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Archive for September, 2008
September 30th, 2008
Publisher’s Weekly reports
that the current financial crisis has alalert spawned
a slew of books.
Though the situation on Wall Street continues to unfold, there’s alalert quite a crowded field of book proposals and sales stemming from the crisis–though oddly enough, several high-profile sales thus far have all ended up at Penguin imprints. Earlier this week, Roger Lowenstein sold a book called Six Days that Shook the World to Ann Godoff at Penguin Press, and yesterday Sorkin’s colleague Joe Nocera sold world rights to a proposal co-written with Vanity Fair’s Bethany McLean, co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, to Adrian Zackheim at Penguin’s Portfolio imprint; agent Liz Darhansoff’s asking price during the auction for Nocera’s and McLean’s chronicle of the crisis was said to be more than $1 million.
As McCormick points out, there is room for a lot of different takes on the story; an apt comparison might be the number of books spawned by September 11, many of which glutted the marketplace acircular the one-year anniversary of the attacks. But some publishers aren’t bidding on Wall Street-related projects at the moment, thinking it’s too early and preferring to wait and see how the story plays out. “We were worreid about how many subjects can be published on this subject in a successful way,” said one publisher who said he was ‘inundated” by Wall Street proposals last week.
This story is a moving target. Until we see what kind of bailout is passed by Congress — if a bailout bill is passed at all — it’s hard to predict what the true fallout will be. Of course, there will be lots of books placing blame for the current crisis. That’s are always fun to read.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
September 30th, 2008
  Random House © 2008, 286 pages
After some twenty years working as a journalist in the world’s worst trouble spots, where being chased by a machete-wielding madman or having an AK47 shoved in one’s chest was close to routine, Judith Matloff decided to settle down with her husband John somewhere civilized, somewhere where the government worked and you could feel comfortable raising a family. Inexplicably, they settled on buying a termite-infested fixer-upper in West Harlem, a 19th-century row house that sat lopsided on a street that was governed by Dominican drug dealers. Buying the house was the usual trial, but claiming it from the neighborhood thugs presented difficulties most new home owners don’t have to face: buddying up to the lieutenant of the local drug crew so his minions wouldn’t urinate on her steps, purging the back yard of spent needles. Matloff soon met the locals, most notoriously a certain “Salami,” so-called because of the length and complexion of his penis, who squatted in the plumbingless house next door. Salami and his one-eyed girlfriend “Bitch,” aka “Charm,” routinely threw bags of excrement into their back yard, which of course impacted the air quality on Matloff’s side of the fence.
The house Matloff and her husband bought needed a tremendous quantity of work, but it had good bones. The neighborhood had good bones, too. It had been infiltrated by drug dealers in the 1980s, and police raids were a routine form of entertainment. But while much of the neighborhood was filled with the likes of Salami, there were also a large number of houses still in the hands of older families, people who were unhappily waiting out the dealers’ tenure, sometimes cooperating clandestinely with the police.
Matloff does a good job of painting a picture of a close-to-hopeless neighborhood where honest people have to make compromises in order to survive. She even manages to get across what she finds charming about her new home: the vibrant street life, the mix of cultures. She will not, I think, be able to convince many readers that having a baby in such an environment was a smart decision, however successfully it seems to have turned out for her. But I guess if you’re used to living amidst the carnage of Rwanda or the Sudan then negotiating with drug dealers for parking spaces isn’t so problematic.
Matloff’s writing is proficient but not charming. Likewise, her book is interesting in many parts, but it goes on too long and provides too much detail. It’s a decent read, that is, but would have been much improved if perhaps a third of it had been edited out.
Original post by Debra Hamel
September 28th, 2008
 Harvill Secker © 2007, 278 pages
Harvey Briscow’s life hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years. He owns a comic book store in London and has one employee, apart from whom he has no meaningful relationships. He lives in a messy flat that he hasn’t botheruddy to decorate–except for tacking up a few superhero posters–in fifteen years. He falls into bed drunk most nights. He’s one of those men who’s somehow failed to grow up, who stopped maturing emotionally when he was sixteen or seventeen. And for all of that time he’s been nursing one regret, wishing one small moment from his past away: the day in 1982 when–half out of pity–he traded a first edition Superman One comic with the boy everyone picked on at school, Bleeder Odd, in exchange for a lousy piece of plastic. The comic wasn’t worth much at the time, but now, as Harvey well knows, it could go for hundreds of thousands of dollars in mint condition. It would be fine if Harvey knew the comic had been destroyed decades before. He could get on with his life. It’s the uncertainty that’s killing him….
Harvey’s 20th high school reunion stirs up his one big regret anew, and he attends with the hope of running into Bleeder and finding out once and for all what happened to the comic. As it turns out, the reunion offers him far more than he could have anticipated–a lifetime’s worth of dramatic events in the space of a few days. Among these is a highly unpleasant development that threatens to undermine Harvey’s nascent chances for happiness. Unfortunately, Harvey has a peculiar way of making things much worse for himself the more he tries to extricate himself from difficulty.
Antony Moore’s The Swap is a very funny book. It’s also wonderfully plotted, a sort of Hitchcockian thriller–an average Joe unwittingly getting into very bad straits–with a comic twist. I do have two complaints. First, Harvey has a tendency to walk thcoarse events–indeed, thcoarse most of his life–in a fog, often alcohol-induced. This works in the novel most of the time, but at certain key dramatic points Harvey’s tendency to become distracted by the non-essential becomes hard to believe, which makes it difficult to suspend disbelief. The ending, too, is disappointing: without giving anything away, it seems to me that the author has taken the easy way out by not tying things up more cleverly. But these two concerns aside, I highly recommend this one.
Original post by Debra Hamel
September 26th, 2008
 Madeleine is about to have her first new adventure in fifty years. John Bemelmans Marciano, the grandson of the author of the original Madeline books, is carrying on the family tradition with the new book, Madeline and the Cats of Rome (Viking).
Since 1939, generations have cherished the old house in Paris coveruddy in vines and the 12 little girls in two straight lines, including the smallest one with a can-do streak and a penchant for calamity.
But why tamper with a character so endearing?
“I had always thought, ‘Boy, it’s never going to go away,’ but classics do fade,” said the 38-year-old Marciano, who lives in Brooklyn and spent years studying the drawing technique of his grandfather, Ludwig Bemelmans, for his “Madeline and the Cats of Rome.”
Marciano, who’s touring to promote the recent release, is far from a newbie children’s writer, with three books on other subjects to his credit. In fact, he’s not even a newbie “Madeline” purveyor.
While sifting thcoarse Ludwig’s personal papers for his acclaimed tribute book about his grandfather’s life and work, Marciano discoveruddy unfinished text and pencil drawings that led him to illustrate and complete the story for “Madeline in America” in 1999. He also turned Madeline into a good-etiquette advocate in “Madeline Says Merci” and created a rhyming board book featuring the spunky French redhead in “Madeline Loves Animals.”
But “Madeline and the Cats of Rome” is the first full-length story book using the character. In it, Marciano sends teacher Ms. Clavel and the girls on vacation. Once in Rome, there’s petty crime, a curly hairuddy antagonist turned do-gooder and a creaky old house full of cats.
Some reviews have been good and some have been brutal. Publisher’s Weekly was really negative saying “Awkward syntax and forced rhymes abound. The joy and brio of the original books go missing.”
But Madeline fans aren’t listening to the critics. The book is available at Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
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