By handselling a few titles companywide, Borders Group has helped make the four titles promoted so far into bestsellers, the AP reported.

Begun after the change in leadership at Borders in January, the program has focused on four titles, no more than two at a time: The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, City of Thieves by David Benioff and The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan.

"All four books have been best sellers, and publishers have credited Borders with either being an early factor in the book's success or a key in turning a hit into a major hit," the AP wrote.

"There has to be the in-house passion," Kathryn Popoff, Borders v-p for trade books, told the AP. "So we ask the buyer to write a letter and work with other buyers and work with publishers to get advance copies to the store so the people there can read it and share that passion."

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Check out backlistbookoftheday.com, a new site from Harper that highlights backlist titles--one book a day, adult and children's, often with newsy hooks.

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"Marc Fitten's Indie 100" blog is chronicling the author's campaign to visit 100 independent bookstores in a single tour during the next few months to promote his debut novel, Valeria's Last Stand, GalleyCat reported. You can also follow Fitten's progress on Twitter @MarcFitten

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Yesterday's Muse used and rare bookstore, Webster, N.Y., and owner Jonathan Smalter were profiled by the Democrat and Chronicle. The "trick to Smalter's business, he says, is maximizing the different strengths of online and in-store sales. Books that don't sell well on the Internet, such as popular fiction titles, fly out of his store. Obscure titles might fetch a profit online, but could sit on a store shelf for months."

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Laura Antonacci has been promoted to marketing associate, education and library in Simon & Schuster's children's division. She was formerly marketing coordinator, education and library.

Customers at Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., who spend at least $30 between 3 and 6 p.m. any weekday through May 29--or until supplies last--receive a Powell's pint glass and a coupon for either a $1.25 beer or a 25-cent soda at Bridgeport Brewing. The pint glasses, which come in blue, green, red and pink with Powell's logo on them, can also be bought for $4 each. On the other side of the glass is the saying, "The NW's Mightiest Bookstore!"

Pennie Clark Ianniciello, Costco's book buyer, has chosen Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos (Harper, $14.99, 9780061240287/0061240281) as her pick of the month for May. In Costco Connection, which goes to many of the warehouse club's members, she wrote:

"One of the joys of reading is that it often provides a mirror for our own lives and relationships. Marisa de los Santos' sophomore effort, Belong to Me, is such a book. Filled with wit and grace, this novel deftly explores everyday life. And the author's training as a poet is obvious, as each word seems to have been deliberately chosen.

"Three women, Cornelia, Piper and Lake, each face one of the following: marriage trouble, loss of control and dark secrets. As their stories unfold, they learn what trust, belonging, sharing and love really mean."

Here's the next chapter of the story that started last month during the Summit of the Americas, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez handed President Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent--and thereby made the Eduardo Galeano book a bestseller here (Shelf Awareness, April 18, 2009).

All the publicity, which was kind of a breakout for Galeano, a Uruguayan who is well known around the world but not in the U.S., has opened up new possibilities for Galeano's next book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, translated by Mark Fried, which Nation Books, part of the Perseus Books Group, is publishing later this month.

The house has doubled its first printing to 20,000, and the pub date has been moved up to May 25. And because of the Chavez-Obama boost, Galeano's tour has changed. As John Sherer, publisher at Basic Books and Nation Books, put it, "Let's just say that it's been a little bit easier for publicity to book some of the mainstream media."

Even before President Chavez helped the sales effort, Nation Books had made Mirrors its lead book and had planned to bring Galeano to the U.S. for a tour. Sherer noted that "early reads from reps had been very strong, and the call reports from the field suggested that Mirrors might just be the book to finally make Galeano the household name he deserves to be. It was by far the book cited the most in their call reports."

Interestingly Galeano said he doesn't want to discuss Open Veins of Latin America on the tour because, among other reasons, he's "extremely proud of Mirrors and wants it to be the book American readers discover him through," Sherer added.

So far, Galeano's tour includes an appearance at BEA as well as readings at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., the Ethical Culture Society in New York, the Free Library in Philadelphia, Town Hall in Seattle, the Los Angeles Public Library, Berkeley's Arts and Lettters and the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, where he will be interviewed by Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt.

Nation Books calls Mirrors "a sometimes bawdy, sometimes irreverent, sometimes heart-breaking unofficial history of the world seen--and mirrored to us--through the eyes and voices of history's unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano asks, 'Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind?'

"Taking in 5,000 years of history, recalling the lives of artists and writers, gods and visionaries from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York and Mumbai, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes that resurrect the lives of the 'thinkers and the feelers, the curious, condemned for asking, rebels and losers and lovely lunatics who were and are the salt of the earth,' Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity."

Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: John Hoffman, author of The Alzheimer's Project: Momentum in Science (PublicAffairs, $25.95, 9781586487560/1586487566).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Nancy Snyderman, author of Diet Myths That Keep Us Fat: And the 101 Truths That Will Save Your Waistline--And Maybe Even Your Life (Crown, $25, 9780307406156/0307406156). She will also appear tomorrow on the View.

Also on Today: Leeza Gibbons, co-author of Take Your Oxygen First: Protecting Your Health and Happiness While Caring for a Loved One with Memory Loss (LaChance Publishing, $14.95, 9781934184202/1934184209).

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Tomorrow morning on NPR's Morning Edition: Huston Smith, author of Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography (HarperOne, $25.99, 9780061154263/0061154261).

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Tomorrow morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe: Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir, authors of The Final Four of Everything (Simon & Schuster, $19.95, 9781439126080/1439126089).

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Tomorrow on Imus in the Morning: Mark Levin, author of Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (Threshold Editions, $25, 9781416562856/1416562850).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: Elizabeth Alexander, author of Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration (Graywolf, $8, 9781555975456/1555975453) and American Sublime (Graywolf, $14, 9781555974329/1555974325). As the show put it: "When Elizabeth Alexander presented Barack Obama's inaugural poem, few of us had considered that in the history of the United States there had been only three previous inaugural poets. What is an inaugural poem? To whom does it speak? For whom should it speak? Where does this poem fit in the context of Alexander's life and poetry?"

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Tomorrow on PBS's World Focus: Richard Haass, author of War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (Simon & Schuster, $27, 9781416549024/1416549021).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Talk of the Nation: James Carville, author of 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation (Simon & Schuster, $24, 9781416569893/1416569898).

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Tomorrow on the View: Michael J. Fox, author of Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist (Hyperion, $25.99, 9781401303389/1401303382).

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Tomorrow night on an ABC Primetime Special: Michael Gates Gill, author of How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else (Gotham, $13, 9781592404049/1592404049).

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Tomorrow night on Larry King Live: Marlee Matlin, author of I'll Scream Later (Simon Spotlight, $26, 9781439102855/1439102856).

Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival by Norman Ollestad (Ecco, $25.99, 9780061766725/0061766720), which will be published in June, has been acquired by Warner Bros.

Ollestad's book recounts his complex relationship with a father who pushed him into extreme sports when he was three years old. Ollestad became an accomplished surfer and skier, and was put to the ultimate test when his father was killed in the plane crash that left Ollestad stranded in a blizzard in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Variety reported that the the movie "will be produced by Storyopolis co-founder Fonda Snyder, literary manager Rob Weisbach and Gerber Pictures' Bill Gerber. . . . Ollestad will be executive producer."

"Nothing prepared me for how deeply Norm's story would affect me," Snyder said. "His gripping story forces you to question, given the protective culture of parenting today, how a father shapes a boy's definition of what it means to be a man."

Cormac McCarthy has won the $25,000 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for lifetime achievement in American fiction, according to the Washington Post.

The PEN American Center also named Steve Coll the recipient of a nonfiction award for his book, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century; and awarded citations to Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin and 18 other authors for excellence in short fiction.

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Yum. At a ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York City Monday night, the James Beard Foundation Awards were served up. The cookbook of the year was Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes by Jennifer McLagan (Ten Speed Press). (See the Shelf Awareness review, November 7, 2008.) For the full list of the many Beard winners, click here.

 

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley and a former chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's Usage Panel, knows words. This collection of 54 of what he calls "snapshots of the language during the final years of the Bush era"--most delivered as commentaries on NPR's Fresh Air, along with a scattering of pieces published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers--is full of penetrating insights into the ways we use and abuse our language.

Despite his pedigree, Nunberg is not among the increasingly tiresome ranks of grammar scolds who believe all would be right with the world if we eradicated the last dangling participle. His is a more practical, frequently political, perspective, and he's an astute observer of the way our leaders employ words to persuade, manipulate, enlighten and conceal. "It's hard to think of an important recent story or controversy," he writes, "that hasn't forced us to reexamine the meanings of familiar words that we used to take for granted."

There are controversies aplenty recalled in the pages of this collection, which at times feels like a flyover of the fiercest political and cultural battlegrounds of the past eight years. For anyone with even a glimmer of consciousness, merely enumerating a handful of the words and phrases he puts under the linguistic microscope inevitably will summon up a host of highly-charged, perhaps even painful, recollections: torture, change agent, values, patriotism, faith, civility, elites and Joe (in his Sixpack and the Plumber incarnations) are a few of the more memorable.

Nunberg leavens his political commentary with humorous glimpses at some of the foibles of contemporary English usage. There's an examination of the evolution of the word "um" (yes, it is a word, according to Nunberg) from its role as a harmless filler of dead air to one that's gaining increasingly unfortunate currency as a "mock apology before you correct somebody who says something particularly stupid or does something inappropriate"; a tongue-in-cheek look at the profusion of brand names ("the Esperanto of the checkout stand") and a rueful take on how the redefinition of the term "planet" bumped Pluto from the roster.

"In an age that has polarized the vocabulary of moral and political values, it can be hard to find neutral linguistic ground," Nunberg notes in one of his final commentaries. Kudos to him for offering a linguistic GPS device well-suited to helping us navigate that rocky terrain.--Harvey Freedenberg

Shelf Talker: A generous and thought-provoking assortment of brief commentaries on the state of our language and its effect modern political and social life.