Abu Dhabi Tries to Put Its Book Fair on the Map

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, 3/12/2007

Now in its 17th year, the Abu Dhabi Book Fair is undergoing a radical transformation, via a new, six-month old partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair. The event, which takes place in the capital of the United Arab Emirates from March 31 through April 7, aims to help establish new relationships between Arab and Western publishers, authors and agents. For the most part, book publishing in the Arab world is a fractured and unregulated industry, with no central distribution, little copyright enforcement and limited retail outlets. "By partnering with Frankfurt," said Abu Dhabi Book Fair director Jumaa Abdulla Al Qubaisi, "we saw an opportunity to try and professionalize publishing in the region."

In previous years, the Abu Dhabi Book Fair—which is run by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage—was an opportunity for local residents to purchase books from around the Arab world, primarily from publishers from Egypt and Lebanon, many of which were not available through local bookstores or online. Approximately 200,000 people visited the fair last year and 350 publishers exhibited books.

This year, the venue has moved from outdoor tents, which offered approximately 10,000 feet of space, to a wing of the new multibillion-dollar Abu Dhabi Exhibition Center, which offers some 40,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space. The additional space allows the fair to dedicate a special section to children's books, as well as provide room for new exhibits covering production and distribution. But the revamped fair is struggling to attract Western publishers in its first year. About 12 small European publishers had registered to exhibit at press time, and no American houses had committed to attend. For his part, Al Qubaisi has tempered his expectations. He told PW, "We partnered with Frankfurt because they are most organized, recognized and professional brand in the business. We have a lot to learn from them. This year we are just getting experience."

The partnership with Frankfurt has yielded a new slate of professional seminars, covering such publishing practices as marketing, public relations and rights acquisition. There are also panels on "Tolerance as a Pre-Condition for Peace" and "Fundamentalism and Terrorism." Among the Americans speaking at the fair will be Rick Vanzura, president of Borders Group International, who will discuss Borders's franchise deal with Dubai-based Al Maya Group to open stores in the UAE.

As in previous years, books will also be for sale. Al Qubaisi emphasized that the fair will be open to all types of publications, save those that "discriminate, are pornographic or foment conflict in the region."

Central to the fair's new agenda is the launch of the Sheik Zayed's Book Awards. The new book award program, named for the late president of the United Arab Emirates, offers eight awards in categories ranging from children's books to best technology in the field of culture, and all carry a $200,000 cash prize. A ninth category, for "person of the year in the field of culture," offers a $270,000 prize. Any work published in the Arabic language and/or a translation from or to Arabic that was published within the last two years is eligible.

Mohamed A. Al Shehhi, a project coordinator for the fair, said he hopes the event will be one part of a larger effort to raise the standing of reading in the Arab world. "Traditionally, leisure book reading has not had as significant a role in Arab culture as religious scholarship, poetry and even reading newspapers. Through the book fair, we hope to help that change," Al Shehhi said. He added, "Ultimately, Abu Dhabi aims to be a safe haven for arts and culture in the Middle East and become a gateway for the West to the region. The Book Fair is an important part of that larger goal."

Georgia: Bookselling in the Peach State

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, 3/5/2007

Georgia boasts 188 bookstores, including 68 chain stores, with the heaviest concentration in Atlanta, the state's largest city and one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States. There, a coterie of dynamic specialty booksellers—including the feminist Charis Books & More, gay Outright Bookstore and children's bookseller Little Shop of Stories—thrive amid the burgeoning chains, which include some 22 Borders and Waldenbooks stores (out of 31 total in the state), as well as five B&Ns and B. Daltons (out of a total of 21, with a new B&N store expected to open in Newnan, Ga. shortly).

Marlene Zeiler, owner of Atlanta's Tall Tales Book Shop, said her 28-year-old 3,000-sq.-ft. general bookstore caters to a "sophisticated" readership that includes employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Emory University. "Some people in other parts of the country may think we Georgians are dumb, but they're wrong," said the former New Yorker.

All this growth and prosperity has its downside. "Bookselling in Atlanta has definitely become more challenging. Atlanta is now so big and with so much happening, it's hard for a bookstore to get noticed," said Frank Reiss, owner of A Cappella Books, which started in 1989 as an antiquarian bookstore, but has transitioned to offering new and used titles from its location in the hip Five Points district.

Likewise, Doug Robinson, owner of nearby Eagle Eye Books, said growth at the four-year-old store has been "modest" if not "flat," and it is primarily the store's Web business that continues to grow, as students are more and more comfortable ordering books online.

The competitive environment in Atlanta has had the greatest impact on the home-grown Chapter 11 bookstore chain, which at its peak had 16 stores and was lauded in the Wall Street Journal as a model independent bookseller. The chain has since fallen into bankruptcy and been reduced to three locations.

Outside of the metro area, the concentration of stores is less dense, but the market no less interesting, said Tom Murphy, v-p of book reps George Scheer Associates. "Though it's true Atlanta has some wonderful bookstores, the real action for me is now in the more rural corners of the state," said Murphy, who has been selling academic and small trade press books, including those from the University of Georgia Press, for 18 years. He pointed out that stores such as Cowan's Book Nook in East Ellijay (est. population in 2005: 706), which is in the mountains near the Tennessee border, and Hattie's Books in Brunswick along the southeast coast, are in out-of-the-way locales isolated from competition and have readers hungry for regional titles.

Leigh Baumann, owner of Jekyll Books at the Old Infirmary on Jekyll Island, one of the Sea Islands, agreed. "We do have a strong regional bias in our book selection," she said. "There's a sense of history here—it's where Vanderbilt, Pulitzer and Morgan had their summer homes and remains a high-end tourist destination—so people who come here want to read about the history and local community." She cited the novels of the late Georgia author Eugenia Price, as well as titles on ecology, birding and the store's self-published Golf Lovers Guide to Jekyll Island as big sellers.

Jeannie Young, manager of G.J. Ford bookshop on St. Simons Island, agreed that her store's temperate island locale is a boon. The wealth of the year-round residents—which include celebrities and athletes, such as golfer Davis Love III—ensures a consistent trade in hardcover books. Tourists are also important customers, and Young sends her store's newsletter to residents in 40 states who continue to order books throughout the year. "I feel very fortunate," said Young. "We continue to grow year after year."

Florida: Bookstores in the Sunshine State

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, 2/26/2007

In the literary world, Florida may be best known for having produced its own indigenous genre—the Wacky Florida Mystery. Purveyors, including Carl Hiaasen, Bob Morris and Tim Dorsey, are big sellers up and down the state. "Those authors—especially Hiaasen— easily draw hundreds to every reading," said Crystal Chancellor, district marketing manager for Borders Bookstores in south Florida. "But that's not all that sells," she added. "Florida is so diverse that you might have one store in which Jewish-interest and health books sell especially well, and another just a few miles down the road where the customers are primarily Spanish-speaking and interested in high-quality literature."

With 284 bookstores, Floridians have plenty of choice: the Sunshine State has the fourth-largest number of bookstores of any state in the country, behind only California, Texas and New York. Of the major bookselling chains, Borders has the greatest saturation, with 66 stores. The breadth of bookstores is as varied as the geography, which ranges from the beachy southern end of the peninsula and the hurricane-prone eastern seaboard to the Georgia border and the balmy panhandle.

Books & Books is Florida's best-known independent bookseller; it's celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Owner Mitchell Kaplan, a former president of the ABA, said that for many years he fought the stereotype that due to the weather, the residents of the Sunshine State wouldn't be interested in reading.

"Florida has traditionally been a place where there was a strong market for indies," he said. "When the superstores expanded into the state, there were initially a lot of closings. But smaller niche stores have begun to spring up." For his part, Kaplan has built a minichain with three locations: Coral Gables, Miami Beach and the upscale Bal Harbour mall.

"When we first opened, Miami was going through a rough period. But we've seen the city remake itself," said Kaplan, who pointed out that half of his sales are to bilingual Spanish/English readers.

Kaplan told PW that his idea of a successful bookstore was shaped by Haslam's Book Store in St. Petersburg on the Gulf coast. Founded in 1933 during the Depression, Haslam's remains the largest independent in the state. It offers 100,000 new titles, as well as several hundred thousand used books, in a 20,000-sq.-ft. setting. Co-owner Ray Hinst, the third generation of the family to run Haslam's (his son is a manager there), said that the "size of the store is the biggest statement we can make." It stays true to its "olde-timey" roots: no mailing list, no sidelines, and it's not open evenings.

In contrast, the Book Mark in Atlantic Beach in the northeast corner of the state is a mere 1,500 sq. ft. The store opened in 1990; Rona Brinlee purchased it in 1995. She said that her location serves three distinct types of clientele: locals, snowbirds who come for a few months and tourists. The combination, said Brinlee, means that her business isn't as susceptible to seasonality or weather. Brinlee is regularly interviewed by tastemaker NPR to recommend books.

Its Own Brand of Southern

Another misconception about Florida that needs correcting: "It's not really the South," says Leslie Reiner at Inkwood Books in Tampa. "Stereotypical Southern books like the Sweet Potato Queens don't work for us. Our customers pretty much read what the nation is reading."

Tom Rider, co-owner of Goerings Book Store in Gainesville in the panhandle, concurs. "We're not quite as empty-headed as we might seem," he said.

Located just a mile down the road from the U. of Florida, Goerings is both a 5,000-sq.-ft. trade bookstore and a separate textbook store. Rider said Gainesville has been experiencing significant growth in recent years, like many larger cities in the South. As a consequence, the chains saw an opportunity; two Books-a-Millions, a Borders and a Barnes & Noble are all nearby.

The boom in population also creates unique challenges: "Since we're still chopping down trees and plowing fields for suburban tract developments," explained Rider, "our customers continue to move further away from us. That means that a location you picked 10 years ago might not be as good, and you need to reassess constantly. Now that's a problem that we in Florida have that others around the country don't."

A punishing road to wisdom: Review of US Guys by Charlie LeDuff

Reporter pursues male psyche through fights, football, Burning Man event

By EDWARD NAWOTKA

US GUYS: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man
By Charlie LeDuff.
Penguin Press, 242 pp. $25.95.

Is there something ominous and seething in the soul of the American man? Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff thinks so.

In his new book US Guys LeDuff adopts the mantle of George Plimpton and throws himself into a variety of dangerous situations: He joins a fight club in Oakland; cruises the dirt streets of the neo-hippie Burning Man festival in the nude; worships with snake-handling Christians in Tennessee; participates in a gay rodeo in Oklahoma City; follows around a wisecracking Detroit homicide detective; and joins an arena football team. In the end you come away with the distinct feeling all is not well in Middle America.

LeDuff bucks the stereotype of the media-elite journalist as someone out of touch with the real America. The journalist's job, he writes, is to be "someplace you are not supposed to be, asking questions that no decent person would, things that would make your mother ashamed." His first book, a collection of Times columns titled Work and Other Sins, dealt with the denizens of New York City bars and back alleys. As a consequence, he's an old-school, rough-and-ready reporter, in the mold of Jimmy Breslin.

The media machinery these days favoring images over ink, it quickly subsumed someone so sui generis as LeDuff. This second book was born of LeDuff's experience filming a Discovery cable TV series called Only in America. The show ran for 10 episodes (it's still showing in reruns) and featured nearly all the stories in US Guys.

But anyone who watches the series will find stark differences in the presentation. While the series is marred by a breezy "gee whiz, look at all the freaky things I'm doing" tone, US Guys is more provocative, cerebral and, frankly, self-loathing. LeDuff is really using America as a mirror in which to measure himself.

And he's not satisfied with what he sees. When he joins a traveling circus of immigrant performers from Russia, Venezuela and Mexico, he's trained to be a clown. "I am, of course, already a clown," LeDuff writes. "A stupid man who hides behind his outrageousness. A scared, stupid little man who would rather people laugh at what he does than at who he is."

Elsewhere, he is preoccupied with provoking others to beat him up. At the "Nouveau Nihilist" Burning Man festival in Nevada, LeDuff tries to provoke the drug-fueled crowd of 40,000 nude, sunburned hipsters by throwing eggs at their giant neon-lit Burning Man effigy, which he sneers at as an "ephemeral piece of 'highly conceptual art' " worshipped "as though it equaled the Acropolis."

In the most memorable episode in the book LeDuff pals around with fight-club members, a gang dubbed the Rats. The club consists of 30 members and eight prospects, ages 21 to 38, and includes "not your run-of-the-mill misanthropes and boneheads. But former Marines, sharpshooters, mechanics, car salesmen, doctors of philosophy, missionaries, bureaucrats, government agents, fine painters, cardsharps," all "physically fit, wild and on the edge of insanity." LeDuff calls them "the most complete-incomplete men there are."

Their parties involve a punk band, bottles of whiskey and a boxing ring in which they beat each other black and blue, much as in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club (later turned into a film starring Brad Pitt).

To prove his mettle, LeDuff challenges Big Mike, a 330-pound dreadlocked 29-year-old psychology student at UC Berkeley. Big Mike is the only African-American member of the Rats, a man LeDuff views as the embodiment of the "black bogeyman."

The 30-something LeDuff is a slender 160 pounds, smokes, has soft hands and is fond of wearing a foppish black suede vest. (Later in the book he will go to New York and try and fail to become a model.) Before the bout, onlookers mock him as "Oscar Wilde the faggot." One sullen Rats member says, "I hope he kills you."

But by the very act of sacrificing himself in the ring, taking his punches and having the guts to ignore his fear, LeDuff wins over the mob, which cheers for him even as he's getting bloodied: "The little man! The primordial. This is the meaning of fight club and riding on the edge and fire and explosions. The exhilaration of life," LeDuff exclaims.

Less punishing is his stint as a member of the Amarillo Dusters Arena 2 football team. The players, who earn a paltry $200 per game, are motivated by dreams of making the big time. Most will fail. Surely this is a metaphor for broken dreams, but in Amarillo he also finds the racial divide between the black players and white players telling. While the white players have the advantage of their skin color when re-entering the job market, the black players, though admittedly "physically superior," have far dimmer prospects.

So why does LeDuff risk so much in the service of his journalism? As he tells a snake-handling Christian: "Well, I don't like the place we're headed, you know? Fat, stupid, scared and [masturbating] to porno."

Taken as a whole, it's hard not to feel that American men have lost their central place in the culture and as a consequence have demeaned themselves. LeDuff sees the possibility of redemption, and self-transformation in fomenting the American man's anger. The danger, of course, is that this energy, so often manifesting itself in violence, will consume itself and leave behind nothing but ashes and a hollow shell of humanity.

Reading US Guys is like taking a brisk slap in the face from someone who's demanding you slap him back. It's not pleasant, but it will give you a sense of how you measure up. And it does leave a sting.

Wal-Mart Dominates Arkansas Bookselling Scene

Arkansas

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, January 22 issue

If you’re looking for proof that the apotheosis of big box retailers has had a detrimental effect on independent bookstores, look no further than the state of Arkansas. With just one bookstore for every 70,589 residents, Arkansas--the 33^rd most populous state with a total of 2.8 million residents--has the fewest number of bookstores per person of any state in the country. There are less than 20 general independent bookstores, many of them small. One, Enterprise Books in DeWitt is a mere 250 sq. ft.

Wal-Mart, which is headquartered in Bentonville, has 92 outlets in Arkansas alone and dominates the retailing scene on its home turf. As a consequence, the chains have been careful not to overreach: Barnes & Noble and Borders have five outlets each, while Books-A-Million has just four. Hastings, has the most of all, with eleven locations.

Though Wal-Mart doesn’t offer an especially broad selection of titles--the average Wal-Mart stocks a few small sections of bestselling hardcovers along with a lengthy rack of mass market paperbacks--almost all its books are substantially discounted. The stores also carry Christian titles, a smattering of remainders, and in some markets, a dedicated African-American books section. The largest Wal-Marts, dubbed Supercenters, stock twice as many hardcovers and an expanded section of trade paperbacks.

John Robichaux, co-owner of Treasure House Books in Harrision, Ark. told PW, “Wal-Mart is a pervasive part of our society, a way of life. But they cut into the core of our business and take away a steady base of our income.”

Robichaux says his strategy for coping is to “stock what Wal-Mart does not,” such as Manga and focus on backlist titles and special orders. He says his 3,000 sq.-ft. store depends in part on tourist traffic driving through to Branson, Missouri, 40 miles north.

Arkansas’ best-known independent bookstore is That Bookstore in Blytheville, opened by Mary Gay Shipley in 1976. Shipley’s enormous energy is renowned throughout bookselling circles. Her store has managed to persevere despite a rural, out-of-the way location and thin local customer base in a large part due to her extensive author series, which gets a big boost by Arkansas native John Grisham, who routinely makes That Bookstore in Blytheville his first stop on any book tour.

When Madison Avenue advertising executive, Maryalice Hurst moved to Arkansas and wanted to open a bookstore, she found a mentor in Shipley. “Mary Gay is an island, a rock,” Hurst told PW. “In her community she’s an economic landmark and she’s certainly a landmark in bookselling. Without her I would have never opened the store.” Hurst's store, in Conway, Ark, is modeled on Shipley's to such an extent that she adopted the name: It is called That Bookstore at Mountebanq Place.

For her part, Hurst says that her business is barely surviving five-and-a-half years after opening on September 1, 2001. One of the obstacles she’s encountered is trying to convince wary locals that it’s okay to buy a book from a "Yankee." In a telling episode, fundamentalist Christian customers objected to having the Koran and the Talmud shelved alongside the Bible in the religion section. Hurst responded by moved the Islamic and Jewish texts to a new shelf Hurst labeled "Philosophy and Ethics.”

Many of the bookstores in Arkansas surveyed by PW seemed to be just hanging on. At Paper Chase Bookstore in Batesville, Ark, owner Mayfan Thomas admitted that “The last three or four years, there’s been a decline in business.” She added, “There are a lot of good readers here, though we only have 9,000 residents. I just hope it’s cyclical.”

In the state biggest city, the capitol of Little Rock, which has a population just shy of 900,000 in the metropolitan area, three independents persist. These are Tyler & Tyler Booksellers, a small store in North Little Rock that specializes in Southern topics, and a pair of started by Rod Lorenzen--WordsWorth Books & Co., which he opened in 1974 and ran until 1986 before selling, and Lorenzen & Co. Booksellers, founded in 1990.

WordsWorth remains Arkansas’ poshest independent. Co-manager David Cockroft describes WordsWorth’s clientele as “upscale and country-clubbish,” the very type of folks who can keep a carriage trade bookstore humming. In contrast, Lorenzen & Co. caters to the thrifty, stocking 90% used books and only 10% new books.

Novelist and short story writer Kevin Brockmeier, a native of Little Rock, lived for a time across the street from Lorenzen & Co. He tells PW he frequented the store so much he “was often mistaken as an employee.” While Brockmeier says he “loves” shopping at the independents, “The real action here is down at the Barnes & Noble. It’s where people will go to socialize.”

Despite the obvious challenges of relative poverty (Arkansas ranks 50th among the states in per capita personal income according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis) and preponderance of big box retailers, brave booksellers keep trying. Cottage Bookstore of Melbourne, a 750 sq.-ft. store opened in November 2005, and Nightbird Books opened in Fayetteville in March 2006.

Lorenzen, whose experience spans 32-years, sums up the state of Arkansas bookselling most succinctly: “We rank about last in everything good and first in everything bad,” he tells PW. “When I started, in the mid 70s, there may have been five or six bookstores in the state. Now, there are just a few more. This is not a state that has a population that can really support a lot of bookstores -- it never has been.”

States Literary Sons & Daughters:

John Grisham, Ellen Gilchrist, Donald Harrington, Bill Clinton

James D. Hornfischer's 'Ship of Ghosts'

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, December 24, 2006

Pearl Harbor, Annapolis . . . Austin? It might seem an unlikely roll call, but landlocked Central Texas has a proud place in the annals of U.S. Navy history, now documented in local writer Jim Hornfischer's "Ship of Ghosts."

The book, Hornfischer's second, offers a harrowing account of the sinking of the USS Houston by the Japanese in 1942. It also tells the little-known story of "The Lost Battalion," a detachment of Texas National Guard artillerymen from Camp Mabry taken prisoner at the same time. Hornfischer recounts in thrilling detail how the Texans and the survivors of the Houston endured 3 1/2 years as prisoners of war and participated in the building of the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, an event romanticized by the David Lean movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

"Finding a story like this was the last thing on my mind when I moved to Austin in 1993," says Hornfischer. "But it turns out I landed at ground zero, so to speak. Not only is Fredericksburg the birthplace of Chester Nimitz and home to the National Museum of the Pacific War, but the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry has a room dedicated to the Burma-Thailand railway that covers the fate of the Lost Battalion and the men of the Houston." (Nimitz was the U.S. and Allied forces commander in chief in the Pacific during World War II.)

Hornfischer has a keen ear and eye for a good war narrative. His first book, "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors," told the story of a World War II battle in which a small U.S. fleet faced down a far larger Japanese force in a 2 1/2-hour slugfest. It won the 2004 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature and has been added to the syllabus of the Navy's Professional Reading program. Hornfischer, who also works as a literary agent, was responsible for getting James Bradley and Ron Powers' mega-bestseller "Flags of our Fathers" into print and selling it to DreamWorks. (The Clint Eastwood-directed film adaptation was released in October.)

Hornfischer first heard about the Houston from his client James L. Haley, who had researched the events for one of his histories of Texas. "He turned me on to the dramatic possibilities of the story," says Hornfischer.

As it turned out, he didn't have far to travel for research. In addition to the resources at Camp Mabry, Ronald Marcello at the University of North Texas has been compiling testimonies from survivors for many years. Val Poss, the president of the USS Houston Survivors Association, lives up the road in Round Rock. She and Otto Schwarz — a hero of the book, who died in August — collected numerous artifacts, videotaped interviews and taped oral histories.

"These people have dedicated much of their lives to honoring the memory of the crew of the Houston and the Lost Battalion, and I am in their debt," Hornfischer says.

Prior to the war, the Houston — which had been commissioned after the residents of Houston campaigned to have a ship named in their honor — had been a favorite of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the ship for four long trips. The president became an honorary member of the crew; he participated in the raucous hazing sailors undergo when crossing the equator for the first time and demonstrated his common touch by inviting enlisted men on fishing trips.

After hostilities broke out, Roosevelt's war plan left the Houston to fend for itself. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Houston was patrolling the waters between the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Philippines. After a handful of dangerous skirmishes, it was torn apart by the Japanese Navy shortly after midnight March 1, 1942.

From the moment the Houston sinks, the book's human drama escalates. Only 368 of the more than 1,000 crewmen lived to make it to Java, where they were imprisoned by the Japanese. A few days later, their fate became entwined with that of 534 artillerymen from Camp Mabry who had also been taken prisoner. When the Guardsmen first appeared in the camp, they made it clear where their loyalties lay. The sailors greeted them heartily with: "Hey, Yanks!," but were quickly corrected. "We're not Yanks," replied the Guardsmen. "We're Texans."

The two groups had more in common than you might think. The sailors were mostly farm boys, a breed deemed "most desirable material" by the pre-war Navy. The Texans hailed largely from small rural towns and shared similar values with the sailors. "These guys were the pre-war enlistees who were not motivated to go in as revenge for Pearl Harbor," explains Hornfischer. "There was a different dynamic at work. A lot of these guys joined the military as an adjunct to the New Deal, or to escape a broken home. For example, one sailor in the book, Howard Charles, joined to get away from his SOB stepfather in Kansas."

The two units were shipped to Singapore and Burma, where they were forced into slave labor, enduring lice infestation, 20-foot pythons, rotten rice, dysentery and cholera. Hornfischer says the privation the men endured was so brutal he "struggled to make the book readable, so someone would want to keep turning the pages."

He focuses on the captives' efforts to undermine the railroad, not, as "Bridge on the River Kwai" would have you believe, to build a viable railroad out of a misdirected form of pride. "That movie either amuses or enrages the veterans," says Hornfischer, "One vet told me, 'Those guys were in the Hilton compared to what we had.' The movie succeeds on its own terms, but those terms are very different from history."

In one telling real-life episode, prisoners Howard Charles and Frank King snuck out of their hut, stole a pair of wire cutters and sabotaged a railroad flatcar loaded with rails. The next morning, when the engineers started the locomotive, the heavy rails slid loose, impaling a handful of Japanese who were riding in the caboose. The Americans behaved "like special forces operatives — starving, brutalized special forces operatives — working behind enemy lines, doing what they could on instinct and guts," writes Hornfischer. "They seized their opportunities in the theater of combat operations just as any soldier, sailor or Marine would do."

Despite the Americans' rebellious nature, just two prisoners managed to escape the camps before the rest were freed at the end of the war. In all, 77 crew members from the Houston and 87 from the Lost Battalion died in Japanese captivity.

Hornfischer says it's an honor to tell the tale of these heroic souls in detail for the first time. He also sees the book as a corrective to a popular misconception about the soldiers who fought in World War II. "Some people talk about the Greatest Generation as an aspect of character that crystallized mysteriously in this generation. But when you look at the Houston, you realize these guys came out of the Depression and the 'Hungry '30s.' You can see rather clearly that deprivation provided an unlikely preparation for this ordeal. The Navy didn't prepare them. Life did."

In 2006, Starbucks Adds Buzz to the Book Biz

Starbucks Adds Buzz to the Book Biz

Books and coffee have gone together since long before the chains got hooked on Starbucks. So it made sense when, in August, Starbucks' entertainment division, lead by Ken Lombard, announced that it would begin selling a small number of titles in its 5,400 stores, starting with Mitch Albom's For One More Day.

The move unsettled some booksellers, who were none too happy to see yet another nonbook retailer join the ranks of their competition. But for publishers, getting a book in front of the coffee merchant's 44 million caffeinated customers each week represented a huge opportunity. Even better—Starbucks bought the book nonreturnable. And Starbucks has proved an able bookseller, selling some 70,000 copies of the book since October 3.

When Lombard told PW Daily (Oct. 26) that the next title to be featured at Starbucks is expected to be a debut novel by an unknown writer, he signaled the company's willingness to go beyond brand-name authors like Albom. Considering the typical print run for first novels, just getting a reasonable number of books into every Starbucks outlet would require the publisher to boost the initial run. The retailer won't say whether it plans to continue buying nonreturnable. If it decides to negotiate more traditional terms, the risk of such a printing would fall mainly on the publisher, who could get hit with big returns if an unknown novelist fails to catch coffee-drinkers' attention the way Albom has.

Will publishers be willing to take such a risk? Almost surely, considering the potential payoff. Even if the demands prove too much for some, Starbucks won't lack for options—Lombard says the company "likes the idea of co-publishing" and is setting up a program.

He's already hinting that Starbucks may know how to move books better than the competition. "There's so much dysfunction in entertainment retailing at the moment. With the relationship our baristas have with our customers, we get instant feedback on a product. We have almost an inverted model: finding products to fit our customers, not customers to fit our products," Lombard says.

BookPeople's Camps for Kids

Last June, Austin's BookPeople hosted an innovative program: Camp Half-Blood. The week-long day camp for children, inspired by Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, took its name from the "half-bloods," the children of Gods and humans who populate the novels. A total of 55 kids attended from such far-flung states as New York, Colorado and Iowa, and even Greece, and inquiries came from England and Japan.

The event was such a success that its organizer, BookPeople's children's outreach coordinator Topher Bradfield, is now planning eight more. The first, based on The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, is scheduled for December 26–31. Camp Spiderwick will be followed in 2007 by camps based on Half-Moon Investigations by Eoin Colfer (March), Abarat by Clive Barker (August), the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix (October), the Charlie Bone books by Jenny Nimmo (November), Babymouse by Jennifer and Matt Holm, and Bone by Jeff Smith (both December). And Camp Half-Blood will return for another run in the summer.

Each camp accepts a maximum of 50 children, with five additional slots reserved for scholarship students sponsored by the bookstore. The cost is $325 per camper.

Although Bradford calls his invention a "literary" camp, the event stresses action. Last summer's festivities included a theatrical "claiming" ceremony (complete with colored smoke, sound effects and stage lighting), simulated chariot racing and Spartan warrior training.

BookPeople owner Steve Bercu explained to PW that Camp Half-Blood was "the test" to whether the idea would be well received and if they could pull it off. "It was and we did," said Bercu. "Then we immediately looked to see what could be done along the same lines."

While last June's Camp Half- Blood managed a $600 profit, Bercu emphasized that the priority of the camps is not to make money. "As much as I'd like to be profitable on every one of these, it's not essential," he said. "I'm more interested in the concept and seeing this have an impact on our potential future customers."

Bercu (PW's Bookseller of the Year in 2005) noted that the passion and involvement of the staff and community was impressive. Hyperion, Riordan's publisher, supplied T-shirts and banners, BookPeople staff sewed costumes and painted sets, and various teachers and parents volunteered to be counselors. After the camp ended, Bradfield said the store was flooded with letters from campers and their parents praising the event.

Though no U.S. booksellers have contacted BookPeople about running a similar camp, interest ran extremely high when Bradfield described the program at the Association of Booksellers for Children's annual meeting at BEA in June. And it has inspired Toni Davis, an employee at the Cornwall branch of the U.K. bookseller Ottakars (recently taken over by Waterstones) to approach Riordan's British publisher, Penguin, about the possibility.

Davis recently traveled to the U.S. to meet with Bradfield and author Rick Riordan during the Texas Book Festival. As a special honor to Davis, who is battling ovarian cancer, Bradfield arranged for some of the children who attended last year's Camp Half-Blood to hold a "claiming" ceremony for her.

Riordan, who told PW he wishes he could "clone" Bradfield and Davis, has dedicated the third book in the series, The Curse of the Titans, to them.

Bradfield continues to drum up enthusiasm for the Percy Jackson books during his weekly visits to schools in the Austin area, where he runs fairs and meets with groups of students to talk about new books. In all, BookPeople has sold more than 1,400 copies of The Lightning Thief,the first Percy Jackson title, and nearly 500 of its followup, The Sea of Monsters. "Prior to the camp, we saw a small boost in sales," said Bradford, "but after—as the kids who went started talking about it to their friends—we saw a bigger bump. Having an excited kid talking about a book is the best form of advertising."

Starbucks Selection Process Raises Eyebrows

Starbucks Selection Process Raises Eyebrows
by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/30/2006

Mitch Albom's novel For One More Day has been a big hit at Starbucks, selling 45,000 copies since it became available at the stores on October 3. The company also confirmed it is looking at extending sales of the book through the holiday season and is talking to several publishers about a second title to go on sale in early 2007. William Morris Agency is acting as a consultant to Starbucks to scout books and negotiate terms on the new deal.

But William Morris's relationship with Starbucks, and the entire selection process, has caused some grumbling among rival agencies as well as at some retailers. Several agents who spoke with PW questioned William Morris's role in scouting books, suggesting a "conflict of interest" existed in having WMA representing both authors and a retailer simultaneously.

"If Starbucks wanted a scout, why didn't they hire one?" asked one agent. "They are having an opportunity to see manuscripts early, which gives them leverage in the long run. As of now, Starbucks hasn't picked a William Morris author to sell, but who is to say they won't favor their own clients in the future?"

Another agent, who claims familiarity with an ongoing negotiation with Starbucks, expressed concern about the terms WMA was requesting for a particular title, going so far as to call the deal "abusive." According to this agent, WMA asked for deeper-than-industry-standard discounts and a two-week window of exclusivity in which to be the sole retailer for a new title. Through a spokesperson, Starbucks strenuously denied asking for a special discount, but did acknowledge requesting two-week exclusivity, a request the company evenually dropped.

Bob Miller, president of Hyperion, said that his company had dealt directly with Ken Lombard, head of Starbucks's entertainment division, when negotiating terms for Albom's For One More Day and that WMA was not involved.

Starbucks said that everything WMA does on Starbucks's behalf is done with the coffee company's approval. The spokesperson expressed satisfaction with the work the agency is doing on the chain's behalf, and in particular, praised the "passion and intelligence" of agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, who is working on the project. Lombard called Starbucks's relationship with WMA "very much a collaborative effort," in which all books under consideration are also vetted by many of his division's 65 partners (Starbucks's preferred term for its employees).

Mostly, agents seemed concerned about their authors developing any kind of relationship with WMA. "Knowledge is power, and the more they know about my authors, the more it worries me," said one.

On the other hand, Starbucks appears willing to take risks and is asking publishers to follow its lead. The company has confirmed that the second book it will sell in its stores is likely to be a debut novel by an unknown writer—a far cry from the near sure-thing Albom's novel represents. This would likely require a publisher to commit to a far larger initial print run on a debut novel than usual. With Starbucks's thousands of locations, it is likely a publisher would need to commit to a print run in the tens of thousands to satisfy demand and maintain a reasonable level of stock in each store. It's a heady risk to take on a first-time novelist, albeit one who will be exposed to 40 million Starbucks caffeinated customers each week.

Starbucks Succeeds with Albom; Second Book Planned

Starbucks Succeeds with Albom; Second Book Planned
by Edward Nawotka, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 10/26/2006

Starbucks has sold 45,000 copies of Mitch Albom's novel For One More Day (Hyperion) since it went on sale at the chain October 3, a week after the book reached bookstores. The figure accounts for roughly 12% of a total of 391,000 copies sold, as tabulated by Nielsen BookScan. (BookScan, which added Starbucks to its file the week it began selling For One More Day, represents about 70% of total book sales).

Ken Lombard, head of Starbucks' entertainment division, said, "So far, it's been a great success."Initially, the merchandising of Albom's book was planned to end on November 6, though Lombard said that the company is "going to take a look at that" and may consider extending sales of the book through the holiday season.

Bob Miller, president of Hyperion Books, said that Starbucks has recently reordered. So far, Hyperion has four million copies of For One More Day in print. Miller added that sales of the title “are running week against week 150% over [Albom’s] The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which sold six million copies."

Starbucks has planned several promotions around For One More Day, including eight appearances at Starbucks stores and today's nationwide "Book Break," discussion groups at 25 Starbucks locations.

Albom, who works as a sportswriter and radio host in Detroit, has committed to a total of 74 events to promote the book. So far, with the Detroit Tigers playing in the World Series, he has been forced to cancel yesterday's appearance at a Joseph-Beth bookstore in Nashville. Albom also plans to conduct a final driving tour to bookstores in Michigan in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

PW has also learned that Starbucks is on the verge of signing a deal to sell a second title in their stores. The next book is expected to be a novel by a first-time novelist. William Morris Agency, which scouts books for Starbucks and negotiates terms on its behalf, is said to be in discussion with a variety of publishers, though Farrar, Straus & Giroux has been mentioned several times as the likely publisher.

Obama Wows Crowd at Texas Book Festival

Obama Wows Crowd at Texas Book Festival

Perfect weather blessed this past weekend's Texas Book Festival at the State Capitol in Austin, where Barak Obama set a record for book sales at the event. According to Barnes & Noble, Obama sold more than 1,000 copies of his political manifesto, "The Audacity of Hope,'' beating past record holders Bill Clinton and local favorite Barbara Bush.

Obama, who signed 365 copies before heading off to a meeting with Democratic movers and shakers at the Driskill Hotel, opened this years Festival at a ceremony that honored Austin writer Louis Sachar and Texas Monthly magazine for their contributions to Texas letters. The enthusiastic audience that gathered in the Texas State Capitol House chamber to hear Obama speak greeted the junior Senator from Illinois with wild cheering and a standing ovation, suggesting that he has a willing base of supporters in Austin should he run for President in 2008.

Also on hand for the weekend were Gore Vidal, touring for his new memoir "tk," condemned the Bush administration in front of an audience of well-heeled guests at the annual Gala, part of the fundraising the Festival does for Texas public libraries. Thriller writer Alan Furst, attracted more than two hundred to his presentation at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where his archives are housed alongside with those of Julian Barnes and Norman Mailer. Notables, including Richard Ford, Irish novelist Colm Toibin, Amy Sedaris also drew enthusiastic audiences, but were rivaled by Texas favorites including Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, whose new book, "Vice: Dick Cheney and the Highjacking of the American Presidency" drew a capacity crowd.

Cheney took body blows elsewhere in the weekend as well, when Vidal and New York Times columnist Marueen Dowd took to attacking the VP during an interview with Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, referring to the VP as "our S&M vice president" and "Bush's Iago" respectively.

A little bit of New York publishing glamour also descended on Texas, with a handful of editors in attendance, including Ann Close, senior editor at Knopf, who publishes four Austin writers: National Book Award finalist Larry Wright, Steve Harrigan, Greg Curtis, and Sarah Bird, who was all smiles after Close told her she was publishing Bird's next novel. Dave Patterson, senior editor at Holt, told PW Daily he was impressed. "It's amazing who they have," said Patterson. "It's easily got to be one of the best events I've seen."

Elsewhere, Jay McInerney, promoting his collection of wine columns, tk, left a few Austinites smirking after sniffing a plastic cup of wine handed to him at a barbecue.

In the exhibition tents, a representative from Sony gathered the curious to his booth showing off the company's attractive new e-book reader, perhaps giving a glimpse of what the future of books might look like to the denizens of the tech happy town and one of the last remaining Democratic strongholds in this deep red state.

The Shore Thing; Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land'

Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land'

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, October 29, 2006

ichard Ford's "The Lay of the Land," his third novel to feature the New Jersey real estate agent Frank Bascombe, should come with a warning attached: "For Mature Audiences Only." No, this is not a book filled with perverse sex or gag-inducing gore. Instead, this is an autumnal book, a late-middle aged bildungsroman, in which a man confronts the end of his options. The book opens with Bascombe mulling over a newspaper story describing a murder-suicide at a Texas nursing school in which a disgruntled student asks his teacher, "Are you ready to meet your maker?" The remainder of the novel is Ford's attempt to answer that question on Bascombe's behalf.

When Bascombe was introduced in 1986's "The Sportswriter," it was Easter weekend 1983, and he was 38 years old, divorced and living in the bland middle-class enclave of Haddam, N.J. His life as a modestly successful writer unraveled after the death of his teenage son Ralph, a subsequent divorce and a flight to Florida. The book, along with his book of short stories, "Rock Springs," published a year later, established Ford's national reputation.

It's ironic that Ford's writing about New Jersey has made him famous. The locale with which Ford is most often associated is New Orleans, where he and his wife lived for many years. (The couple now live in a post-Katrina exile in Maine.) Ford's Southern connection is evident in his writing style, which is as laconic as the muddy Mississippi, and similar to that of his Gulf Coast compatriots Walker Percy and Eudora Welty. In Ford's books the action arrives only intermittently, between extensive bouts of self-reflection, and is delivered in long, meandering internal monologues — a style he's employed in all three Bascombe novels.

By the time "Independence Day" appeared in 1995, Bascombe was back in Haddam, selling real estate and trying to connect with his son Paul, a surly 15-year-old, by taking him to visit the basketball and baseball Halls of Fame over the 1988 Fourth of July weekend. Bascombe had started dating Sally (who will become his second wife) and entered what he calls his "Existence Period," characterized by his efforts to make good on the present and amend for the past, without risking too much. That novel's emotional pragmatism resonated with readers and critics alike, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, the first novel to take both prizes in the same year.

Over three decades, Bascombe has evolved into Ford's American Everyman, the equivalent of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. Through him readers experience the travails of the striving, emotionally befuddled American middle class. He could easily be mistaken for a doppelganger of Ford himself: Like Ford, Bascombe hails from Mississippi, was educated in Michigan (Bascombe graduated from the University of Michigan, Ford from Michigan State), is a fiction writer (Bascombe has published a book of short stories) and is a former sportswriter. The major difference is that Bascombe traded writing for real estate after interviewing a crippled football player (a pivotal event in "The Sportswriter"), while Ford has gone on to publish six novels, two collections of novellas and a story collection.

Bascombe's choice of occupation is not as radical as you might think. In "The Lay of the Land," he makes a connection between these two professions: "Realtors share a basic industry with novelists, who make up important stuff from life-run rampant just by choosing, changing and telling." He adds, "Realtors make importance by selling, which is better-paying than the novelist's deal and probably not as hard to do well."

In the new book, Bascombe has relocated to Sea-Clift, a new-money enclave on the Jersey shore, where his real-estate business is booming. The year is 2000 and Bascombe, 55, has literally become radioactive — he's walking around with 100 irradiated titanium pellets embedded in his prostate to treat cancer. It's the week before Thanksgiving, which he intends to celebrate with "the usual holiday morbidities" and a $2,000 Thanksgiving feast catered by Eat No Evil, an organic, cruelty-free food company. Joining him are his daughter Clarissa, a Harvard grad and part-time lesbian living with him as a surrogate nurse and spiritual counselor, and Paul, who sports a mullet and a "beardstash," writes greeting cards for Hallmark in Kansas City and plans to bury a time capsule in Bascombe's yard. In lieu of his second wife Sally, who has abandoned him to be with her first husband, Bascombe is considering inviting his first wife, Ann, who is seeking reconciliation.

Meanwhile, in the background is the hanging chad controversy that subsumed the 2000 presidential election. Bascombe, who has always been good company as a narrator and is adept at evoking a person's entire character in a few words, sums up the candidates as follows: Bush is the "knucklehead," Al Gore is the "stiff" and Ralph Nader is simply dubbed "Nadir."

Materially speaking, this guy should probably be a Republican, but emotionally, he remains a Democrat — that is to say, he's a mess (at least under the current administration). The cause of his consternation is not just cancer or politics, but what Frank calls the transition into his "Permanent Period." This is marked by the constant feeling of being "off-shore, waiting for the extra beat" — the realization that he could die — and the lingering sense that if you "never did one damn substantial thing in your life, good or otherwise, and never would, and if you did, it wouldn't matter a mouse fart."

As in the previous novels, Bascombe's tart voice allows Ford to illuminate Bascombe's thoughts on family, women, aging and work — the plainspoken stuff of life — in an entertaining way. When his Americanized Tibetan partner, who has taken the unlikely name of Mike Mahoney, offers to buy out Bascombe's half of the business to give him time to travel, Bascombe dismisses this proposal as "Buddhist crappolio."

Elsewhere, pondering his legacy, his "Forever Concept," he thinks:

I realized I could die and no one would remember me for anything. "Oh, that guy. Frank, uh. Yeah. Hmm. . . ." That was me. Not that I wanted to blaze my initials forever into history's oak. I just wanted that when I was no more, someone would say my name (my children, my ex-wife?) and someone else could then say, "Right. That Bascombe, he was always damn blank;" or, "Ole Frank, he really liked to blank." Or, worst case, "Jesus Christ, that Bascombe, I'm glad to see the end of his sorry blank." These blanks would all be human traits I knew about and others did too, and that I got credit for, even if they weren't heroic or particularly essential.

These existential, stream-of-consciousness musings are a welcome return to his previous form. But all too often in "The Lay of the Land," Ford turns Bascombe's attention to real estate issues, treating the reader to pointless disquisitions on mortgages, demographic shifts and New Jersey shoreline property valuations. It may be an accurate reflection of a real estate agent's daydreams, but it's ultimately a bore, bereft of much metaphorical power.

Ford has attempted to temper the book's dark undertone by punctuating the plot with a quirky series of spectacular events, including a terrorist hospital bombing for which Frank becomes a suspect and the unexpected appearance of Revolutionary War re-enactors at an elderly friend's funeral. He also burdens the book with oddball, unexplainable characters, such as Paul's girlfriend, an Amazon who lost her hand in a land mine accident in Texas. To top it off, the novel's denouement features machine guns.

In the previous Bascombe novels, the lack of external drama felt like the authentic day-to-day stupor of white, middle class suburbia. By contrast, "The Lay of the Land" feels more like a Janet Evanovich novel. Bascombe is left gaping at the random weirdness around him with little more comment than "Life's interesting."

It's as if Ford was trying too hard to be simultaneously profound and entertaining. The result is an overstuffed book that could have benefited from more of the "choosing, changing and telling" that even the failed writer Frank Bascombe realizes is essential to the novelist's job.

Reviewing the State of Book Review Coverage

Reviewing the State of Book Review Coverage
With financial pressures mounting, will newspapers cut space?
by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/9/2006

The departure in September of Dallas Morning News book columnist Jerome Weeks and books editor Charles Ealy—two of 111 reporters who took voluntary buyouts from the paper—has brought the state of book reviewing in traditional media back into the spotlight.

Initially believing that no replacement would be named for Ealy, AAP president Pat Schroeder sent a letter to DMN editor Bob Mong expressing her "dismay and disappointment" with the situation. Schroeder was only slightly mollified to learn from Mong that an interim books editor had been named and that the paper will continue with book coverage comparable to what it has done in the past. The DMN typically devotes three pages to books each Sunday, and reviews business books on its business pages.

In her letter to Mong, Schroeder wrote, "...severely curtailing book coverage or eliminating it altogether, newspapers not only fail the communities they serve, they defeat their own interests in regaining those elusive and essential advertising dollars." But Mong told PW that advertising "does not sustain the paper's book coverage," though he added, "I'd love to make a presentation to publishers with our advertising people. I could talk about the benefits of reaching our readers both in the paper and online." He indicated that the paper has noted a "strong demand" for book coverage from its readers, who are generally affluent and educated.

For her part, Schroeder said, "I'm always amazed they say you don't see enough ads—but I don't see too many ads for sports teams. It's been a nagging concern for the last couple of years. We talked about it at our recent board meeting—people said, 'this is horrendous'—the real question is what to do." As a first step, Schroeder asked the AAP's Trade Committee, chaired by Hyperion Books president Bob Miller, to explore ways to facilitate more book coverage in newspapers and other media.

With newspapers under increasing financial pressure, however, is it reasonable to expect them to give extensive coverage to an industry where they get relatively little support? Among the remaining Sunday review sections, only the New York Times Book Review receives a significant number of ads. The Washington Post Book World has seen very little publisher support throughout its history. "It's been a real problem," said Book World editor Marie Arana. The situation is much the same at the San Francisco Chronicle, where, said editor Phil Bronstein, the section gets few ads. "It gets harder and harder to justify something that has no ad support," said Bronstein. "We continue to do it because we think it is important to the cultural community of the Bay Area."

The importance of books to the culture remains the driving force behind the Post's commitment to its 16-page Sunday review. Arana noted that longtime Post publisher Katharine Graham was adamant that "in a city as important as this and in an enterprise as important to knowledge and education as the publication of books, that the Washington Post would have a full-sized, dedicated book review section." Although ads are up slightly at Book World, they don't come close to underwriting the section. "It's not that we're steaming ahead happily without the ads, but it's what we have to do because the New York publishers have not been supportive for papers around the country. They basically support their hometown paper, the New York Times," said Arana.

Books remain an integral part of the Los Angeles Times, a paper that has generated its own headlines recently about its future within the media empire of the Tribune Company. "In a funny way, the publishing industry's terrible neglect of the L.A. Times Book Review was actually good preparation for this era for us," said Tim Rutten, associate features editor. "We learned a long time ago that if we are going to do a book review, we couldn't count on publishers' ads, because they don't advertise on the West Coast."

The Chronicle's Bronstein believes that if publishers supported its section, "it would send a very good signal that they believe in their product." Since the Bay Area is an extraordinary book community, he said, the paper intends to cover books "for as long as we can." How long will that be? "I just don't know in this environment," said Bronstein.

Savage and savvy, 'Smonk' goes on a rampage

Savage and savvy, 'Smonk' goes on a rampage

Smonk By Tom Franklin
William Morrow, 254 pp., $23.95

By Edward Nawotka, Special for USA TODAY

In acknowledgments at the end of Smonk, Tom Franklin thanks his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly, "for never running screaming from the house" after reading early drafts. Too bad this doesn't appear at the start, where it might have warned readers just how twisted this novel is — even if it's also ingenious.

Smonk, Franklin's follow-up to 2003's Hell at the Breech, churns together elements of Southern Gothic, gunslinger Westerns and horror to convey the tale of Old Texas, a tiny, isolated Alabama town surrounded by scorched sugarcane fields and filled with "strangeness and secrets."

The only residents of the town are a few ragtag men and dozens of widows and young women. There, the dry air is filled with the barking of rabid dogs and the hissing of flesh-eating vultures.

The Civil War, though nearly a half-century in the past, took the town's original cadre of men, most of whom never returned. Now the town is at war with a new nemesis in the person of Eugene Oregon Smonk, a killer without conscience.

Smonk is one of the more corrosive villains in recent literature: an explosives expert trained during the war with Spain, who, despite his dwarfed stature, missing eye, immense goiter, "parched skin the color of an ancient red saddle," syphilis and consumption, retains a magnetic power over the women of Old Texas.

As the novel begins, Smonk shows up to stand trial for terrorizing the town and having his way with the local women.

He suspects a lynching and has hired a pair of mercenaries to back him up with a water-cooled Maxim machine gun.

Soon, Smonk has reduced the courthouse to splinters and dispatched dozens of souls to heaven before fleeing. The two townsmen who remain alive form a pathetic posse and give chase.

Highly entertaining, Smonk is more picaresque than deftly plotted, and full of exaggerated violence worthy of a Japanese comic book. Some sensitive readers may want to run screaming from the house, but those with a strong stomach for graphic death and sex will be smitten with Smonk.

Jeff Abbott's 'Fear' : Trauma Drama

Jeff Abbott's 'Fear'

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, August 13, 2006

As a rule, when an author opts for a one-word title, you can be confident he's gunning for the commercial big time. Think of "Frankenstein," "Dracula," "Shogun," "Jaws." Single letter titles, such as "V," "G" and "Z," are strictly reserved for the highbrow stuff.

Last year, Austin writer Jeff Abbott, the author of seven paperbacks, had his first hardcover published. Appropriately, he went with a one-word title: "Panic," etched in ruby red type against a white background, as if a killer had painted the book in blood. A thriller about Evan Casher, a twentysomething documentary filmmaker who gets embroiled in a web of espionage and murder that stretches from Texas to London, it was intended as Abbott's breakthrough book. Mission accomplished: "Panic" has been optioned by The Weinstein Co. movie studio, with a screenwriter and director attached.

Abbott's latest one-word-title novel, "Fear," is the tale of Miles Kendrick, a mob lackey turned state's witness who is hiding out in Santa Fe, N.M., as part of a federal witness protection program. Miles is in therapy to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder he's suffered since gunning down his best friend during an FBI takedown gone wrong. When his therapist is killed in an explosion, a variety of thugs descend on picturesque Santa Fe in search of some secret computer files. Soon, Miles begins piecing together the story, which involves secret experiments that are being performed on people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He eventually hooks up with a "Survivor"-type reality show winner and an Iraq war veteran to foil this plot, and Abbott puts the action into overdrive, sending his characters on a road trip to Yosemite, where he stages a memorable chase scene.

Fans of Abbott's earlier books — four novels featuring Jordan Poteet, a librarian-cum-detective in a small Texas town, and a second series focused on Whit Mosley, a judge in a crime-ridden Gulf coast town — might be disconcerted by his transformation into a retailer of guns-ablazing thrills. But authors have every right to try new things — to leave behind the security blanket of established characters, to draw in new readers, to court Hollywood with some bang-bang-bang.

Unfortunately, Abbott's big jump has fallen a little short: "Panic" amounted to little more than one long chase scene. This isn't entirely a criticism; Abbott writes great chase scenes and the book's big set piece, a running gun-battle through New Orleans' Audubon Park, was especially well-done. What the book lacked was the sense of something serious at stake.

The major plot point in "Panic" involved encrypted computer files, which are sort of abstract, no matter what data they contain. And the book's villains were named Dezz and Jargos, which made them sound like European soccer hooligans. It was all a bit breathless and, ultimately, pointless. (The shocking surprise that is revealed at the end seemed more apt for an episode of "Alias" than a hardcover thriller.)

"Fear," once again, revolves around missing computer files and once again gives the bad guys European-sounding surnames — Groote, Quantrill and Sorenson. (The good guys — Allison, Celeste and Nathan — are all American.)

This time around, at least, there's something real at stake: Given the many damaged veterans who are returning to the U.S. from Iraq, the focus on post-traumatic stress disorder lends the book an air of timeliness. "Fear" doesn't offer as sophisticated a reflection of a contemporary, verifiable reality as, say, Dan Fesperman's recent thriller "The Prisoner of Guantanamo," but it's more tethered to the here-and-now than "Panic." Abbott has done his research and is especially edifying about the stress hormones, neurotransmitters and beta-receptors — collectively described by one doctor as "fear juice" — that enhance a traumatic memory and burn it into various regions of the brain.

That said, Abbott's readers had better prepare for a bit of trauma themselves. In "Fear," Abbott has dramatically amplified the level of violence. There are a half-dozen perfunctory scenes in which a minor character, often introduced as a false deus ex machina, is dispatched by an unceremonious double-tap between his or her astonished eyes.

Abbott also serves up a generous helping of gratuitous bloodshed and carnage, including multiple scenes of torture (one especially gruesome form involves running the tip of a screwdriver along exposed bone), as well as multiple face-bashing and razor-slashing fights.

Just this week the Journal of the American Medical Association published a report describing the neuropsychological effects of fighting in Iraq. It concluded that months of living with heightened adrenaline left soldiers struggling to focus and suffering subtle lapses in memory.

"Fear" has a similar effect: It might leave you temporarily juiced, but you won't remember much about it.

Texas writer Edward Nawotka covers the South for Publishers Weekly and is a nationally syndicated book critic.

Flamenco Fever: Interview with novelist Sarah Bird

Flamenco Fever

Former go-go dancer and novelist Sarah Bird learned the artful Spanish dance before she wrote her latest novel

It was love that led Texas novelist Sarah Bird to flamenco.

"I was 20, living in Spain and working at a German scuba diving camp on the Costa Brava," says Bird, who is now 56. "I was also nursing a broken heart from a boyfriend I'd left behind in Albuquerque." Some friends took her to see a flamenco performance, which affected her in profound ways. "It was literally the first physical manifestation I'd ever seen of my own interior emotional landscape."

The artful Spanish dance has been an obsession ever since and provided the inspiration for Bird's latest novel, The Flamenco Academy (Knopf).

The novel is the story of Rae and Didi, childhood friends in Albuquerque. At their high school graduation party, Rae meets Tomas Montenegro, a mysterious young flamenco guitarist. Tomas quickly disappears, however, but that single encounter haunts Rae and her desire to see-and finally seduce Tomas-motivates her to learn to dance flamenco.

Rae and Didi enroll at the University of New Mexico-the only college in America that grants a degree in dance with a flamenco focus -- where they study with Dona Carlota Anaya, a gypsy dancer who recounts her tumultuous life story while drilling her students in el arte. Dona Carlota hectors the girls, calling them burros, while teaching them the relevance of each complicated compas (beat) and brazeo (arm movement).

In a plot that sounds straight out of a play by Federico Garcia Lorca, Rae who earns the nickname "Metronome," and Didi, who's called "Tempest eventually duel and have a falling out over Tomas.

Bird’s writing career began in the 1980s with a series of five romance novels published under the pen name Tory Cates. Then came a run of comic novels that include The Boyfriend School, Alamo House, and The Mommy Club. Her critically acclaimed novel The Yokota Officer's Club (Knopf, 2001), about the daughter of an Air Force pilot who in the 1960s took his wife and children to live on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, was based on Bird's unusual experiences as a touring go-go dancer in Japan in the '60s.

Bringing the story of The Flamenco Academy to life, by contrast, required some fancy footwork. Over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Bird's hometown of Austin, the author, who is married and the mother of a 17-year-old son, Gabriel, reveals that she took beginning dance classes at the Festival Flamenco at the University of New Mexico. The event draws the top flamenco artists from around the world for a week each summer to teach and perform. It's easy to imagine the leggy author, who is slim, standing close to six feet, getting the sinuous moves down. (Gabriel came with her and took flamenco guitar lessons. "He learned the rhythm structures of the music, and later back in Austin, was able to interpret them for me," Bird says.)

Though a few notable nonfiction books about flamenco have appeared, including Fernanda Eberstadt's Little Money Street (Knopf) and Jason Webster's Duende (Broadway), the art is notoriously difficult to capture. Among filmmakers, only Carlos Saura's works, which include magnificent flamenco interpretations of Bizet's Carmen and Lorca's Blood Wedding, are considered worthy.

Bird's very first writing assignments for pulp magazines of the 1970s, served her well in dealing with the exaggerated operatic nature of flamenco and its outrageous gypsy practitioners "Those magazines wanted blue collar, first-person anonymous stories, like 'I kidnapped my own child' and 'I seduced my parish priest,'" she says.

The hardscrabble Andalusian gypsies of The Flamenco Academy relish their working-class bawdiness. In one scene, a young gypsy, a girl who "likes to have sex in the wrong place" is nicknamed El Peste (The Stink). Later, a gypsy mocks another woman by suggesting her husband would prefer that drink some mint tea to fatten her nether parts so she can enjoy sex.

Throughout the novel, Bird tries to balance the sacred and the profane. Flamenco is alternately referred to in the novel as "tragedy in the first person," and less reverentially as "obsessive compulsive disorder with a beat."

The plot of The Flamenco Academy ultimately turns on a question about authenticity and whether puro flamenco can be performed by someone who is not gitana por los cuatro costaos, that is to say "gypsy on all four sides." Likewise, Bird says she's concerned that some aficionados within the flamenco community may find her depiction of el arte inauthentic. "They are the most insidery insiders you've ever met and they have these constant arguments about purity. Flamenco is as regimented as haiku, and the entire experience of trying to get the specificity down on paper was extremely intimidating. I've been worried by how the puro puros are going to take it since the start."

Like the sore backs and joint damage flamenco dancers endure from the constant stamping of their feet, that worry took its own toll on Bird, who rewrote the story five times over the course of 15 years. "I originally envisioned this as a novella," she says of the book which now runs to 381 pages. "First, I wrote it as a murder mystery. Then I did a version where two characters get married and have a child." She even turned the story into a screenplay that was optioned by Meatloaf, with J-Lo's husband Marc Anthony discussed as the possible star. "Finally," she says, "I just gave up and finished it."

She's spent as much time writing this novel as she has raising her son.

Bird's next novel, tentatively titled Weightless, depicts the world of Texas socialites and the internet bubble burst of the early 90s. The world is seen through the eyes of a woman married to a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to George W. Bush, and returns Bird, who also pens Texas Monthly's popular back page humor column, to the broad comedic tone that marked her books prior to Yokota.

Bird doesn't want to leave the impression that writing The Flamenco Academy was all hardship. Taking the dance classes at Festival Flamenco, she says, was "an uproarious amount of fun. One thing I can testify to is that I can really get my groove on and after ten days of flamenco hand twirls, my Carpal Tunnel was completely cured."

Greg Palast Wants to Blow Your Mind

Palast wants to blow your mind

Who's afraid of Greg Palast? According to the best-selling, left-wing muckraker, here's who should be: Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney and the entire American press corps

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, June 18, 2006

Investigative journalist Greg Palast doesn't do anything the easy way. He wires himself up and tries to get the political and corporate elite to admit to malfeasance. He "liberates" confidential documents from places such as the World Bank.

Though Palast is a born and bred American, his incendiary stories usually appear in the U.K., on BBC television's "Newsnight" and in the Guardian newspaper. In the U.S., he's shunted onto fringe radio stations such as Pacifica. Among the mainstream media outlets, only Harper's magazine has dared run his stories. Even so, his 2004 book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," was a best-seller here.

Palast's new book, "Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal 'O8, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War," is breathless and cryptic and must be read to be believed. (Or, for many, disbelieved.) It appears to offer documentary proof that there really are secret and not-so-secret rulers of the world.

I spoke to Palast, who regularly appears on television wearing a Sam Spade-style fedora and trench coat, by phone from San Francisco, where he was launching his U.S. tour with an appearance on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! radio show. He is, if anything, even more provocative in conversation than he is in print, if only because he doesn't have the opportunity to footnote some of his more lurid accusations — not all of which the American-Statesman can vouch for. When I asked him how it felt to go head-to-head on the best-seller list with right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, whose book "Godless" went on sale the same day as "Armed Madhouse," he suggested that her popularity is a mirage, accusing her supporters of simply buying her books en masse and dumping them in the ocean. He offered no proof for this assertion.

Austin American-Statesman: You talk about there being a class war in the U.S. and describe the flooding of New Orleans as its "Gettysburg." Would you explain?

Greg Palast: It's the second time that this happened. When the levees burst in 1927, it was a period of time when everybody said the Republican Party was going to control the U.S. government for the rest of the century. But then one Democratic politician stood up and said, "The rich are killing us." This one guy — Huey Long — stood up and said we need pensions, we need government protection, we need regulation of the power companies that have gone wild and are ripping us off. And he created a program that was later renamed the New Deal and the Democrats ran this country for decades on that. It took bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans for us to realize this is happening again, but (the Republicans) are doing their best to stamp it out.

One of the things that comes across in the book is your faith in the power of the press to make change. Do you still believe in that?

I see the power of the press to disinform. In 1929, Huey Long was able to deliver his message by using a new, uncontrolled medium by going over the airwaves. He was the first to deliver a message that wasn't controlled by the newspaper barons. It was called radio. Now we've got the Internet. That's all we've got at the moment.

You're a big fan of Long's.

I'm a big fan of getting around the privileged class. So, you know, we do have a Huey Long today. He's called Hugo Chavez. When the levees broke in New Orleans we had a president who sent in rescue teams and desalinization plants. It was Chavez, but our State Department sent back the planes. In the book I report on Chavez's assassination — I just thought I'd do it in advance. You know, I reported on two stolen elections (2000 and 2004). Now I'm reporting on 2008 being stolen. I figure if I do it in advance I might be able to affect things.

So what makes your reporting different?

First of all, I wear wires and do secret recording and get oil executives to fess up to planning with Dick Cheney's team what they are going to do with the oil fields of Iraq. Then I've got to go find the documents. It takes two years of hunting and looking. First I had a sense it was there, then there is the confirmation it is there, then I finally get it. Once you get the stuff, a lot of it is highly technical and interpreting it and confirming it is very complicated. No one has the time or interest. Then again, the U.S. press doesn't want to confront power. For example, I had these "caging lists" that came out of the Republican computers. How was I going to prove this was actually a scheme to wipe out black voters? Well, you can stand in their doorway and literally ask, "What is this stuff?" Sometimes you get your answer when the guy turns pale and bolts. The BBC often accepts that as confirmation.

So do you consider yourself a great reporter?

I always appreciate praise, but I don't. You or any other reporter in America could do what I do if you had editors and producers who gave you months to go out and find proof that the Republicans shoplifted the state of Ohio.

You praise the Internet as the medium of the future, yet it is often criticized for factual inaccuracies, often due to the speed at which stories are posted online.

Let me ask you how accurate were Judith Miller's reports on weapons of mass destruction in The New York Times? Of course the Internet has all sorts of garbage on it, but it's also one of the few places you'll get the hard stuff. Anyone can drive a car: a drunk or an ambulance driver.

You blame a lot of our troubles on Texans, from Bush to James Baker. Are you trying to say we should be ashamed of being Texans?

No, it was Texans (such as journalist Jim Hightower) who exposed George Bush. But if there's one place that the class war could not be clearer, that's in the Lone Star State.

Bookstore Camp Brings Greek Myths to Life

Bookstore Camp Brings Greek Myths to Life

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on June 8, 2006 Sign up now!

by Edward Nawotka, Children's Bookshelf -- 6/8/2006
Article



This week BookPeople in Austin, Tex., is hosting a unique summer camp. It’s for nine to 14-year-old fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, which include 2005’s The Lightning Thief and this season’s sequel, The Sea of Monsters, both published by Hyperion.

Dubbed Camp Half-Blood, it takes its name from the “half-bloods,” the children of Gods and humans who populate the novels.

The inspiration for the camp came from BookPeople’s Topher Bradfield, who in his job as the store’s outreach coordinator, visits Austin-area elementary schools. Often of late, he says, he found himself reading from the first chapter of The Lightning Thief. “It was a great way to get the boys to pay attention,” he explained.

The subsequent sales that his visits generated—so far, BookPeople has sold more than 400 hardcover copies of The Lightning Thief and another 300 paperbacks, as well as 300 hardcover copies of Sea of Monsters—proved to him that the project would have support within the local reading community.

With Riordan’s blessing, Bradfield concocted an elaborate storyline that relocated the camp from its original fictional location in New Jersey to Austin, under the pretense of needing to re-fashioning The Apple of Discord (which was in part responsible for the Trojan War), which has been broken into 13 pieces. Accordingly, campers are broken up into 13 cabins, each representing a different Greek god—with Zeus and Poseidon at the pinnacle.

This past Saturday night, BookPeople staged an elaborate theatrical “claiming” ceremony—complete with colored smoke, storm sound effects and stage lighting—at which campers were assigned parent deities and given an individual prophecies by the Oracle of Delphi. Various deities and mythical creatures were portrayed by BookPeople employees.

Riordan celebrated his birthday by driving the hour from San Antonio for the festivities. Describing the scene, he sounded awed. “There was Greek dancing drumming and even a man dressed up as a Spartan,” he said. “It was like stepping into my own book, and it was the first clue that something I had written was larger than me.”

A total of 55 campers are participating in the camp. Some have traveled such far-flung areas as New York, Colorado, Arizona, Iowa and Greece to take part. Word spread through Riordan’s Web site, and BookPeople answered queries from as far away as Japan and the U.K.

The city of Austin lent use of Zilker Park’s rock garden, a part of Austin’s public park’s system, as the location for the camp. Activities start at 8 a.m. and involve a daily quest for pieces of the Apple of Discord, lessons on Greek mythology and philosophy from University of Texas and Austin Community College graduate students, swimming, kickball and Frisbee golf. A Greek war re-enactor has been flown in from California to teach Greek battle formations, such as the phalanx.

According to Bradfield, the budget for the camp was $9,500 and sponsors include a local bakery, ice cream parlor and an Arabic bazaar. Bradfield and three Austin public school teachers are acting as camp counselors. Campers paid just $185 for the week, and BookPeople offered five needy students full scholarships.

“The price works out to about $4 per hour for childcare, which I think is quite a bargain,” Bradfield said. He joked that if the camp were a success, there may be opportunities to franchise the concept. “But let’s see how it goes first this year. Steve [Bercu—owner of BookPeople] insisted that this [event would have to] sell out before we make any future plans, and it has.”

Tiger Unleashed: Review of Tiger Force by Michael Sallah

From the San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 2006

Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War
By Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss

LITTLE, BROWN; 403 PAGES; $25.95

During the summer of 1967, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Gerald Morse radioed soldiers operating under his command in the central highlands of Vietnam and barked, "You're the 327th infantry. We want 327 kills." It was an unforgivable statement that would eventually lead to one of the most appalling killing sprees of the Vietnam War and the unwarranted deaths of hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children.

The unit Morse was addressing, his "Tiger Force," was a group of 45 gung-ho soldiers that made up the reconnaissance platoon attached to the 327th Infantry, a battalion of 900 infantrymen that was just one of three in the 101st Airborne. The Tigers were the most bloodthirsty lot of them all.

Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss' unsettling "Tiger Force" explains how this motley group of young men from the far corners of the United States became unhinged murderers and why their war crimes went unreported for nearly four decades.

Sallah and Weiss, reporters for the Blade newspaper of Toledo, Ohio, were tipped to the story by a fellow reporter at their newspaper who was bequeathed boxes of secret documents from Henry Tufts, a former head of the Army's Criminal Investigations Command (known as CID), after his death in July 2002.

Their four-part series for the newspaper, outlining the heretofore unknown story, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. This book offers an even more exhaustive account of Tiger Force's killing rampage and the subsequent efforts by a series of Army investigators to hold the soldiers accountable for their actions.

Sallah and Weiss re-create the events, relying on interviews with 43 Tiger Force veterans. The reporters also went to Vietnam and tracked down now-elderly Vietnamese witnesses and descendants of the victims. Central to their account is the story of Pvt. Sam Ybarra, an American Indian who together with his childhood friend, Kenneth "Boots" Green, joined the Tigers. Initially, the two fought together in the fertile highlands that were one of the principal sources of rice for the North Vietnamese Army. The Army deemed it a strategic necessity for the United States to clear the area of farmers, many of them Buddhists with spiritual ties to the land. Some farmers agreed to be flown to relocation camps, which Ybarra compares to his fellow Indians being relocated. When some of the farmers refuse to leave, the area is deemed a "free-fire zone" -- a confusing designation that still stipulated that soldiers must request permission before shooting. That eventually leads to much unnecessary bloodshed. Typical of these stories is that of an unarmed North Vietnamese soldier taken prisoner whom Ybarra nonchalantly executes by cutting his throat.

The Tigers, forced to remain in the field far longer than others, grow frustrated. Ybarra is among the first Tigers taking trophies, slicing the ears off slain Vietnamese and fashioning them into necklaces. Others collect scalps or teeth. Then, after Green is shot in the head by a sniper, Ybarra snaps. In the most disturbing episode of the book (or frankly almost any book describing American soldiers at war), on the day the Tigers achieved their "magic number" of 327 kills, on Nov. 19, 1967, Ybarra beheads a crying baby.

Unlike numerous filmmakers, from Francis Ford Coppola to Oliver Stone to Stanley Kubrick, who have inadvertently sensationalized some of the same material, the authors do an outstanding job here of maintaining sober detachment as they depict increasingly brutal scenes of amorality. Occasionally, the authors try to rationalize what the soldiers were doing, at one point remarking that the soldiers' frustration, fury and cruelty were the consequence of battle fatigue. "The Tigers were in a rage mode and were shutting down," they write. "When this happens, the soldier undergoes a unique set of physiological changes that few people understand outside combat. The midbrain -- that part of the brain responsible for breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure -- takes over for the forebrain, the part that processes information. The survival instinct takes over." A deeper examination of why the Tigers behaved so terribly would have been welcome, though as reporters this is not the authors' primary responsibility, which is to break news and get the facts down. The second half of the book begins when CID Army officer Gus Asprey, a Vietnam vet born in Austria to a Nazi father, is handed a manila envelope, case "No. 221, the Coy Allegation." Within, a sergeant named Gary Coy describes a soldier named "Sam" severing the head of a baby while fighting in Vietnam. Here the book takes on the tenor of a first-rate legal thriller.

Asprey's investigation would, over the course of a harrowing three years, slowly uncover the Tigers' wrongdoings, all neatly summarized in a 55-page report. The Army was determined to bury the case. It was deemed too similar to the My Lai massacre and too close to Nixon's resignation to warrant pursuing. Within the month, Asprey was exiled to an office in Seoul, South Korea. It took until Tufts' death for the files and the story of Tiger Force to come out in the open.

Sallah and Weiss have done the American public a service by piecing together this story and managing to offer compassion to soldiers who thus far have been left hanging to bear total responsibility for the events. In an era when some pundits excoriate the press for irrelevance and bias, and budget-cutting publishers curtail time-consuming investigative reporting, this is one shining example of how journalism can fulfill its most noble aims: informing, and consequently, empowering the public.

What we -- and our government -- decide to do with that new knowledge is the next question that must be answered.

Edward Nawotka covers the South for Publishers Weekly. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Review: Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan

Astronaut's challenges aren't just orbital

Review of Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan from the San Francisco Chronicle

KNOPF; 397 PAGES; $24.95
The space shuttle blasts off on a column of fire equivalent in force to an erupting volcano. The ride into orbit 240 miles above the Earth takes a mere eight minutes. Despite its brevity, the shuttle trip remains perhaps the most extraordinary journey a human can make.

However, familiarity and indifference have stripped space flight of much of its wonder and romance. The "heraldry of old-time space flight" has vanished," writes Stephen Harrigan in his dazzling new novel, "Challenger Park." What we remember most vividly are the disasters, such as the Challenger shuttle exploding 73 seconds after liftoff in 1986 and the Columbia breaking up on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003. Lucy Kincheloe, the astronaut at the heart of Harrigan's book, is aware of her diminished status. She wryly remarks, "It seemed to her that space travel in her time had lost more in vision than it had gained in viability -- the original quest had been forsaken or forgotten, and that she and the other shuttle astronauts were mostly in the service of keeping the practicality of space alive until a bold new direction could be charted." There's no indication of what she would have thought of President Bush's January 2004 announcement about funding a return mission to the moon and a trip to Mars.

Harrigan has been a longtime contributor to Texas Monthly and is the author of six previous books, including the best-selling novel "The Gates of the Alamo." He skillfully weaves a surfeit of detail about the contemporary astronaut's lot in life into a compelling and moving narrative that makes for one of the most extraordinary novels of the year.

Harrigan's novel begins as Kincheloe's husband, Brian, returns to Earth after making his second serious mistake while in orbit. As his career begins to freefall, hers ascends, and she's assigned her first mission. Now she must endure marathon days of training while juggling an increasingly bitter husband and her two children, a 7-year-old boy suffering from acute asthma and a 3-year-old daughter. Soon, she finds herself attracted to Walt, a recent widower and the NASA staffer in charge of her training.

The milieu is Clear Lake, Texas, the modest company town serving NASA's Johnson Space Center, 20 miles south of Houston. It's the kind of characterless, strip-mall-centric exurb endemic to Texas, though one distinguished by a giant fiberglass astronaut atop the local McDonald's. Unlike the macho, testosterone-fueled lives of male shuttle astronauts described in other books, such as Mike Mullane's recent memoir "Riding Rockets," Lucy's life most often resembles that of a soccer mom: driving the minivan to and from the local elementary school (this one with a hallway lined with photos of "Astronaut Moms and Dads"), stopping by Starbucks and scheduling babysitters. Walt's life is even more mundane, the highlight being a bit of banter with the waitress at Luby's Cafeteria, a cheap restaurant chain that caters to retirees and families, and watching DVDs with his childhood friend, a Catholic priest losing his faith.

The first half of "Challenger Park" revolves around NASA. Harrigan takes us into the cockpit of the shuttle simulator, with its intimidating array of 2,000 switches, and into the pool (and into the murky waters of adultery), where Lucy mimics the movements required for her forthcoming space walk, in which she will be encased in a spacesuit "as bulky and unmaneuverable as a parade float." Harrigan describes the "suffocating dread" before liftoff, and, once they're in space, the surprised mosquito that had boarded the shuttle before the hatches were closed "turning frenzied loops in front of [Lucy's] visor, doing its bewildered best to fly in weightlessness" once they reach space.

There, an unfortunate chain of events will put Lucy's life at risk.

Throughout "Challenger Park," Harrigan questions the roles of ambition, duty, fealty and self-sacrifice in our lives. But always at the heart of this novel is the mystery of love and the relationship that exists between husband and wife, parent and child, God and humanity, man and his dreams, and, quite literally, the Earth and the heavens.

Given that, it's not surprising that unlike a great many writers who depict adults as perpetual adolescents, forever striving for a more prestigious job or a beautiful lover, Harrigan gives his characters real problems that demand maturity, as well as superhuman self-control and sober professionalism. That kind of respect for his characters translates into respect for the reader.

Harrigan may not yet be well known outside of his home state, but this book -- as scintillating and brilliant as the ocean of stars in a clear night sky -- easily makes him candidate for the best writer living in Texas (Larry McMurtry now lives most of the year in New Mexico) and certainly puts him in the top tier of American novelists.