New Releases in April

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein
Blockade Billy by Stephen King
The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell
Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (paperback)
2010: Take Back America: A Battle Plan by Dick Morris
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
Eat the Cookie… Buy the Shoes: Giving Yourself Permission to Lighten Up by Joyce Meyer
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy Frost
The Shadow Effect: Harnessing the Power of Our Dark Side by Deepak Chopra
Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush

Streisand to Keynote BEA 2010

Barbra Streisand, the legendary actress, singer, and director, will appear at this year’s BookExpo America (BEA) at the Opening Night Keynote Reception on Tuesday, May 25th. She will be interviewed before thousands of booksellers and book industry professionals about My Passion for Design, to be published by Viking on November 16, 2010. It will be Ms. Streisand’s first appearance on behalf of the book.

“We are honored to welcome Barbra Streisand to our stage,” notes Steven Rosato, Event Director for BookExpo America. “One of the truly exceptional things about having a distinguished guest like Ms. Streisand headline our event for us is that it calls attention to the strength, vitality, and excitement that is so much part of the book industry. We are deeply grateful to Ms. Streisand for committing her time and energy to what is certain to be a stellar moment at BEA.”

In her first book, My Passion for Design, Barbra Streisand reveals another aspect of her talent: the taste and style that have inspired her extraordinary homes and collections. My Passion for Design will focus on the architecture and construction of her newest homes, the dream refuge that she has longed for since the days when she shared a small Brooklyn apartment with her mother, brother, and grandparents.

BookExpo America will take place May 25th – May 27th at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City. It is a business convention, open only to members of the book trade. The Opening Night Keynote Reception will be in the Special Events Hall and all registered attendees will be admitted. For more information about BEA please visit www.bookexpoamerica.com and connect with BEA on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Gerd Leonhard on the Future of Media

Author and self-proclaimed ‘media futurist ‘ Gerd Leonhard spoke at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit in London, last week where he spoke of the new model for online delivery of data (news, books, information, entertainment, etc.) His presentation materials are summarized here and available below.

Here is the slideshare version of his presentation as well as the direct link to the low-resolution PDF download; feel free to download and re-use as you like (under the usual creative commons, attribution / non-commercial license).

Some of the bottom lines from his presentation: 1) in content and media, we are rapidly moving from just selling ’stuff’ i.e. copies of content, to selling services and experiences 2) EGOsystems are rapidly becoming ECOsystems; (i.e. because we are all connected now we must create and implement mutually beneficial business models that are based on market-making and revenue sharing) 3) Trying to enforce control when trust is crucial is a very bad idea, 4) In the content industries, the concept of mostly ’selling copies’ is becoming ‘toast’ 5) The future is in selling -and bundling – access, not (just) copies, and the ecology of selling access is totally different – we must get used to it! 6) The content 2.0 economy will work only in conjunction with a new approach to what telecom companies, ISPs and mobile operators will and can do, going forward. 7) All content is shifting to the cloud, and Media As A Service (MaaS) will become a standard, very soon therefore, data is the new oil (!) 9) Value, Reason, Price, Ease of Payment and Packaging are the main success factors in selling content online 10) Most business models in the content industry will be based on a constantly changing mix of ‘I pay, you pay, they pay’ and last, but not least… 11) A message to Murdoch et al: Forcing to Buy is like Forcing to Love!

Here is the slideshare version of his presentation as well as the direct link to the low-resolution PDF download; Leonhard offers this as a free download and allows you to re-use as you like (under the usual creative commons, attribution / non-commercial license).

‘The Other Rooms’ – Yoko Ono (Charta)

Formatted much like her famed 60’s book ‘Grapefruit’ (or the minimalist Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt playing cards ‘Oblique Strategies’,) Yoko Ono returns with her de minimis view on storytelling through a series of imaginary rooms with walls that aren’t there. The various ‘rooms’ serve to awaken the memory of a person named Anton, whose memories of his mother only exist in the form of a handful of sand that she left for him when she ‘disappeared step-by-step into oblivion.’

Published as part of her exhibition ‘Anton’s Memory’ at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation at Palazzetto Tito in Venice, the book is divided into chapters on rooms (the Blue Room, Rooms and Footsteps, Rooms of Various Lightness and the Room to Work on Your Hometown In) as well as gardens, light passages and tools like the Space Transformer.

Of course, no one questions reality, time and space quite like Ms. Ono. Her art exhibitions are like nothing the world has seen, which, of course, is what attracted Beatle John (who arugably had ’seen it all’) to her side in the late 60’s.

Like ‘Grapefruit.’ (and much of Ono’s oeuvre) ‘The Other Rooms’ is complete minimalism at its best, with some pages left blank and most having merely a single sentence to their role as part of the story. (favorite page: “This is not here.”) ‘Rooms’ is therefore not a book you ‘read’ as much as a book you refer to from time-to-time, much like you would appreciate a painting or a piece of music, while also serving as another example of her mind expanding fare for the world.

The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons (ESPN/Ballantine)

With the NCAA March Madness in full effect, we thought it would be a good time to take a look at one of the definitive books on basketball. And while Bill Simmons’ new brick is based on the NBA, the seasonal fanaticism of both worlds is equally intense.

Simmons has spent his life absorbing all things NBA from his childhood as a Boston Celtics fanatic (when Simmons was just five, his dad chose Celtics season tickets over a new motorcycle for his own birthday gift – which got young Simmons on the path of early b-ball fandom) to his role as the ‘Sports Guy’ for ESPN.com. Now all those years of study have come together in the 715 page ‘The Book of Basketball.’

While there have been a number of books on the sport (though not nearly as many as the statistical analyser’s supreme sport of baseball) nowhere is there a book that disintermediates and reconstructs basketball legends, teams and statistics quite the way Simmons tears it apart. (“What if Memphis landed Lebron James instead of Cleveland?” “What if Len Bias hadn’t OD’d?” etc, etc…) Or as Simmons rightly contends, basketball is not a sport that can be properly judged by statistics alone.

The centerpiece of this book is Simmons re-configuration of the Basketball Hall of Fame. He evaluates its list of inductees and then reassembles them based on his four tiered ‘pyramid’ of ranking 96 players according to skills, stats and levels (and a few ‘what-ifs.’) In doing so, Simmons indulges everything from imaginary match-ups, a slew of little-known or largely forgotten facts, (like the Lakers emergency plane landing in a cornfield in 1960) a wide-array of bustable myths as well as looking at player’s performances through the unfiltered lens of history.

Simmons knowledge of the game is at an all time high – even with games played before he was born – which, Malcolm Gladwell in his brilliant introduction, credits to being able to review games in a room with five TV monitors and still getting away with calling it your ‘office.’ (Do we detect a tinge of jealousy here?)

On top of it all, Simmons, who also served as a writer on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, punctuates his analysis with a more than ample degree of humor (some of it just plain riotous) that few sports books ever embrace (Do not skip the footnotes – they are filled with phat gems.)

While the details of this book are far too voluminous to recount here, suffice to say, if you or someone near you qualifies as a basketball fanatic, this book is so packed with stories, histories, analysis and reconsiderations of everything NBA, you will be hard-pressed to consider yourself an authority without it. In a word: awesome.

Review: A $499 e-Reader That Opens Like A Book

E-book readers are a fun category of gadgets, because their shape is not yet set in stone. So how about an e-book reader that actually opens like a book? The AP’s Peter Svensson reviews the new $499 Entourage Edge.

See Video here

Signs – Lettering in the Environment by Barnes and Dixon (Laurence King)

Signs are everywhere. Whether directing travelers or advertising new products, urban signage has become a fact of modern life. We were thus intrigued when we found a recent book taking up the study of such things.

Unfortunately, Signs: Lettering in the Environment, while attempting some semblance of a scholarly study, only sufficiently covers two main areas of signage: directive road signs and signs that identify buildings. And while there are a preponderance of signs within both categories, we had hoped for much broader coverage of things like outdoor advertising, more non-institutional signage, perhaps neon signs and all the other signs in the environment that are firmly ensconced all around the world.

Taking them at their premise, which is well defined in their introductory notes, Baines and Dixon (who have written on similar subjects before) approach their subject with a somewhat clinical view, describing and illustrating both road and architectural signs through the ages. Distinctions are clarified between type (that which allows typographic automation) and lettering (done on command for customized situations) as well as how things like font selection, cap and lower case decisions, readability studies and type accoutrements (arrows, blank space, layout and placement) effect the over all decision making when it comes to formatting signage.

The book is divided roughly into the two aforementioned parts (road signs and buildings – with a few additional field study examples thrown in at the end) and each is presented with a historical view including the identification of signs which no longer exist. More like a term paper than an art book, ‘Signs’ does quite a good job given it’s self-imposed parameters. We had just hoped for more categories of signs given their omnipresent state in the modern world. Perhaps next time.

Guardians of Being – Eckhart Tolle and Patrick McDowell (New World Library)

It was Patrick McDonnell, the creator of the popular cartoon series Mutts, that first came up with the idea of approaching spiritual author Eckhart Tolle with the notion of a collaboration.

After all McDonnell’s simple, animal cartoons, often convey the essence of appreciating the world we live in while bring it down to the most basic level of the world of pets.

Echhart agreed, added some tweaks to McDowell’s original idea, and the result is ‘Guardians of Being,’ which is both a illustrated book and a volume of inspirational messages from the master himself.

While the images and words are well suited to each other, the extra value in this work comes in it’s usefulness not just to adults, but particularly to children, who would have never been exposed to Tolle’s work. With the addition of the Mutts style drawings, simple but effective messages about awareness and the here and now can be understood and embraced by readers of all ages. A natural.

How to Get Divorced by 30: My Misguided Attempt at a Starter Marriage – Sascha Rothchild (Plume)

Something’s fishy here. First off, the book itself. ‘How to Get Divorced by 30′ began life as an article in the Los Angeles alternative paper, the L.A. Weekly. It has since been optioned by Universal Pictures to (possibly) become a feature film. Fair enough; the title alone is enough from which to build a fun, chick-flick/rom-com that could last a couple of weekends in the mall (assuming the studio covers their bet by putting actual comedy writers on the project who can exorcise this painfully drab story out of their script.) But the middle piece – the book itself – dreadful.

For some reason, Rothchild (and her publisher) thought her twenty-something life’s story was interesting enough to foist 224 pages onto the general public during the fallow first quarter. It is not. (It appears that the movie option was already in place, as the book would clearly be a ‘pass’ without it.) Her story, the story of a writer of limited accomplishment, moving to LA to ‘make it,’ and turning a loser boyfriend into a loser husband is about as exciting as the ‘marriage’ of the half-filled ketchup bottles Rothchild merges while waiting tables at the Palm. (A mundane procedure, she actually feels obligated to explain.)

After a handful of uninspired relationships lead her to Jeff, a curmudgeonly wannabe actor/bartender whose life seems to revolve around living in his La-Z-Boy recliner, playing video games and smoking pot all day, it is shocking that Rothchild both marries him and then is somehow surprised that the obviously ill-fated unison ends in divorce. (This, despite the fact that she has to buy her own engagement ring at the mall, is married by a guy who got his certificate off the internet and hopes Jeff wears his ‘good jeans’ on their wedding day!) It would be hard to imagine a reader out there who shares her surprise as anyone with a pulse could see this coming from deep left-field.

This quick read, gallivants (one of her favorite words, she uses it more than once in the book) back and forth to work with the author, questions whether she should have ended up with a previous boyfriend or two instead, and generally covers the quotidian lifestyle of a young Valley couple whose greatest life-changing event is the day they get a flat-screen TV.

And let’s not forget the part where after sixteen years, she decides to try cocaine again just to see if ’she is addicted.’ WTF? The fact that this white-trash wedding story is completely banal is bad enough. The continuation of that thinking (that anyone would want to actually read about it) only serves to underscore the basic problem; that Ms. Rothchild lacks the maturity to realize she has nothing interesting to offer here.

The most curious part are the online reviews. While there are a number of negative ones, suspiciously most of the Amazon reviews are five-star and all posted the same week by people who have few, if any, other reviews posted and appear to live in cities the author formerly called home. (A common amateur sign of insider reviews.) Of course, they claim the book is hilarious, scintillating and well-written and many can’t wait for her next volume (ahem…).

Unfortunately, with an Amazon sales ranking at nearly 400,000, this is more like landfill waiting to happen. Let’s see if a movie ever gets made, and if so, who the real writers are. One word: Fail.

Link to Sascha Rothchild’s original LA Weekly article

Gore Vidal – Snapshots in History’s Glare (Abrams)

When you mention Gore Vidal, what comes to mind? A novelist? Essayist? Playwright? A Politician? Commentator? Screenwriter? A Raconteur? A Socialite…?

Of course, the right answer is ‘all of the above.’ In fact, it might be argued that Gore Vidal is America’s ultimate renaissance man. Certainly, his latest book, ‘Snapshots in History’s Glare’ does nothing to dispel this notion.

From his early days growing up in a political family in Virginia including his time at boys school, his associations with writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, the political years with Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, as a confidante of the Kennedys as well as his own political ambitions, to the intoxicating highlife of the movie and showbiz worlds, Vidal has enjoyed a life like few others.

This book, which could alternately be described as a scrapbook, an annotated photo album or perhaps even a visual memoir, is an amazing collection of every phase of Vidal’s life from Virginia to New York, to Hollywood (twice) to his many years along the Amalfi coast. Anchored by photographs and mementos saved by his long time companion, Howard Russell Auster (whose death was the inspiration for this book), Vidal has assembled a completist’s collection of everything from early handwritten notes from political figures, to Hollywood letters, to an impressive collection of photographs of the rich and famous and even pictures of most of his movie posters and his many, many book covers. (Including when, as the bete noire of the New York Times book editor, he was forced to adopt the nome-de-plume, Edgar Box!)

Vidal was certainly a bon-vivant of his generation, entertaining at times various celebrities from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer to David Hockney, to decades long relationships with Johnny Carson, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and others. Vidal’s commentary offers his clever and sometimes acerbic remembrances of events past, such as how he was denied writing credit for the film epic ‘Ben-Hur’ though later was successful in suing MGM to obtain personal vindication. (One must observe, as well, the caustic words he saved for his famed debate partner, the late William F. Buckley.)

In the book, Vidal periodically whines that the glory days are now behind us. Given the depth of the rarified lifestyle he enjoyed over the last 60 years, he may very well be right.

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