After living nearly a year long than expected, political humorist and columnist Art Buchwald died on Wednesday at 81. He wrote more than 8,000 newspaper columns and more than 30 books, the last of which was Too Soon to Say Goodbye (Random House, $17.95, 9781400066278/1400066271), which appeared in November. In it, Buchwald  told the Buchwaldian story of how in February last year, he checked into a hospice ready to die after doctors said he would not survive without dialysis, which he decided to forgo. His many friends visited to say goodbye, but his kidneys improved.

Among his other books were I'll Always Have Paris and the recent Beating Around the Bush: Political Humor 2000-2006 (Seven Stories Press, trade paper $17.95, 9781583227503; hardcover $24.95 9781583227145), which has introduction by Garry Trudeau.

Buchwald lived in Washington, D.C., and spent summers on Martha's Vineyard. Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven put up a sign of farewell in its windows. "The world of the printed word has lost a great icon," Ann Nelson, owner of the Bunch of Grapes, said in the Martha's Vineyard Gazette. "He always told me I had the power to make or break a writer's racket, and he said, ‘I love her especially when she puts my book in the window.' "

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Booksellers to the rescue.

Today's Washington Post features an unusual ad from HarperCollins. The first part quotes a scathing review from the Post's Jonathan Yardley (no surprise there) of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, which last week he judged "a massive deadweight of a novel."

Then the ads quotes a quartet of booksellers at Politics & Prose, who say, "We beg to differ. Four of us on staff have devoured this gigantic and vastly entertaining book. There is a Tolstoyan array of characters that together create a panorama of Indian life. The characters are etched unforgettably on our minds."

The booksellers' review was prominent on the store's Web site. With their approval, Harper decided to air the two points of view.

HarperCollins had a difference of opinion with another major U.S. newspaper this week. The New York Times ran a full page ad for Christopher Moore's You Suck: A Love Story, but made the publisher disguise the word suck--a move Harper thought really @#^%@ed! But the Times's review department did not censor itself: Janet Maslin used the full title and even addressed it, so to speak.

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Bookselling This Week celebrated New Year's Day--a day at least a few indies stay open and have substantial sales. At Changing Hands, Tempe, Ariz., doors open at noon and most everything in the store is discounted 25%. In nine hours this year, the store grossed $51,000, much of it titles that otherwise would be returned. Like Changing Hands, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, Calif., has a tradition of opening on New Year's Day and discounts hardcovers 20% and calendars 50%. The King's English, Salt Lake City, Utah, discounts books and offers revelers champagne as well as Alka Seltzer, club soda and orange juice.

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Lorelei on the Mississippi.

Bookselling This Week also profiles Lorelei Books, which opened in Vicksburg, Miss., on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Owned by Laura and Troy Weeks, who moved from Virginia in 2005, the 1,600-sq.-ft. store emphasizes local and regional history, Civil War and university press titles. (The siege of Vicksburg was a key Civil War battle.)

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Although it did not break out sales by category, Hastings Entertainment, which sells books as part of its mix of media, had lower-than-expected sales in the two months ended December 31. Total sales rose 2% to $127.7 million. The company lowered it projected net income estimates for the fiscal year, which ends January 31.

Hastings blamed the disappointing sales and margins on "a highly competitive holiday season, directed markdowns in sidelines and electronics to make room for our fiscal year 2007 merchandise plan, and sales incentives offered to increase the company's market share."

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Book signing of the times.

On Monday, Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, the Mendocino Book Company, Ukiah, Calif., hosted the book launch for The Call to Shakabaz by Amy Wachspress (Woza Books), a fantasy adventure that "demonstrates the fundamental principles of nonviolence as practiced by Dr. King and features an all-black cast of characters." Wachspress and her husband, Ron Reed, who own Woza Books, Talmage, Calif., read from the book. Afterwards the crowd ate "spice cake" in honor of a character in the book who bakes spice cake. For more information, go to Woza Books's Web site.
 

The Caravan Project, headed by Peter Osnos, will release its first 23 books this spring. From seven non-profit publishers, the books will be available in print, digital and downloadable audio formats. The presses offering the first list are Beacon Press, Council on Foreign Relations Press, Island Press, the New Press, the University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press and Yale University Press.

The titles are nonfiction and focus on history, current affairs and issues. One author is especially familiar to booksellers: Chris Finan, executive director of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, whose From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America will be published by Beacon.

Caravan is developing a Web site with funding from the MacArthur Foundation. In addition, Caravan has become a project of the Century Foundation. Booksellers are strongly involved in the project.

 

Tonight on 20/20: Robert Pagliarini, author of The Six-Day Financial Makeover: Transform Your Financial Life in Less than a Week! (St. Martin's Press, $24.95, 9780312353629).

A front-page story in yesterday's New York Times about Andre Waters, a former pro football player with a brain injury who committed suicide last November, included extensive commentary from Chris Nowinski, author of Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis from the NFL to Youth Leagues  (Drummond Publishing, $14.95, 9781597630139/1597630136), which was published in October and is distributed by NBN. Nowinski is a former Harvard football player and professional wrestler who suffered repeated concussions that led him to retire from those sports and, as the Times put it, to try "to expose the effects of contact-sport brain trauma." He suggested to Waters's family that an examination be made of Waters's brain, which discovered severe brain damage, the likely source for Waters's depression.

Within hours of the article's appearance, the proverbial phone was ringing off the hook, and Drummond did interviews with NPR's All Things Considered, CNN's News Room, ESPN's Outside the Lines and Washington Post Radio. Today he is taping a segment for Good Morning America that will air today or Monday, and he will be on CNN Headline News on Sunday.

 
I hate to break into my annual allotment of "luminous" so early in the year, but am forced to after reading The Saffron Kitchen. I might as well throw in "spellbinding" and "poignant" too. Yasmin Crowther's debut--a story of love, family, exile and yearning--is a marvelous addition to the literature about Iran and Iranian émigrés, and to fiction in general.
 
Maryam Mazur was a teenager in the Iranian city of Mashhad in the early 1950s, full of life and strong-willed, the daughter of a Shah-supporting general. As a girl, she longed for something other than an arranged marriage--perhaps love, certainly an education as a teacher or nurse. After an unfortunate and misunderstood incident, her father, believing the family honor compromised, brutally punished her and banished her to Tehran. She then moved to England, where she married and had a daughter, Sara. Three decades later, when her nephew Saeed arrives to live with her and her husband, he brings memories and a long-suppressed rage to the surface, with tragic consequences. With Sara in the hospital and her nephew afraid of her, she believes she doesn't deserve her family and leaves England for Iran. She travels to the village of Mazareh, where she had spent her summers, where she had been young and hopeful, "where life had been redeemable."

When Maryam gets to Iran, she says that while she had run away from her past, "it has been inside me all along, and now it has brought me back here." In London, she felt that she was removed from life, always looking to see how she fit in, how things were done. "We never really escape. All I ever wanted as a child, a young woman, was to be free of etiquette and tradition, arranged marriages and everything just so. All I found was another world where I had to work out the new traditions, habits, how to appear just so. Isn't it silly?" The paradox is that Maryam had to leave Iran to breathe, but then has to return to keep breathing.

Yasmin Crowther has a deft way with description, making the cold, dusty plains of northern Iran an intriguing place, both mysterious and welcoming. Maryam's happy childhood memories of "amber honey, marbled with bees' wings and broken torsos," of tea and samovars, are beautifully and sparely rendered: "Low sunbeams fell through the half-open door and cast long shadows on the hearth and tiled floor, scattered with fallen onion skins and coriander stems. A black cauldron of rice bubbled slowly and filled the air with soft, starchy warmth, while two chickens turned gold on the spit." Her tragic memories are a stark counterpoint to that warmth and security. The story moves between the present and the past, and both come together when Sara journeys to Mazareh to find her mother. To Sara, the village in winter is cold and desolate, with mud houses, the stink of animals. To her mother, it is a place to reclaim her life and her past, to feel "the slow restitching of time begin." The difficult passage of both Maryam and Sara into understanding and healing will captivate the reader.--Marilyn Dahl

The following were the bestselling titles at Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association stores during the week ended Sunday, January 14, as reported to Book Sense:

Hardcover Fiction

1. Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin's, $16.95, 9780312306342)
2. The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, $26.95, 9780060563455)
3. Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison (Grove, $24, 9780802118387)
4. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Algonquin, $23.95, 9781565124998)
5. For One More Day by Mitch Albom (Hyperion, $21.95, 9781401303273)
6. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (FSG, $25, 9780374146351)
7. Exile by Richard North Patterson (Holt, $26, 9780805079470)
8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, $24, 9780307265432)
9. Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, $25.95, 9780307262998)
10. The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory (Touchstone, $25.95, 9780743272506)
11. Next by Michael Crichton (HarperCollins, $27.95, 9780060872984)
12. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (HarperCollins, $27.95, 9780061130359)
13. Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris (Delacorte, $27.95, 9780385339414)
14. Thirst by Mary Oliver (Beacon, $22, 9780807068960)
15. The Terror by Dan Simmons (Little, Brown, $25.99, 9780316017442)

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. You: On a Diet by Michael F. Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. (Free Press, $25, 9780743292542)
2. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (Crown, $25, 9780307237699)
3. Palestine by Jimmy Carter (S&S, $27, 9780743285025)
4. About Alice by Calvin Trillin (Random House, $14.95, 9781400066155)
5. The Intellectual Devotional by David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim (Rodale, $22.50, 9781594865138)
6. I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron (Knopf, $19.95, 9780307264558)
7. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, $27, 9780618680009)
8. Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, $26.95, 9780385507776)
9. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (Knopf, $16.95, 9780307265777)
10. Marley & Me by John Grogan (Morrow, $21.95, 9780060817084)
11. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Viking, $25.95, 9780670034826)
12. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press, $26.95, 9781594200823)
13. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking, $29.95, 9780670037605)
14. Cesar's Way by Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier (Harmony, $24.95, 9780307337337)
15. This I Believe edited by Jay Allison, Dan Gediman (Holt, $23, 9780805080872)

Trade Paperback Fiction

1. The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (Penguin, $14, 9780143037149)
2. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Grove, $14, 9780802142818)
3. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (Random House, $13.95, 9780812968064)
4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead, $14, 9781594480003)
5. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (Back Bay, $13.99, 9780316010702)
6. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (Norton, $13.95, 9780393328622)
7. Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, $14.95, 9780375706868)
8. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (HarperSanFrancisco, $13.95, 9780061122415)
9. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult (Washington Square, $14, 9780743454537)
10. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (Touchstone, $16, 9780743227445)
11. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (Vintage, $13.95, 9781400095957)
12. March by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin, $14, 9780143036661)
13. Arthur and George by Julian Barnes (Vintage, $14.95, 9781400097036)
14. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Mariner, $13.95, 9780618711659)
15. The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea (Back Bay, $14.95, 9780316154529)

Trade Paperback Nonfiction

1. The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (Mariner, $14.95, 9780618773473)
2. Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama (Three Rivers, $14.95, 9781400082773)
3. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (S&S, $19.95, 9780743270755)
4. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Scribner, $14, 9780743247542)
5. The Iraq Study Group Report (Vintage, $10.95, 9780307386564)
6. 1491 by Charles C. Mann (Vintage, $14.95, 9781400032051)
7. Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (Random House, $14.95, 9780812973013)
8. The Places in Between by Rory Stewart (Harvest, $14, 9780156031561)
9. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen, $12.95, 9781878424310)
10. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library, $14, 9781577314806)
11. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (Random House, $13.95, 9780375760396)
12. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (Vintage, $14.95, 9780375725609)
13. The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2007 (World Almanac, $12.99, 9780886879952)
14. The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion, $14.95, 9780786888764)
15. The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman (Penguin, $15, 9780143038788)

Mass Market

1. 1984 by George Orwell (Signet, $7.95, 9780451524935)
2. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, Fourth Edition (Merriam-Webster, $7.50, 9780877799290)
3. S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton (Berkley, $7.99, 9780425212691)
4. The Cat Who Dropped a Bombshell by Lilian Jackson Braun (Jove, $7.99, 9780515142419)
5. Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan (Tor, $7.99, 9780812577563)
6. The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury (Signet, $9.99, 9780451219954)
7. The Cell by Stephen King (Pocket, $9.99, 9781416524519)
8. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (Pocket, $9.99, 9781416524793)
9. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (Warner, $6.99, 9780316769488)
10. Nothing But Trouble by Michael McGarrity (Onyx, $7.99, 9780451412287)

Children's Titles

1. Forever in Blue (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, #4) by Ann Brashares (Delacorte, $18.99, 9780385729369)
2. Eragon by Christopher Paolini (Laurel-Leaf, $6.99, 9780440238485)
3. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd (HarperCollins, $7.99, 9780694003617)
4. Eldest by Christopher Paolini (Knopf, $21, 9780375826702)
5. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (Megan Tingley, $17.99, 9780316160193)
6. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins, $16.95, 9780060254926)
7. The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo (Candlewick, $7.99, 9780763625290)
8. Pirateology by Captain William Lubber (Candlewick, $19.99, 9780763631437)
9. Do Princesses Wear Hiking Boots? by Carmela Lavigna Coyle, illustrated by Mike Gordon (Rising Moon, $15.95, 9780873588287)
10. The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes, illustrated by Louis Slobodkin (Harcourt, $7, 9780152052607)
11. Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser (HarperCollins, $16.99, 9780060542092)
12. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White (HarperTrophy, $7.99, 9780064400558)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic, $9.99, 9780439358071)
14. On the Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier (Harcourt, $16, 9780152579951)
15. Cross-Country Cat by Mary Calhoun, illustrated by Erick Ingraham (HarperTrophy, $6.99, 9780688065195)

[Many thanks to Book Sense and MPIBA!]