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The Fall Preview

In A Boom Year For Publishers, With Books Flooding The Stores In Record Numbers, Here Are 100 To Watch For.
By Marie Arana

Sunday, September 12, 2004; Page BW08


The paradox of book publishing is that, just as everybody is lamenting a shortage of serious readers, our shelves are creaking with new books. By the end of this year, we're told, 175,000 new titles bearing a 2004 publication date will have coursed into the market. That's 50 percent more than we saw a decade ago. Who's reading? Plenty of you are. Trade publishers are actually reporting a slight uptick in sales, across most categories.

From the 60,000 books yet to be minted this fall, here is an early alert on a hundred or so that have piqued our interest. (Please note: they have yet to be reviewed on these pages.) The list may seem long -- for some, a lifetime of reading -- but look at it this way: It's less than half of one percent (.005!) of the number of titles the industry is offering this year: a shortlist if ever there was one.

The Fiction List

Literary Fiction
Author, Author, by David Lodge (Viking, Oct.). A great literary critic turns tables and novelizes a great novelist: Henry James.

Bad Dirt, by Annie Proulx (Scribner, Nov.). More stories about quirky Wyomingans, from America's "laureate of landscape."

Banishing Verona, by Margot Livesey (Holt, Nov.). The author of Eva Moves the Furniture offers a story of galvanic love between a pregnant woman and a carpenter.

Casanova in Bolzano, by Sandor Marai (Knopf, Nov.). The notorious lover meets his erotic match, at long last, and at the very end; by the author of Embers.

The Double, by José Saramago (Harcourt, Oct.). A depressed history teacher rents a video, spies a man who could be his twin, and sets out to find him.

The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips (Random House, Sept.). An archaeologist stakes his reputation on a scrap of Egyptian pornography; by the author of Prague.

Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry (Shoemaker & Hoard, Nov.). The latest installment in Berry's narrative of Port William, Ky.

Heir to the Glimmering World, by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton, Sept.). Set in the Bronx, the story of an immigrant clan and their eccentric American benefactor.

The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle (Viking, Sept.). A virginal young man takes a job with Dr. Kinsey, the infamous sex researcher; by the author of Drop City.

Magic Seeds, by V.S. Naipaul (Knopf, Nov.). The hero of Half a Life is resurrected as an underground revolutionary in India.

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth (Houghton, Oct.). Charles Lindbergh becomes president and the country swings hard right, into virulent anti-Semitism.

Villages, by John Updike (Knopf, Oct.). A coming-of-age story in which women -- many, many of them -- are a young man's defining teachers.

War Trash, by Ha Jin (Pantheon, Oct.). The author of Waiting now gives us a story about a Chinese POW held by Americans during the Korean War.

The Zigzag Way, by Anita Desai (Houghton, Nov.). The author of Fasting, Feasting offers this story of an American historian wandering Mexico in search of his ancestors.

Popular Fiction
Any Place I Hang My Hat, by Susan Isaacs (Scribner, Oct.). A young reporter sets out in search of the mother who abandoned her as a baby.

Human Capital, by Stephen Amidon (FSG, Oct.). A novel about American suburbanites, dirty little secrets and the allure of easy money.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (FSG, Nov.). College life in the sex-crazed, power-hungry '00s, by the author of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Light on Snow, by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown, Oct.). By the author of Eden Close: When a father and his daughter stumble upon an abandoned baby, family secrets begin to spill.

Mantrapped, by Fay Weldon (Grove, Dec.). A man and a woman brush past each other on the stairs of their local laundromat and end up switching souls; by the author of Auto da Fay.

Nights of Rain and Stars, by Maeve Binchy (Dutton, Sept.). Sudden tragedy electrifies the lives of a group of travelers in a tiny Greek village.

Outside Valentine, by Liza Ward (Holt, Sept.). Obsessed with a serial murderer, a young woman tries to heal ancient wounds.

The Power Game, by Joseph S. Nye Jr. (PublicAffairs, Dec.). A novel of Washington's corridors of power, by the former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts (St. Martin's, Oct.). A fugitive from a maximum security prison in Australia makes his way to the teeming underworld of Bombay.

The Vagabonds, by Nicholas Delbanco (Warner, Nov.). Ford, Edison and Firestone leave a large fortune to the Saperstones -- hush money for a night of excess with the beneficiaries' grandmother.

Historical Fiction
The First Desire, by Nancy Reisman (Pantheon, Sept.). An eldest child vanishes at the cusp of the Great Depression -- and the whole family tree creaks and tumbles.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (FSG, Nov.). By the author of Housekeeping, an epic of three generations of preachers in a single American family.

Life Mask, by Emma Donoghue (Harcourt, Sept.). Dangerous liaisons in 18th-century London; by the author of Slammerkin.

Love and Honor, by Randall Wallace (Simon & Schuster, Sept.). A Virginia cavalryman travels to Russia on a clandestine mission for Benjamin Franklin.

The Red Queen, by Margaret Drabble (Harcourt, Oct.). On the eve of her trip to Korea, a woman receives a mysterious package from Seoul: the ancient memoir of a crown princess.

Shoulder the Sky, by Anne Perry (Ballantine, Sept.). The story of a World War I British army chaplain who uncovers the murder of a war correspondent -- by one of the soldiers in his care.

Something Dangerous, by Penny Vincenzi (Overlook, Oct.). Born into a publishing empire, the beautiful Lytton twins suddenly find their charmed lives threatened by world events.

To the Last Man, by Jeff Shaara (Ballantine, Oct.). Shaara leaves behind the American Revolution to give us this view from the trenches as America enters World War I.

Mysteries and Suspense
Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, by John le Carré (Walker, Oct.). George Smiley, as he first appeared four decades ago -- a reissue of le Carré's first works.

Metro Girl, by Janet Evanovich (HarperCollins, Nov.). Cuban contraband, South Beach bimbos, a missing boat captain -- and the bored Baltimore girl who stumbles into it all.

Night Fall, by Nelson DeMille (Warner, Nov.). An illicit tryst on a beach turns into another kind of obsession when an aircraft explodes overhead.

Skeleton Man, by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, Nov.). A new chapter in the Leaphorn and Chee adventures.

A Taint in the Blood, by Dana Stabenow (St. Martin's, Sept.). Twenty years after a fire that claimed her house and brothers, a woman hires Kate Shugak to clear her mother's name.

Whiteout, by Ken Follett (Dutton, Nov.). A canister containing a deadly virus goes missing just as a blizzard descends.

The Winds of Change, by Martha Grimes (Viking, Sept.). A dead girl, a well-known financier, a house of horrors and . . . Superintendent Richard Jury.

Wolves Eat Dogs, by Martin Cruz Smith (S&S, Nov.). Moscow detective Arkady Renko scouts out the dread Chernobyl.

Poetry
American Smooth, by Rita Dove (Norton, Sept.). Her first collection in five years.

Blue Iris, by Mary Oliver (Beacon, Oct.). New work from a poet of the pastoral.

The Displaced of Capital, by Anne Winters (Univ. of Chicago, Oct.). The long-awaited follow-up to The Key to the City.

Inner Voices, by Richard Howard. (FSG, Oct.). Selected poems.

The Prodigal, by Derek Walcott (FSG, Oct.). A lifetime of journeys.

Taboo, by Yusef Komunyakaa (FSG, Sept.). Part One of his Wishbone Trilogy.

The Unsubscriber, by Bill Knott (FSG, Oct.). By the author of The Naomi Poems.

A Voice: Selected Poems, by Anzhelina Polonskaya (Northwestern, Dec.). A fresh voice from Russia.

Literary Subjects
Bound to Please, by Michael Dirda (Norton, Nov.). Our man on page 15.

The Five Books of Moses, by Robert Alter (Norton, Sept.). A new translation with commentary.

Gilgamesh, translated by Stephen Mitchell (Free Press, Oct.). A contemporary take on the oldest story in literature.

Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes and Polish Memories, by Witold Gombrowicz (Yale, Oct.). Two doors to an idiosyncratic mind.

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, edited by Leslie S. Klinger (Norton, Nov.). Lavishly illustrated, copiously footnoted.

The Proust Project, edited by André Aciman (FSG, Nov.). Twenty-eight writers riff on In Search of Lost Time.

A Reading Diary, by Alberto Manguel (FSG, Oct.). Favorites of a discriminating reader.

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, by Harold Bloom (Riverhead, Oct.). How literature informs us.

The Nonfiction List

Pressing Issues
The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind, by Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer (Wiley, Sept.). At long last: a bead on Iraq's WMD?

The Fall of Baghdad, by Jon Lee Anderson (Penguin, Oct.). The endgame, the toppling, the occupation.

Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States, by Harvey Kushner with Bart Davis (Sentinel, Nov.). It's only gotten worse, according to this seasoned counselor.

Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces, by Linda Robinson (PublicAffairs, Oct.). From Vietnam to Homeland Security, our elite troops in action.

The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, by Kenneth Pollack (Random House, Nov.). By the author of The Threatening Storm, which made the case for invading Iraq.

War and the American Presidency, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Norton, Sept.). On the dangers of preventive wars.

The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security, by Winslow T. Wheeler (Naval Institute, Oct.). How money is diverted from the U.S. war chest to pork and personal agendas.

America in the World
America Alone: Our Country's Future as a Lone Warrior, by Mark Steyn (Regnery, Oct.). The West as a coalition is over, says Steyn. The world is either with us or against us.

Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, by Cornel West (Penguin, Sept.). Our failures abroad flow from our hypocrisies at home.

The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, by Jeremy Rifkin (Tarcher, Sept.). The European model is better suited to our time.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, by Timothy Garton Ash (Random, Nov.). We need to work together: a historian describes the future.

Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Wonder Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes, by Mary Eberstadt (Sentinel, Nov.). Is anyone parenting anymore?

What We've Lo st, by Graydon Carter (FSG, Sept.). The editor of Vanity Fair calls Bush's agenda too radical.

You Have the Power, by Howard Dean (S&S, Sept.). The former presidential candidate imagines a more muscular Democratic Party.

History
Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, by John Ferling (Oxford, Sept.). The race that shaped the nation.

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle (Holt, Sept.). An accomplished black doctor, a terrible shooting . . . and Clarence Darrow.

Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, by S.J. Hamrick (Yale, Oct.). The British knew all along that Soviet spies were among them.

Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, by Robert Conquest (Norton, Dec.). A master scholar decries the false nostrums of academe.

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, by Joseph E. Persico (Random, Nov.). The last day of World War I.

Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War, by Melvin Patrick Ely (Knopf, Sept.). America's first fully integrated community.

Liberty and Freedom, by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford, Oct.). A cultural history of two founding principles.

Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy, by Sarah Bradford (Viking, Nov.). The shrewd, beautiful noblewoman in her roiling and ruthless time.

Making Friends With Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to War, by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, Nov.). A British aristocrat backed the wrong horse -- but there's more to the story.

The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, by Antony Beevor (Viking, Sept.). She was Chekhov's niece and Hitler's favorite actress.

Slavery and the Making of America, by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (Oxford, Oct.). A companion to the PBS series.

Biography
The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, by Kitty Kelley (Doubleday, Sept.). The queen of unauthorized biography takes on the leader of the land.

His Excellency: George Washington, by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf, Oct.). Our all-too-human first president.

John James Audubon: The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes (Knopf, Oct.). The master illustrator, from immigrant to pioneer.

Let Me Tell You a Story, by Red Auerbach and John Feinstein (Little, Brown, Oct.). A basketball legend teams up with a famed sportswriter.

The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. III, by Norman Sherry (Viking, Oct.). Oct. 2 will mark the centenary of this remarkable literary figure.

The World's Banker, by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin, Oct.). James Wolfensohn and his global empire of 10,000 financiers.

Memoir
Gods of Tin: The Flying Years, by James Salter (Shoemaker & Hoard, Oct.). His days as a fighter pilot in Korea.

Magical Thinking, by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's, Oct.). Personal stories by the author of Running with Scissors.

My Life with Pablo Neruda, by Matilde Urrutia (Stanford, Oct.). The poet's lover, muse, wife and widow tells it from her perspective.

Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, by Valerie Hemingway (Ballantine, Oct.). From Papa's daughter-in-law and personal secretary.

The Story of a Life, by Aharon Appelfeld (Schocken, Oct.). Vignettes from the author of Badenheim 1939.

A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz (Harcourt, Oct.). The Israeli novelist's account of growing up in war-torn Jerusalem.

Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, by Nigel Slater (Gotham, Oct.). A food writer savors his childhood.

The Arts and Entertainment
All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, by Terry Teachout (Harcourt, Nov.); and George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, by Robert Gottlieb (HarperCollins, Nov.). A two-step for the master.

Cary Grant, by Marc Eliot (Harmony, Sept.). The very fetching Archibald Leach, from boy to superstar.

Disneywar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom, by James B. Stewart (S&S, Nov.). Scrapping for control of the entertainment empire.

The Inner Voice, by Renée Fleming (Viking, Nov.). A soprano's heart-throat-mind connection.

The King & I, by Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette (Doubleday, Oct.). Pavarotti's manager isn't going to take it any more.

Margot Fonteyn, by Meredith Daneman (Viking, Oct.). The genius of a ballerina.

Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century, by Gary Giddins (Oxford, Nov.). A collection by the leading jazz critic.

Culture, Race, Religion
The Artificial White Man, by Stanley Crouch (Basic, Oct.). Who's the real deal? And how black is black enough?

Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA, by Tim Junkin (Algonquin, Sept.). For another man's brutal crime, Kirk Bloodsworth was going to die.

Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, by James Webb (Broadway, Oct.). The Counsels of Cormac: The Ancient Irish Guide to Leadership, translated by Thomas Cleary (Doubleday, Sept.). The Last of the Celts, by Marcus Tanner (Yale, Oct.). Oh, glorious isles!

An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, by Pankaj Mishra (FSG, Oct.). Just as the Buddha set out to find life's true meaning, Mishra sets out to find the Buddha.

Exuberance, by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf, Sept.). The celebrated psychiatrist on how a passion for life can fuel achievement.

Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, by Ben J. Wattenberg (Ivan Dee, Oct.). How will birth dearth affect an economy fueled by growth?

Green River, Running Red, by Ann Rule (Free, Oct.). The 21-year career of a serial murderer.

When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today, by Harvey Cox (Houghton, Dec.). Jesus didn't just hand out answers; he taught us to think.

Why Some Like It Hot, by Gary Paul Nabhan (Island, Sept.). Your genes are hardwired to love jalapeños or, perhaps, hardwired to hate them.

Science and the Environment
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton, Oct.). Back in time to the first bacterium.

Bicycle: The History, by David V. Herlihy (Yale, Nov.). Two wheels against the world.

Life at the Zoo: Behind the Scenes with the Animal Doctors, by Phillip T. Robinson (Columbia, Oct.). The pleasures and perils of running a modern zoo.

On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon, by Alan Tennant (Knopf, Sept.). A rattletrap Cessna chases the stately bird, from Texas to the Caribbean.

Vaccine A: The Covert Pentagon Experiment That's Killing American Soldiers, by Gary Matsumoto (Basic, Sept.). How thousands of U.S. and British troops were unwitting guinea pigs to immunization research. •

Marie Arana is the editor of Book World. She can be reached at aranam@washpost.com.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company



The Fall Preview (washingtonpost.com)

PUBLISHER's MARKETPLACE BLOG PRESAGES DETROIT FREE PRESS

Notes from the making of a bestseller.

by Raelynn Hillhouse

Copyright © 2004 by Raelynn Hillhouse
www.InternationalThrillers.com

(Aug. 29) Well, you heard it here first. In the Aug. 19 blog entry below, I warned you how if you’re reading RIFT ZONE and you think something is too far-fetched, chances are it’s pulled from real life—my life. Today in a fun review in the Detroit Free Press a reviewer wrote, "She [my heroine] is pressed into service (somewhat unbelievably) by the East Germans."

Somewhat unbelieveably, huh?

Guess what.

Whitney's recruitment by the East German secret police was lifted from my life, but toned down to make believable fiction. (And to add a dash of irony, the event was when I was a Michigan grad student…)

So I should've said in the essay below, that truth is stranger than fiction not only because fiction has an editor, but because fiction has reviewers as well…

Check out the blog entry below to find the even more far-fetched reality of the spy world.

_______________________________

MY REAL-LIFE SPY STORIES BEHIND RIFT ZONE

Notes from the making of a bestseller.

by Raelynn Hillhouse

Copyright © 2004 by Raelynn Hillhouse
www.InternationalThrillers.com

(Aug. 19). As my debut novel about a female smuggler finds its way into bookstores and readers' hands, it seemed like a good time to write about the real life experiences the book is based on. If you’re reading RIFT ZONE and you think something is too far-fetched, chances are it’s pulled from real life—my life. As I wrote the spy novel, time and time again I found myself having to tone down things that had really happened to me because no one would believe it. I started to understand why truth is stranger than fiction: Truth doesn't have to get past an editor.

Take the first chapter of RIFT ZONE, for instance. It opens with scenes in which the East German secret police try to set up the main character in a sting by luring her into working for them. They hope to entrap her by convincing her to smuggle a decrepit Western-made computer to the West, then nail her at the border for stealing state property. They even follow her through the Wall to the West.

Sounds far-fetched, huh?

Nope. It happened to me. But the Stasi tried to entrap me using a Xerox machine, not a computer. You see, back behind the Wall, you had to have a security clearance just to operate a simple copy machine. The clearance wasn’t restricted to those working with the darkest of state secrets, but to anyone and everyone who was near a copier. The paranoid commie regimes didn’t want to risk that someone could copy anti-communist literature or even worse—set up a free underground press. Thus, there weren’t many copiers in the East and the security clearance wasn’t given out easily. (Not to mention East Germans really didn’t want to invite the secret police to root around in their past to process their clearance!) But a novel with the secret police doing a sting with a portable Xerox machine seemed too over the top, so I toned it down and wrote about a computer instead.

I lived in West Berlin in the mid-1980s the summer before I was to study in East Berlin as a guest of a government-sponsored propaganda agency, The League for Friendship of the Peoples. It was a given that the League was more or less a Stasi front organization for international espionage (think USIA & CIA), but their sponsorship was only way that I could get access to this self-isolated state for an entire year.

Not long before I was scheduled to move over to the East, roommates and I started noticing the telltale clicking of a bugged phone (or at least telltale for old-fashioned phones and antiquated phone systems.) Then I got the call from my contact, Egon, at the League.

At the time there were less than a dozen phone lines between both halves of the city of 3 million and it took hours and hours of dialing before striking it lucky and getting a line. Somehow my guy managed to get lucky every day that August—and at just about the same time each day. I suspected Egon wasn’t playing the same phone lottery as everyone else.

Egon tried to convince me I could help out the League by schlepping a broken Xerox machine through East Berlin, through the Wall and to their special repairman in the West. He wasn't suggesting that I smuggle it, but carry it through the border under the noses of the Stasi border guards. If I complied, he saw no problem in sponsoring me for a multiple entry visa that would grant me a privilege only a handful of civilians of any nationality had: permission to cross through the Berlin Wall at will.

We went through a crazy dance for months. My visa would get approved, then mysteriously revoked. I stalled. And I stalled. The Stasi was not an organization that took rejection well, so I figured it was best to play hard to get. I came up with every possible reason why I didn't want to entrap myself with that damn copier. For every excuse, Egon had a work-around:

Worried the guards would think I was stealing State property? No problem. He'd write the Stasi border guards a note. Too heavy? He'd carry it most of the way for me. Too heavy in the West? They'd even spring for a taxi in the West and advised that I cross at Charlie instead of Friedrichstrasse because it would be easier to catch a taxi there—although he'd never been across the border. The cost of repair? Not to worry. Even though it was illegal for him to have West German Marks, he just happened to have some in their petty cash.

Yeah, right.

And my visa? It was going to take a few more days…

The Stasi was deadly, but it also had a Keystone cop/B-spy movie side to it as well:

Once in East Germany, a tiny police car packed with 5 guys, screeched to a halt not far from where I was traipsing through the woods. I watched as a guy with dark glasses, black leather jacket and an attaché case handcuffed to his arm popped from the car, then disappeared into the brush.

I’ve seen people (clandestinely, they thought) open up hollow coins on the border to flash a secret badge to the Stasi border guard.

In a restaurant in Krakow, Poland I had a stranger come up and ask to swap chairs with me—not places, but the actual chair, with the explanation that there might not seem to be any difference to me, but there was a big one to him. The chairs looked identical, but we can only guess that one was wired a little differently…

In Prague I was once awakened in my hotel room by a sound suddenly coming from the nightstand--that of reel-to-reel tape recorder automatically rewinding.

Now would you honestly believe any of this if it were in a spy novel? Probably not. Implausible and over the top are the words the critics would grab for. But these things really happened to me. So my challenge with RIFT ZONE was to recreate that bizarre, shadowy world of spies in a way that was both true to the actual historical circumstances, but toned down enough to seem plausible to the reader. And that Xerox machine? They finally gave up. But not until after I altered a few of their documents and the People's Police dutifully issued me that visa that allowed me free passage after all.

But then it got revoked again…

And then there was the time the border checkpoint was closed and I had no visa, but I talked the border guards into allowing me to enter East Berlin anyway….Nah, would never make it past my editor.


Publishers Marketplace: Raelynn Hillhouse

LEONARDO DA VINCI AT THE BEACH
Pop Esoterica!
by Ingrid D. Rowland

Despite prevailing gossip in the groves of academe, people still like their Renaissance, with its prancing nymphs, striplings in hose, and Venus on the half-shell, an endless Primavera with Lorenzo de' Medici presiding benignly over the pagan rites. The fact that this Renaissance is a myth gives them no pause whatsoever, nor should it: the Renaissance was always a myth, and also, on occasion, a chivalric lay or an instructive fable, depending on who told the story, why, and to whom. For Angelo Poliziano, currying the favor of Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano with superabundant talent, the Medici brothers posed as modern Arthurian knights in Stanze per la Giostra, or Verses for the Joust. Botticelli, in the same years, acted as the city's great mythographer, painting glossy riddles in tempera for a restless Medici cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. If Machiavelli sent it all up with masterful cynicism in The Prince, he did so believing in another myth of Florence, the city as free Etruscan republic. Whatever their individual cynicism or dashed hopes, they all persisted in regarding Florence as a divinely favored place, every one.

People today still like this Renaissance of Poliziano, Botticelli, and the brothers Medici, because it stands for an idea of civilization, no matter what the poststructuralists say, and in these strange times an idea of civilization is something we desperately need. The depths of that need can be judged from the tone--and the popularity--of thrillers otherwise as disparate as The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four, both of which take Renaissance Florence as their shining image of civility, and quite specifically of Western civility. In a world where a rich turbaned sheik takes aim at skyscrapers, discotheques, and train stations in the name of holy war, these books argue, with their genre's implicit conservatism, that the West has contributed something more to humanity than McDonald's, cowboy presidents, and the stock market. The extraordinary success of such pointedly cultural thrillers indicates a longing to take the Western heritage seriously, to accord it some degree of honor rather than subject it to yet another critique. This is not by any means a discouraging development.

Despite The Da Vinci Code's title, however, the standing symbol of Western civility in both this best-seller and in The Rule of Four is not, in fact, the multifarious and frustratingly incomplete work of Leonardo da Vinci, but rather the paintings executed by his contemporary Alessandro Filipepi, whom we know by his nickname "the Little Barrel," or Botticelli. The Rule of Four explicitly singles out Botticelli for two reasons: one is clearly the quality of Botticelli's painting itself, with its hard-gloss tempera surfaces, sinuous lines, and crystal-clear perspectival spaces. This linear clarity is essential to Renaissance Florence, the limpidly geometric architecture of which sits solidly on a foursquare ancient Roman street plan. Leonardo moved on from Florence to foggy Milan, where his painting began to explore the interplay of light and shadow and took on the darkness, the ambiguity, the indefinable edges that make all his later work as enigmatic as Mona Lisa's smile.

Botticelli also figures in The Rule of Four because of what happened to him in life: some of his paintings were destroyed between 1494 and 1496 by followers of the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola. In those years, Savonarola's disciples, called piagnoni or "snivelers" owing to their weepy acts of repentance, set huge bonfires of the vanities, lit to purge a society as devoted to its own version of conspicuous consumption as our own. Some of Botticelli's more licentious--that is, mythological--paintings were apparently flung into the flames along with jewelry, clothing, cosmetics, and frivolous books; and he has sometimes been identified as a piagnone himself. In any case, he fell victim to religious fanaticism, at least until the day when Savonarola's power-lust came to be seen as a vanity in its own right and the Florentines lit another refining fire in their main piazza, this time for the Dominican demagogue and two of his associates. (Another victim of religious zeal was Botticelli's near contemporary the great German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, whose hands would be broken by Lutheran fanatics--but sixteenth-century Nuremberg was swept away by events in the twentieth century as sixteenth-century Florence was not, and Riemenschneider's adversaries were not punished so neatly.)

For the authors of The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four, Botticelli's combination of lucid form and riddling content speaks of initiation into higher truths about humanity and civility, truths rooted in the traditions of Greece and Rome at the dawn of Western civilization, and transmitted secretly down the centuries. Thrillers, after all, thrive on secrecy, on the distinction between appearance and reality. Their most successful recent incarnation was as Cold War spy novels; and writers of thrillers, like their readers, are still searching a post-communist world for the next set of black-and-white certainties.


Christianity, another essential component of Western civilization, appears in a more ambiguous light. The Da Vinci Code centers on a secret cache of documents, guarded by a secret sect of adepts, that, if revealed, would bring down the Church--in this novel meaning Roman Catholicism--by documenting that Jesus had not died on the cross and been resurrected from the dead, but instead had moved to France with his wife Mary Magdalene to found the Merovingian dynasty of French kings and to keep alive a series of pagan mysteries that included ritual sex and cultivation of what the book's characters call, with striking pedantry, "the sacred feminine." (This complex of beliefs seems to consist of the Mutterrecht of the nineteenth-century mythographer Bachofen strained through the sieve of the present-day New Age goddess cult).

The Da Vinci Code would have us believe that the descendants of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their distant scion King Clovis have been guarded since ancient Roman times by a knightly group called the Priory of Sion, whose grand masters seem to have been exclusively French except for two fifteenth-century Florentines, Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, both of whom are said by Dan Brown to have left hints about this secret stewardship in their paintings. The evidence that he supplies for their membership in this French confraternity is so superficial that even a drowsy traveler engrossed in the action can swallow it without a thought--or without a look at an actual painting. Brown's best-known assertions in this regard have to do with Leonardo's Last Supper. Through the conversations of his characters (who exist more to spout instructive "facts" than to converse), Brown identifies the figure to the right of Jesus (the figure to our left) in this great, ruined fresco as Mary Magdalene, who is, according to his own claims, the wife of Christ. On the basis of this assertion, Brown claims that Jesus and his consort spell out a gigantic M with their arms and bodies. The V-shape of the space between them is presumed to refer to Mary Magdalene's womb, the figurative chalice that is the real Holy Grail, and the prime example in Western tradition of the sacred feminine.

The problem with this ad hoc iconography is that readers of The Da Vinci Code may come to believe that by accepting the conventionally flimsy premises of a thriller plot, they have learned something about Leonardo and his art. Brown encourages this delusion by professing at the beginning of his book that what he says is true. But in this claim, as in the rest of his narrative, he is writing fiction. As the Bible makes plain, Leonardo's blond bombshell is a man, the "Beloved Disciple" who has been resting in his Lord's bosom, identified by immemorial Christian tradition as the apostle John. Leonardo's portrayal of the Beloved Disciple as an attractive young blond fits right into the conventions of every other Last Supper painted in Italy in his generation. Given the villainous perversity of Brown's gay characters, all of them devoutly Catholic (the corrupt cardinal and his catamite-driver, the hit man from Opus Dei), one wonders what it is that really drives him to perform a sex change on the Beloved Disciple as embodied in Leonardo's admittedly androgynous youth. For Leonardo's famous sfumato, or "smoke effect," extends beyond the modeling of his figures to the very ambiguity of their being.

The fresco of the Last Supper once dominated one end of the dining room, or refectory, of a religious community in Milan, reminding the friars that through their faith they transformed every meal into a last supper in the presence of Jesus. There are profound historical and spiritual connections between ancient Greco-Roman sacrificial ritual and the sacrifice of the Jewish Passover, both of which together informed early Christian ritual; but what Leonardo chooses as the focus for his own version of the story is a human drama. He depicts this Passover meal at the moment just after Jesus has announced that one of his twelve disciples will betray him that night. Jesus lets the terrible news settle in with an expression of calm resignation, suffused with an infinite sadness that can still be seen through the painting's ravaged surface. (Leonardo, as often, had tried a new technique in this painting, and it failed to improve on the old, painstaking traditional method.) Saint Peter, hand pointed to his chest, has shot up from the table and is crying, "Who, me?" The Beloved Disciple, who has been leaning against Jesus up to now, has pulled back, faint with horror: "Not I!"

Leonardo is showing us, as he showed those Milanese friars five hundred years ago, that terror jolts us all into stark solitude. The friars would have recognized that they, too, should stand on guard against the complacency, the human weakness, that might lead them to betray their own faith in their Lord. Meanwhile, of course, Judas Iscariot has already turned his friend over for thirty pieces of silver; and Leonardo shows the guilt-ridden informer knocking over the saltcellar, the most precious object on the table. It takes more than a human spell-out ("M" is for Magdalene, "V" is for ... viscera?) to convey the dark ambiguities that stand at the heart of Leonardo's great picture.

Along with its occasional forays into art history lite, The Da Vinci Code introduces us to the Priory of Sion's most recent grand master, whose profession is director of the Louvre, at least until his murder at the very beginning of the book. This excellent Frenchman had worked, in other words, right in front of the Leonardos and Botticellis that will gradually disclose his secret life as a hierophant of the sacred feminine to the thriller's protagonists, and to its readers. The dramatic manner of his death shows how well versed he has been in the Last Supper's alphabetic arcane: bleeding to death from a gunshot wound inflicted in one of the museum's galleries, he strips naked, writes a pentagram on his belly, scrawls secret messages in fluorescent pen, and then arranges himself in the pose of a famous Leonardo drawing. The Frenchman's presence of mind--and absence of incapacitating pain--is plausible only according to the loose logic of pulp fiction.


The Rule of Four also involves a secret hoard, which, like the sacred feminine in The Da Vinci Code, has been threatened with suppression by the Church. This time the Church is circumscribed to the time and the person of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, although the secrets targeted for suppression once again include pagan rites and abundant sex, once again hinted at by a litter of clues in Botticelli's paintings. (But then how many secrets do not involve wild sex and pagan rites, from Euripides's Bacchae to Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever"?) The key that enables the protagonist of The Rule of Four to unlock these "pagan mysteries in the Renaissance" (to borrow a phrase from the great scholar Edgar Wind) lies in a dense, beautifully illustrated novel called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real book that was published in 1499, although one less impossibly rare than the young authors of this thriller imply.

The chapter headings of the Hypnerotomachia spell out a curious acrostic that has puzzled everyone who discerns it: "Francesco Colonna Loved Polia Very Much." (Who was he? Who was she? Scholars still do not know for sure.) Working from this genuine premise, the authors suppose that the mysterious work hides a whole series of secret messages, each disguised by a different kind of fifteenth-century code. As deciphered by the novel's present-day protagonists, the messages add up to a ciphered cry for help from Francesco Colonna to his fifteenth-century readers: Savonarola and the snivelers are closing in on him. Never mind that Savonarola was incinerated a good three years before the Hypnerotomachia's publication. The plot of The Rule of Four thus exploits the Hypnerotomachia's most salient quality (after its marvelously sensuous illustrations, some of them reproduced in The Rule of Four): its nearly impenetrable prose, which from the beginning has either fascinated or repelled readers. Those who have soldiered on through Francesco Colonna's dense jungle of strange adjectives and slow, slow action have often read deep meaning into the text, while others, such as the sixteenth-century jurist Antonio Agustin, stopped at the sexy pictures. One disgusted reader in the sixteenth century put a warning in the flyleaf of a copy of the book now preserved in the Vatican Library: "it's a boring novel of sorts." But the pictures are not boring in the least.

Which is why the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili looks like such prime material for hiding secret messages. Nobody would write like Francesco Colonna if they could help it, including Colonna himself. The book sold poorly.
But then he used "elephantine" to describe a nymph's ivory-pale leg. He called Ionic columns Doric. He was trying very hard to write a beautiful and mysterious novel, so hard that the metaphorical drops of sweat plop large on every page and we seem to hear the author's indecorous groans as he strains to reach for another arcane metaphor. In the meantime, The Rule of Four spices the code-breaking by making it a competition among various species of cultural fauna: the drunken Princeton professor, the suave New York art dealer, the obsessive Midwestern bookseller, the obsessive undergraduate on scholarship, the graduate student (whose obsessiveness goes without saying). It often seems as if the characters' behavior is driven less by curiosity about a five-hundred-year-old steamy novel than by an immanent preoccupation with wealth and status, symbolized by membership in those Princeton eating clubs whose rites of passage may be as opaque to outsiders as the ponderous prose of the Hypnerotomachia.

Thrillers are a conservative genre. Like Greek tragedies and murder mysteries, they upset society's balance in order to right it, and to re-affirm it in the righting. Like Wagner's operas, they keep an unresolved chord going for hours just to set up the sheer biological joy of its final resolution. A good thriller must provide comfort after the thrill. Many people have read The Da Vinci Code while riding on airplanes, senses irked into a state of low-grade discomfort and dulled by oxygen deprivation, dehydration, and slipping time zones. The characters in a thriller should not grab them too insistently or they will weep into their chicken Chernobyl; the plot must obey only the logic of the jet-lagged, and no suggestion of philosophical anarchy should threaten to bring down the premises by which airline passengers continue to believe that lift plus thrust will keep them airborne to their destination.

Thus The Da Vinci Code may threaten to bring down the Church, but its heroes hail from other safe bastions of civilization: the Louvre, Harvard, and the police, whose members act with courage and ingenuity to keep civilization secure for ourselves and our descendants. At the same time, we learn that Leonardo and Botticelli have been sending out their own beacon of civility from Renaissance Florence, under the approving gaze of the Medici. Indeed, despite some close calls, the Church itself survives the conniving of The Da Vinci Code's gay villains, both the corrupt cardinal and the hit man from the powerful and very real Catholic organization called Opus Dei. Dan Brown's most daring move is to insert a topical twist into the novel: a new pope, the successor to John Paul II, deprives Opus Dei of the favor that it enjoys in our own world under the present papacy and sets Catholicism on a new, liberal course. Now that is real re-affirmation of the social order! Quietly, all the while, the dynasty founded by Jesus and Mary Magdalene is revealed to have lived on from generation to generation, lovingly watched over by the Priory of Sion; and only a churl would note that some two and a half centuries ago the French decided to consign the divine right of kings to the guillotine.

Yet if it is the thriller's place to comfort souls in transit, so, too, it is the scholar's pleasure to take potshots at pretensions to historical truth in potboilers or on screen--to point out with stolid glee that, say, every fresco in Gladiator does not in fact need to look as if it had gone through the eruption of Vesuvius, that Roman army generals in the field were unlikely to tote around marble busts of family members, and that pitching catapults against trees is a waste of good shot (ancient war machines were designed to knock down city walls). Only this kind of unregenerate stickler, perhaps, would wonder what precisely the Priory of Sion's incriminating documents were written on, papyrus or parchment, and what kind of bureaucrat drafted them for what kind of archive; or insist that "Da Vinci" is the one thing Leonardo would never have been called in his lifetime, any more than "Of Arc" was Joan's surname. At the same time, scholarly sticklers are precisely the sorts of people that The Da Vinci Code praises for working (as the book might put it in characteristic breathless italics) in the Vatican Secret Archives, the most exclusive archives in the world! One of these indefatigable pedants even gets to be the book's hero.

Pedantry aside, The Da Vinci Code's jet-lag logic also raises some more serious questions. It is difficult--no, impossible--to look upon the novel's bucolic ending, as the latter-day spawn of Jesus and Mary Magdalene fade into a Scottish sunset, without noting, like the filthy anarcho-syndicalist peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that the world no longer stands in need of sacred kingship, male or female. "I am Arthur, your king," intones Graham Chapman's Arthur in that excellent film, to which the peasants cackle: "I thought we were an autonomous collective!" Long before the advent of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which The Da Vinci Code draws a good deal of its lore about Mary Magdalene and the Children of Jesus, Monty Python had already connected the Holy Grail to a gaggle of beautiful, lascivious women, but with tongue planted firmly in cheek; and it is hard to read some passages of The Da Vinci Code without thinking of Michael Palin as Galahad stumbling into the seraglio as the ladies berate their queen: "Oh, naughty, naughty Zoot! Time for a spanking!"

As the Pythons recognized, it is one thing to postulate a sect of divine kings in a society that includes Crusades and Knights Templar among its features, but the bloom has long since left that medieval rose, and as the final sentence in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili observes, "a withered rose will never live again." The Da Vinci Code should be taken for what it is: modest balm for convalescents, insomniacs, and jet travelers. It is certainly not in any real way about the people, the places, or the ideas that it uses for its story--though if, like the now-defunct Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles called Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo, it sparks interest in the realities of those excellent artists, it will have performed a mighty work.

The Rule of Four nurtures higher ambitions; unlike The Da Vinci Code, whose Harvard professor gives off only the sparest scent of the Charles River, the book is deeply rooted in another bastion of Western civilization, Princeton University, whose tortuous undergraduate rituals take on much greater reality than the putative secrets of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In fact, the book is mostly about Princeton: about getting into your eating club, writing your senior thesis, hooking up with a partner, with an evanescent gust of Florence to shiver the clinging ivy. One wonders what would have happened if The Da Vinci Code or The Rule of Four had been set at, say, Michigan State or California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where human thought has been known to occur, and, some would assert, the institutions carry out a civilizing influence. Yet all too evidently, as these authors suggest, Western civilization, despite its name, stopped dead somewhere around Philadelphia. There is as much courtly bowing and scraping in The Rule of Four as there is in Rigoletto, without Verdi's thrilling outrage that grown men must look on in patient silence while spoiled young men disgrace themselves.


The Rule of Four is clearly a more learned thriller than The Da Vinci Code. It has real local detail and puzzles too intricate to solve mentally from an airplane seat. (Indeed, some of the puzzles cannot be solved at all, as they are fictitious.) For this intellectual complexity, The Rule of Four belongs to the same genre of action writing as Foucault's Pendulum, although Umberto Eco's novel is even more learned and much more clever, proving as it does that conspiracy theories eventually create their own reality, a theory that has since been proved prophetic by the new-forged "link" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Foucault's Pendulum and The Rule of Four also share, unwittingly, a cultural arrogance that has always been the besetting flaw of most civilized traditions. After all, life and learning for most of human history have also happened outside Princeton, outside Florence, outside Umberto Eco's personal library, and without benefit of Y chromosomes--but you would never know it from this reading list.

Like Leonardo's Last Supper, The Rule of Four takes place over Easter, a season that began at the Passover seder. It is part of the essential conservatism of thrillers that both The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four still feel the need to dabble in religion without confronting it except as a murky paganism or a neatly symbolic way to mark time. (Foucault's Pendulum makes a similarly obligatory descent on one occasion into Brazilian Santería.) But religion will not be bought off so cheaply.

In August 1427, nearly seventy years before Girolamo Savonarola started spitting fire in Florence, a skinny, toothless Franciscan preacher named Bernardino da Siena delivered a sermon to a crowd packed into the Campo, Siena's gracefully sloping public square. A local weaver took down the sermon verbatim, as he had every day since Bernardino began preaching on August 15. "I have a relic today," the famous preacher announced. "It's not the arm of Saint Bartholomew, or the Virgin's sleeve; it's something much better. In fact, it comes straight from Jesus Christ Himself, and there's enough for every one of you." Even reading between the lines, you can feel the crowd's excitement at obtaining a piece of the Lord, and the way Bernardino stokes this excitement, drawing out the suspense to a pitch of high anxiety. When the tension seems unbearable, he finally cries out, "It's the Gospel!" And the crowd groans in disappointment. The weaver records their roar, and Bernardino's reply. "Oh, oh, oh, oh! O ye of little faith! You thought you would get an easy thing to carry around."


Bernardino knew how difficult the Gospels were to understand, and how difficult an enterprise it was to transform their teachings into a way of life. He spent his own life trying to make their meaning plainer to ordinary people like the burghers of Siena, in sermons that provide a fascinating mix of religious dedication, compassion, and bigotry, delivered with a homespun eloquence that drew from his refined literary education as well as his years on the road. Bernardino shows that it is the difficulty of the Gospels, not their simplicity, that made them so fascinating, and so compelling: the fact that only believers ever saw the resurrected Jesus, the impossibility of understanding how a human being could also be God, the way in which women had played an indispensable part in creating the story of Jesus and in spreading it.

The Gospels were as demanding in the fifteenth century as they had been in the first, with their threats to overturn society and to transform souls, and they remain the single most reliable key to Italian Renaissance art. They are the real Da Vinci Code, and at this hard, simple news the people will groan with the same disappointment as Bernardino's public all those centuries ago. (This is the point of the Protestant Darrel L. Bock's Breaking the Da Vinci Code, a book whose introduction is written by a Catholic.) Disappointment or no, the best guide to understanding Leonardo's Last Supper remains Bernardino's relic, for Leonardo surely began with the Gospel accounts of that portentous Passover meal in Roman-occupied Judaea when he formulated his composition, as did Andrea del Castagno before him and Caravaggio afterward. The secrets that this ancient story hides are the boundless promise and unfathomable frailties of human nature, the mixture of loyalty and treachery that we all share, the real mysteries that confront us.

These are the secrets that underpinned the apparent paganism of Botticelli's mythological allegories as well as his religious subjects (the Birth of Venus and the Primavera are also probably paintings about the Virgin Mary) and the friar's tale that is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Indeed, it was the very mixture of ancient fertility with Jewish mysticism and the Christian tale of resurrection that gave the Renaissance its beauty, and such civility as it mustered. Not necessarily stuff for an airplane journey or a convalescence, but nonetheless excellent sustenance for a sound mind and body.

The most compelling recent historical novel about religious strife in the Renaissance is a large novel called Q, written by a group of Italians who called themselves "Luther Blissett" for that occasion and are now known as "Wu Ming." (Like Monty Python's peasants, they actually are an autonomous collective.) If we really want to see what happens when religion drives believers to extremes, it is hard to do better than this vivid, terrifying portrait of a survivor of the Protestant Reformation, who travels through Europe watching societies, personalities, and every tie of civility breaking down as otherworldly certainties compel people to commit appalling acts in the here and now. The characters in Q bleed real blood, blood that was still soaking Europe in the trenches of World War I, and the firestorms of World War II.

Once again the tale revolves around a secret, but in Q it is a secret in the good old tradition of the Cold War novel: the secret of our own nature, at once so angelic and so diabolical, and so eternally out of control. Like The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four, Q has clearly been written in response to the tumults of our age, but it suggests, unlike those books, that there is no secret code to make everything right. Instead, like Bernardino's Gospel, the answers to our woes lie plain before us, accessible to all, as they have always been: the arts of coexistence, complicated, controversial, and requiring not a code-breaker's insight but a citizen's constant vigilance, laced with a Good Samaritan's instinctive compassion.

Ingrid D. Rowland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the American Academy in Rome.

The NewRepublic Online

August 29, 2004
Death Takes a Holiday
By MARILYN STASIO

ALTHOUGH I haven't yet made a trip abroad because of something I read in a detective story, I can't say I haven't been tempted. Mysteries set in faraway places make me want to toss some clothes in a bag and take off at dawn for:

. . . Cuba, Jose Latour's ''Havana World Series'' in hand, to imagine that wild time when American mobsters were fighting over control of the casinos and making bets on everything but a political coup.

. . . the sleepy back-country township in South Africa where Thobela Mpayipheli, a onetime government agent who has reinvented himself as a peaceable man, is reluctantly coaxed back into action in Deon Meyer's ''Heart of the Hunter.''

. . . the shady precincts of modern-day Shanghai patrolled by Chief Inspector Chen and fellow officers charged with investigating politically sensitive crimes in Qiu Xiaolong's ''When Red Is Black.''

. . . Brazil, clutching ''Southwesterly Wind,'' the latest mystery in a beguiling series by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, in the hope of catching Inspector Espinosa on one of his meditative walks through Rio.

. . . and, in a fanciful moment, time travel to the Australian city of Melbourne in the 1920's, the setting for Kerry Greenwood's ''Murder in Montparnasse'' and other whimsical mysteries in a series featuring a fashionable liberated woman, Phryne Fisher, as amateur sleuth.

But my first stop would have to be Italy, which teems with resident mystery writers. Although they view their respective regions from a morbid perspective, acute observers like Magdalen Nabb (in Florence), Donna Leon (in Venice), Andrea Camilleri (in Sicily) and Michael Dibdin (who won't stay put) are vivid chroniclers of the daily drama of life and death. And while their sleuths are no less familiar than Virgil with the infernal darkness of the national soul, they make more cheerful tour guides. Their Italian detectives are pensive souls who ponder cases over robust meals in noisy trattorias and refer to Cicero for insights into the human condition. Actually, Andrea Camilleri's cop, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, is more partial to Sicilian philosophers like Giovanni Gentile, and in ''The Terra-Cotta Dog'' he declares himself ''deeply moved'' by fried mullet, boiled squid and poached baby octopus. Michael Dibdin's urban investigator, Aurelio Zen, out of his element in the northern reaches of the Dolomites in ''Medusa,'' struggles to understand the archaic Ladino dialect and has even more trouble digesting the region's smoked meats and gamy stews.

Italian sleuths are also great walkers, invariably taking the most scenic route on their way to break the news to some poor old widow that her good-for-nothing son has been arrested for murder. Ardent admirers of all things beautiful, they will often stop to look at the frescoes in a church. In ''Uniform Justice,'' Donna Leon's sleuth, Commissario Guido Brunetti, even exchanges greetings with a mynah bird in a pet shop.

The point, of course, is that these fictional detectives and amateur sleuths are naturally inquisitive and supremely perceptive. They know their territory intimately and study it obsessively, alert to the slightest signs of change -- and danger. Kurt Wallander, the melancholy police inspector in Henning Mankell's Swedish procedurals, is an eloquent ruminator on the creeping evils of the postmodern era. ''What's happening to the world?'' he demands in ''Firewall'' when two teenage girls show no remorse after killing a taxi driver. Karin Fossum's ''Don't Look Back'' asks the same question in neighboring Norway when the murder of a well-liked girl awakens the residents of a picturesque village to a chilling fact: there are no more islands of tranquillity in a changing world. ''They hug their children close, and nothing feels safe anymore.''

Scandinavian cops may be the most morose of an angst-ridden breed, but they aren't alone. Fictional police officers throughout the world are shaking their heads over criminal behavior that would have been inconceivable to earlier generations. Investigating the murders of two illegal Albanian immigrants in Petros Markaris's ''Deadline in Athens,'' Inspector Costas Haritos visits the street where the couple lived and is stunned by their neighbors' blatant bigotry. ''Why all this fuss about two Albanians?'' demands the owner of a grocery store. ''After all, with two Albanians less and another one in prison, Greece is a better place.''

Don Lee is equally forthright about Japan's racist attitudes toward blacks and Koreans in ''Country of Origin,'' which also takes a gritty look at Tokyo's fabled sex-entertainment industry. Lee's underdog cop, Inspector Kenzo Ota, who is on the team investigating the disappearance of an American woman, is such a naive puppy that he doesn't realize his own landlady is a ''romance consultant'' in the flesh trade.

Pepe Carvalho, the world-weary private eye in ''The Buenos Aires Quintet'' and other books in a series by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, makes no apologies for his indifference to anything happening outside his native Barcelona. But when his uncle asks him to track down his wayward son in Buenos Aires, Carvalho is prepared to consider the possibility that ''a new Argentina has been born, a new breed of Argentines.'' His tolerance fails him, however, once he comes face to face with the legacy of violence passed down by a succession of ruthless military regimes.

This gritty genre realism is all very informative, you might say, but having traveled this far for a vacation, may I please have some restorative culture -- and perhaps some mindless fun? Leslie Forbes's ''Bombay Ice'' comes close to being mindless, with its overstuffed plot about rampant corruption, but this potboiler still qualifies as fun, with its gaudy picture of a Bollywood film factory whose production head is suspected of having murdered his wife. If modern India seems overwhelming, you'll find relief -- and pure entertainment -- in Barbara Cleverly's enchanting stories set in the declining years of the Raj. ''The Damascened Blade,'' the third in a richly atmospheric series, takes her Scotland Yard investigator, Joe Sandilands, to the lawless northwest frontier that India shares with its fierce neighbor, Afghanistan.

Amelia Peabody, the bossy archaeologist in Elizabeth Peters's romantic adventures set in Egypt at the turn of the last century, makes a perfect companion for a cruise up the Nile. After being hustled with your tour group through four temples and six tombs in one day, you can relax on deck and sink into ''Guardian of the Horizon,'' the latest adventure featuring an intrepid heroine who has been fighting grave robbers and fending off lusty sheiks for close to 30 years. Or you could choose to travel with Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, or chief, of Cairo's secret police, in ''Death of an Effendi'' and other whodunits by Michael Pearce, set in the same colorful period. But Egypt hounds should also stock up on the gorgeously detailed dynastic mysteries of P. C. Doherty and Lynda S. Robinson.

Rereading ''Gorky Park'' is still the best way to get through a plane trip to Moscow. But once you arrive, the newly translated novels of Boris Akunin, which are set in czarist times and feature the escapades of a dashing diplomat-sleuth named Erast Fandorin, will introduce you to the unique Russian sense of humor. For all its elegant style, ''The Winter Queen'' is a madcap spoof of those absurdly romantic feats of heroism so dear to the Russian soul.

The reader who has been to London a million times and already knows to pick up the latest P. D. James or Peter Robinson can get a fresh slant on familiar territory with the historical mysteries of Leonard Tourney (16th century) and Bruce Alexander (18th century) -- or the incomparable Dr. Sam Johnson mysteries by Lillian De La Torre, if you can find these out-of-print classics -- as well as the better-known Victorian series by Anne Perry. But I must admit Paris is a blind spot with me, since I have yet to discover a more agreeable companion than Inspector Maigret.

As for culture, that's easy enough to find in genre novels, especially if you're headed for Spain, the setting and inspiration for Arturo Perez-Reverte's sophisticated literary thrillers. These intellectual puzzles, full of the most extravagant refinements, are the work of a mind enthralled by the aesthetic mysteries posed by old paintings (''The Flanders Panel''), rare manuscripts (''The Club Dumas''), arcane arts (''The Fencing Master'') and religious architecture (''The Seville Communion''). Finding himself in a cathedral square that ''had witnessed the bonfires of the Inquisition,'' the protagonist of ''The Club Dumas'' reflects that ''after all, this was Toledo. A crucible for underground cults, initiation rites, false converts.'' And suddenly you too are there.

In the end, though, what you most want to hear when you're on foreign soil are the voices of the people who live there. To my ear, the most insistent regional accents are heard in Scotland, in the brutal street talk of writers like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Denise Mina as well as in the more subtly sinister tones of Louise Welsh (who argues, in ''The Cutting Room,'' that Glasgow, for all its claims to toughness, is ''a peaceful wee haven'').

But if there's one person who can drown them out, it's the deceptively soft-spoken Precious Ramotswe, ''the only lady private detective in Botswana'' and the sensible heroine of a delightful series by Alexander McCall Smith that began with ''The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.'' Thinking about all the stories she has heard of her native land, Precious wonders, ''Who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?'' -- and the answer is right there, in the lovely sound of her own sweet voice.

Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the Book Review

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The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Death Takes a Holiday

August 24, 2004
Sex, Sex, Sex: Up Front in Bookstores Near You
By EDWARD WYATT

Porn stars may not keep many things hidden, but whatever secrets they had are now on the shelf at the local bookstore.

A wave of confessionals and self-help guides written by current or former stars of pornographic films is flooding bookstores this year, accompanied by erotic novels, racy sexual-instruction guides, histories of sexual particulars and photographic treatments of the world of pornography.

While many bookstores have long maintained sections devoted to erotica or sexuality, rarely have those books been as prominently positioned as some of the current crop, which have been elbowing their way onto display tables at the front of the major chain bookstores.

Every generation has a book or two that sets pulses quickening and generates frantic debate about pornography, community standards and the lowering of the bar for what is acceptable. But the latest flurry of sex books, coming at a time when sexual images already dominate advertising, entertainment and the Internet, is clearly finding a wide audience.

Publishers, for their part, insist they are not simply churning out dirty books.

"I don't publish pornography," said Judith Regan, president and publisher of ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins. "I publish smart books about sex. A lot of people try to imitate what I do but they don't do it well."

Ms. Regan's most recent offering is "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale," a memoir by Jenna Jameson, probably the most successful woman ever in the adult-film business, written with Neil Strauss, a former reporter and music critic for The New York Times.

The book, which is already climbing the best-seller lists, is long (579 pages), graphic (with clinical descriptions of a smorgasbord of sex acts) and bulging with color photos of a mostly nude Ms. Jameson (which led some stores, including Wal-Mart, to refuse to stock it).

Also headed for stores this fall is "XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits" (Bullfinch Press) by the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, with an introduction by Gore Vidal and essays on the intersection of pornography and culture by Salman Rushdie, Nancy Friday, John Malkovich and others.

For history buffs there is "The Intimate History of the Orgasm" (Grove Press), as well as histories of prostitution (Grove) and the pornographic film industry (ReganBooks), all currently in stores or coming soon. Atria Books has just issued "Star," a novel by Pamela Anderson with a reversible book jacket that contains a nude pinup of the author on the inside.

"100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed" (Grove), the sexual memoir of a teenage Italian girl, and "The Surrender" (ReganBooks), a former ballet dancer's account of her spiritual awakening through anal sex, are also on the way. Even some mainstream novels are drawing attention for their sexual content, like Tom Wolfe's forthcoming chronicle of the sex-and-beer obsessions of the college crowd, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

"Sex is what is selling these days," said Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books and Washington Square Press, imprints of Simon & Schuster that publish Zane (who will not disclose her real name), one of the industry's top-selling authors of erotica. "When publishers see that, everybody wants to get into the market."

The current crop of books was spawned by the success two years ago of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." by Catherine Millet, a French art critic. The book, published by Grove Press, received mediocre reviews but spent nine weeks on the Times best-seller list, bringing a new air of respectability to the genre.

Bob Wietrak, vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble, said that while erotica had been around for years, a big difference now was that it was written by name-brand authors rather than by the ubiquitous Anonymous.

"What we're seeing now in novels is that they're sexy, but they're very sophisticated," Mr. Wietrak said. That sophistication has brought greater acceptance, he said, and demand has generated better placement in stores.

Ms. Jameson's book is featured at the front of most bookstores. ReganBooks is also promoting "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," by the Vivid Girls, stars of pornographic films produced by Vivid Entertainment.

The key to her assertion that Ms. Jameson's book is smart, Ms. Regan said, is in the subtitle. "This is a cautionary tale for this culture," she said, referring to the book's frank descriptions of Ms. Jameson's rape by a relative of her boyfriend, her drug addiction and other trials.

"It's the story of what she aspired to and what she's become, and the price she paid for it," Ms. Regan said. "You cannot live a life like this and not pay a price."

Last week, the book appeared among the top 20 titles on the Amazon.com best-seller list. It also showed up at No. 27 on the extended best-seller list of The Times for the week ended Aug. 14, which is notable because the book did not officially go on sale until Aug. 17. (The extended list of 30 best sellers appears at www.nytimes.com; the top 15 of those appear in The Times Book Review on Sundays, about two weeks after the list date.)

A different kind of sexual awakening is the subject of "100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed." When it was published in Italy last year, the author was identified only as Melissa P., and she would not pose for photographs that showed her face because, she said, she was not yet 18.

The book itself is hardly as demure, relating such tales as the author's 16th birthday, when a lover goaded her into having sex with five men at once. The book sold more than 500,000 copies in Italy alone, and its success has spread across Europe. The author has helped her fame by revealing herself as Melissa Panarello. In interviews, she insists that the book mirrors her own experiences, although she stretched into two years events that actually took place in one.

Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said he believes the book will endure alongside previous erotic best sellers published by Grove, including "Tropic of Cancer" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

While he acknowledged that a chronicle of an adolescent's sexual experiences "is probably not a book that is appropriate for every market," Mr. Entrekin said the book was neither exploitative nor pornographic. "Pornography, for me, comes from intent, and I just don't think there's that intent here," he said.

Malaika Adero, a senior editor at Atria, concurred, saying that erotica like Zane's "Sex Chronicles," "Addicted" and, most recently, "Skyscraper" have sold more than a million copies not because they are exploitative but because they are intelligently written.

"These books are not subtle or coy or sentimental," Ms. Adero said. "They express their sexuality with a humor and a confidence that is reflective of today's woman. That is a cultural change that I don't think is going to reverse itself."

Some others clearly agree, including Harlequin Enterprises, publisher of the famed Harlequin Romance novels. In recent years Harlequin has introduced several book series that take a distinctly modern - that is, explicit - view of sex. In one series, called Blaze, the authors Lori and Tony Karayianni, writing as Tori Carrington, address a letter to readers in which they claimed to have surprised themselves at how far into "the shadowy side of sex" they go.

Harlequin romances, of course, can be bought at Wal-Mart, one of the biggest sellers of books today. But Wal-Mart shoppers looking for Ms. Jameson's memoir will be disappointed: the chain decided against carrying the book, Ms. Regan said. (Wal-Mart officials did not respond to inquiries seeking comment.)

Wal-Mart shoppers can, however, buy Ms. Anderson's novel, "Star," though with a difference. To accommodate Wal-Mart and other mass retailers, Atria issued about one-quarter of the 135,000 copies of the novel in print so far with a plain pink cover, instead of the jacket featuring a nude Ms. Anderson - a sort of modern equivalent of the plain brown wrapper.


The New York Times %3E Books %3E Sex%2C Sex%2C Sex%3A Up Front in Bookstores Near You

Laptop stolen from Corelli author

The author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin has offered a reward for the return of a stolen laptop containing the first 50 pages of his next novel.
Louis de Bernieres told the Eastern Daily Press the laptop had been taken from his garden shed in Norfolk.

The author was attending the Edinburgh Festival when the burglary happened.

He said he was offering £500 for the laptop's return, and a further reward for information leading to a conviction "of the creeps that stole it".

De Bernieres said he now faced having to rewrite the start of the book A Partisan's Daughter.

"I felt stupid for forgetting to bring the laptop in with me. I think I had been meaning to go back down there," he told the Eastern Daily Press about the theft.

"They also got all my garden tools which is a pain at this time of year."

He added: "I was about 50 pages through a new book and it was going very well, I was on a roll. I mostly feel angry."

De Bernieres had first embarked on A Partisan's Daughter when he was in his 20s, inspired by Yugoslavian friend who had claimed to have worked as a prostitute. He said he was on the fourth rewrite of the book.

"I would like to offer a reward of £500 for the return of this computer, and a further reward of the same amount for any information that leads to the conviction of the creeps that stole it," he told the newspaper.


The author shot to fame with Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which became a critically-acclaimed bestseller before it was adapted for the big screen.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3584460.stm

Published: 2004/08/20 16:39:02 GMT

Zhang Ziyi to Star in 'Geisha' Movie

Fri Aug 20, 2:18 PM ET Add Entertainment - AP to My Yahoo!

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer

LOS ANGELES - After long years of development and some tricky Hollywood dealmaking, a movie version of the best-selling novel "Memoirs of a Geisha" is headed into production.


The book became a sensation around the world when it was first published in 1997. The story chronicles a young girl's rise from poverty in a Japanese fishing village to life in high society.


The lead role of Sayuri will go to Zhang Ziyi, the Chinese actress who starred in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and appeared in the comedy "Rush Hour 2," her publicist said Thursday.


For those unfamiliar with the story, a geisha is a Japanese woman schooled in the art of dance, singing and conversation to be a companion for wealthy men.


Zhang, 25, has been working to perfect her English for several years and now speaks the language with little difficulty.


"This is the first time that I will play the lead in an English-language movie. It will be a big challenge, but the studios, producers and director have shown great confidence in me. I will continue to do my utmost to make this the best role I've ever played," she told The Associated Press.


Ken Watanabe, an Oscar nominee for "The Last Samurai," will portray the Chairman, a high-powered executive with whom Sayuri falls in love.


Another "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" co-star, Michelle Yeoh, has signed to portray Mameha, the elegant and experienced geisha who becomes Sayuri's mentor.


"Geisha" will be directed by Rob Marshall, the Oscar-nominated director of "Chicago."


Marshall has long wanted to make this his next project, but was locked into a contract with Miramax Films, while Columbia Pictures and DreamWorks SKG held the rights to "Geisha." After lengthy negotiations that threatened to block his participation, a deal was eventually reached among the studios.


"We could not be more excited about the extraordinary cast that we have in place for `Memoirs of a Geisha,'" said Marshall, who's also a Tony-winning director and choreographer. "We are adapting a beloved piece of literature that has become a worldwide sensation, which made it important to me to assemble a cast with a prestigious international profile."


For many years, Steven Spielberg was interested in directing the film. He will now serve as a producer.


"From the time I first read Arthur Golden's novel, I wanted to see this as a film," Spielberg said. "It's a uniquely compelling story rich with characters who take you into a world you have never experienced before."


Production is set to begin in the fall, but the release date has not yet been specified.






Yahoo%21 News - Zhang Ziyi to Star in %27Geisha%27 Movie

Nautical novelist 'couldn't even sail'
By James Landale
BBC News


The late Patrick O'Brian's celebrated maritime novels inspired legions of fans to venture on to the ocean waves. But fresh evidence suggests the legendary writer couldn't even sail.
Since Patrick O'Brian died four years ago, the author of the famous seafaring novels behind the film Master and Commander has been exposed as a man who invented much of his own life. He was English, not Irish; his name was Russ, not O'Brian.

Yet none of this has dented his cult following and reputation among his fans as one of the greatest story tellers in the English language. His 20 novels about the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin continue to sell by their thousands.

But now fresh claims have emerged that will test the loyalty of even his most vocal supporters.

It appears that the man who wrote so brilliantly and so accurately about naval warfare and life aboard ship during the Napoleonic wars did not actually know how to sail. The claim is made in an article by a wealthy American businessman called Tom Perkins in the current edition of the sailing magazine Yachting World.

Mr Perkins, a venture capitalist behind some of the world's biggest internet companies, was such a fan of the books that he invited Patrick O'Brian, then aged 80, and his wife to spend two weeks on his 154ft superyacht "Andromeda" on a cruise of the Mediterranean in the summer of 1995.


In his article, Mr Perkins describes a dinner where he and Mr O'Brian discussed the trip. He claims that the author's "knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil".
They agreed to start the voyage at the small harbour of Port Vendres on the southern French coast near to where the reclusive writer lived.

"O'Brian then suggested a cruise circumnavigating Sicily, a stop in Greece, dropping by Beirut and winding up with a comprehensive tour of the Balearic islands," Mr Perkins writes.

"I was stunned! How, I wondered, could this old salt possibly comprehend a tour of over 3,000 nautical miles with numerous ports of call, in 14 days in a yacht capable of only about 12 knots?

"As I began to explain the physical limitations of time and space, he added a desire to drop the hook in Naples, Capri and Tangiers as well."

On being told that this was impossible and that they would confine the trip to a cruise of the Balearic Islands, a somewhat disgruntled O'Brian gave Mr Perkins the impression that he was "short-changing him on his yachting holiday". And once on board, Mr O'Brian revealed a further lack of nautical knowledge.


He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day
Tom Perkins, Yachting World

"Underway to Menorca beneath a sunny sky with a 20-knot following wind, the sailing was marvellous and O'Brian was delighted," Mr Perkins writes. "I introduced him to the helm but he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe [a sudden change of direction involving the boom swinging violently from one side of the boat to another].
"I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful. He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day."

Mr O'Brian had in the past claimed that he had sailed on board square-rigged ships in his youth, learning to "hand, reef and steer".

In the article, Mr Perkins also gives fresh insight into Mr O'Brian's otherworldliness, a man who knew more about the 19th Century than his own time.

"One morning after breakfast... Patrick said: 'Tom, I wish to ask you an embarrassing question which will reveal my utter and total ignorance of all things in the modern world. What is software?'" Mr Perkins replied: "The piano is the hardware and the sheet music is the software."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/3570988.stm

Published: 2004/08/16 17:04:42 GMT

© BBC MMIV


BBC NEWS %7C Magazine %7C Nautical novelist %27couldn%27t even sail%27

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

C-SPAN Writes Last Chapter Of 'Booknotes'

By Tommy Nguyen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page C01

In announcing the cancellation of "Booknotes" -- C-SPAN's popular author interview program -- yesterday, host Brian Lamb was haunted by the numbers. He spends 20 hours each week reading books in preparation for "Booknotes," he estimates. That's 1.8 years of his life that have been dedicated to reading since the show debuted April 2, 1989. Now he wants to reclaim some of that time for his personal life.

Has it come to this? The author-interviewer, arguably the most quirky and dedicated on television, the creator and curator of one of TV's few institutions for avid readers -- has he finally tired of books?

"Oh, that's not true -- I still love reading," Lamb says. "I've never missed a show in all these years. It's been great, but I also think it seemed, in many ways, like I was always studying for a semester exam every week. Even kids in school get the summers off. I just thought it was time to do something new."

The program -- which has featured guests ranging from Bill Clinton to Shelby Foote, from Roger Mudd to Michael Moore -- will be pulled Dec. 5, when "Booknotes" celebrates its 800th author interview.

"What? They're canceling 'Booknotes?' " says Barbara Meade, co-owner of the Politics and Prose book store on Connecticut Avenue, a mecca for a "Booknotes" kind of person. A candlelight vigil at the store has not been announced. "Well, our store customers have loved watching his interviews, and they've gotten very interested in a particular book after watching a show [on the book]. We hear from our customers that 'Booknotes' is the only thing they watch on TV. They're going to be very disappointed."

As word spread yesterday among book lovers, many remarked on the way the show's tone and mood could edge on the surreal. Some recall Lamb asking questions such as:

"What was it like running U.S. foreign policy?"

"Was Khrushchev a trustworthy man?"

"How much did you make when you were 23 years old?"

"What is buggery?" Lamb once asked author Martin Gilbert.

Lamb's idiosyncratic interview techniques were eulogized. "Lamb's show is the most strait-laced stream-of-consciousness bit of showbiz on a rigidly anti-showbiz outlet in the history of entertainment," said one author who did not wish to be identified because he had been a guest on the show.

Local literary agent Debra Grosvenor, who has seen many of her clients on the show (including Eleanor Clift and Steve Neal), says she'll miss it a great deal.

"It was fabulous," she says. "It seemed to be an unbiased discussion on that particular book, and Lamb comes across as a very intelligent reader. I don't think its [book sales] impact has ever been quantified in the industry, but we would always be thrilled when one of our authors got on the show."

On Dec. 12, "Booknotes" will be replaced by another interview program hosted by Lamb, tentatively called "Q&A," which will occasionally invite guests from the book world. More frequently, however, they will come from beyond. It's a bonus, says Lamb, if they come from the deep beyond.

"We really want to hear from new and exciting people who are not necessarily writing books, accomplished people from all walks of life," says Lamb, mentioning that politicians, journalists, doctors, scientists and historians will all be a part of his expanded Rolodex. A scenario he's counting on for the show's development sees him picking up the paper, turning to the back pages and finding a story on someone who has very little or no chance of making it on any other TV show. That's his new definition of a quality guest.

"There are 4,000 schools of higher learning in this country," Lamb says. "How many of those chancellors and presidents have you seen on TV? How many of them have interesting stories to tell? How about we just start with that?"

Lamb, founder and CEO of C-SPAN, says he also changed the show's focus because he has become a bit weary of the book promotion cycle: After publishing a book, an author will simply make the rounds and appear on many shows. "What really kept me and the show going all these years was this great opportunity to learn something new in my reading, meet new authors and pass along my unique experience to the audience," says Lamb. But since exclusive television appearances are so rare among authors, "it seems that I can't do that anymore. So if I do interviews with authors in the future, I'd rather talk to them outside of that sequence."

"Booknotes" will still survive on its Web site, where archives of the interviews will remain, and Lamb insists that BookTV -- C-SPAN2's 48-hour programming on the weekends -- will see enhancements that will compensate for the loss of "Booknotes." Most likely viewers will see another interview show soon.

But Lamb wants everyone to get excited about his new show. "Because we're not governed by ratings on C-SPAN, we have the luxury to experiment," says Lamb. "We can be different and unusual."



C-SPAN Writes Last Chapter Of 'Booknotes' (washingtonpost.com)

Valuing Bestselling Books
July 2004

Retail Strategy
Research by
Alan Sorensen
Assisstant Professor of Strategic Management
Stanford Graduate School of Business

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Each week millions of readers look at the New York Times bestseller list to see what everybody else in the country is reading. And as soon as a title hits the list, booksellers typically push the book to the front of the store and slash its price by as much as 40 percent.

So it seems reasonable to assume that once a book makes the list its sales will really take off—if not for the lower price then because readers might view bestseller status as a sign of quality or because they don't want to miss the action. According to Alan Sorensen, an assistant professor of strategic management who has studied the effect of bestseller lists on sales of hardcover fiction, the majority of book buyers seem to use the Times' list as a signal of what's worth reading. Relatively unknown writers get the biggest benefit, while for perennial best-selling authors such as Danielle Steel and John Grisham, being on the list makes virtually no difference in sales.

"There is an effect, but it's small—much smaller than most people would have expected," says Sorensen, who studied sales records for 2001 and 2002. "What's remarkable is there is this dominant downward [sales] trend," he says, describing the typical sales path over time in the fiction titles he studied. Most sales occur soon after a book hits the shelves and gradually peter out. "If anything, what appearing on the [bestseller] list does is not so much cause your sales to increase from one week to the next, but rather to decrease at a slower rate."

Of course, looking at bestsellers alone wouldn't prove that any week-to-week sales changes were caused by the list itself. To answer the causal question, Sorensen needed a comparison group: books that sold well but somehow missed the list. So he looked at data from Nielsen BookScan, a sales monitoring service that tracks retail sales of books across the nation. Unlike the New York Times, which samples sales from only some stores, Nielsen BookScan captures most actual sales.

Consequently, Sorensen found differences in the two lists. In fact, in the two years he studied, Sorensen found 109 different books that failed to make the Times list even though Nielsen reported they sold more copies than other titles on the Times' list. Thus, if Sorensen saw sales rise on the Nielsen BookScan data the week following that same title's appearance on the New York Times list but saw no similar increase for a different top-selling Nielsen book that wasn't on the Times list, he inferred that something about the appearance on the Times list caused the subsequent jump in sales.

Based on these comparisons, Sorensen estimates that previously best-selling authors got the least benefit from being on the New York Times list, while unknowns had the greatest jump in sales. On average, he estimates, appearing on the Times list might increase a book's first-year sales by 13 to 14 percent, but for first-time authors sales probably would increase by an impressive 57 percent. And for established authors like Danielle Steel or John Grisham whose every novel seems to become a bestseller, "the list has no discernible impact on sales," writes Sorensen.

This pattern, he says, suggests the bestseller list primarily tells consumers what may be worth reading. "It's free advertising for new authors who make it to the list," he says. With a well-known author, on the other hand, people don't need a bestseller list to help them decide whether to buy the book.

Careful to isolate the bestseller list from other likely causes of higher sales, Sorensen also looked at the famous "Oprah effect," the stunning way being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's on-air book club immediately catapults a title onto the bestseller list. Though reluctant to name numbers because there were few Oprah titles in the sample, Sorensen says the Oprah effect is "many times bigger" than the bestseller effect.

Looking at sales of individual titles is fun, but for economists, says Sorensen, a more interesting question is the effect of bestseller lists on overall product variety. If bestseller lists are indeed generating extra sales, are those sales stolen from other books? Or are those extra sales literally extra sales, bought by people who wouldn't otherwise have bought any book? "It's a really hard question, and I don't have the ideal data for answering it," concedes Sorensen. But he has indirect evidence suggesting that being on the list does indeed generate extra sales. If he's right, everyone but the perennially best-selling authors and their publishers may have a little bit less to grumble about.

—Marina Krakovsky



Research - Valuing Bestselling Books - Stanford GSB