A Cautionary e-Book Tale

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/13/2009 7:44:00 AM

On December 23 ScrollMotion released the first batch of its widely anticipated e-book apps for the iPhone, starting with titles such as Twilight and Eragon. Within 24 hours the company had pulled them from the iTunes store due to security issues.

“A flaw in the encryption came to our attention almost immediately,” said Calvin Baker, director of ScrollMotion’s e-book program. “Since security and DRM are among our highest priorities, we thought it important to take immediate action.”

Unfortunately, that means ScrollMotion and its partner companies, Hachette Book Group and Random House among them, lost out on the post-Christmas rush of iPhone and iTunes owners fillling their new gizmos with data. The apps reappeared this past weekend. As of Monday afternoon, the 14 titles are again for sale.
Matt Shatz, v-p of digital at Random House, told PW that the delay had no bearing on the publisher's plans to release some 20 books that will soon be available through iTunes via ScrollMotion (search under “Iceberg Reader”). Maja Thomas, v-p, Hachette Digital Media, confirmed that Hachette had a similar number of titles forthcoming on ScrollMotion.

“It’s very, very unlikely that anything would have happened,” said Baker about the experience, “but we thought it better to be overly cautious.” Better, as they say, to be safe than sorry.

Follett Ends Trade Store Experiment

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/12/2009 12:13:00 PM

After nearly three years in business, Intellectual Property, a stand-alone trade bookstore operated by Follett in Austin, Texas, will close in March. The 6,000, sq-ft. bookstore opened in 2006 across from the campus of the University of Texas and exclusively sold trade books, academic titles, and sidelines, but no textbooks.

Initially, Follett discussed the possibility of using Intellectual Property and its branding as a prototype for future trade stores, though no subsequent locations were opened.

Follett was recruited by the University to open the store after a Barnes & Noble on the same street closed the previous year. The University paid Intellectual Property an annual subsidy of $75,000 for it to host events for UT professors and sell books on campus. The decision to close comes as the store’s lease comes up for renewal.“Unfortunately, foot traffic wasn’t what we expected it to be and we were never able to sell enough volume in that location,” said Follett spokesperson Elio DiStaola. “We struggled to make our sales goals.”

DiStaola admitted that the off-campus location may have been a factor – the University of Texas is some 40 acres in size. “As a company that manages 800 or so college stores, I can tell you there’s a big difference between being at the center of campus and not” He added, “There are so many place for people to buy books now and in this financial environment, it made no sense to keep this one open.”

The store currently employs eight people; manager, Chris Murray, is transferring across Austin to manage the Follett bookstore at Huston-Tillotson University.

Schaffner Press: Publishing as Improvisation

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/26/2009

Tim Schaffner's hobby, jazz drumming, put him on a roundabout path to independent publishing. “I got involved with Artt Frank. He played with Chet Baker and has been my teacher and mentor,” said Schaffner. “We put together a book for jazz drummers—Essentials for the Be Bop Drummer [by Artt Frank and Pete Swan, 2005]. That led to a memoir by a jazz musician in L.A. who had been a convict at Folsom Prison for 10 years—Hope to Die [by Verdi Woodward, 2006]—and that led to The Snow Angel [by Michael Graham, 2006]; that was my first hardcover.”

Publishing is in Schaffner's blood. The son of a literary agent—whose clients included Ray Bradbury, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Beard—Tim took over his father's agency when his father died in 1983 and ran it until 1995, first in New York City and then in Tucson, Ariz., where he moved in 1990. After closing the agency, Schaffner taught high school English and English as a second language, and drummed.

Initially, Schaffner, now 48, founded his eponymous press to revive out-of-print titles. “That had always been my dream,” Schaffner said. Among his first books were Sisters on the Bridge of Fire (2002) by Debra Denker, a Central Asia travelogue that was originally published in 1993 by Burning Gate Press; Barbara Guest's 1994 Doubleday biography Herself Defined: H.D. and Her World, which Schaffner republished in 2003; and Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness by Edward Butscher, a Seabury Press hardcover in 1976 and a Schaffner Press paperback in 2004.

Schaffner signed on with IPG in 2005 for distribution. This, along with keeping print runs low—typically a few thousand copies—has enabled him to continue publishing while slowly building a higher profile. There have even been some critical and sales successes: the Plath bio and The Lost Childhood by Yehuda Nir, a memoir of life in Warsaw during WWII that Schaffner reprinted in 2007, have gone into second printings. Father Michael's Lottery by Johan Steyn, a fictional account of doctors battling AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa that Schaffner bought from KwaZulu Natal University Press, was blurbed by Ian McEwan and Margaret Drabble, and was a Book Sense notable book in January 2008.

The year 2009 will be the biggest year yet for the press, which has a handful of new titles scheduled for publication, including the just-released Dancing at the River's Edge by Alida Brill and Michael D. Lockshin, a dual memoir by a doctor and his patient documenting a chronic illness, and Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, a hip-hop–inspired mystery by Marc Blatte due in March. The book, slated for a 3,000-copy first printing in hardcover, is picking up buzz; the author—a Grammy Award–nominated songwriter—is already scheduled to appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

The press's highest-profile book this year is likely to be One Ring Circus, an anthology of 25 years' of boxing journalism written by Katherine Dunn, author of the acclaimed novel Geek Love. The book, coming in April, is likely to attract some of Dunn's cultish fan base.

Serendipity again played a role in this acquisition: Dunn was introduced to Schaffner through a friend, the film critic D.K. Holm, who is working on a book about filmmaker Richard Linklater for Schaffner.

“I had the idea for a collection in the back of my mind, but hadn't put any work into it until I was introduced to Tim,” Dunn said. Her agent, Richard Pine at Inkwell Management, negotiated a modest contract for the book.

“He was understanding of the situation,” said Schaffner, “and in fact seemed quite pleased that someone had taken note of this side of her.”

So far, Dunn said, she is delighted to be working with a small press: “Tim is both editor and publisher, so there's no disconnect there like there can be with a larger house.” She added, “It's been educational and revealing to me about what's taken place in American publishing. Here's an example of an indie press taking up slack from the conglomerate publishers. Working with Tim has been wonderful.”

Other forthcoming Schaffner Press books include the aforementioned look at Richard Linklater, as well as bios of Ken Kesey and John D. MacDonald. And while the list is eclectic, it isn't quite as improvised as it appears: “If you look at my list, the underlying theme is social issues and the concerns of our society,” said Schaffner. “I'm interested in books that come from a person immersed in a world that don't necessarily tell a story in a chronological order, and also address something larger than the subject itself. I have several books under contract that reflect that.”

Great American Bargain Book Show Travels to Boston

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/23/2009 11:12:00 AM

This summer, the Great American Bargain Book Show (GABBS) will relocate from Atlanta to Boston, where it will be held in the Hynes Convention Center, August 21-22. It will be the first large-scale official remainder show in the Northeast.

The show originated in Nashville, Tenn. as the Onboard Remainder Christmas Show and lasted for five years before L.B. May and Associates, owners of the Spring Book Show, purchased the show in 1997, moved it to Atlanta, and gave it a new name. The show has traditionally positioned itself as an early opportunity for booksellers to stock up on remainders prior to the holidays and CIROBE.

“I think the timing is right for the move,” said co-owner Larry May in a statement. “Boston is the right city, too. We looked at a lot of different cities and several were suitable, but, for a number of reasons, Boston made the most sense. First, the Northeast region is full of independent bookstores and they are geographically concentrated in a much smaller area than those in the Southeast. Secondly, because of Boston’s proximity to metro New York, the show will be easily accessible to the big buyers and the internationals.”

The Boston-area is already home to two major remainder vendors: Strictly By-The-Book in Fall River, Mass. and World Publications, in Bridgewater, Mass.

John Strymish, buyer at the New England Mobil Book Fair in Newton Highlands, Mass., said although he believes he can negotiate a better deal by going direct to vendors than at shows, he was happy GABBS was traveling to Boston. “I would probably go to it because it was in town—depending on how much money I had and how scared I was to spend it.” He added, “Remainders are a huge part of our business and they are doing better right now than anything else in the store.”

Wiley Tests e-Texts in Texas

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/19/2009

When Kevin Hegarty, v-p and CFO of the University of Texas at Austin, went looking for a publisher to supply e-textbooks for classes at the school, he was surprised by lack of enthusiasm. “We visited with publishers and they all said they were willing to pioneer on this, but the only one that came to the table with a serious deal was Wiley,” Hegarty said. “Of course, now, since the deal was announced, Pearson is chomping at the bit. McGraw-Hill is chomping at the bit.”

When classes start January 20, about 1,300 students for six different classes will be given Wiley e-textbooks—what Hegarty called “essentially enhanced PDFs.” UT has licensed the books to test how functional e-textbooks are for faculty and students. “The real question in my mind is whether the tools of digitization have progressed far enough that faculty will find it useful,” said Hegarty. He added, “As you might guess, the professors in math, engineering and accounting were the most interested.” A team of learning psychologists has been hired to track the experiment and assess its result.

Hegarty said Texas is paying $25 to $45 per book and negotiated roughly a 50% discount on full price of the textbooks. (The school also has the right to print any textbook at a cost of 1.5 cents per page for students who request a physical copy.) “There was just too much work going into this for a 10% discount,” he said. While he appreciates the cost savings, he thinks they could and should be reduced by as much as 70%–80% of current levels. If the e-book test is embraced, said Hegarty, the university might wrap the cost of the books into the class itself.

One critic of the plan is Michael Granof, chairman of the University Co-op, the University of Texas's textbook store, and a professor of accounting at the UT graduate schools of business and public policy. “There's no reason for a university to get involved with licensing,” he said. “If a publisher has an e-book available, the instructor can put the link to the book on the course Web site and the student can click the link and buy the book from the Co-op, just as they would for any other book they bought.”

He predicted that if the university takes over responsibility for supplying textbooks in digital form to students, it will undermine the viability of the bookstore. “The Co-op is a not-for-profit—meaning 100% of our profits go to the university,” said Granof.

Based on the Co-op's firsthand experience selling e-books, Granof believes he can predict the outcome of UT's experiment: in the 2008 fall semester, the Co-op sold a total of 55 e-books, though they were available for 198 courses taken by a total of 15,000 students.“E-books are definitely coming, but when they are going to get here, I'm not sure,” said Granof.

Ryan D'Agostino's 'Rich Like Them': revealing, banal

An unconventional look at America's richest people pays a visit to Austin ritziest zip code

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Ryan D'Agostino's mother probably never told him that it was impolite to ask strangers about their money. A former writer for Money magazine and now an editor at Esquire, D'Agostino visited 20 of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the United States to canvas homeowners for their success stories. The resulting book, "Rich Like Them," is a grab bag of "how I made millions" and "save your pennies" stories from tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley's (94027 — the richest ZIP), country clubbers in Las Vegas (89109), Manhattanites (10021) and our own local moguls.

The Austin ZIP he visits is 78730 — which is roughly bounded by Capital of Texas Highway (Loop 360), RM 2222 and the Colorado River — and was, surprisingly, the only Texas entry on the list of the 100 wealthiest. (D'Agostino used 2005 stats. 78730 fell off the list in 2007.)

In all, D'Agostino visited 19 towns in 11 states, walked 60 miles, knocked on about 500 doors and conducted 50 interviews.

Sure, he could have simply phoned, like any other reporter. But, D'Agostino argues, "Walking a few miles through a town on a regular day tells you a lot about its rhythms, the cadence of its goings-on, its values, even its history. Knocking on strangers' doors reveals a town's fiber, its small glories, its rust and dents, its quiet spots."

Rust and dents? Not in these neighborhoods.

Anyone who has done any canvassing knows it has its challenges. Big houses tend to be on big lots, with plenty of security and homeowners who work hard and therefore often aren't home. (During my college years, while canvassing for a group that advocated turning weapons factories into manufacturers of domestic appliances, I spotted an enormous house with a BMW in the drive, meaning someone was home. It turned out to be the residence of the CEO of Raytheon. His wife gave me $5 and told me to "go to McDonalds and get a real job.") D'Agostino encounters grumpy housekeepers, a threatening dog in Westport, Conn. (06880), and daunting gates in Beverly Hills (90210, natch), which he circumvents by tailing a UPS man and slipping onto properties after him.

Those people that do talk, he reasons, are likely to be worthy of reading about, "Because close-minded, unadventurous, uninteresting people wouldn't invite a stranger into their homes and share their life stories with him." (No, but someone lonely might. Ask anyone who's ever delivered pizza.)

D'Agostino organizes the book thematically, into a half dozen sections, with titles ranging from "Open Your Eyes" and "Luck Doesn't Exist" to "The Economics of Obsession" and "The Myth of Risk." He even defines different character "types" — The Visionary, The "Lucky" One, The Worker Bee, The Connector and The Renegade — an echo of Malcolm Gladwell's triumvirate of The Salesman, The Connector and The Maven in "The Tipping Point." This suggests, at least to the casual browser, that D'Agostino possesses a serious business intelligence.

But compared with Gladwell, whose new book, "Outliers," also tries to distill a formula for success, D'Agostino sounds a bit too much like an overeager junior executive.

Maybe it's his willingness to trust in complete strangers, or the way he labels cars and houses with price tags or the simple fact that so much of the advice he echoes is clichéd, along the lines of "be driven by more than money," "work for yourself" and "learn from failure." It's all timeless, if a bit pedestrian. D'Agostino admits as much when he writes: "Not everyone who makes $1.6 million a year is Lao-tzu."

When D'Agostino talks to a fortysomething Dellionaire, a woman he dubs "The Dell Lady," who was one of the first 900 employees of the company, she credits being in the right place at the right time but doesn't call it a lucky break.

"Luck?" says The Dell Lady, "Luck is when you're at your desk until 4 a.m. every night, chasing deals and trying to come up with the next big thing, and a few years later you look up and your broker tells you you're worth a few million dollars."

Perhaps, but for every Dell there are tens of thousands of other companies staffed by dedicated workaholics that never turn their employees into early retirees.

Another Austinite, Mark Banta, who founded a successful medical services company in his 20s, tells D'Agostino that he worked 15- to 20-hour days to make himself a success.

Work hard. That's timeless, if a bit dull, as far as advice goes.

The Austinites depicted in the book come across as relatively modest about their success, something Banta confirms when he tells D'Agostino that the city has "a lot of seven-figure folks, and you also have a lot of eight-figure folks, too. You just wouldn't know it. They wear blue jeans and golf shirts." They are also welcoming. D'Agostino remarks in passing that Austin was where he had his highest degree of success getting good interviews — about 40 percent compared with an average of 10 percent elsewhere.

As one would expect of a book based on the premise of knocking on doors in expensive neighborhoods, much of the advice D'Agostino gets concerns success in the real estate market. Austinite Steve Wolford, whose occupation isn't disclosed but who seems to be some sort of real estate investor — it's a signal weakness of this book that D'Agostino doesn't always make such things clear — greets D'Agostino while barefoot and wearing "khaki shorts and a faded lavender T-shirt." He then invites D'Agostino into his 4,300-square-foot custom built house to take in the view from his back deck.

"This view — this is my insurance," Wolford says of the vista, which encompasses the downtown Austin skyline and Lake Austin and guarantees that the house will always be sellable.

"Insurance is a good thing, and Wolford was right: Someone would always want that view," writes D'Agostino in agreement — putting Wolford's statement in the same category of seemingly unimpeachable wisdom as statements from earlier in the book that people "will always want to live on the water" and "forever want to live in Westport, Connecticut."

Such pronouncements underscore the glaring, fatal flaw in "Rich Like Them": A fancy house is no barometer of wealth. Since the recent mortgage meltdown, it's even among the most suspicious assets: "jumbo" and "Alt-A" mortgages blew a lot of hot air into the housing bubble and look to be among the largest categories of defaults in 2009. People who claim to have made their money in real estate cannot necessarily be trusted.

Even so, there are a number of heartening cases in the book that illustrate how diligence, intuition and, yes, a bit of luck can pay off handsomely. As it turns out, D'Agostino's "general philosophy of success—oversimplified," arrived at after so many interviews, boils down to little more than common sense: "never slack[ing] off and periodically socking away untold piles of cash into your bank account."

Tenacity + compound interest = wealth. Now that's advice you can bank on

German Book Office's 10th Anniversary

December was a busy month for the German Book Office in New York.

First, the organization celebrated its 10th anniversary with a lunch on December 5—unfortunately timed for Black Wednesday; guest of honor Random House CEO Markus Dohle sent his regrets. Eleven days later, it hosted its second “buzz panel” to promote new German-language titles to potential editors. The biannual event, which was inaugurated in May, drew 40 people to listen as translators and scouts pitched books at Deutsches Haus on the New York University campus. Finally, the GBO began serving as the official, rather than de facto, New York office for the Frankfurt Book Fair. Hannah Johnson is the new liaison assisting U.S. publishers with their arrangements for the annual fair.

The GBO, which is a public/private partnership supported by the German Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut and the Frankfurt Book Fair, has been “instrumental in bringing hundreds of book titles to the attention of American publishers,” said Riky Stock, GBO New York's director since 2002. A recent example of a book published with the help of the GBO, Stock noted, is Fred Wander's novel The Seventh Well, released by W.W. Norton. Stock emphasized that the GBO does not sell rights, but assists with logistics and bringing attention to German authors who haven't hit the bestsellers list. “A popular writer like Cornelia Funke might not need our help, but there are plenty more who do,” Stock said. Over a calendar year, the GBO promotes as many as 40 fiction titles, 40 children's books and 80 nonfiction titles, which are divided into spring and fall lists and published as catalogues.

Looking forward, Stock said that GBO's attention is turning increasingly toward working with university presses, which have been especially receptive to publishing German nonfiction, and she cited recent sales to Stanford and Princeton University presses; Stanford has signed Violence as Worship by Hans G. Kippenberg, while Princeton has acquired Trust in Violence by Jan Philipp Reemtsma. In 2009 the GBO's 10th annual “editor's trip,” which takes a group of overseas editors to visit German publishers and editors, will focus on nonfiction books.

“People always say that Americans aren't interested in translated literature or books from foreign countries,” said Stock. “Our experience at the German Book Office has proven that not to be true. We wouldn't be here after 10 years if they weren't.”

Year in Review 2008: Literature -- from Texas

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

The year 2008 should erase any lingering doubt about Texas' importance on the literary landscape. Texas writers hit best-seller lists, took home national awards and sparked international controversies.

On the business side, one of the largest new independent bookstores in the country opened for business in Plano.

And elsewhere, it was a good year for vampires – and a bad one to be an American looking for a Nobel Prize.

TOP 10 OF 2008

1 Texans win National Book Awards: The swells in New York City might have been shocked when two of the four National Book Awards went to Texans this past November – but we weren't. (After all, Texans have also won a trio of Pulitzer Prizes for books over the last three years). Thank you, Mark Doty, University of Houston professor and winner of the poetry prize for his collection, Fire to Fire, and Annette Gordon-Reed, the Livingston-born author who won in the nonfiction category for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. You did our state proud.
Also Online

2 Legacy Books opens: Sleek, modern and, at 23,000 square feet, huge by independent bookstore standards, Legacy Books opened just in time for the economy to start crumbling. Still, you have to see the new store in Plano for yourself: It boasts an 1,800-square-foot kids section, a kitchen for cooking demos, a cafe that offers beer and wine – and 110,000 books. North Texans now have another excuse to keep their spending local.

3 Stephenie Meyer bewitches: If you think 110,000 books sounds like a lot, it's nothing compared with the 7 million copies sold of Ms. Meyer's Twilight saga, about teenage Bella and her vampire boyfriend, Edward. It was a big year for the author, who turned 35 on Christmas Eve: She published her first adult novel, The Host, in May; the final Twilight volume, Breaking Dawn, in August; and saw the film version of Twilight land in theaters in December. A May event in Frisco attracted more than 1,000 fans.

4 Cormac McCarthy archives purchased by Texas State: Though he now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Cormac McCarthy allowed his literary archive to be purchased by the Southwest Writers Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos. There, it will reside in perpetuity alongside the works of other notable Texans such as Willie Nelson. University President Denise Trauth called Mr. McCarthy's papers "the crown jewels of our literary treasury."

5 The Jewel of Medina controversy: Down the road in Austin, the University of Texas made headlines after Denise Spellberg, a UT professor of Islamic history, warned the publisher Random House that a novel it was about to publish might incite a violent reaction from Muslims. That book, The Jewel of Medina by one-time Texan Sherry Jones, fictionalized the life of a bride of the prophet Muhammad, portraying her in sexual situations. A witch hunt ensued, with Salman Rushdie and others accusing Ms. Spellberg and Random House of censorship. The book was eventually published by Beaufort Books, an indie press, and received mostly indifferent reviews.

6 Kathleen Kent's debut: Speaking of witch hunts, Dallas novelist Kathleen Kent used the Salem witch trials as the basis for her first novel, The Heretic's Daughter. The book, which is based on the life of Ms. Kent's distant relative Martha Carrier, one of the first women tried and hanged as a witch in Salem, was one of the most buzzed about books of the year and hit the New York Times extended hardcover fiction best-seller list.

7 Texas-size best-sellers: Dallas native Alice Schroeder's The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, an 838-page bio of the investment tycoon, received an $8 million advance from its publisher Bantam, one it looks likely to earn out. Since it was published in September it has consistently stayed in the top 10 on best-seller lists. And on the fiction side of the list, former Austinite David Wroblewski's 576-page novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was already being heralded before Oprah Winfrey picked it as the 62nd selection for her Book Club in September.

8 Deceased authors win accolades: Two of the most talked about books of 2008 came from authors who didn't live long enough to relish their publishing success: Roberto Bolano's novel 2666, which is based in part on the story of the hundreds of young women murdered in Ciudad Juarez, sits atop many book critics' top 10 lists, despite his having died in 2003. Mary Ann Shaffer died in February, just six months shy of her debut novel about World War II, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, becoming a bookseller and book club favorite.

9 Nobel committee snubs American writers: It has been 15 years since an American, Toni Morrison, won a Nobel Prize for Literature, and it was clear this wasn't going to be our year either. Weeks before the Nobel was announced, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, said American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," adding "Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States." Unsurprisingly, the prize went to a European: Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Clezio.

10 Writer as president: Barack Obama is a great communicator. He's an especially good writer, having honed his skills as editor of Harvard Law Review. His two books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope, were instrumental in his election to the presidency. It was through books – not television, not the Internet – that Mr. Obama introduced himself to millions of Americans, making him a literary story, not just a political one.

Book Review: 'A Great Idea at the Time' by Alex Beam

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, December 21, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.


From 1952 until the mid-1970s, some 1 million households bought sets of Britannica Great Books of the Western World, either through mail order or pushy door-to-door salesmen, "Britannica hucksters" promising "better living through reading."

The books, which cost hundreds of dollars, comprised 95 titles, starting with Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey and ending with Freud. They represented 443 works by 74 authors totaling 32,000 pages of 9-point, double-column type.

Ranging from household names (Aristotle, Plato, Dante and Chaucer) to those known only to specialists (William Harvey and Christian Huygens), the books still decorate many a living room (both my parents and in-laws still have sets), where they sit unloved and unread in their homely brown bindings with a candy colored stripe on the spine coordinated to an academic discipline. And for a time during that same period, reading the classics became almost faddish.

According to Alex Beam's breezy new history of the Great Books, A Great Idea at the Time, we have a pair of ambitious academics to thank for igniting so many autodidactic aspirations: Robert Hutchins, who became dean of Yale Law School at age 29, and Mortimer Adler, an assistant professor at Columbia University at age 26. Both ended up at the University of Chicago, Hutchins as president, where they helped install a curriculum based entirely on the Great Books. The experiment lasted just four years but persisted far longer in the form of the core curriculum.

Acolytes went on to establish a similar curriculum at St. John's College, which maintains campuses in Santa Fe and Annapolis, and where all four years continue to be spent committed to the Great Books.

(Adler had less luck selling the Great Books in Dallas, though. In 1952, he met with H.L. Hunt in hopes of persuading the legendary oilman to buy multiple copies of a special Founders Edition of the books at $500. Hunt balked at the offer. Twice. His reasoning: The set included Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto.)

Mr. Beam, a columnist at the Boston Globe, makes it clear early on just how unfashionable reading the Great Books is in this era of multicultural liberal education. He mocks the practice as middlebrow and marvels at what rubes Adler and Hutchins were for believing so earnestly in the promise of books to edify the masses.

Maybe he's just spent too much time in Beantown with all those professors, but Mr. Beam shows little sympathy for anyone involved in academics or with academic ambitions, period, and even sneers at those who unwittingly bought Adler's and Hutchins' pitch.

While I tend to agree with Mr. Beam that liberal arts education is oversold, his frequently flippant tone mars this otherwise fascinating book. If Mr. Beam should have learned any lesson from his subjects, it's that few people appreciate being lectured to by a know-it-all.


Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

A Great Idea

at the Time

The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife

of the Great Books

Alex Beam

(PublicAffairs, $24.95)

New iPhone E-book Apps from ScrollMotion

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 12/23/2008 7:31:00 AM

ScrollMotion, a two year old iPhone application development company, has launched Iceberg, an e-book reader for the iPhone with titles from six publishers: Random House, Hachette, Penguin, Counterpoint, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Simon & Schuster.

“What makes the software different,” said ScrollMotion’s chief literary officer Calvin Baker, “is that each book is a self-contained app. You download the book, not a piece of software.” Iceberg mimics the natural reading experience, allowing the user to “flip” the page with a swipe of the finger and uses the iPhone and iTouch’s interface to allow for scrolling, shrinking and expanding text, bookmarking and note taking.

Among the first titles available are Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, Extras by Scott Westerfeld, Brisingr by Christopher Paolini, Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen, and When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale. Matt Shatz, v-p of digital at Random House, told PW, “We really like the ScrollMotion application and the guys behind it.” He said the difference ScrollMotion brings to iPhone e-book reading is their treatment of DRM, which is tied to Apple’s iTunes store. “The way ScrollMotion does it, they offer us a way to sell DRM protected books directly on the phone, which the other main readers out there do not yet do at this time.”

Like the Kindle, books can be downloaded wirelessly, though unlike the Kindle which sells most titles for $9.99 or less, prices for the Iceberg-formatted books are the same or more as retail list -- $27.50 for the Paolini, $23.95 for the Kneale, $12.99 for the Westerfeld ($2 more than the paperback). As of today, two dozen titles are available for download. Baker said he “anticipates 200 titles should be available within weeks.”

The company arrives on the e-book scene with a publishing pedigree. Josh Koppell, founder and chief creative officer of ScrollMotion, published a memoir Good/Grief with HarperPerennial and earlier launched a digital music packaging company called TuneBooks, which was adopted by the iTunes music store to display digital liner notes, credits, biographies and other ephemera. Baker has written three novels, including Dominion, published by Grove in 2006.

Texans well-represented in National Book Awards competition

Texans well-represented in National Book Awards competition

12:00 AM CST on Wednesday, November 19, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Tonight's National Book Awards is the book world's equivalent of the Oscars.

The annual black-tie ceremony in New York City draws glitterati and literati alike. They come to ogle, to flirt and, at the popular cocktail party beforehand, to handicap the contenders for the four $10,000 prizes.

This year, 200 publishers submitted 1,258 books to compete for the awards honoring the year's best works of fiction, nonfiction, young people's literature and poetry. Of those, 20 finalists were selected, five in each category. What may surprise the bow-tied crowd is that four Texans grace the list.

Livingston-born Annette Gordon-Reed was shortlisted in the nonfiction category for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, a group biography of one family of slaves owned by Thomas Jefferson. It covers Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, who became a lover and bore him children, as well as the rest of her family.

Ms. Gordon-Reed, now a professor at New York Law School, believes the book is especially relevant because of this year's election.

"It's amazing to contemplate that the president I write about held black people as slaves, and we will now inaugurate a black president," she said.

Recalling her segregated childhood in Conroe, Ms. Gordon-Reed said: "I can remember as a little girl going to separate waiting rooms at the Sadler Clinic and sitting in the balcony at the Crighton movie theater. I integrated our school district, which wasn't the easiest thing for a 6-year-old, but it gave me an early sense that blacks were on a journey of sorts, from worse to better, I hoped and still hope."

Kathi Appelt was born in Fort Bragg, N.C., came to Texas as a child and graduated from Houston's Spring Branch Senior High School and Texas A&M in College Station, where she still lives. The author of some 30 illustrated books for children, such as Miss Lady Bird's Wildflowers and the beloved Bubba and Beau series, Ms. Appelt is a finalist in the young people's literature category for her first novel, The Underneath.

The book is the story of a lonely hound dog and a mother cat who come to depend on each other for survival in East Texas. She also weaves throughout the book a folk tale of a 10,000-year-old shape-shifting water moccasin – itself inspired by her interest in the Caddo Indians.

In addition to the vivid, rich characters, the landscape itself comes to life. "I just love the pine forest, the swamp – it's so mysterious," Ms. Appelt explained. "There's just the feeling of magicalness to it."

In a coincidence, poetry finalist Reginald Gibbons also graduated from Spring Branch Senior High. Now a professor of creative writing and classics at Northwestern University in Illinois, he is shortlisted for his 11th poetry collection, Creatures of a Day. Though he left the Long Star State at age 18, he acknowledged, "Texas has had a pervasive influence on my life – it is present in some way in each of my books." He also credits underappreciated Trinity-born writer William Goyen as "one of three or four writers who have been most important to me." (Mr. Gibbons serves as Goyen's literary executor.)

Mr. Gibbons was the first to publish the work of two other of this year's NBA-shortlisted authors, Chicago novelist Aleksander Hemon (fiction) and Patricia Smith (poetry), both while he was editor of the literary journal TriQuarterly from 1981 to 1997.

Houston, said Mr. Gibbons, is far more interesting to him today than when he was a child.

"There is so much more literary life there than when I was growing up in the '60s," he said, "a big part of which stems from the creative writing program at the University of Houston, which brings in many powerful writers."

Among those to whom Mr. Gibbons refers is Mark Doty, a New Yorker who spends half the year teaching at UH. Mr. Doty's eighth book of poetry, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems, is a finalist in the poetry category. The book covers some two decades and provides a kind of conversation between the younger self and older self. Mr. Doty couldn't be reached for comment.

Though the National Book Awards are a competition, all the finalists win in a way: Each gets a medal, and the attention alerts new readers who might not have noticed them before.

"It makes me feel that my work is very present at this moment in the U.S.," said Mr. Gibbons. "The country is so huge and so many thousands of books are published, that it's not often that happens."

That is reward in itself.

Two Indies for Big D

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 11/17/2008

Dallas may pride itself on being the brashest city in the country, but for nearly three years it has lacked a large-scale independent bookstore. Earlier this month that changed, with the opening of the 24,000-sq.-ft. Legacy Books.

The store is situated in the north Dallas suburb of Plano, in a purpose-built space that boasts an 1,800-sq.-ft. kids section, a third-floor art book gallery, a kitchen for cooking demos, a cafe that offers beer and wine, a wi-fi bar with computer stations (so people with laptops don't clog the cafe)—and 110,000 books. Managing partner Teri Tanner is a former national and regional sales director with Borders and Barnes & Noble, who said she's been “dreaming of this store for 25 years.”

Though the economy is foundering, Tanner believes this to be as good a time as any to open a bookstore. “There's never a right time for anything,” she said. “One thing that makes me really hopeful is when I look at this from the perspective of it being a local store. People are becoming increasingly aware of buying local—whether because it keeps tax revenue in the community or there's a lower environmental impact. I think we can make a difference to this community.”

Tanner has recruited experienced bookselling staff from the area, including romance buyer Kathy Baker, formerly of Waldenbooks in Hurst, Tex., and the 1999 RWA Bookseller of the Year, and Jeremy Ellis, one-time event and marketing manager at Austin's BookPeople, who now serves in the same capacity at Legacy. Former Borders publicity director Ann Binkley has consulted on publicity. In all, the store has 33 employees.

Legacy's event schedule started off auspiciously, featuring designer Isaac Mizrahi presenting his new book, How to Have Style, in his only Texas appearance. Forthcoming events feature a mix of national and local favorites, including Adam Jones, author of Rose Bowl Dreams: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Football, and Willie Nelson biographer Joe Nick Patoski.

Tanner said that the book selection and product mix will change in response to customer reaction. “We've already broken out our very substantial religion section into different faiths,” she noted.

So far, the early response has been positive, with local media taking a keen interest. One thing that Legacy can count on: the locals have money to spend. “According to USA Today, Plano is one of the wealthiest communities in America,” said Tanner. “So at least we know we got the demographics right.”

Some 25 miles south, in the Bishop Arts District in Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhood, Jorge Alvarez and Gilbert Barrola have launched a more modest enterprise: Dicho's, a 1,300-sq.-ft. bookstore. This is the second branch of Dicho's. The original was founded in Pomona, Calif., in 2000 and relocated to Gainesville, Tex. (pop. 28,000), in 2006 when the duo moved. Now Alvarez and Barrola commute the 70 miles back and forth between the stores in Dallas and Gainesville—where the outpost of Dicho's is somewhat larger, at 3,000 square feet.

“We realized that running two bookstores is just something we couldn't do all by ourselves,” said Alvarez. “So we've hired three employees.” Alvarez, who at one time managed a Barnes & Noble bookstore at California State University of Los Angeles, described Dicho's (which without the apostrophe means “aphorisms” in Spanish) as a “nontraditional bookstore.”

“We also sell furniture, lamps and home décor, and we display the books as a series of vignettes,” he said. “For example, right now we're featuring Too Many Toys by David Shannon—we have it grouped with a bunch of vintage toys and a fire engine children can play on.” Children's books represent a large portion of the book stock; there's also a small branch of Dallas's Cretia's bakery in the back.

The Oak Cliff neighborhood is not typical of Dallas and, according to Alvarez, is home to a large constituency of gays, lesbians, Latinos and Democrats—“all groups we hope to cater to,” he said, noting that at some point he hopes to add Spanish-language titles to the store's mix.

They aren't the only ones to have realized the neighborhood had potential: Oak Cliff is the former location of Black Images Book Bazaar, which closed in December 2006.

Economic Downturn Shutters Dallas-area Indie

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 11/7/2008 7:19:00 AM

David Norwood, owner of The Bookworm in Frisco, Tex. is closing his two-year old, 4,000 sq.-ft. bookstore immediately. “We were approaching the break even point, then the economy turned,” Norwood said. “The holiday season isn’t starting soon enough and we’re in too big of a hole.” Seven part-time employees will lose their jobs; Norwood plans to return to his former career in software development. “The return to the corporate world will be a welcome relief,” he said. “Running a bookstore is like having a double full-time job.”

On reflection, Norwood said has learned that he need not have opened such a large store. “We could have gotten by being a bit smaller, therefore paying less rent and utilities,” he said. “The bulk of the business was in relatively new releases, not bestsellers necessarily, and fans of particular authors who were content to let us special order for them. The amount of inventory we had here in here initially that didn’t sell just ended up sitting here tying up money. In the long run I thought maybe it would have been fine -- we had steady sales growth until the economic thing happened this year.”

The news of The Bookworm’s closing comes in the same week that Legacy Books, a 24,000 sq.-ft. indie, celebrates its grand opening in nearby Plano. “I’m encouraging all my customers to shop there,” said Norwood. “It’s opening in a rough economic climate and they are going to need all the help they can get.”

There’s a New Gang in Town: Austin’s Delacorte Dames and Dudes

By Edward Nawotka, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 11/6/2008

Delacorte’s Austin authors: (l. to r): Shana Burg, Margo Rabb, April Lurie, Varian Johnson and Jennifer Ziegler.

DDD—no, it’s not a heavy-duty new battery. It’s the acronym for an informal group of Austin, Tex., writers all published by Delacorte Press. “Delacorte Dames and Dudes was a little cumbersome to say,” says member Jennifer Ziegler (How Not to Be Popular, 2008), “so we shortened it.”

Other DDD members are April Lurie, author of The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine (2008), Margo Rabb, author of Cures for Heartbreak (2007), Shana Burg, author of A Thousand Never Evers (2008), and the latest member, Varian Johnson, whose novel Saving Maddie is forthcoming in 2010.

The writers realized they all had a publisher in common while attending meetings of the Austin Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. “That became a good excuse to get together,” says Ziegler.

Their first gathering took place June 10 at the Central Market grocery and has since moved to BookPeople, becoming a regular monthly fixture on the authors' calendars. Unlike other writing groups, the focus here is on professional development, rather than critiquing the work itself. “Most of the writers are already in a critique group,” says Ziegler, “This is more like a support group.”

The meetings have no formal agenda. “We talk about our very odd jobs.” says Ziegler. “It’s therapeutic, because other writers understand what you’re going through and can offer advice and encouragement.”

Ziegler says the group has shared information on speaking engagements—even recommending other members to interested parties when one was invited but not available. Later this month, DDD will carpool to San Antonio to attend the annual National Council of Teachers of English conference, and will even share hotel rooms.

Asked what would happen if someone in the group jumped to another publisher, Ziegler opted for plausible deniability: “Right now our main concern is figuring out how to initiate Varian,” she says.

Texas Book Festival's 13th is Still Lucky

Originally appeared in Publishers Weekly, November 4, 2008

By Edward Nawotka

“Thank God for global warming,” said Claiborne Smith, literary director of the Texas Book Festival. Perfect 80 degree weather greeted this past weekend’s festival goers, who visited the Texas capitol in Austin for the 13th annual gathering. Despite the lack of a marquee headliner like Bill Clinton (2005) or Barack Obama (2006), both the number of attendees – typically 40,000 over two the two days – and quantity of book sales – which are handled by Barnes & Noble and routinely top $100,000 -- “should be about the same,” reported Smith. Over 190 authors participated. 

Long-time Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda remarked: “On Saturday morning itself the Capitol Grounds looked like a carnival, and I had a standing room only crowd for my book Classics for Pleasure.” Rue Judd, publisher of Houston’s Bright Sky Press, said her sales were “better than ever before” and expected to sell all 12 cases of Mike Renfro’s Shine On a history of local favorite Shiner Beer. In the past Cinco Puntos Press has been a vocal critic of the Festival, accusing it having both high booth prices and exclusionary policies, but has since had a change of heart. “We brought five authors to the Festival,” said Cinco Puntos v-p John Byrd.

Unsurprisingly, considering the Festival’s proximity to the election, politics took center stage. Many of the largest venues were committed to authors discussing political themes, whether it was Jane Mayer outlining the shortcomings of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, Harvard professor John Stauffer describing echoes between our age and that of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, or Christopher Buckley offering updated inscriptions to go above the entrances of various government buildings (The Library of Congress: “Just Google it.” The Pentagon: “Make my day.”)

Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro, though not beloved by many Johnson loyalists, took home the Festival’s highest honor, a Bookend Award.

Smith noted that this year the Festival was forced to pay many authors travel expenses, that despite the fact that numerous publicists told Smith they were favoring festivals over book signings. “One thing that we as a festival can do is guarantee a good crowd for a writer,” said Smith. “which is not necessarily something a bookstore can do."

Book critic Michael Dirda champions reading for pleasure

11:22 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 29, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA/ Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com

The mid-20th-century Italian novelist Italo Calvino once asked: “What do reading and lovemaking have in common?” The answer is, of course, pleasure.

Longtime Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda concurs. The title of his latest book, Classics for Pleasure, says it all. It is his fifth collection of essays about books and reading, after all.

“I wanted to break open the canon in ways that surprise people, by including books like Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost stories or the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer,” Mr. Dirda says by phone from his home near Washington, D.C.

Mr. Dirda will be sharing his inclusive view of literature, and his gift for celebrating the pleasure of reading, with thousands of Texans at this weekend’s 13th annual Texas Book Festival taking place at the State Capitol in Austin.

He’s no stranger to such scenes, having been a regular presenter at the National Book Festival, which was co-founded by first lady Laura Bush in 2001 and is modeled on the Texas Book Festival, which the first lady also co-founded.

Mr. Dirda sees the rise in the number of book festivals as a positive trend in a culture said to be increasingly disinterested in books and reading.

“The country has a lot more readers than we realize,” says Mr. Dirda. “When I’ve gone to festivals, I’ve seen people from all walks of life, ages and backgrounds. There does seem to be a real enthusiasm for books that we sometimes forget about. What’s more, there often is a little something for everybody at such things, so it’s a great day out.”

Mr. Dirda’s own passion for books is infectious. The Pulitzer-winning critic’s latest book (Harcourt, $25) offers summaries of 90 titles, ranging from the accepted ancients, such as Plutarch and Ovid, to contemporaries Eudora Welty and André Malraux, as well as writers whose works may not be everybody’s idea of classics, such as H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick and cartoonist Edward Gorey.

The most important thing about the book, says Mr. Dirda, “is that people realize this is not academic literary criticism — it’s a book of enthusiasms, books that are important to me and that I want to introduce to others.”

The book is so effective that, as one reads it, it’s all but impossible not to pitch it aside and rush out to purchase whatever title Mr. Dirda has just finished describing, be it Xavier de Maistre’s anti-travel book A Journey Around My Room (written in 1795 after he was confined to his quarters for 42 days as punishment for dueling) or the Icelandic Sagas or the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. That Mr. Dirda should be so high on medieval and Romantic literature, an area the majority of us will find obscure, is no surprise: It’s the field in which he holds a doctorate.

His eclectic interests might meet their match at the Austin event, which this year includes gay-themed young adult fiction, T. Boone Pickens in conversation with Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, a panel covering “Water Issues in Texas,” and a talk with Pulpwood Queen Kathy Patrick, the larger-than-life personality who runs Beauty and the Book, a bookstore-cum-hair salon in Jefferson, Texas.

Though it’s an election year, which means publishers have largely decided to hold back their biggest name authors until the media might pay attention again, there are still a number of not-to-be-missed authors on the roster, such as LBJ biographer Robert Caro, who is being honored with a Bookend Award from the organizers, and novelist Richard Price, who will be interviewed by Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch.

The only disappointment to Mr. Dirda is the absence, for the first time in many years, of Kinky Friedman.

“He’s someone I’m fond of and who I actually think of as being a Texas writer,” says Mr. Dirda. “Otherwise, I don’t think of a writer, Larry McMurtry for example, in that way. I tend to think more about the quality of their vision or their process.”

As for Mr. Dirda, he’s looking forward to catching up with fellow authors whom he admires, including Francine Prose, Christopher Buckley and Roy Blount Jr.

“Otherwise, I’m just the same as everyone,” he says. “I’m looking for discoveries. And hopefully, as is the case with my book, rediscoveries.”

Houston freelance writer Edward Nawotka, who served as programming and communications manager of the Texas Book Festival in 2004, will interview Mr. Dirda onstage at this year’s festival.

Fairgoers Raise $12,500 for Agent’s Memorial Fund

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/27/2008 12:45:00 PM

At a charity raffle at the Frankfurt Book Fair, dozens of friends and colleagues of the late Gernert Company literary agent Tracy Walker Howell raised $12,500 to benefit the Tracy Walker Howell Memorial Fund. The money raised will go toward endowing a scholarship at Howell's alma mater, Middlebury College, for a student to study for a year at the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School in Italy.

Howell, who served as a literary agent and director of foreign rights for The Gernert Company, died suddenly on February 8, 2006, age 42. She was widely known, in part, because of her role as manager of world publishing rights for John Grisham. Organizers of the raffle included Cecile Barendsma and Cullen Stanley, both of Janklow & Nesbit, and Hal Fessenden, v-p of subsidiary rights, Penguin USA. Nancy Wiese, v-p director of subsidiary rights at Grand Central, served as MC of the event. Among the prizes were several weeks in vacation homes spread across the globe, as well as jewelry, and a custom drawing by Matteo Pericolli. Among the winners were scout Virginia Marx, who won a week in the Liguria vacation house donated by Ullstein Heyne publisher Ulrich Genzler, and Maria B. Campbell, who took home a new Sony e-reader. A full list of prizes and winners, as well as further information about the Tracy Walker Howell Memorial Fund is online.

No One to Believe In: Unreliable narratives of the war on terror.

Originally appeared in The Texas Observer

Ed Nawotka | October 17, 2008 | Books & the Culture

Austin literary agent James D. Hornfischer has represented a variety of military authors and written a pair of bestselling World War II naval histories, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors and Ship of Ghosts. His experience tells him that books about war are published in four distinct phases.

The first phase is composed of books by journalists and other professionals sent to cover the war for newspapers or magazines. These are literally the first drafts of history.

The second wave often comes from officers and administrators—educated elites—who have celebrity cachet to cash in or are motivated to justify decisions questioned by first-wave journalists.

The third and most enduring phase chronicles major events from the viewpoint of small groups of soldiers or sailors. These books often deal with war’s aftermath and pain, and are written by the grunts, the ground-pounders, the trigger-pullers.

The fourth and final phase, Hornfischer says, is written by historians, who generally wait until military documents are declassified and filed with the National Archives before weighing in.

Why do we need so many versions of the same story?

Because truth in war, whether physical or moral, is contested terrain.

Apply Hornfischer’s theory to the so-called war on terror and we’re already well into phase three, on the cusp of phase four, and showing signs of the emergence of a new phase entirely.

Phase one included Evan Wright’s Generation Kill. Published in 2004, it chronicled the Rolling Stone embed’s time with a Marine reconnaissance unit as it made its way across Iraq during the initial invasion.

Phase two included apologias such as American Soldier by Gen. Tommy Franks and Ambassador L. Paul Bremer’s My Year in Iraq—books that tried to explain what had just gone wrong.

The transition to phase three started with combat narratives by Ivy League–educated officers, such as Andrew Exum’s This Man’s Army and Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away. Both men make much of their educations; Exum graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Fick from Dartmouth. Exum and Fick, only just removed from the start of the war, are less conflicted about their roles than Dallas resident Brandon Friedman, whose memoir, The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War (a book for which Hornfischer served as literary agent), describes how Friedman (another college-educated officer) had longed since childhood to fight but became demoralized after twice nearly dying in friendly-fire incidents.

It’s interesting to note that Fick is one of the soldiers featured in Wright’s Generation Kill, reinforcing the suggestion that later-phase war books often serve as correctives to earlier-phase titles.

One phase is effectively saying to the other: You cannot be relied upon to tell the whole truth.

Who, then, can be relied on to tell the truth?

Take, for example, Jessica Lynch, a West Virginia native who is on record saying she joined the Army to help pay for college. After her supply unit’s capture by Iraqis in March 2003 and her subsequent rescue, Lynch became a national hero. She appeared on the cover of People and struck a $1 million deal with the publisher Knopf for a book titled I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story.

Despite the title, the book was actually written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Rick Bragg, who took half the advance. It was only with such help that the book reached bookstores by Veterans Day in November 2003, less than eight months after Lynch’s rescue.

Among the book’s biggest revelations was the assertion that Lynch had been raped while a prisoner—a claim that Bragg inserted, despite Lynch’s claim that she couldn’t remember the three-hour period during which the rape supposedly occurred. The claim has been countered by the doctor who treated Lynch following her rescue in Iraq, and largely discredited since.

Was the rape fact, fiction, or conjecture?

Cynics called its inclusion propaganda, but just as well to call it a sign of the times. Whether it’s James Frey lying about a prison term or Colin Powell lying to the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction, we live in an era of unreliable narrators.

Think of the phrase “the war on terror.” What does that mean, exactly?

Or the word “interrogation” with regard to “enemy combatants.” Isn’t that just a smokescreen for torturing prisoners of war?

Think of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Outrage may be a better word for it.

Various books have been written about Abu Ghraib, starting with Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the story in The New Yorker in May 2004.

Thousands of news stories were filed. The soldiers involved were publicly pilloried, and the name and face of Lynndie England—the young Army private photographed holding a naked prisoner’s leash—became synonymous with American shame. England went to jail, as did some of her cohorts. Yes, there have been trials, but no one of any real authority has ever taken responsibility. No one above the rank of sergeant ever served time, and no one ever faced charges for war crimes, torture, or violations of the Geneva Conventions.

And like all tragedies of American life, including 9/11, Abu Ghraib is already fading away into memory.

Until last year, few authors had any kind of access to the soldiers who perpetrated the crimes at Abu Ghraib.

But in 2007, Tara McKelvey published Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War. That book, according to Hornfischer’s theory, effectively started the fourth wave of books on the war on terror.

McKelvey doggedly tracked military documents and computer files supporting claims of abuse, such as one guard’s “wish list” of “alternative interrogation techniques,” including “phone book strikes” and “low-voltage electrocution.” Even more disturbing is McKelvey’s revelation that civilian contractors probably participated in the abuse, and one translator may have sodomized a male teenager.

Working from interviews with former detainees—many of whom express reluctance about sharing their stories—McKelvey served up a dozen case studies of abuse that went beyond what was shown in the infamous photographs. The dirty laundry list includes sophisticated forms of torture like stress positioning, “monstering” (deprivation of diet and sleep), and, McKelvey strongly suggests, rape and murder. The worst abuse, she reports, took place at makeshift short-term detention facilities such as gyms and trailers, where detainees were held for less than 14 days and then released without any record of their imprisonment.

She writes about videos of bored prison guards “Robotripping” (getting stoned on a mixture of Robitussin and Vivarin) and simulating sex with one another.

In addition, McKelvey tracked down many of the principals in the Abu Ghraib photos for interviews, and she was the first writer to interview England in person after the soldier’s trial and subsequent 36-month incarceration.

McKelvey’s book isn’t without flaws. She tries a bit too hard to ascribe overly simple sociological motives to the perpetrators, suggesting that the poverty-stricken home lives of some of the soldiers contributed the abuse.

For example, Lynndie England worked at a chicken-processing plant where animals were arguably abused (though, curiously, she quit in protest) and participated in amateur porn shoots before her tour of duty in Iraq—all of which, McKelvey asserts, not entirely convincingly, predisposed her to bad behavior at Abu Ghraib.

Unfortunately, with the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy, and the fact that the war is still being fought, it will be some years before a full picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib emerges. If and when one finally does, it is likely to have as many facets as a shattered mirror.

The latest example of the search for the truth of the Abu Ghraib story is Standard Operating Procedure, which takes two forms: a film by Errol Morris and a book written by Morris and Philip Gourevitch, each of which draws on the same source material: 200 hours of interviews with those who worked at Abu Ghraib, including five of the seven MPs indicted for abuse. Given the multiple lenses through which Morris and Gourevitch tell the soldiers’ stories, Standard Operating Procedure might be considered a phase-five book, a work that simultaneously synthesizes the narratives that came before it and casts doubt on their strict veracity.

The most important of these sources is Sabrina Harman, an aspiring forensic photographer who took many of the scandal’s most famous photos—Hooded Man, Leashed Man, the Naked Human Pyramid—including the most damning evidence of all: the photo of a dead Iraqi, killed by the C.I.A. during interrogation at the prison.

Harman appears in one notorious photo posing over the dead man, beaming a smile and offering a ridiculous “thumbs up” sign. (This photo was taken by reservist Charles Graner, the Svengali of the group and the man responsible for posing many of the photos, who fathered a child with Lynndie England and later married another MP from the group, Megan Ambuhl. Graner is notably absent from the film; he’s still serving a prison sentence for his role.)

Harman tries to explain why she looks so pleased in the picture: “I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hilla, and so whenever I would get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands. ... So any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs-up because it’s just—I just picked it up from the kids. It’s just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo, you want to smile. It’s just, I guess, something I did.”

This sounds like a self-serving justification for a gesture that’s callous at best, evil at worst. As a viewer and reader, do we believe that she’s telling her truth, or is she just concocting an excuse? Morris uses a camera device called the Interrotron to conduct his interviews. The person being interviewed looks directly into the lens and so appears to be making eye contact with the viewer in what looks like a direct, human connection.

Reading Harman’s words on the page is one thing, but watching her say them in the film makes us want to believe her, to forgive her even. But can we?

“Every narrator is unreliable,” Morris told the Observer this year. “I’m a big fan of Vladimir Nabokov; he’s the king of the unreliable narrator. My favorite book by him is Pale Fire and the character of [Charles] Kinbote. And just like Kinbote, we’re all self-deceived. When someone recounts the past, whether it’s Kinbote or Lynndie England or Sabrina Harman, they are re-enacting their past in words, they are trying to recover the various pieces from the bric-a-brac of memory. To think for a moment that it’s an absolute description is a mistake.”

The very existence of two different pieces of work—a film and a book—with the same name and deriving from the same sources suggests competing versions of the truth. The book is not a movie tie-in version of the film, nor vice versa. While both are drawn from the same interviews, their tones differ significantly, not least in the fact that Morris’ film, unlike the book, offers dramatic “re-enactments” of the events at Abu Ghraib.

For his part, Gourevitch suggests that some events are so complex and inherently confusing that they might ultimately be unfathomable.

“There is a constant temptation,” he writes in Standard Operating Procedure, “when rendering an account of history, to distort reality by making too much sense of it.”

It’s tempting to think he’s referring to Morris. At the very least, he’s acknowledging the dangers of placing too much faith in any single interpretation of history.

If Hornfischer’s four-phase hierarchy presumes truth—or at least understanding—is ultimately attainable, Standard Operating Procedure’s phase-five bifurcation shows significantly different narratives unspooling from the same recent past.

And why shouldn’t there be doubt, of our leaders, our generals, even our soldiers? The Bush administration has sown these seeds with its own language, in which a “mission accomplished” is the start of America’s longest war, and a weapon of mass destruction is nothing but an aluminum tube.

Documents like I Am a Soldier Too, Monstering, and Standard Operating Procedure, imperfect as they are, might be the closest we can come to the disorienting confusion of this war, which is itself so vaguely defined, yet so incontrovertibly real, and which has already claimed so many victims—not the least of which is the very idea of truth itself.

Detailed Warren Buffett bio reveals man behind fortune

By EDWARD NAWOTKA
Oct. 10, 2008, 11:19AM

THE SNOWBALL: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.
By Alice Schroeder.
Bantam, 960 pp. $35.

If you've looked at your 401(k) statement and started to fear that everyone in financial markets is either greedy, predatory or incompetent, do yourself a favor. Take $35 out of the mattress and buy a copy of Alice Schroeder's The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. At a time like this, it's a real comfort: Buffet is living proof there's at least one wholly rational person managing money.

The Oracle of Omaha is one of the rare money men as well known on Main Street as on Wall Street. Actually, he could probably pass you on Main Street and you wouldn't notice. Despite his $50 billion-plus fortune, Buffett has rejected the Robb Report trappings of the ultra-rich. He drives himself to work (in a Lincoln Town Car), eats at McDonalds, drinks Coke and still lives in a modest house he bought in 1958. Yet, depending on who's counting, he's either the richest man in the country or second-richest, trailing only Bill Gates (a good friend and, according to Schroeder, a surrogate son).

Certainly, this part of the reputation is well-known. But what of the man behind the money?

That is what biographer Schroeder sets out to reveal. What she delivers is the portrait of a middle-American Midas with enough anxiety about parents to rival Hamlet's. Her tendency to psychologize is the one notable flaw in what is otherwise an excellent and highly enjoyable look at the business titan.

A native Texan and graduate of the University of Texas, Schroeder befriended Buffett while working for Morgan Stanley, where she covered Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, as an analyst. Blessed by Buffett to write the book, she was given access to his files, friends, family and, often, himself, and has stuffed the book with anecdotes.

While readers may want to get to the icy deal-making of Buffett's adult years rather than linger with boy Warren as he sells 5-cent packs of gum, Schroeder makes clear these early experiences provided the foundation for his mature investment philosophy.

A key moment occurred in 1941 when Warren, age 11, stumbled upon the concept of compounding in a library book called One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000.

"Compounding married the present to the future. If a dollar today was going to be worth 10 some years from now, then in his mind the two were the same," writes Schroeder, suggesting he was mentally leveraging his investments even as a prepubescent.

A year later he partnered with sister Doris to buy his first stock: three shares of Cities Service Preferred, a favorite of his father's, who had started his own stockbroking business in the midst of the Depression. Buffett bought at $38.25 and sold at $40, netting a $5 profit.

Soon after, the stock rocketed to $202 a share. "Warren learned three lessons and would call this episode one of the most important of his life," Schroeder writes. "One lesson was not to overly fixate on what he had paid for a stock. The second was not to rush unthinkingly to grab a small profit."

The last lesson was that losing someone else's money would upset them and that he shouldn't manage their money until he was confident in what he was doing. Warren, we're told throughout the book, avoids confrontation and likes to be liked.

This stance, Schroeder suggests, goes back to his parents, who were "notable for their lack of warmth." His father had a "Quaker-like personality." A zealous Republican, he eventually served in Congress. His mother was prone to explosions where she would tell her children they were "worthless, ungrateful, and selfish; and should feel ashamed."

As a consequence, Schroeder says, he has spent much of his life seeking approval from surrogate mothers. That latter ranged from his two wives to the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham to his steady bridge partner Sharon Osberg (with whom he plays on the Internet many nights).

Personal issues aside, the core of the book chronicles how Buffett transformed Berkshire Hathaway from a virtually worthless textile business into (as of 2004) a company with 172,000 employees, $64 billion in revenues, profits of $8 billion a year and (in 2006) a valuation of more than $200 billion.

Schroeder's focus is sharpest from the years 1999 to 2004, when she offers a detailed account of his thinking and decisions, both wise, such as his canny avoidance of the dot-com bubble, to mistaken, such as his purchase of Dexter Shoe Co., which he calls the worst acquisition he ever made.

Since so much drama of business is cerebral, it helps that Schroeder can get into his head, which she does by interspersing Buffett's direct quotes, in italicized blocks, into the narrative. It's a surprisingly effective device, one that provides a kind of meta-textual commentary to the work, though it does leave the impression that Buffett is looking over Schroeder's shoulder the whole time.

Buffett isn't especially quippy, and Schroeder has to work hard to smelt aphoristic business advice from the ore of her subject's life. What she comes away with is folksy and somewhat bland: Follow your own "Inner Scorecard" and not the crowd, look for the "cigar butts," stocks discarded by others but with just enough tobacco for one more puff.

Then there is the rather strained metaphor that gives the book its title:

"The snowball just happens if you're in the right kind of snow, and that's what happened with me. I don't just mean compounding money either. It's in terms of understanding the world and what kind of friends you accumulate. You get to select over time, and you've got to be the kind of person that the snow wants to attach itself to. You've got to be your own wet snow, in effect. You'd better be picking up snow as you go along, because you're not going to be getting back up to the top of the hill again. That's the way life works."

(But don't snowballs melt easily, especially in the midst of a market meltdown like the one we're in now? Not when they are like Buffett's — his metaphorical snowball must be the size of a small moon.)

If you're looking for advice about the current financial crisis, you won't find it here: The book all but ends in 2004 with the death of his first wife Susie from cancer, with just 23 pages devoted to 2004 to the present.

Perhaps the best thing to do is consider his comment at the time of the Enron debacle: "Cash and courage in a crisis is priceless." Watching Buffett's recent market moves, which include a $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs, you'd have to say he sees opportunity when others are trying to flee.

If Schroeder's book proves anything, it's that Buffett is one money man who follows his own advice.

Ike Dealt Heavy Blow To Texas Booksellers

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/6/2008

When Hurricane Ike hit Galveston Island, Tex., a little after midnight September 13, Tim Thompson lost his livelihood. Midsummer Books, the 2,000-sq.-ft. bookstore Thompson had owned since 2004, was completely destroyed. “We had eight feet of water in the store,” Thompson said from his temporary home in Austin. “We left the day before and didn't have time to save anything other than the computer with the stock database.”

Thompson employed a manager and a part-timer, both of whom also evacuated. Though he estimates insurance should cover half of his losses, he will not reopen. “I agonized over the decision. But I was planning on moving the store next summer, anyway, and it's going to take the island months to get back to normal. Business would be terrible.”

He said he will move his family back to Galveston once it is habitable so his children can finish out their school year. After that, he doesn't yet know. As far as the store is concerned, he has had one inquiry about purchasing the name and goodwill, but isn't certain anything will come of it. “For now, Midsummer Books is history,” Thompson said. It was the island's only bookstore focused on new books. Earlier this summer, Hastings Entertainment closed an outlet on the island. Galveston Books, a used bookstore, remains, though it, too, was severely damaged.

Elsewhere in southern Texas, many bookstores were left without electricity, which disrupted business for a week or more. In Houston—where some people are still without electricity even three weeks after the storm—Brazos Bookstore was closed for 11 days and had water damage to a small section of the store. Manager Jane Moser canceled nine events, including one with A.J. Jacobs on September 11, the day before the storm. She estimates lost revenue to be as much as $50,000.

Down the street at Murder by the Book, manager McKenna Jordan and assistant manager David Thompson returned from their wedding in Scotland and Paris honeymoon to find water had seeped through the ceiling and soaked the carpet of the store. Power was out, and Thompson said they bought a generator, which allowed them to keep the store open, even though they had to choose between running the cash register or keeping the lights on. Two events had to be canceled—one with Margaret Cole (who, coincidentally, had her 2005 event at the store canceled because of Hurricane Rita) and another with Brad Meltzer. On generator power, the store still managed to host Don Winslow (who drew 30 people) and Austin writer Joe Domenici, who brought in 50. In all, the store's power outage lasted eight days. “We can't complain too much. We came off so much better than we could have,” Thompson said.

Further west in Houston, author David Ebershoff managed to make it to Blue Willow Bookshop on the day before Ike. “He was fantastic,” said owner Valerie Kohler. “Then we didn't have power for two days. Otherwise, things got back to normal relatively quickly.” The same went for Katy Budget Books. “We closed early the day of Ike and lost power for two days, canceling a pair of events,” manager Stacey Ward reported.

Of the more than a dozen chain booksellers in the region, all Barnes & Noble stores are open again. Borders closed some stores due to power outages. The last two to reopen were a Borders store in Houston (reopened September 25) and a Waldenbooks store in Baytown, Tex. (reopened September 26).