'Wonderful World' by Javier Calvo: Pulp fiction with a European twist

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, April 12, 2009

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

Spaniard Javier Calvo's first novel to be translated into English, Wonderful World, is a peculiar amalgam of crime caper, literary homage and Eurotrash sideshow.

It is December 2006, and the city of Barcelona is plastered with posters touting the arrival of the latest Stephen King novel, Wonderful World, "the story of a man that wakes up one day and discovers that everything around him has turned perfect ... His co-workers are friendly to him. His ex-wife, too ... .Wars end. Politicians turn smart."

Meanwhile, in the real world, antiques dealer Lucas Giraut is coping with the fallout from his father's death three months earlier. His affairs are as complicated as the cartonniers, antique desks filled with secret compartments, he collects.

Giraut's mother, Fanny, whose face has been rendered an immovable mask by a series of collagen injections and face-lifts, is challenging Giraut's mental competence in a bid for taking over the family's restoration business. He has enlisted a motley group to steal a quartet of Irish paintings his father had tried to acquire, landing him in jail. The thugs include: a gangster named Bocanegra (Black Mouth) who wears women's fur coats and runs a strip club called Dark Side of the Moon; a white Russian Rastafarian jewel thief; a thuggish giant who resembles the Thing from the Fantastic Four; and a sex addicted ex-cop.

All the while, he can only confide in his downstairs neighbor, a pre-pubescent girl named Valentina Parini, the self-proclaimed "Top European Expert on the work of Stephen King," who daydreams methods of creatively killing her schoolmates.

As Giraut journeys deeper into the underworld (and both Calvo's and the faux King novel progress), the book's strange mysteries begin to unravel. Why, for example, was Giraut's father so deathly afraid of Windows and why was he so obsessed with the band Pink Floyd? Whether this will matter to the reader depends entirely on how much you're willing to indulge Calvo's picturesque imagination. This is not a novel about deep emotions; rather, it is one intended to dazzle with its audacity. It is loaded with X-rated vice and entertains through exaggeration. (Think of a Pedro Almodóvar film.)

Despite the allusions to Stephen King, he isn't the model for the work. Calvo is taking his cues from American writers such as Jonathan Lethem – Calvo is married to his sister, who also translated this novel – and David Foster Wallace, whom Calvo has translated into Spanish. Fans of either of the aforementioned writers will best be able to appreciate this European riff on post-modern American pulp.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Wonderful World

Javier Calvo

(HarperCollins, $27.99)

A Good Time To Be Selling Used Books

by Jim Milliot with Ed Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/13/2009

Not all businesses do badly in a recession; one segment of the book market that appears to be holding up fairly well is used books. “People are looking for bargains,” said Kathy Doyle Thomas, executive v-p at the used bookstore chain Half-Price Books, “and Half-Price is a bargain hunter's paradise.” Brian Elliott, president of the online marketplace Alibris, said sales rose about 18% in 2008, slower than in previous years but still a solid gain in difficult times. Sales at Alibris slowed in September, but bounced back enough at the end of the year for holiday sales to increase 8%. Sales continued strong in January, slowed in February, but came back again in March, Elliott said. At Half-Price, sales in the July through February period were up 9% and the company is optimistic it will finish fiscal 2009 on an up note.

The recession has not only increased consumers' interest in looking for inexpensive items but also increased interest in selling old books to raise cash, which has bolstered used book dealers' inventory and lowered purchase prices. “We're paying less for our used books because we're seeing more of the same titles,” Thomas said. While the online marketplaces don't buy books, Hannes Blum, president of Abebooks, said many of the sellers who use its service have increased their inventory. Elliott noted that part of Alibris's growth has come from expanding its partnerships with retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Borders.

The higher inventory has helped slow what had been one of the industry's biggest concerns, sliding prices. “Prices have stabilized a bit,” Elliott said. “The enormous downward pressure on prices seems to have worked its way through the system.” Still, a key component of the success of the online marketplaces has been the tools they provide, which give sellers and buyers information on pricing trends. And not all parts of the online market have been immune to the economic downturn; high-end antiquarian and rare book sales have suffered from the same lack of discretionary income affecting other book segments. “Collectors have become more cost conscious,” Blum said. Elliott noted, however, that Alibris had strong gains in its rare and collectible segment after it revamped that section on its Web site. At Half-Price, cooking titles have been in strong demand, along with young adult fiction. “People underestimate that section,” Thomas said.

Half-Price just opened its 103rd store last month and plans to open two more outlets by Memorial Day. With so many great real estate opportunities available, Doyle said, the challenge now is to not overexpand. After a failed experiment with online sales in the late 1990s, Half-Price has been using Amazon to sell online and is beginning to use the other online marketplaces. Since its launch, Half-Price has had a strong environmentalist bent, and Thomas believes the chain is now benefiting from heightened interest in the environment. “The green movement has helped used books become a little more acceptable,” Thomas said, adding that Half-Price alone has “kept millions and millions of books out of landfills.”

Even though the used book market is still enjoying a growth spurt, no one is complacent. “Our job is to keep demand growing faster than supply,” Elliott said.

'It Will Come to Me' by Emily Fox Gordon: a witty tale of academia

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, March 29, 2009

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Edward Nawotka is a Houston freelance writer.

At 56, Ruth Blau is "unplaceable, and hence invisible." Author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels, good enough to be hailed by "low-pH adjectives," Ruth has not published since the birth of her son Isaac, some 20 years earlier. These days she's exclusively identified as the wife of Ben Blau, professor of philosophy at the fictional Lola Dees Institute in Spangler, Texas, "a faculty wife desperate to impress."

Ruth narrates much of Houstonian Emily Fox Gordon's debut novel, It Will Come to Me, a brisk, witty chronicle of three weeks in the life of the Blaus as they deal with a series of small dramas: the arrival of a young new writer-in- residence at Lola Dees, the installation of a new university president, the replacement of Ben's highly efficient departmental secretary, and the promise of a reconciliation with Isaac, who suffers from mental illness and is living as a homeless man.

It Will Come to Me begs to be read as a romàn a clef or, at least, a book heavily informed by Fox Gordon's autobiography. The 60-something author teaches at Rice University (the obvious model for Lola Dees, as Houston is for Spangler) and wrote about her own treatment for mental problems in 2000's Mockingbird Years. Her second book, 2006's Are You Happy?, recounted her 1950s childhood among academics in Williamstown, Mass.

Fox Gordon understands the academic milieu intimately, and Ruth's pithy observations are memorable: Tenured professors are described as "marsupials, creatures with no natural enemies who could look forward to living out their days in absolute safety;" graduate students are alternately "good children" or "a zombie army" ready to find "new campuses in which to take root and propagate."

Of course, academics are easy targets – just look at any of the dozens of satires set at universities, from Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim to Jane Smiley's Moo – and where Fox Gordon shines is in her serious depiction of the characters' concerns. Ruth and Ben are decidedly not caricatures, a flaw that plagues many academic satires. Ben's specialty in ethics wasn't chosen merely for its potential for irony: He is sincere about his job, thinking of virtue as something tangible, "not airy," but "meaty." Isaac's absence is not a metaphor of say, a lack of love in the Blaus' marriage, but a real problem.

The plot is another matter. It's too patchy, more a series of vignettes than a real story arc, and ends on such an unbelievable confluence of events that it would have been rejected by an undergraduate creative writing class. But the story itself will quickly be forgotten. What lingers is page after page of Fox Gordon's pithy, insightful observations about baby boomer angst and the (impossible) pursuit of academic happiness.

SIBA's Jewell Offering Free Book with Purchase

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/26/2009 10:54:00 AM

Wanda Jewell, executive director of the Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance, has taken Barack Obama at his word and is doing her part to help increase traffic in her member stores entirely on her own. Dubbed the “Free Book Stimulus Plan,” the program aims to reward those who shop at SIBA stores by sending them a free book from Jewel’s personal library. All that is required is for anyone who purchases a book at a member store to fill out an online form, available at www.freebookstimulusplan.com and mail Jewel the receipt. She’ll in turn mail them a book from her personal library.

“If I hadn’t been working with SIBA for the past 20 years I wouldn’t have so many books to give away,” she said. Jewel will ship books anywhere in the contiguous 48 states. Initially, SIBA is paying for the postage, though Jewell plans to sell a signed first edition of John Irving’s The World According to Garp and other valuable volumes to fund the project, which is projected to last until her library is depleted.

Down Economy Pushes Up Remainders

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/16/2009

I don't understand why it's not shoulder-to-shoulder in here,” said Paul Mann, co-owner of the Book Gallery, a bargain books chain with six locations throughout Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. He was standing amid the 500 or so tables piled high with bargain, remainder and hurt books at the Spring Book Show, held March 6–8 at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta. Mann was upbeat about the SBS. “Returns from Christmas are huge, and there's lots of great product to get jazzed about,” he explained. “With so much product coming in the warehouses, it's a buyer's market, since the companies have to move out old stock to make room for the new.”

So Mann was looking to score deals. Earlier this year, he purchased some five skids of books, 7,000–8,000 units, for which he paid a mere 12½ cents apiece, including shipping. “I held a '1 Day Sorting Sale' in which I left the books in the gaylords [boxes in which they were shipped], and priced every book marked $13.99 and lower for $1.99 and those above $14 for $2.99,” he said. “People got so excited they were diving into the gaylords face first. We sold about 1,500 books in the first 90 minutes, which is enough to cover the cost of all five skids. Everything we sold after that was profit.”

Mann isn't the only one experiencing a surge. “Bargain is up,” confirmed Jeffrey Press, president of World Publications Group of East Bridgewater, Mass., one of the largest remainder distributors. “The economy is bad and books are cheap entertainment. Things are so busy, we put in a permanent second shift at our warehouse.”

Yet the depressed economy isn't good for everyone. Smaller, hand-to-mouth operations are struggling and some have closed. “There were plenty of people we called to come whose phones were out of order,” said Larry May, director of the SBS. Some 850 people were registered for the event, a drop of 250 from 2008. “At the same time,” said May, “we still sold out the vendor space, had 15% new attendees and plenty of new sellers.”

Among notable new vendors was ToW Distribution, a graphic novel remainder house in Buford, Ga.; Parable from Franklin, Tenn.; a quartet from the U.K. (AB Books, 66 Books, PR Books and Columbia Marketing); and two university presses, the University of Alabama Press and the University of Tennessee Press. Daniel J.J. Ross, director of the University of Alabama Press, said the press has 100,000 books in overstock. “Previously, we would sell overstock direct, but came here as an experiment to see what kind of price we could get,” Ross said. He called the show “a learning experience” and observed that the sellers appeared to outnumber the buyers.

May estimated approximately 350 of those in attendance were buyers, including those from the big chains as well as discount outlets such as Citi Trends; largely absent were overseas buyers—currency devaluations prevented them from making the trip as they have in earlier years—and independent booksellers.

Among the issues being discussed at the show were publishers' plans to shrink lists, which could result in a tightening of the supply of remainders three to five years out. Most dismissed the buzz among publishers about trying to sell nonreturnable and higher sales of e-books as nonissues. All were following the saga of Borders, which should it fail would, in the words of one distributor, “dump tons of books” on the remainder shelves. (The Borders remainder buyer was at the show ordering books.)

“It's impossible to predict where things will go,” said May with a smile and a shrug. “This is the book business, after all.”

George Friedman's 'The Next 100 Years': unpredictable

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, March 22, 2009 

Thanksgiving Day 2050: While most of America is "watching football and napping after digesting a massive meal," the Japanese launch moon-based missiles and destroy most of the United States' orbiting Battle Stars. This 21st-century Pearl Harbor will lead the world into war, pitting the U.S. — the globe's lone superpower — and its ally Poland against a coalition that includes Japan and a resurgent Turkey, which now controls most of the Middle East and commands an empire to rival that of the Ottomans. 


"It will be a world war in the truest sense of the word, but given the technological advances in precision and speed, it won't be total war — societies trying to annihilate societies," writes 60-year-old-Austinite George Friedman in "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century." As such, total casualties of the fighting — which will be fought with hypersonic aircraft, space- based weaponry and armored, battery-powered foot soldiers — will cost perhaps 500,000 lives, just a few thousand of them American. It is, Friedman points out, a pittance compared with the 50 million who died in World War II. 


The 21st-century world war is the centerpiece of Friedman's work of speculation and prediction. Examining a resurgent Russia under Putin, Friedman predicts that "Central Asia will be back in the Russian sphere of influence by 2010" and foresees a "rematch" of the cold war by 2020. The book ends with the U.S. on the verge of a conflict with Mexico as a result of mass immigration that has, over the long term, empowered our neighbor to the south and destabilized the U.S. from within. Along the way Friedman explains how Japan, Poland and Turkey become world powers and why so many things that seem important to us now — such as Islamic extremism and Chinese economic dynamism — will eventually fade from relevance. 


"Some people have called me a hustler and suggested that a book like this is somehow frivolous," admits Friedman, from his cell phone while on book tour. "But this is a serious work that was written to make some complicated concepts accessible to a general audience. It is kind of the culmination of a life's work." 


That work is now running Stratfor, a private intelligence company Friedman founded in Austin in 1996. Before that Friedman — who has a political science Ph.D. from Cornell University — spent two decades in academia, most recently at Louisiana State University, where he founded a precursor to Stratfor called the Center for Geopolitical Studies. 


Like some of his theories, Friedman's choice of Austin as home for his business might seem counterintuitive. "You would think an intelligence organization would best be served by being in Washington, D.C.," he says. "But that is a city of gossip, It's easy to confuse the discussion about who is going to be promoted with making history. We wanted some distance from that in which to think. Austin has some advantages: UT has a superb library — which is essential to good intelligence — and a pool of bright, quirky people from which to recruit." He adds, "I hire a lot French medieval literature majors, people who have knowledge we don't have, see the world as we don't see it and are insatiable about learning new things. People who don't say 'That's impossible!'" 


Friedman writes in "The Next 100 Years" that "Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination," adding "the changes that lead to the next era are always shockingly unexpected." 


Of course, technically, a book such as this should be shelved as fiction, at least until it comes true. That said, even skeptics will find that the book's verifiable nonfiction — such as the history cited — is no less fresh when run through Friedman's mind. He offers, for example, an elegant disquisition on the unpredictability of history by moving decade through decade of the 20th century, explaining what the world looked like then and what happened a mere 10 years later. "In the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world,... the future seemed fixed," he begins. Of course, what soon followed was radically different. 


Friedman's other major concern is something that is actually fixed: geography. "Geography is important, because it changes little," he says. "As a consequence, the same things happen over and over again. The frequency of wars — between France and Germany, for example — and their importance, are rooted in geographic forces. But that is the old civilization. The U.S. only emerged as the decisive global power after World War II and is still immature. The U.S.'s power is based on its Navy and ability to control both oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, which no other power has been able to do." 


Friedman often compares the U.S.'s behavior to that of a teenager, which explains, for example, our actions post-9/11. "There is no question that American execution of the war in Iraq has been clumsy, graceless and in many ways unsophisticated. The U.S. was, indeed, an adolescent in its simplification of issues and in its use of power." He then adds the kicker: "But on a broader, more strategic level, that does not matter. So long as the Muslims are fighting each other, the United States has won its war." 


This war, it seems, aims to prevent anyone from forming a coalition that offers a real challenge to the U.S. It is a strategy that will play itself out in the many small wars the U.S. is likely to find itself involved in during the next century — none of which we will necessarily want to "win." Ultimately, Friedman argues that the U.S., by virtue of its geography, population and technology, is likely to remain the world's primary decision maker. This message has found a welcome reception among readers, so much so that the book has become a surprise best-seller. It debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list in January and has remained on the list. According to Friedman's Austin-based literary agent, Jim Hornfischer, nearly 100,000 copies of the book are in print. 


Perhaps the book serves as a palliative in this age of economic uncertainty. 


On the subject of the current crisis, Friedman is sanguine. Take the current financial crisis, for example. "Look at 1972, 1984...and it goes from being an unprecedented disaster to cyclical. We bailed out Chrysler in the '70s, we bailed out savings and loans in the '80s, and we're bailing out banks today. In my lifetime the world has ended from a financial standpoint at least seven times," he notes. "The one thing Americans lack and need the most is perspective."

'Hiding Man' by Tracy Daugherty: Biography reveals Texas author Donald Barthelme to be a modern man of letters

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, February 8, 2009

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

No recent book about a contemporary writer has been more necessary, or welcome, than Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Man, the first comprehensive biography of the late Houstonian Donald Barthelme.Barthelme is credited as being among the great late-20th century fiction writers, and one of its few exemplary postmodernists, along with John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon. In hundreds of short stories, most published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and '70s, he displayed a pyrotechnic literary technique that disoriented as often as it impressed readers.

These stories were collected in 10 volumes, starting with Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and culminating in two best-of anthologies, Sixty Stories (1981) and Forty Stories (1984). There is a children's book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, Or the Hithering Thithering Djinn (1971), for which he won a National Book Award, and a quartet of novels, including Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975).

He had, in his time, "as much fame as a literary writer could expect in America," Daugherty writes. Today his reputation has waned, though he is credited with mentoring dozens of writers, many of whom studied with him at the University of Houston, where he taught from 1981 until his death from cancer in 1989.

As Daugherty skillfully explicates, Barthelme was born in Philadelphia but moved to Houston at age 2. He was educated in Houston Catholic schools (but graduated from Lamar High School), studied at U of H (never graduated) and reviewed movies for the old Houston Post. He was drafted into the Korean War (never fought), got serious about art (serving as a director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston) and wrote. He moved to New York in 1962 and only returned to Texas for the job at U of H, and only then as a part-timer.

That his fiction is not so well known now is largely a consequence of its difficulty: It is often somewhat absurd, typically devoid of plot, full of esoteric allusions to history, literature (Woyzeck, Husserl), current events and his life. In its time it was described as collage. Today, we would call it a mash-up. Whatever it is, it is not careless, something Daugherty spends a great deal of his book proving.

"He wanted to join the centuries-long literary conversation, not titillate thrill-seekers looking for a Book-of-the-Month selection," Daugherty writes.

Daugherty offers a coherent case for why Barthelme is important to American literature. He argues, "Not since Poe had anyone brought such ingenuity to the form." He does an exemplary job of connecting the man to both his era – this is a wonderful cultural history of Houston and New York in the latter half of the 20th century – and to his influences, which ranged from Barthelme's childhood copy of the Baltimore Catechism, which taught him that literature was not always blocks of prose, to Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot demonstrated to him how "philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on," according to Daugherty.

Daugherty outlines Barthelme's connoisseurship of city life, especially his fondness for long walks where "something ridiculous was bound to happen," as well as his dedication to women (he was married four times and had two daughters) and drink (Teacher's Scotch). He also deftly points out where the prose reflects the personal, connecting Barthelme's improvisational writing style to his hobby of jazz drumming, and the frequently dastardly father figures in the fiction to Barthelme's lifelong rebellion against his powerful father.

What one comes away with is a portrait of a thoroughly modern man of letters, one whose imagination was shaped by his environs and reading.

Perhaps the one important aspect that's missing from the book is proof that Barthelme was, in addition to being a great avant-garde writer, a great Texas writer. How so? Consider this abstract from The New Yorker of his story, "Porcupines at the University," one of his most accessible, published in April 1970.

"A herd of porcupines want to enroll at a university, or so thinks the Dean when he sees them approaching. The Dean doesn't want them because there are no facilities for four or five thousand porcupines. The porcupine wrangler, Griswold, wanted to drive the porcupines to the great porcupine canneries of the East, & make a lot of money. He also hoped to be a singer on the Ed Sullivan show and then at a Las Vegas night club. As they near the university, the herd is threatened by the Dean, who is ready to repel them with a Gatling gun. A deal is made and the herd is taken to New York. In the last scene the citizens in their cars are watching the porcupine herd on the Cross-Bronx Expressway."

The story is a hilarious satirical concoction, one that recasts the work of classic Texas writers, especially J. Frank Dobie, and his contemporaries, John Williams among them, as a Looney Tunes cartoon. (It's fun to imagine what he'd do with Cormac McCarthy's work.)

By calling his biography Hiding Man Daugherty is alluding to the fact that much of the workings of Barthelme's mind seems unknowable. So, his job as a biographer is, ultimately, to try and use the life as a skeleton key to the work, which he does admirably well. Still, writers will tell you that biographies are irrelevant without having read their original works. So find a copy of Sixty Stories or The Dead Father and start there. Then, once thoroughly enchanted, turn to Daugherty for guidance.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Hiding Man

A Biography of Donald Barthelme

Tracy Daugherty

(St. Martin's Press, $35)

Book Review: 'Germania' gets the history right, but misses on the made-up stuff

Sunday, February 8, 2009

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

For three weeks following the death of Adolf Hitler, Allied-occupied Germany was left under political control of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the Nazi navy.

Dubbed the Flensburg Reich, for the northern German city where the administration was located, the short-lived government sought at first to persuade the Allies to team with the Germans to repel marauding Russians, and then, once evidence of the Holocaust became widespread, to show mercy.

Dallasite Brendan McNally uses this overlooked but fascinating episode of history as the basis for his debut novel, Germania – much of it written at the Starbucks on Lower Greenville. Germania is the name Hitler gave to the capital of his dreamt-of 1,000-year empire, a place of "salmon skies and buildings, of civic spaces, and a city that would be a thousand years of glory, a light upon nations."

Those words are spoken in the novel by Nazi architect Albert Speer. He, along with SS chief Heinrich Himmler, are the two key characters in the book. It shifts between the two men, first Speer as he tries to save what remains of German industry and Himmler as he dreams of becoming "King of Europe" while trying to negotiate a separate peace with Eisenhower, and later as they plot their escapes.

All the while the fates of the two men are caught up with those of an invented quartet of Jewish vaudeville performers called The Flying Magical Loerber Brothers. We meet them – Ziggy, Franzi, Manni and Sebastian – as the novel opens, performing acrobatic and magic tricks on a pre-war stage (and off-stage, killing Nazis), and again later, as each has a role to play in history: Manni as an assassin who cozies up to Speer, Ziggy as a Nazi U-boat captain loyal to Dönitz and the Navy, Sebastian as an operative with The Blood of Israel, and Franzi, a gay double-agent, working with both the Russians and the British, who becomes Himmler's masseuse and spiritual adviser.

Each Loerber Brother is also endowed with a psionic ability – Manni has the ability of mind control, Sebastian controls people's dreams, Ziggy is a telepath – which have, presumably, helped them survive as Jews in plain sight.

Unfortunately, this marriage of history and magic realism is awkward at best. McNally gets the history part right – the plot and characters as drawn from the record are, for the most part, wholly convincing – it's the made-up stuff that proves problematic. The brothers are too indistinct as individuals, particularly in scenes where more than one are present; the Nazis are the strongest presence, and history itself has already given us more than enough of these men.

Germania has antecedents in literature, most notably Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Michel Tournier's 1970 novel The Ogre, both of which offer magic realist takes on the Third Reich. But these are complex novels where moral ambiguity is threaded through the narrative, provocative enough to be polarizing.

McNally's novel isn't as lofty – Germania is intended more as entertainment than a philosophical or psychological study – and this is the problem. The topic with which he's dealing – the German Jews' relationship to the Holocaust and Nazis – may simply be far too real to ever be rendered as fanciful.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Germania

Brendan McNally

(Simon & Schuster, $26)

Jerusalem Book Fair on Track

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 2/2/2009

After the recent fighting in Gaza, Americans planning to travel to the biennial Jerusalem Book Fair, taking place February 15–20, might be reconsidering their plans. The peace seems fragile, but fair director Yoel Mako said all events remain in place. “People need not worry,” said Mako. “I'm quite sure everything will be quite nice by the time of the fair. I would say very openly that even when there is fighting taking place in Gaza, life in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv is quite normal.”

He said the fighting has had “no effect whatsoever” on plans for the fair. “We have 30 writers coming from all over the world. All of the cultural programs are proceeding and there have been no cancellations.” Among those expected from the U.S. are some 50 people from the trade community, including those who participate in the fair's editorial and agent fellowship programs. In all, some 80,000 members of the public are also expected, primarily to shop for books. “The strength of the fair is the cultural programs and activities that connect international and Israeli writers,” said Mako. “Amos Oz, for example, is launching his new book. I'm quite sure that during the fair there will be discussion about the affairs of the region. In fact, we encourage it.”

This year the fair's top honor, the Jerusalem Prize, will be awarded to Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The prize is given to an author “for literary achievements in the field of freedom of the individual in society.”

Bryan Burrough's 'The Big Rich': gossipy, engrossing

'Barbarians at the Gate' author's latest book examines the rise and fall of the great Texas oil men

By Edward Nawotka

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 01, 2009

Who do Texans have to thank for the Super Bowl, the rise of political conservatism, and our reputation as rootin'-tootin', Cadillac drivin', larger-than-life caricatures?

Easy answer: H. L. Hunt, Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, aka "The Big Four." These men are "quickly passing from headlines into history," laments Temple native Bryan Burrough, author of "The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes." "But they did more to cement the public perception of Texas and Texans than anything in our history."

Burrough knows a good story when he hears one: A special correspondent for Vanity Fair, he began his career with The Wall Street Journal in Houston and Dallas, and has authored or co-authored five books, including the blockbuster "Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco," which is now in its 22nd edition. Reached by phone at his home in New Jersey, it's immediately clear Burrough hasn't gone native. He speaks with a distinct Texas drawl and immediately pours on the charm. "As soon as my last child is off to college, I'm moving to Austin," he says, "It's the best city in America." He also points out that his wife is a former Statesman editor.

Despite Burrough's Texas roots, he didn't come up with the idea for "The Big Rich." In 2004, he'd just published "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34," (which, incidentally, will be released this summer as a movie starring Johnny Depp), and his editor suggested his next book cover Texas oil.

"I knew immediately how to do it. It had to be about the four families," says Burrough. "These men were the Warren Buffetts and Bill Gateses of their day. But at the same time, they were the original Beverly Hillbillies."

He continues, "Not one of these men graduated from college. They were the first shirtsleeve millionaires."

Though Burrough found no proof that "The Beverly Hillbillies" was based on any of the Texas oilmen, there was one show that was - "Dallas," which was loosely inspired by the querulous clan of H.L. Hunt.

Hunt, who hailed from Missouri, transformed himself from "a gentleman planter into a professional gambler and then, finally, at the age of thirty-five, into a successful oilman," writes Burrough. The year was 1924, when Hunt controlled about $7 million worth of oil. By the early 1950s he was a billionaire and considered, with the possible exception of Sid Richardson, the richest man in America.

In Burrough's depiction, Hunt is far more complicated than you might expect: A "strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind, a self-educated thinker who was convinced - absolutely convinced - that he was possessed of talents that bordered on the superhuman." He was also a covert bigamist, with three families, who became an influential backer of political conservatives and such a vocal critic of John F. Kennedy that he was suspected of orchestrating the president's assassination. (One of his sons, Lamar, dreamed up the Super Bowl. After seeing his daughter playing with a Super Ball, he thought it would be a good name for the first championship game in 1967 between the recently merged NFL and upstart AFL, which he helped to establish.)

Hunt was not alone in willingness to leverage wealth for political clout. Burrough recalls how, in the 1950s, Clint Murchison used his "personal retreat" - the Hotel Del Charro in La Jolla, Calif. - to curry favor with Joe McCarthy, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, who liked it so much, he returned every summer from 1952 until his death in 1972.

"The oilmen's legacy is the type of Texas conservative that has been so successful in Washington in recent years," Burrough says. "George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Dick Armey ? I don't know how many of them would have existed today were it not for the money and influence of the oilmen back in the '40s and '50s."

Of course, with Barack Obama now in the Oval Office, things are starting to look different.

"Sure, you still have people like T. Boone Pickens who can get himself heard, " says Burrough, "but that only means he has the money to buy ads, not real influence."

Diminishing influence

Aside from politics, the other significant legacy of the oilmen is one of conspicuous consumption, something best embodied by the story of the Shamrock Hotel, Burrough's personal favorite tale in a book full of decadent tales.

"I was shocked there wasn't more written about it already," said Burrough. "It really deserves its own book."

The Shamrock Hotel was the dream of oilman Glenn McCarthy, a mustachioed, bourbon-swilling, fist-fighting Houstonian who got his start running gas stations, struck oil, and palled around with Howard Hughes and John Wayne. He served as the model for Jett Rink, the oilman in Edna Ferber's 1952 novel "Giant," later played by James Dean in the 1956 movie of the same name.

In the late 1940s, McCarthy embarked on his dream project, a hotel so lavish he hoped it would turn Houston into an A-list destination, and as a consequence make him "The King of Texas."

The Shamrock Hotel (the name was chosen through a newspaper contest) had 1,100 rooms, a 10,919-square-foot dining room, parking for 5,000 cars, the world's largest pool and a neon sign that could be seen from miles away. It cost $18 million, and the opening party, held on St. Patrick's Day, 1949, cost another $1.5 million. That event, recounted in detail by Burrough, was a star-studded affair; McCarthy chartered a train to bring in movie stars - Dorothy Lamour, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner and Edgar Bergen among them - from California. It was probably worthy of its place on the pantheon of great parties next to Truman Capote's "Black and White Ball."

Of course, like the power and influence of Texas oil itself, the party didn't last. Overextended, within five years McCarthy lost the Shamrock to his investors. Later converted into a Hilton, it remained open, much diminished, until June 1, 1987, when the first wrecking balls smashed into its façade.

"If I had to pick a date," says Burrough, "that would be when the era of the Big Rich came to its end"

Tellingly, what replaced the Shamrock was a parking lot for the burgeoning Houston Medical Center, which has become almost as synonymous with the city as oil. Of course, much of the Center's funding came from another of the Big Four, Roy Cullen.

Though the influence of Texas "oilionaires" might not be what it used to be, it's still an integral part of our economy and history, one Burrough believes is central to any Texan's identity.

"Sure, as a political and cultural animal, Texas never quite fulfilled its potential," says Burrough. "But people forget that when these people burst onto the national stage in 1950, Americans thought of millionaires as Vanderbilts and Astors, guys in distant mansions. Here, for the first time, were a bunch of ordinary Joes who came into an astonishing amount of money. We're so used to it now, with the Internet millionaires, but then it was a new thing. In fact, there were so many Texas millionaires and billionaires it began the whole process of those wealthiest Americans lists.

Adds Burrough, "Anyone who calls themselves a Texan has an obligation to know and remember them."

Domnitz To Step Down from ABA

By Jim Milliot and Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/15/2009 1:30:00 PM

In a letter sent out this afternoon, Gayle Shanks, owner of Changing Hands Bookstore and president of the ABA, informed the membership that ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz will leave the association in July. Domnitz’s contract expires this month, but Shanks told PW that the association asked him to stay on to give them a chance to find a replacement “in a conscientious and timely way.” Domnitz has led ABA since 1997 when he succeeded Bernie Rath.

In her letter and comments to PW, Shanks said she believes Domnitz’s most important accomplishment during his tenure has been improving the communication between the ABA staff and the membership. By facilitating interaction among all types of booksellers, Domnitz helped “ABA become a cohesive group looking to continue independent bookselling in this country,” Shanks said.

Under Domnitz, ABA placed more emphasis on its educational programs, made the transition from its Book Sense marketing campaign to the new IndieBound and filed an antitrust lawsuit against Barnes & Noble and Borders that was settled in 2001. The association also sold its headquarters and property in Tarrytown, N.Y. and moved to smaller offices. Domnitz’s legacy, Shanks said, “will be strong booksellers who are well educated and have a desire to maintain their bookstores in their community on into the future.”

The ABA has formed a CEO Search Committee to find a successor to Domnitz. Shanks will chair the committee, and other members will include Michael Tucker from Books Inc. (San Francisco, CA), Steve Bercu from BookPeople (Austin, TX), Linda Ramsdell from The Galaxy Bookshop (Hardwick, VT), Lilla Weinberger from Readers' Books (Sonoma, CA), and Betsy Burton from The King's English (Salt Lake City, UT). ABA legal counsel, Deanne Ottaviano of Arent Fox LLP, will assist in the search. The first meeting of the committee will take place in Salt Lake City during the upcoming Winter Institute.

Book Festival Director Rallies to Save Atlanta Writing Programs

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/26/2009 2:31:00 PM

When the Atlanta History Center, parent organization that runs the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, let go of 15 of their 74 staff, including 7 of the 8 staff of the Mitchell House, it effectively ended the institution’s creative writing programs, among the most prominent in the city, and put in doubt the future of its popular author reading series. But all was not lost: within three days the writing programs were reinstituted, this time under the auspices of Agnes Scott College. Dubbed Agnes Writes, classes begin in February and will be taught by novelist David Fulmer and memoirist Hollis Gillespie, among others. Summer writing camps for children and young adults are also on the schedule, with Julie Bookman, former director of the writing programs at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, planned to direct.

Darren Wang, executive director, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival, organized the transition. “With everything that’s been happening with the writing community in Atlanta, there’s a real need to make this happen,” Wang told PW. “We were in a position to make this happen, so we did.”

"Agnes Scott College has a tremendous literary history," said Wang. "The college's annual Writers' Festival is nationally admired and has brought the likes of Julia Alvarez, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates to speak to metropolitan Atlanta's writers. I also knew, through working with Agnes Scott as a partner to the Decatur Book Festival, that the college moved nimbly and was quick to embrace new opportunities."

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.