Emails from an A**hole – John Lindsay (Sterling Books)

Ahh, yes, the return of the Lazlo Letters. Do you remember them? The Lazlo Letters was a book of very clever letters sent to corporations in the 70’s to agitate and irk them by offering seemingly innocent, but absurd requests by a mysterious agent known in real life as comedian Don Novello (that’s right, Father Guido Sarducci)

John Lindsay (no, not the former mayor of New York, but supposedly a 20-something student at Penn State University with too much time on his hands) has picked up the baton and tossed it into cyberspace with the advent of his new book ‘Emails from an Asshole.’ In it, Lindsay, pokes, prods and provokes his unwitting victims through a series of emails designed to make people crazy, while at the same time seeming kinda, sorta plausible at first. He does so both by answering and ultimately placing a series of internet ads designed to reel in his unsuspecting bait.

Examples: Selling a car whose CD player is stuck on Def Leppard or needs a lot of duct tape to keep the airbag from exploding, or selling World War II memorabilia like an autographed Hitler baseball (or Winston Churchill’s iPod!) or trying to get a Little League team to take a uniform sponsorship from his fake porn company.

Lindsay’s escapades are one part ‘Jackass’ and two parts funny phone pranks only done by email and captured in book form. As imbecilic as some of the jokes are, this prankster actually puts a lot of thought into his japery, even going so far as to harass his victims from multiple personas and e-mail accounts to creating actual dialogues between a fake husband and wife, placing the helpless advertiser smack in the middle of a ‘domestic dispute.’

You will be hard pressed to not find yourself rolling over with laughter (check out the 10 lb. attack dog ‘Killer’) in this easy to read volume. For those looking for more, check out Lindsay’s ever-popular website DontEvenReply.com for more of his hilarious insanity.

The Program – Kelly Traver, M.D. (Atria) Change Your Brain, Change Your Body – Daniel Amen, M.D. (Harmony Books)

In recent years, a host of new publications have hit the consumer health sciences market, examining, not the methods by which to maintain a healthier lifestyle, but rather the sources and motivations that lie beneath those methods. Two such recent releases are ‘The Program’ by Kelly Traver, M.D. and ‘Change Your Brain, Change Your Body’ by famed neuroscientist, Dr. Daniel Amen.

Based on years of study of her patients in her Menlo Park, California clinic (and her MDHealth Evolution organization), Traver’s book, ‘The Program: The Brain-Smart Approach to the Healthiest You’ is a 12 week plan for insuring or reclaiming one’s optimal health through what can essentially be described as a behavioral re-wiring of the personal health game-plan emanating from the human brain. Beginning by describing twelve characteristics of the brain (the emotional brain, the rational brain, the adaptable brain, etc…) Traver assembles a self-reliant plan covering topics like mastering stress, maximizing energy, outsmarting heart disease, diminishing diabetes, curing sleep loss, preventing cancer as well as looking at how to age successfully. Throughout her program, Traver’s directives and style are both warm and understandable while allowing the reader to track their progress through easy to monitor progressions. Traver spends ample time discussing both preventative and remedial measures that are based on her own studies as well as widespread medical data. It is a program that has had demonstrably successful results but more importantly, it is presented in a way that could not be easier to follow. Traver’s work is a breakthrough in presentation and therefore highly recommended.

Dr. Daniel Amen’s latest ‘Change Your Brain, Change Your Body: Use Your Brain to Get and Keep the Body You Have Always Wanted’ is less of the traditional folksy-health wisdom, as much as it is a consumer facing scientific study of exactly how the brain works to insure (or debilitate) the quest for better health. Though example after example, using neurological testing and imaging, Amen explains his basic premise ‘when your brain works right, your body looks and feels better. When your brain is troubled, you have trouble with how you look and feel.’ In his 372 page manifesto, Amen revels his formula for health improvement and ‘brain-boosting’ via everything from hormonal therapy, exercise, diet (brain food) and more – complete with action steps and tracking journals – to create positive effects in addressing conditions like chronic stress, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, brain trauma, lack of sleep, personal energy and much more. While Amen appears to have the solution for every disease, he at least offers a comprehensive plan for combating most major preventable diseases with a wide variety of methods that may have the effect of eliminating or at least inhibiting the onset of such maladies. Beyond this book, Amen has a long series of books (‘Magnificent Mind at Any Age,’ ‘Change Your Brain, Change Your Life’) that cover similar and related subjects. He also runs four regional clinics as well as a website (amenclinics.com) that features more advice plus a series of 3-D brain spect images revealing the effects of his treatments.

More on Travers: the MD Health Evolution

More on Daniel Amen: AmenClinics.com

You Never Give Me Your Money – Peter Doggett (HarperStudio)

From the looks of it, The Beatles – the most influential band in musical history – were actually two groups. The first was the mop-top through drug-influenced neo-psychedelic pop band that changed the world through musical messages from ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ to ‘All You Need is Love.’

The second, was a business.

It’s that second group that Peter Doggett reveals here, perhaps for the first time, all in one place.

Beginning at the end, Doggett explains and assembles the story of the post-breakup Beatles; a behind-the-curtain view of the battles and infighting that began shortly after Paul McCartney beat John Lennon to the punch in announcing that pop’s biggest sensation would be no more.

Published last year in the U.K. (in line with a catalog re-issue and the high-profile release of the Beatles’ ‘Rock Band’ game) and due on these shores shortly, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ chronicles the maneuvers and machinations of the various post-Beatle camps and the influence of outside players (Yoko, Allen Klein, Beatle advisers like Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and others) as well detailing the often acrimonious actions and reactions of the four key players to the split. (Interestingly, enough, in addition to court papers, legal actions, financial tie-ups and more, the four members also used their music – John: ‘How Do You Sleep?’ Paul: ‘Too Many People,’ George: ‘Sue Me, Sue You Blues,’ and Ringo: ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ to express their feelings of frustration and, at times, distain for one another.)

Doggett’s completist’s chronology describes both a world where “The Beatles empire continued to keep the legal profession afloat,” while also detailing the personal and emotional responses of the four members to each other and the circumstances that often times pitted them – overtly or otherwise – against each other. Doggett, a well established British music writer is to be commended for researching and compiling a much needed, detailed history of the complex dealings of the greatest pop legacy of our lifetimes. A must read for followers of the band and their high-profile but arduous afterlife.

Read an excerpt here.

Wingnuts – John Avlon (Beast Books) Echo Chamber – Jamison & Cappella (Oxford University Press)

Obama’s a Nazi! Buy Gold! Who is ‘The Worst Person in the World?’

What has happened to the news media? It has become polarized in search of ratings, is what happened; at least according to John Avlon in his new book (and the first book from The Daily Beast) ‘Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America.’

Led by the radical voices of the far right wing (the ‘fright wing’ as Avlon calls them) this largely insane polarizing of the extreme left and right is driven by two factors according to the book – the electoral rejection of the right in November of 2008 as well as the declining ratings of talk radio and its reliance on a largely older, white demographic audience. In a world where die-hard partisans are perhaps the only reliable audience (P1s), talk radio (with an incubation assist from websites like WorldNetDaily, Redstate and others) has purposely rearranged itself into a forum for self-segregated narrowcasting. The more shocking, the better – at least for ratings.

The vocabulary of the extremists, both in the media and extremist politics, includes frequent references to Marxism, socialism, death panels, Obamacare, the birthers, the truthers and of course, the bedeviled Nazism. It seems the more radical the verbiage, the more popular the pontificator becomes, (Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, etc.) at least with the base.

Avion explains both in a historical (TR, FDR, JFK) and current day context (town hall meetings, Tea Party, etc.) how these factions began and evolved but concludes with a formula for the settling of these conditions through the emergence of a more vocal populist (i.e. centrist) movement. We’ll see.

In ‘Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment,’ authors Jamieson and Cappella take a much deeper and scientific approach to their study of the connection between Limbaugh, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. Backed by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, ‘Echo Chamber’ is an exacting and through accounting of the detailed factors (framing, name calling, collusion) employed by the ‘conservative opinion media’ to not only broadcast their message to a narrowly chosen demographic (white, older, southerners that make up the sweet spot of the GOP), but whose agenda actually reaches right into the heart of the Republican party to do everything in their power to either anoint, or deny political success to, candidates that pass their litmus test of Reagan conservatism (anti-regulation, gun rights, small government, anti-welfare, pro-life, etc.) Examples of those who have benefitted (Bush, Palin) as well those who have been attacked, or perhaps killed, politically for not being conservative enough (McCain, Huckabee.)

The missing piece in both books is the deep dive, where the authors look way under the hood at the true germination and funding of these messaging campaigns (lobbyists), the benefactors of the message (corporations) and the true innerworkings of the skunkworks who pull the strings on all of this (Frank Luntz, Dick Armey, RNC operatives, etc.) The opportunity here is for a new Woodward and Bernstein to emerge to get beyond the surface speakers of this movement and to reveal the real shadow players in this political agenda.

In other words, it’s time for a new Deep Throat.

Beefheart – John ‘Drumbo’ French (Proper Books)

There is no more ultimate poster-boy for avant-garde rock than Captain Beefheart (nee Don Van Vliet).

As a well known cohort of Frank Zappa’s, Beefheart revolutionized a form of bizarro rock that came from the high deserts of California and took Don and the Magic Band around the world over three multi-colored decades. John French (given the moniker ‘Drumbo’ during the sessions for the famed ‘Trout Mask Replica’ album) sat behind the drums for Beefheart for eight albums, (beginning with ‘Safe as Milk’) and has recounted the behind the scenes going-ons throughout discombobulated recording sessions and wild global romps that solidified the Captain’s image in the hearts of fans of rock’s outer fringes for years.

The trouble is, and as ‘Drumbo’ well reveals, all was not well in the Beefheart camp. Many players – the author included – suffered constant beratement at the hands of their fearless leader. As French tells it, most band members were made to feel two-feet tall through many years of Beefheart’s abuses. The problem for the reader may be that French’s account may be just too dense for most readers. His penchant for infinate detail probably only appeals to the total die-hard fan and in the end, ‘Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic’ covers an important figure in rock history, but may best be viewed as a reference book rather than a fluid and easy read.

Seth Godin Announces Linchpin Meetup

From Seth’s blog:

Announcing worldwide-meet-the-tribe-of-Linchpins day on June 14, 2010. In as many as 500 cities worldwide, here’s your chance to find some folks just like you.

One of the first linchpins I ever knew was my 3rd grade teacher. His daughter was born on flag day, and for some reason, I’ve never forgotten that. So in her honor, it’s Linchpin day on June 14.

Here’s a simple, fast and free way to find other Seth fans in your community. Meet other people who talk about this blog, read the books and want to make an impact on the universe. Find people who ship.

This one-time worldwide meetup lets you either volunteer to run your local in-person, non-virtual, face-to-face group meeting (in a bookstore, cafe or greenhouse) or merely join one. The page is simple. Find a city or add one. If the city needs an organizer, volunteer if you like. It’s very lightweight, free and it might just work.

Chemistry happens when people interact…

Have fun!

When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison – Greil Marcus (Public Affairs)

There may be no more qualified writer in America to tackle the task of trying to help us understand the complete cryptic and spiritual musical enigma that is Van Morrison. After all, the Berkeley based Greil Marcus (“Mystery Train”) has been at the forefront of rock criticism since Rolling Stone was based in San Francisco, which is also where Morrison moved when after a tour of the area in 1970, he discovered his music was played on the local radio all throughout the day.

In ‘When That Rough God Goes Riding’ (a quote from a Morrison lyric from his 26th album, ‘The Healing Game’, and an extrapolation from Yeats’ ‘Second Coming.’), Marcus sets about on an expedition to mine Morrison’s long and storied career, not as a biographer or even a chronologist but rather of focusing on the music – and mainly particular pieces of music – with the goal of bringing the special and oft-times unexplainable highlights to light. He is looking for those moments when the song or performance soars above the conscious limits of the performer; he is in search of what Ralph Gleason called ‘the yarragh’; some kind of guttural utterance that emerges when a singer gets down so deep with his music and takes it to a transcendental level.

There have been many highs and lows in the long career of ‘Van the Man,’ and Marcus covers most of them here, from the early days with Them, to his performance of “Caravan” at the Last Waltz, to years spent in Belfast, New York and Marin County, CA. But it is the music, most notably the high-highs of Van first solo outing, the initially under appreciated but now legendary ‘Astral Weeks,’ to the long fallow period of more than fifteen albums from 1980 to 1996 appropriately dismissed by Marcus as a period where the “tedium was almost heroic in its refusal to quit,” that drives the story here.

Far from perfect, but a real interpretation of the singer as the medium for the song instead of the other way around.

Marcus recently did selected readings from his book at San Francisco’s Booksmith book store. Here is an hours’ worth of that appearance courtesy of Fora.TV.

Interview with Greil Marcus (from moreintelligentlife.com)

Twitter Power 2.0 – Joel Comm (Wiley)

Well, well, well… here we were all set to publish a write-up on Joel Comm’s recently released ‘Twitter Power’ one of the many, many books that have popped up in the wake of the phenomenon that is the world’s largest social networking micro-blog, when all of a sudden we get a call from the book’s publicist in New York asking if we would like to cover – wait for it – the new edition!
Now assuming Twitter books will be almost as prolific and quick to market as third-party Twitter apps (there are well over 1,000 already), we better get going on this! In ‘Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time,’ writer Comm takes us on a virtual tour of all the main features of the micro-blog site and the numerous ways that Twitter can be used to expand one’s sphere of influence or to build a following by spreading communication on behalf of one’s business. Like many Twitter tomes, Comm explains how to get started on Twitter, how to build a following, the rules of community, tweet protocol and a complete explanation of all the basics needed to begin using Twitter ‘correctly.’ Comm goes onto explain, through many of his personal examples (he is a big social networking blogger as well) how to use basic strategies to build and engage your audience through the quality of your tweets, creating a variety of announcements, contests, etc. Comm further illustrates how to manage teams via Twitter and concludes with a tour of the basic third-party applications available for Twitter (Twit-pic, TweetDeck, Twillow, TwitterCounter, etc…) as well as a discussion of some ways to use the Twitter API.
In the end, ‘Twitter Power 2.0′ is not so much about power (as it’s name implies) but rather Twitter basics. It is a beginners book, not an advanced volume. Perfect for someone who still hasn’t joined the world of Twitter, but apt to be seen as boring or nothing new, for those who have already been using the micro-blogging service for a year or more. If you or someone you know has yet to explore Twitter, ‘Twitter Power’ may be a good place to begin. If you are already a regular user, there is little new here that you won’t already know and may find other books (Brian Solis’s ‘Engage’ for example) more your speed.

Book Expo America Readies for NY

The 2010 Book Expo America is in the final stages of set up. Booths, seminars and author appearances have all been announced, including the keynote speech on Tuesday night by legendary superstar Barbra Streisand. All events take place at New York’s Javitz Center between Tuesday May 25th and Thursday, May 27th. New events this year include Let’s Get Digital, New York Book Week and a DIY Authors Conference. Special author appearances now confirmed include Jonathan Alder, William Ayers, William Peter Blatty, Mika Brzezinski, Frank Deford, Nelson DeMille, William Gibson, Heather Graham, John Grisham, Tony Hawk, Michael Korda, Joyce Carol Oates, James Patterson, Condoleezza Rice, Rick Springfield, Jon Stewart, Garry Trudeau and hundreds more.

For details, conference schedules, travel partners and more, check out the BEA conference link here: http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/

When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead – Jerry Weintraub (Twelve Books)

Ok, so he didn’t close Arthur Godfrey. He got Elvis, and Sinatra, and Dylan and Zeppelin. He produced movies ranging from Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’ to ‘The Karate Kid’ to the star-packed successful remakes of the ‘Oceans’ series (‘Eleven,’ ‘Twelve’ and ‘Thirteen.’) He even counts world leaders like George Bush, Jimmy Carter and the late Armand Hammer his friends.

Meet the real Mr. Showbiz. Meet Jerry Weintraub.

Hard to believe that one man went from being a young New York talent agent to managing some of the biggest acts in the world, to turning the regional live concert business on its ear by becoming a national promoter, to becoming a top Hollywood movie producer and even running his own film studio; Jerry Weintraub is the consummate Hollywood deal maker.

Not since Bernie Brillstein’s book ‘Where Did I Go Right?’ has anyone written a tome of such wonderful showbiz stories as Weintraub has compiled in ‘When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead.’ (In fact, Weintraub was a partner of Brillstein’s in the company Management Three.) While not a complete compendium of every detail of this impresario’s life, ‘Stop Talking’ is filled with the stories of a man who used a combination of naivete, imagination, chutzpah and sheer perseverance to move mountains for himself and his clients to achieve goals that may have seemed impossible – even hours before the show (Elvis in Miami comes to mind.) What emerges is the story of a man who doesn’t see why the whole world can’t be packaged under the banner ‘Jerry Weintraub Presents.’

In looking back, Weintraub seems nearly as stunned today as he did decades ago when he first embarked on many of these adventures. Along the way, Weintraub rubs shoulders and does deals with a who’s who of showbiz royalty; from Lew Wasserman to Walt Disney to Steve Ross to Kirk Krikorian to the modern-day brat pack of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and countless others, Weintraub has worked with them all.

In the final analysis, Weintraub is a storyteller and these are just some of the incredible stories of his life. An avuncular and fun read, “Stop Talking” is a self-portrait of a man who got to the top through some confluence of determination, luck and alchemy making this volume one kick-ass read.

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