"Without our Internet sales, we would not have survived the summer."--Robert Jordan, owner of the Archives Book Café, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which mostly sells used books, as quoted by the Miami Herald.

Kepler's Books and Magazines, the Menlo Park, Calif., bookstore that closed at the end of September and is seeking to reopen, notified Shelf Awareness and other media over the weekend of a major announcement later today. Quoting an unnamed insider, today's San Jose Mercury-News reports that the store has good news: it has succeeded in negotiations with its landlord and will reopen this Saturday in its longtime location. More tomorrow!

Congratulations! Labyrinth Books held a grand opening party at its new New Haven, Conn., store on Saturday. Intrepid correspondent Sean Concannon of Parson Weems reports that the store has 3,500 square feet of space on two levels and stocks 65,000 volumes and 35,000 titles. Approached by Book Haven owner Susan Schwab when she wanted to close the store, owners Cliff Sims, Dorothea von Moltke and Chris Doeblin decided to make the leap and open their second store. (The main store, opened in 1997, is near Columbia University in New York City.)

Labyrinth gutted and remodeled the Book Haven space, exposing brick and trusses under three layers of drop ceilings. Manager Chris Evans said that the store has "exceeded expectations," as the community has embraced the shop and textbook adoptions by Yale professors doubled. Like the New York store, Labyrinth New Haven is focusing on academic books and aims to fill the niches of the " 'ologies," philosophy, literature and the classics.

In honor of Changing Hands Bookstore winning the Spirit of Enterprise Award (mentioned here last Friday), the Arizona Republic offers a long story about the Tempe, Ariz., bookstore, which it says "survived not only because of its charm but because it used textbook techniques for finding a market niche. . . . Its secret has been focusing on making the store a great place to gather. "

The latest challenge, according to co-owner Gayle Shanks, is dealing with demands on customers' time, including electronic games, music, longer working hours and longer commuting times. The store has a task force looking at ways to reach people under 30. "We won't have another 30 years unless we build another reader base," she told the paper. "We're never going to have the younger market convert to only reading books. I just want them to do both."

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Playwright August Wilson died yesterday of liver cancer in Seattle, Wash.. He was 60.

Wilson chronicled the black experience in a 10-play series. Fences and The Piano Lesson won the Pulitzer Prize. His breakthrough play was Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

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Patti Wyatt, children's librarian at Mitchell Community Public Library, Mitchell, Ind., for 15 years, has bought the inventory of H&H Bookstore, Bedford, Ind., and is setting up a store called Lazy Days Books in the back of her house, near the library. Lazy Days will open October 15. Wyatt told the Times-Mail that she will "carry on" H&H owner Velva Hutton's approach at the used bookstore.

In other Bedford, Ind., book news, Joe Glasbow and his wife, Marina Guba, who have run JoNa Books publishing for 10 years, have opened JoNa Books, a discount bookstore carrying mostly remainders and bargain books (we hope not JoNa publishing's books!). JoNa Books, the store, is located at 1611 J St., Bedford, Ind. 47421.

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A group of corporations, nonprofits and universities led by Yahoo plan today to unveil the Open Content Alliance, which will digitize hundreds of thousands of books and make them available to anyone online, according to today's New York Times. The project hopes to avoid the Google Library program's most controversial aspect by focusing at first on works in the public domain.

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The Daily Freeman profiles a book retailer that has reversed the usual trend: Mezzanine, a bookstore and café in Kingston, N.Y., started as Used Book Trader.com, an Internet-only business. In its bricks-and-mortar incarnation, Mezzanine offers mostly used titles (20% are new) and specializes in SF/fantasy and horror, detective stories, spy novels and thrillers as well as erotica. Since opening in May, the store's café has out gobbled up more sales than the bookstore section. Owners Larry Zalinsky and B.C. Gee still sell online. The store is located at 79 Broadway, Kingston, N.Y. 12401; 845-339-6925.

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Nice touch: the Holy Cross Bookstore at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., is selling T-shirts that read simply "Stand Bayou" for $12. Of that amount, $8.75 goes to the Chaplains' Office campaign to support the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

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The Constant Reader will be interrupted: the Albert Lea, Minn., bookstore is closing. Owner Grace Haukoos told the Albert Lea Tribune that she opened the store in 1988 intending it to be a "fun, five-year project. . . . I'm past retirement age so it's time to do something else." The store may stay open through Christmas, depending on sales.

After closing, the first thing Haukoos said she wants to do is read. "Everyone thinks if you run a bookstore you read books all day, but that's not true," she said.

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En garde! Samurai Comics, which is owned by Mike and Moryha Banks and has a store in Phoenix, Ariz., opened a branch in nearby Avondale on Saturday. According to the Arizona Republic, Samurai celebrated having giving away thousands of books.

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Marilyn and Carlos Benemann are consolidating their book operations into their Eureka Books store, Eureka, Calif., and will close their Ferndale Books store in Ferndale after 23 years. The main reason: Carlos has a new career as a court interpreter. According to the Times-Standard, Marilyn will focus on Internet sales. The stores specialize in used and out-of-print books on California, the West, archeology, exploration and Argentina, Carlos Benemann's birthplace.

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Congratulations! The Brown Bookstore at Brown University, Providence, R.I., is celebrating its 35th anniversary with a sale that started on Friday and lasts through tomorrow and a series of author signing and raffles. Among the authors:

Bancroft Prize-winning historian and Brown University professor emeritus James T. Patterson, whose newest book is Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (Oxford).
Alumnus Michael Chorost, whose new book is Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin).
Alumna Jennifer Miller, author of Inheriting the Holy Land: An American's Search for Hope in the Middle East (Ballantine).
Alumna Kirstin Allio, whose debut novel is Garner (Coffee House Press).
Brown professor Forrest Gander, author of A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory & Transcendence (Shoemaker & Hoard, Publishers).
Sam White, author of The Goddess of the Hunt Is Not Herself: Poems (Slope Editions).

Yesterday, 60 Minutes probed one Robert Oxnam, author of A Fractured Mind: My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder (Hyperion, $23.95, 1401302270). Oxnam will make multiple appearances today on the Today Show and Good Morning America.

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On this morning's Good Morning America, Ashley Smith, the hostage who convinced courthouse killer Brian Nichols to turn himself in, will turn up. She is the author of Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero (Morrow/Avon, $24.95, 0310270677).

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The Today Show makes nice today and tomorrow with Greg Behrendt and Amiira Ruotola, authors of It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken: The Smart Girl's Break-Up Buddy (Broadway, $19.95, 0767921852).

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Today, WAMU's Diane Rehm Show walks in formation with E. L. Doctorow, author of The March (Random House, $25.95, 0375506713).

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Tonight on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno's menu: Emeril Lagasse, whose new book, Emeril's Delmonico: A Restaurant with a Past, about the famous New Orleans restaurant (Morrow Cookbooks, $29.95, 0060740469), has just been served. He will also appear on Good Morning America this Friday.

A Life Disturbed: My Pacific War Revisited

"This is a book about then, and now." So begins Merrel Clubb's A Life Disturbed: My Pacific War Revisited (University of Washington Press, $24.95, 0295985364, October 2005), a straight-forward, unpretentious and gripping memoir. Now professor emeritus of English at the University of Montana, he served in World War II as a naval shore fire control officer assigned to army and marine combat units for amphibious landings in the Aleutians and South Pacific. His mother saved over 150 letters from Clubb, written with humor, honesty, bitterness, exasperation and fear. Forty years later, when he read and re-read the letters for the first time, he relived his experiences--the island battles, the battles inside himself--and considered the battles that continue even now in his heart.

A literate man from an academic family, Merrel Clubb joined the navy in Oklahoma City in 1942 because he "had read All Quiet on the Western Front and wanted no part of trench warfare." His desire to avoid muddy foxholes came to nothing, he soon realized:  "I boil down to a dirty, smelly, trench soldier." On Makin Island, his foxhole wasn't big enough for his bedroll, which in any case was full of books, making a handy fortification at his head. It was a fortuitous move: P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum stopped a bullet.

Clubb's images are stark and chilling, as with this incident on Guam: "And it rained every night. And it poured every day. One evening . . . we received orders to move up to help another battalion. That meant moving through hundreds of our own men, who would shoot at anything at night. . . . In a single column the entire battalion moved up through large areas of Marines without being detected. . . . the only sound as we started out the cocking of rifles up and down the line; the smell of the rotting dead; and then up on a hill a thousand men silently digging holes in the middle of the night. . . . we dug with shovels, helmets, even our hands, while the moon looked quietly down on us."

He was often courageous. He was always terrified: "We land on Iwo Jima tomorrow. This time I have no feelings at all. I know what to expect and have only intense fear, disgust, and hate for the next few days." Years later he asks himself if he really killed: "Of course. But I refuse to believe it. I remember almost nothing. I have never really faced up to the question. . . . Nor have I wanted to." At the same time he realizes that he took pleasure in many of his war experiences, saying, "War is a time of vivid living."

Attempting to fill in the gaps of his memories, he began to read voraciously, from accounts of campaigns he was in to general histories to memoirs and novels. He concludes, "I still see no sense in war. . . . There may be, and probably are, valid reasons for fighting a war, but there are few wars that have been thought for those reasons." He does not subscribe to the popular belief that WWII was an unambiguous struggle between good and evil, nor does he buy into "the last good war" idea.

Even though he felt in many ways untouched by the war, "an observer watching the young man who wrote the letters and others like him wander through a charade," his life was profoundly affected. He feared feeling too deeply and sensed a hardness in himself, and he never again played the piano or read poetry for enjoyment. "I want to listen to music--to Verdi, Chopin, Mozart--but at the same time I want to listen to the silence I hear after the thunder of the war. I choose the silence."  

A Life Disturbed is compelling, honest, sad and thoughtful and an important addition to our understanding not only of World War II, but of combat and sacrifice, past and present.--Marilyn Dahl