Scholastic has deleted material from its Web site that was intended to help teachers discuss the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 and will have a new discussion guide "complete with background information" posted this morning, today's Wall Street Journal reported.

The miniseries, set to air on Sunday and Monday, has come under sharp attack from Clinton Administration figures who say it falsely depicts key events. In one example, the miniseries shows Samuel Berger, the former national security advisor, hanging up on a CIA officer at a critical time, something he says never happened. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright wrote a public letter criticizing her portrayal, and former President Clinton's lawyers have written to ABC, too.

The New York Times reported today that ABC plans to run the series but is currently "reevaluating and in some cases re-editing crucial scenes." ABC has defended the approach by saying The Path to 9/11 is a dramatization, not a documentary.

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Bookselling This Week has a heartening story about the opening tomorrow of Bay Books in Bay St. Louis, Miss., where many stores, including Bookends, were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. After Bookends owner Susan Daigre decided not to rebuild (she has joined her husband's modular home business, which is in great demand at the moment), Kay Gough decided to fill the void left by the lack of a bookstore.

Besides the usual stresses of opening a store, Gough is contending with the reality that "everything takes longer than you would think it should here. Nothing is simple because the infrastructure was so destroyed."

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The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has issued a poster for Banned Books Week, Sept. 23-30, that incorporates the FREADOM logo and depicts the Statue of Liberty reading a book. Created by Roger Roth for The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History, the poster can be downloaded free from the ABFFE Web site and printed as an 11" x 17" poster.

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The Midwest Booksellers Association has launched Midwest Connections, a marketing initiative for publishers and member stores to promote titles and author in the Midwest. The association aims, as it put it, not "to re-invent the wheel of marketing/promotion/publicity campaigns," but instead "to build on its knowledge of member bookstores and its relationships with publishers to help customize" marketing programs for the region.

Booksellers will be able to participate per promotion at any of three levels of intensity, depending on what works best for them depending on the book and author involved. For example, to be classified as a "top tier" store, which would allow for an author appearance, a store would have to meet certain criteria, including doing a certain amount of promotional effort for the book and author, submitting a proposal for the author event, ordering books directly from the publisher and being a Book Sense store that reports to the Heartland bestseller list.

Publishers will have three models to choose from: adult fiction/nonfiction; cookbooks/how-to; and children's/middle grade/YA. Publishers will be asked, among other things, to suggest titles and authors for the program, provide the author for the top tier stores, help with coop, provide promotional materials to bookstores, and more.

The association has committed itself to administer and organize the programs and work with all participants, among other things.

The first two books and authors to be featured under the program:

• The Driftless Area: A Novel by Tom Drury (Atlantic Monthly Press), which was published in August. Events include a regional tour by the author, a Spoken Word radio taping, speaking at the MBA trade show book & author dinner, ads and listings on MBA Web sites, rebates and prizes for MBA stores that promote the book, etc.
• Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry (HarperCollins), an October title that will be promoted in many similar ways.

For details, see MBA's Web site and its Midwest Connections brochure or contact Susan Walker, MBA executive director, at susan@midwestbooksellers.org or UMBAoffice@aol.com or phone 612-926- 5868.
 

Next Friday, September 15, The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian DePalma and starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank, blossoms. The movie is, of course, based on the classic James Ellroy novel about the famous unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, a case that strangely anticipated the death of Ellroy's own mother. (That story he explored more directly in his 1996 memoir, My Dark Places.)

Warner has issued Black Dahlia tie-in editions in mass market ($7.50, 0446618128) and trade paperback ($13.99, 0446698873) formats. The books are already appearing on bestseller lists, including the Book Sense/Southern California Booksellers Association list below. After the movie was screened at the Venice Film Festival last week, it became one of the most-searched for titles on B&N.com; yesterday it was No. 20 on the site's bestseller list.

Pasadena Weekly has an excellent article about Ellroy, the Black Dahlia case, his mother's murder and the author's current book tour for the movie and tie-in editions. Calling DePalma "the ideal artist" to film his book, Ellroy endorses the movie, although he wasn't consulted on the script and would have preferred for the Short character not to appear on screen alive.

Ellroy seems to want soon to put this grizzly past behind him. As he told the paper, "This is my farewell tour to two things: my mother's death and the Black Dahlia. It's over. After this tour, I will never answer another question about these things. It's an idea whose time has come and gone. . . . I have told the fu**ing story of my mother and the Black Dahlia 96 million fu**ing times." (Editors' note: certain @#$! words disguised not for moral reasons but to bypass spam filters.)

Among the many books written about the case, each of which offers a different solution:

• Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder by Steve Hodel (HarperCollins, $15.95, 0061139610), which appeared in a revised edition this summer and includes a foreword by Ellroy. LAPD homicide investigator Hodel pins the murder on, of all people, his late father, Dr. George Hodel.
• Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Bayliss (Bulfinch, $35, 0821258192) aims to make a connection between the Black Dahlia murder and surrealist art and the art and film communities in Los Angeles. In other words, the killing was so beautifully weird that an artist must have done it.
• The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles by Donald H. Wolfe (HarperCollins, $26.95, 0060582499). Based on extensive archival research, this book pins the murder on mobster Bugsy Siegal, better known as the founder of modern-day Las Vegas.
• Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia by John Gilmore (Amok Books, $17.95, 187892317X), just published in a revised version. The son of an LAPD cop who was on the force at the time of the murder, Gilmore supports the department's belief that Jack Wilson, an alcoholic burglar, might have been the murderer. He makes his case with grisly, noir details.

This morning on the Early Show: Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Da Capo, $24, 0738210854).

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Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: Ray Suarez, author of The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America (Rayo, $24.95, 0060829974).

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Tomorrow on the Weekend Today Show: Clinton R. Van Zandt, author of Facing Down Evil: Reflections of an FBI Hostage Negotiator (Putnam, $24.95, 039915308X).

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On CBS's Sunday morning, Kenneth Feinberg, who headed the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, will talk about his new book, What Is Life Worth? (PublicAffairs, $13.95, 1586484516).

John Wood has made regular appearances on behalf of the nonprofit organization Room to Read since he founded it in 2000--a year after he left Microsoft, where he was a marketing executive--but lately he's navigating new territory: a book tour to promote his recently published memoir Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children (Collins, $25.95, 006112107X).

In six years, Room to Read has built 200 schools, established 3,000 libraries and donated more than 1.5 million books in Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal and other countries throughout the developing world. Room to Read also publishes local language children's books and recently created a scholarship fund for girls. Routinely queried about how he made the transition from corporate life to the nonprofit sector, Wood decided that the time was right to pen a memoir and is hopeful that the book will increase awareness of Room to Read's mission.

When asked if he is looking forward to the tour, the first-time author said, "Bring it on! I love telling the Room to Read story and connecting with audiences." One important point Wood plans to impart to audiences is that "you don't have to be Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or Bono to go out and change the world."

Along with independent and chain bookstores, Wood's book tour includes appearances at a variety of venues. These include the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, where Dean Deepak Jain of the Kellogg School at Northwestern (Wood's alma mater) will introduce the author. Events at the Asia Society in San Francisco and the Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley will feature Wood "in conversation with" venture capitalists Don Valentine and Bill Draper, two early investors in Room to Read.

When setting up the tour, Collins v-p and senior director of publicity Paul Olsewski "looked for accounts with strong ties to local community groups who would be on board with the mission of Room to Read and John's story." In Seattle, home to Microsoft's headquarters, Wood will appear at the Queen Anne Bookshop as well as the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Other places on what Olsewski deemed "a very ambitious and enthusiastic final list of booksellers and events" are the Downtown Harvard Club, the New York University Graduate School of Public Service, the Professional Women Business Conference in Sacramento, Calif., Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif., and the Texas Book Festival in Austin.

Wood's tour began last week at Cody's Books in San Francisco, where he has lived for the past seven years. Marketing director Melissa Mytinger said the store was "thrilled" to host the kick-off event, which she described as "a real celebratory evening" that drew a crowd of nearly a hundred people. According to Cody's assistant manager Eric Schultheis, "from both a sales and an attendance point of view, it was very successful." Next up for Wood are appearances at Barnes & Noble in New York City today and the Greenwich Library in Greenwich, Conn., on Monday.

As he traverses the U.S. while on tour in the coming months, Wood is eager to share his story with people he believes are likely to respond to his message of how books can make a difference. "At its heart," said Wood, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World is "a story about book lovers sharing this amazing gift with children around the world who have never had the privilege of reading books, or having access to a library. So I believe that this story will really resonate with the book lovers we meet while on tour."--Shannon McKenna

The following were the bestselling titles at Southern California Booksellers Association stores during the week ended Sunday, September 3, as reported to Book Sense:

Hardcover Fiction

1. Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen (Random House, $24.95, 0375502246)
2. The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth (Putnam, $26.95, 0399153942)
3. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (Knopf, $24.95, 1400044618)
4. The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (Knopf, $23, 030726419X)
5. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (Viking, $25.95, 067003777X)
6. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Algonquin, $23.95, 1565124995)
7. Judge and Jury by James Patterson and Andrew Gross (Little, Brown, $27.99, 0316013935)
8. The Devil's Feather by Minette Walters (Knopf, $24, 0307264629)
9. Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear (Holt, $24, 0805078983)
10. The Return of the Player by Michael Tolkin (Grove Press, $24, 0802118011)
11. The Messenger by Daniel Silva (Putnam, $25.95, 0399153357)
12. The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell (New Press, $24.95, 1565849930)
13. The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho (HarperCollins, $24.95, 0060527994)
14. Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle (Viking, $25.95, 0670037702)
15. Can't Wait to Get to Heaven by Fannie Flagg (Random House, $25.95, 1400061261)

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron (Knopf, $19.95, 0307264556)
2. State of Emergency by Patrick J. Buchanan (St. Martin's, $24.95, 0312360037)
3. Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, $27.95, 159420103X)
4. Marley & Me by John Grogan (Morrow, $21.95, 0060817089)
5. Elizabeth by J. Randy Taraborrelli (Warner, $26.99, 0446532541)
6. Lies at the Altar by Robin Smith (Hyperion, $24.95, 1401302564)
7. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown, $25.95, 0316172324)
8. The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman (FSG, $30, 0374292795)
9. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking, $24.95, 0670034711)
10. The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, M.D. (Morgan Road, $24.95, 0767920090)
11. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (HarperCollins, $23.95, 0060777044)
12. Grayson by Lynne Cox (Knopf, $16.95, 0307264548)
13. The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury, $24.95, 1582344515)
14. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press, $26.95, 1594200823)
15. Static by Amy Goodman and David Goodman (Hyperion, $23.95, 1401302939)

Trade Paperback Fiction

1. The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (Penguin, $14, 0143037145)
2. The Sea by John Banville (Vintage, $12.95, 1400097029)
3. On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Penguin, $15, 0143037749)
4. History of Love by Nicole Krauss (Norton, $13.95, 0393328627)
5. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead, $14, 1594480001)
6. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (Random House, $13.95, 0812968069)
7. Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor, $12.95, 1400077109)
8. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (Mysterious Press, $13.99, 0446698873)
9. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (HarperSanFrancisco, $13.95, 0061122416)
10. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage, $14, 0375706674)
11. The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory (Touchstone, $16, 0743272498)
12. March by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin, $14, 0143036661)
13. Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates (Harper Perennial, $14.95, 0060816228)
14. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Penguin, $15, 0143034901)
15. Bangkok 8 by John Burdett (Vintage, $13.95, 1400032903)

Trade Paperback Nonfiction

1. An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore (Rodale, $21.95, 1594865671)
2. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay, $14.95, 0316346624)
3. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Scribner, $14, 074324754X)
4. 1776 by David McCullough (S&S, $18, 0743226720)
5. Julie and Julia by Julie Powell (Back Bay, $13.99, 0316013269)
6. The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion, $14.95, 0786888768)
7. The Places in Between by Rory Stewart (Harvest, $14, 0156031566)
8. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library, $14, 1577314808)
9. Zagat Survey: Los Angeles/Southern California Restaurants (Zagat, $13.95, 1570067422)
10. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle (Plume, $14, 0452287588)
11. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (Anchor, $14.95, 1400032806)
12. Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? by Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg, M.D. (Three Rivers, $13.95, 0307345971)
13. Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (Penguin, $15, 0143036610)
14. 501 Spanish Verbs by Christopher Kendris, Ph.D., and Theodore Kendris, Ph.D. (Barron's, $16.99, 0764124285)
15. Everything Men Know about Women by Knott Mutch (Studio 9 Books & Music, $3.99, 155207045X)

Mass Market

1. The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly (Warner, $7.99, 0446616451)
2. Morrigan's Cross by Nora Roberts (Jove, $7.99, 0515141658)
3. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (Warner, $7.50, 0446618128)
4. The Camel Club by David Baldacci (Warner, $7.99, 0446615625)
5. Lifeguard by James Patterson and Andrew Gross (Warner, $9.99, 044661761X)
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Warner, $6.99, 0446310786)
7. Thud! by Terry Pratchett (HarperTorch, $7.99, 0060815310)
8. The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard (HarperTorch, $9.99, 0060724234)
9. Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley (Warner, $7.50, 0446612723)
10. To Distraction by Stephanie Laurens (Avon, $7.99, 0060839104)

Children's Titles

1. Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic, $4.99, 0439376149)
2. Pirateology by Captain William Lubber (Candlewick, $19.99, 0763631434)
3. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Paperbacks, $9.99, 0439785960)
4. Dial L for Loser (The Clique #6) by Lisi Harrison (Little, Brown, $9.99, 0316115045)
5. How to Eat Fried Worms (movie tie-in edition) by Thomas Rockwell (Yearling, $5.99, 0440421853)
6. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins, $16.95, 0060254920)
7. The Giver by Lois Lowry (Laurel Leaf, $6.50, 0440237688)
8. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (Megan Tingley, $8.99, 0316015849)
9. Flotsam by David Wiesner (Clarion, $17, 0618194576)
10. Eldest by Christopher Paolini (Knopf, $21, 037582670X)
11. Hoot by Carl Hiaasen (Yearling, $6.50, 0440421705)
12. Olivia Forms a Band by Ian Falconer (Atheneum, $17.95, 141692454X)
13. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume (Puffin, $5.99, 0142401013)
14. The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares (Delacorte, $8.95, 0553375938)
15. Ghosthunters and the Incredibly Revolting Ghost! by Cornelia Funke (Chicken House, $4.99, 0439833086)

[Many thanks to Book Sense and SCBA!]