Shelf Awareness for Monday, November 14, 2005


William Morrow & Company: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

Del Rey Books: Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

Peachtree Teen: Romantic YA Novels Coming Soon From Peachtree Teen!

Watkins Publishing: She Fights Back: Using Self-Defence Psychology to Reclaim Your Power by Joanna Ziobronowicz

Dial Press: Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood

Pantheon Books: The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Peachtree Publishers: Leo and the Pink Marker by Mariyka Foster

Wednesday Books: Castle of the Cursed by Romina Garber

News

Notes: Paradies Flies; Google the Renter?; Nonprofits

The Paradies Shops, which runs more than 400 stores at airports and hotels under its own name and licenses, is taking a trip to new territory, the Atlanta Business Chronicle and MSNBC report. For the first time in its 45-year history, the company is opening stores outside its traditional areas, in this case, at the Georgia Aquarium, where it will have two gift shops.

Last month Paradies opened the first New York Times bookstore, in Lexington, Ky.'s Blue Grass Airport.

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Salinas, Calif., which got lots of bad press for deciding to close its three public libraries, passed a new tax last Tuesday that will keep library doors open, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The half-cent sales tax increase was approved by 61% of voters in the city of 150,000.

During the past year, Rally Salinas raised almost $800,000 for the libraries and related programs. The effort was aided by community groups, local businesses, celebrities--and even inmates at San Quentin, who raised $1,000 selling doughnuts, pizza and fried chicken to fellow prisoners.

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The digital race continues. Today's Wall Street Journal reports that Google has approached at least one publisher about a possible program to allow consumers to "rent" an online copy of new books for a week. The copies would not be downloadable or printable. The concept follows announcements in recent weeks about pay-per-view programs by Amazon and Random House.

Under the Google proposal, customers would pay 10% of the book's list price, a rate publishers who spoke with the paper said was too low.

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The Economist offers one of the more cogent explanations for the rush by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to digitize books. "Most of the web has already been scanned and indexed--there are already between 8 billion and 10 billion items online. Although search technology is constantly tweaked to provide better performance and more relevant results, studies by Microsoft have shown that around half of all search queries fail to provide the information that users want. 'We need to get offline content online. Offline is where trusted content is, and where people who need to answer questions go,' explains Danielle Tiedt, manager of search content acquisition at MSN. 'Books are only the first step,' she says."

The article also points out that while many people quote Stewart Brand to the effect that "information wants to be free," they forget the rest of his famous 1987 aphorism: "Information also wants to be expensive."

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Bizarre bookstore news section:

Yesterday afternoon Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh, N.C., was robbed by a gunman during a cookbook signing, the News & Observer stated. The thief was discreet enough--handing a cashier a note--that customers had no idea the theft had occurred.

Noting that the store has had two burglaries in recent years, owner Nancy Olson joked, "Why didn't he go to a Barnes & Noble and rob them?"

Actually B&N didn't have an easy Sunday either. In Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday afternoon, a Subaru station wagon smashed through the windows of a B&N and made it about 40 feet into the store, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Luckily no one was hurt seriously. Appropriately perhaps, the car destroyed the travel section and ended up in--or as--history, as it were.

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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel offers a long profile of Woodland Pattern Book Center in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wis., on its 25th anniversary. The store stocks 27,000 books with an emphasis on poetry and small press titles, curates art shows, hosts jazz performances, holds poetry slams, offers readings, teaches bookmaking and more. Director Anne Kingsbury told the paper, "What makes us a little different from other literary centers is that we've presented different art forms where it intersects with text or literature."

Woodland Pattern has survived in part because Kingsbury's husband, Karl Gartung, kept his day job--for salary and benefits--the pair own the building the store is in and the business is organized as a non-profit entity.

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Speaking of bookstore nonprofits, the group seeking to organize a bookstore co-op in New Paltz, N.Y., to replace Ariel Booksellers, which is closing this month, met and discussed plans. According to the Daily Freeman, the steering committee hopes to offer literacy, education and arts programs; educate readers on the value of buying locally; raise $200,000; and sell memberships of $100 for single readers and $200 for families.

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Today's New York Times profiles one of the estimated 25 buyers of the (nearly) complete Penguin Classics collection of 1,082 books that Amazon has been offering since June for nearly $8,000. The owner is Kathryn Gursky of Los Alamos, N.M., who has an MLS and works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her home was burned to the ground by a forest fire in 2000; her husband bought the collection as a birthday present to help replace her 2,300 lost books.

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Another New York Times piece today explores the push by some publishers to develop books closely with other companies. In this case, HarperCollins created a $16.99 children's title, Cashmere If You Can, with the cooperation of Saks Fifth Avenue (the store had the idea for the book). Until January, the book is a Saks exclusive and will not be available elsewhere.

In the book, whose text copyright is held by Saks, a family of Mongolian goats live on the roof of Saks's midtown New York City store. The Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon in the Saks building is another placed product, so to speak.

Bookseller comment ranged from "disgusting" (Carla Cohen of Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C.) to "It all depends on how good the book is" (Mitch Kaplan at Books & Books, Coral Gables, Fla.).

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Longtime management consultant and business guru Peter Drucker died on Friday at 95. He wrote 39 books in his career. For a good start, try The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins, $17.95, 006093574X), which was originally published in 2001.

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David Westheimer, a longtime journalist and novelist, died last Tuesday in Los Angeles, the Houston Chronicle reported. He was 88.

Westheimer was best known for Von Ryan's Express, the bestseller that became a popular 1965 movie starring Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard. Like many of his other works of fiction, Von Ryan's Express was based on Westheimer's experience as a POW during World War II.


Now Streaming on Paramount+ with SHOWTIME: A Gentleman in Moscow


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Stewarts Unite

Today on the Today Show: James Patterson, author author of Mary Mary (Little, Brown, $27.95, 031615976X), which goes on sale today and continues the Alex Cross series.

Today also eats up the Scotto family, authors of Scotto Sunday Suppers and Other Fabulous Feasts: Creative Entertaining for Every Occasion (Regan, $39.95, 0060815639).

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WAMU's Diane Rehm Show talks with Patricia Aburdene--co-author with John Naisbitt of the megabestselling Megatrends books--author of the new Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism (Hampton Roads, $24.95, 1571744568).

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Oh my. Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Martha Stewart.

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Yesterday's Today Show highlighted Book Sense's Best Children's Books.

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Yesterday All Things Considered spoke with Vikram Seth, author of Two Lives (HarperCollins, $27.95, 0060599669).

GLOW: Greystone Books: brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe, illustrated by Reuben Coe


Books & Authors

Attainment: New Books This Week and Next

The Regime: Evil Advances by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (Tyndale House, $25.99, 1414305761) appears tomorrow, November 15. This is the second volume of the Before They Were Left Behind series, the prequel to the Left Behind series.

A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World by Susanne Antonetta (Tarcher, $24.95, 1585423823) goes on sale on November 17. The author draws on her experience with manic depression and interviews with people with multiple personality disorders, autism, schizophrenia and other "neuroatypical" conditions to show different ways of viewing the world.

Star Wars: Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader by James Luceno (Del Rey, $25.95, 0345477324) lands in this world next Tuesday, November 22. Run!

The Lighthouse
by P.D. James (Knopf, $25.95, 030726291X) also goes on sale on the 22nd. Commander Adam Dalgliesh is challenged again.

John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father by Peggy Noonan (Viking, $24.95, 0670037486) goes on sale on the 22nd. The Reagan speechwriter and columnist on the late pontiff.

BINC: Apply Now to The Susan Kamil Scholarship for Emerging Writers!



Book Review

Mandahla: Call It a Gift Reviewed

Call It a Gift (a Novel) by Valerie Hobbs (University of Nevada Press, $18.00 Paperback, 9780874176124, February 2005)

from the pile on the floor; that, and the fact that it fit into my overcoat pocket. I'm glad I did, because it's a delightful book.
 
Jeronimo Smith, a 77-year-old retired janitor, and Emily Parsons, also retired and a cultured, recent widow, meet at the Santa Barbara public library. Jeronimo has come for the Collected Poems of Yeats. He needs the book, since "only Yeats could get him through a really bad time, and this one was bad. His forty-seven-year-old son had run away from home. Again. And this time he'd taken the Yeats with him." Unable to find the book on the shelf, he discovers that Emily is in the process of checking it out, and won't give it up. So Jeronimo posts himself on the library steps every morning, until she finally returns the book. They talk, they go out for coffee, and Jeronimo finds himself uncharacteristically taken with Emily. Thus begins his eccentric courtship: "He'd intended to be charming. But that was only, he reminded himself, in case she decided to renew the book. He'd been prepared to charm it away from her. What he hadn't intended was . . . to care so deeply about what the devil she thought of him."
 
Hobbs portrays characters deftly. Jeronimo does not go gently in his life, but sails into it with directness: "While he waited, he attacked a flyer hung on the door with his blue marking pen, adding an m to community and changing the e to an a in effect." Emily, who has moved to California from Pittsburgh to take care of her grandchildren, is becoming weary: "They all slammed doors in this family. They said all the worst things with doors. And it was wearing [her] down. A year and four months she'd been here. Sixteen months on the way to forever . . . she knew with a sickening certainty that her coming here had been a mistake."
 
What Jeronimo doesn't know is that Emily is dying of cancer. She hasn't told her daughter, and is still trying to figure out how to live in the time she has left. As she thinks about him, she wonders why it matters what he thinks of her. "Was she still in denial? Hadn't she yet passed into one of the other more useful, sensible stages? She should be reading about that, about dying in the correct order, not about planting gardens she would never get to weed."
 
The Yeats-loving janitor impulsively proposes a road trip to Yellowstone; however, Emily doesn't have the courage to run away, believing that "the last trip of her life would be to a sick ward." But when Jeronimo climbs a ladder to her window in the middle of the night, camper packed and ready to go, she doesn't hesitate.
 
Family responsibilities, their own needs and longings, their rebellion against aging "sensibly" all combine to tell a charming and bittersweet story. As Emily says, "Not all gifts are those one would choose, are they?" But she and Jeronimo turn their imposed gift into one of love.--Marilyn Dahl

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