobiography—have surely felt a similar pull to write about music. In a field of music writing one might label “music as memoir,” authors reveal just how much music speaks to them and use music as a prism through which to view the world around them.

“Your man or your woman’s gone, the whiskey don’t work no more, you’re aching for the homeplace—and God ain’t listenin’,” writes Dana Jennings in Sing Me Back Home (Faber and Faber, May), drawing on his own dirt-poor family in New Hampshire to explain 20th-century rural America. “You just need to wallow sometimes,” Jennings acknowledges in a Hank Williams–inspired chapter titled “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

“You’ve got music fans who want a valentine of or homage to their favorite artists, and you’ve got those who just want the dirt,” says Lissa Warren, senior publicity director at Da Capo. “Some of these guys are just over the top,” says Warren’s colleague, executive editor Ben Schafer. “They have decadent stories—of women, sex and drugs.”

And riding in on the heels of autobiographies such as last year’s Slash by the Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist are such down-and-dirty tell-alls as Stephen Davis’s Watch You Bleed (Gotham, Aug.) and W.A.R.: Axl Rose (St. Martin’s, Feb.) by Mick Wall—both of which are on, you guessed it, Guns ‘n’ Roses. Of course, old-time rockers are still garnering ink in such books as AC/DC by Murray Engleheart (Harper Entertainment).

“There has been a trend toward rock stars finally telling their life stories themselves,” says Schafer at Da Capo. “Once something like Clapton happens, they say, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ ”

Eric Clapton, Nikki Sixx, Slash, Tommy Lee, and the Police’s Andy Summers and Sting—the list goes one—have all joined the confessional club.

[ click to view full article at Publisher’s Weekly ]

from The Washington Post

 Bethesda Start-Up Makes Writing a Little Less Lonely

By Kim Hart
Washington Post Staff Writer

On the Web, everyone can be a published author.

Amateur and professional writers alike have found voices in blogs and social-networking profiles, bypassing the cut-throat competition of old-line publishing. Now a Bethesda start-up is trying to leverage that community of would-be authors to help write books, or at least improve them.

WEbook, which launched last week, invites writers, editors, topic experts and anyone else who has something to say to put their virtual pens together to work on literary projects. If the finished works get high marks from the site’s members, WEbook publishes hard copies and sells them through online booksellers such as Amazon.com and retail stores including Barnes & Noble. Some books can also be read via mobile phones or in e-book format.

WEbook’s first published novel, a 58-chapter thriller called “Pandora,” was written by 17 people and will hit shelves next week.

By adopting the growing crowd-sourcing model, which aims to tap into the wisdom of a wide range of people, and the collaborative style of Wikipedia entries, WEbook hopes to help frustrated writers realize their potential.

“The idea is that a book would turn out better if the author could get fast, early feedback during the writing process,” said WEbook President Sue Heilbronner, a former lawyer whose pent-up creative ambitions drove her to the entrepreneurial world.

Novel-writing isn’t considered to be the most social activity, Heilbronner says. That’s why many of the 90 projects on the site take the form of anthologies of first-person essays, how-to guides and short-story collections. Current works in progress include “101 Things Every Man Should Know How to Do,” a playful tutorial on how to cook a steak or break dance, and “The First Year,” a collection of essays about the experiences of first-time teachers.

In addition to attracting writers, WEbook hopes to tap into the expertise of people with detailed knowledge of more esoteric fields. Heilbronner hopes experts in law or espionage, for example, could lend their know-how to make a legal thriller more authoritative.

WEbook plans to pull in revenue by selling content produced on the site, mostly through hard copies of books, e-books or even audio books. For works not selected for publication, the company will give members the option of self-publishing their manuscripts through WEbook. Eventually, the site plans to charge for premium listings for highly skilled writers or book promotions.

WEbook isn’t the first to experiment with collaborative publishing. Last year, Penguin Books in Britain launched a wikinovel project called “A Million Penguins” to see what happens when dozens of people weigh in on the plot, characters and title of a manuscript. Book publisher HarperCollins tried a similar venture by letting teens contribute chapters for a teen novel, now available as an e-book. Each November, National Novel Writing Month, thousands of aspiring writers gather in groups across the country to hammer out 50,000-word novels in social settings.

[ click to read full article at WaPo ]

from Shelf-Awareness.com

Attainment: New Titles Out Next Week

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, April 22:

So Brave, Young and Handsome: A Novel by Leif Enger (Atlantic Monthly, $24, 9780871139856/0871139855) recounts the journey of a failed novelist and an outlaw from Minnesota to Mexico during the early 20th century.

The Whole Truth by David Baldacci (Grand Central, $26.99, 9780446195973/0446195979) follows government and media leaders during a geopolitical crisis.

The House at Riverton: A Novel by Kate Morton (Atria, $24.95, 9781416550518/1416550518) follows the servant of a struggling English family during World War I.

Quicksand by Iris Johansen (St. Martin’s, $26.95, 9780312368067/0312368062) is the 12th novel featuring forensic sculptor Eve Duncan.

Santa Fe Dead by Stuart Woods (Putnam, $25.95, 9780399154904/0399154906) is the third thriller with attorney Ed Eagle.

The Third Circle by Amanda Quick (Putnam, $24.95, 9780399154843/0399154841) is the fourth entry in the Arcane Society series.

Willie Nelson: An Epic Life by Joe Nick Patoski (Little, Brown, $27.99, 9780316017787/0316017787) chronicles the life and career of a cultural icon.

[ click to visit Shelf-Awareness.com ]

from the NY Times

He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

Philip Parker says he has computers do the substantial amount of repetitive work that is required in the writing of so many books.

By NOAM COHEN Published: April 14, 2008

It’s not easy to write a book. First you have to pick a title. And then there is the table of contents. If you want the book to be categorized, either by a bookseller or a library, it has to be assigned a unique numerical code, like an ISBN, for International Standard Book Number. There have to be proper margins. Finally, there’s the back cover.

Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing.

Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

As part of his love of words, and dictionaries in all languages, Mr. Parker said he has taken to having his computers create acrostic poems — where the first letter of a series of words spells a synonym of those words, often to ironic effect.

Of course, one of the difficulties of generating a hundred thousand poems is stepping back and assessing their quality.

“Do you think one of them is Shakespeare?” he was asked.

“No,” he said. “Only because I haven’t done sonnets yet.”

[ click to view full article at NY Times ]