Eric Lincoln Miller

Gearing up for last day at Milwaukee Ave Art Festival

2011-07-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

While critical paperwork piles up at home and in my office, going out and meeting people and showing the things we have to offer - books, healthy coffee, art-poetry broadsides, custom stationery products, book distribution, Send Out Cards, and our book publishing consulting business, I see the challenge of being involved in too many things. It's hard to be good at one or two things when you have a world of stuff going on: -- it can also be a turn-off for some people. But not all people. It's a question of finding the right people, and not becoming too involved in the outcome. Some people you can engage, others not. If you can inspire one or two of them you get what is called leverage. They work for the good of themselves, and while they build their own business they are helping you as well. The quest for applied leverage continues ...

My regular job is to sell books for clients to bookstores. Bookstore people in the Midwest are my long-standing customers. I have a commitment to them and to my client publishers to do a good job. My network of bookstores is the one that crosses all the paths of everything I do, all the stuff listed above. It's always been like that. The bookstore network, the one-on-one customer service, the engagement, the approach to understanding what the bookseller's needs are and what kind of books they can sell best, the development of a trusting relationship between us is what drives my business. It has always been the case through 26 years as a book traveler in the Midwest territory.

And dealing with the general public, the book buying public, has never been a strength of mine. My core audience has always been business owners, especially bookstore owners, managers, and buyers. And so the shindig at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival is a new skill set for me. I've been trying to build up an e-mail list. A mailing list, direct mail and greeting cards, is the ultimate goal, but you need to take small steps. The goal is to develop an audience; people who are interested in what you do and what you have to offer. I'm working on it. It's a balancing act.

Showing up is half the battle. Everything else is in your positive attitude, save 2% which is intangibles and sheer luck. "You're a good man," a fellow who stopped by my table at the Milwaukee Avenue Art Festival told me. Raising that kind of awareness and increasing engagement with these kinds of people is the key to success over time. You need to be in it to win it!

Live from Milwaukee Avenue Art Festival

2011-07-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

3ibooks has its kiosk just inside the entrance of 2515 N. Milwuakee Ave. The building is a converted roofing contractor's warehouse. Inside it's bloody hot, the lighting and ventilation are poor at best, and the cracked concrete floor is murder on the feet and it has a permanent layer of dust. But the flow of interesting people is nonstop, and we are right next to LSLR: -- The Logan Square Literary Review. This is a very high quality journal "hand crafted in Logan Square" -- www.loganliterary.com -- and edited by a triumvirate of Eleanor Black, Patrick Dahl, and Daniel Majid. There is a definite synergy to both our approaches to all-things-local literature, and I definitely think we will be collaborating on some projects together in the future.

One of the exhibits just behind our table is LSLR's showcase of MILWAUKEE AVENUE: THE MILLENNIAL SHIFT. This is a fascinating display of artwork, posters, photographs, broadsides, advertisements, rock concert handouts, circulars going way back, and these super-cool venue flyers for current places doing great work up and down the avenue. Young Chicago Authors at 1180 N Milwaukee is one notable organization that used to have a home on W Division Street, and was referred to me by past 1st Ward alderman Manny Flores. They sponsor the largest youth poetry festival in the city, the latest event being called Louder than a Bomb.

I met up with a very vivacious young woman named Katie Palmer, an actress who has come to Chicago by way of Orlando, FL. She originally hails from Connecticut, and she is involved with one of the venues featured in the Milwaukee Avenue showcase, the Gorilla Tango Theater at 1919 N Milwaukee Avenue -- http://www.gorillatango.com/ -- and Ms. Palmer is starring in a current stage version of the classic film THE OMEGA MAN. Ms. Palmer told me it was a burlesque, and being billed as a Hestonian Opera, in honor of screen actor Charlton Heston. I'm partial to THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and SOILENT GREEN myself, but I always dug Omega Man too. I really enjoyed talking to Ms. Palmer and her boyfriend, and I think this play might be worth checking out.

We are here in this outside-the-box venue as guests of Any Squared 2328 N Milwaukee Avenue. This is an art collective that grew out of the ashes of ARTillary, and they put on art shows such as this one in places that don't normally do them. They did an amazing job with it. There is a deejay spinning disks, real vinyl, and innovative sound performance artists coming in at regular intervals, and some really cool exhibits. The one that caught my eye was LOSS OF SPACE from the Espacio Perdido Gallery, curated by Abdi Y. Maya & Eliazabeth Farias. I had a chance to talk to Liz and went through some of the pieces from the show, a mixture of paintings, lithographs, photos, and multimedia collage. One set of photographs that was really arresting were ones by local photographer Luis Hernandez. He has this Indian Muse character, really photogenic, who inhabits three different settings. It draws the viewer in and makes you want more information.

All in all, Saturday at the Art Festival was fun and productive.

SEND OUT CARDS is a game changer for business people

2011-07-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

www.sendoutcards.com/ericlmiller

Jordan Adler calls it "the law of reciprocation" -- people experience it all the time because they took the time to send a card to somebody. It's a great business tool, a distinct way to enhance relationships and differentiate yourself from the pack.

Frank has had explosive growth at Metropolitan Bank down the street, and he was wondering out loud what he was going to do for an encore next quarter or next fiscal year. "It's in the cards!" I told him.

JUICE PLUS is an incredible system to get the fruits and vegetables you need to be essentially healthy. And SEND OUT CARDS has a variety of JUICE PLUS images to go on cards that distributors can send out to the customers, clients, and friends. This helps to effectively spread the needed message of JUICE PLUS. Karen can also use it to motivate her national team to achieve new heights in volume.

Erica told a story about how she sent a client a card and it made the recipient's week. Just imagine what could happen if you send out 1 - 3 cards daily! Over the course of a year, almost 1,000 people are positively impacted by expressions of gratitude. The end result: -- an increase in business!

A way for Jim to separate himself out from all these brokers hawking loans is to reach out to his customers and show them that he cares beyond making a fast sale. He's a holistic broker and a real cool character, and he's looking to build and maintain relationships with young people and help them achieve their dreams of home ownership. Through the cards, they become generational customers.

John could make himself memorable by sending cards to his customers and prospects thanking them for the opportunity to evaluate their property. He could send "looking forward to seeing you" cards, "forget-me-not"cards, and holiday cards that carry the message that he cares and will go the extra mile for people.

Handymen are a dime a dozen in this town, and you wouldn't want someone on your home that you didn't trust. Word of mouth is all it takes, and there is a never-ending stream of work where a majority of the houses are falling apart around here. Card sending is a way to widen the network of people you know. With sending out cards, Tom could demonstrate beyond his handyman skills that he's a cut above the rest.

The importance of a well thought-out estate plan can't be under-estimated. People lose thousands of dollars every year because they procrastinated and didn't set up a plan whilst they were healthy. And Gwen could find her potential clients using the SEND OUT CARDS system; the reach out is personal, immediate, and powerful.

In reality every business owner and professional needs to use SEND OUT CARDS. They mostly do a bad or uneven job of connecting with their customers and clients on a personal level. You, dear reader, need to experience it. Go to this web site (www.sendoutcards.com/ericlmiller) and click on number 2 to send a free card. Send the card out and see this amazing system in action!

Top 25 Forthcoming Books from the Great Lakes Region

2011-07-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

The following books represent the cream of the crop of Great Lakes regional publishing. Diverse authors, diverse subjects, diverse publishers! Happy reading!!

Univ. of Utah Pr./Poetry Foundation - BLUEPRINTS: BRINGING POETRY INTO THE COMMUNITIES
edited by Katherine Coles paperback $8.95 trade 978-1-60781-147-3 Available - Poetry

Academy Chicago - COUNTY: LIFE, DEATH, AND POLITICS AT CHICAGO'S PUBLIC HOSPITAL by David Ansell MD cloth $32.50 978-0-89733-620-8 trade Available Memoir/Medicine

Univ of Georgia Pr. - LAST DAY ON EARTH: A PORTRAIT OF THE NIU SCHOOL SHOOTER by David Vann cloth $24.95 trade 978-0-8203-3839-2 October 2011 True Crime

Intelink Pub Group - 9/11: 10 YEARS LATER by David Ray Griffin paper $18 trade 978-1-56656-868-5 September 2011 Current Affairs/Politics

Johns Hopkins Univ Pr - INVENTING IRON MAN: THE POSSIBIBILITY OF A HUMAN MACHINE by E. Paul Zehr cloth $24.95 trade 978-1-4214-0226-0 - Science

Univ. Pr. of Kansas - DEFENDING CONGRESS AND THE CONSTITUTION by Louis Fisher paper $24.95 trade 978-0-7006-1799-9 - Politics

Univ Pr. of Kansas - FISHES OF THE CENTRAL UNITED STATES 2nd edition Revised & Expanded
by Joseph R. Tomelleri paper $24.95 trade 978-0-7006-1816-3 Nature/Picture Book

Univ. Pr. of Kentucky A VOICE IN A BOX: MY LIFE IN RADIO by Bob Edwards cloth $21.95 trade 978-0-8131-3451-2 Memoir/Media

Univ Pr. of Mississippi ALAN MOORE: CONVERSATIONS edited by Eric T. Berlatsky paper $25 trade 978-1-61703-159-5 Graphic Novels/Comics

Minnesota Historical Soc Pr. THE1968 PROJECT: A NATION COMING OF AGE by Brad Zellar paper $24.95 trade 978-0-87351-842-0 US History

Univ. of Texas Pr. - GREEBACK PLANET: HOW THE DOLLAR CONQUERED THE WORLD ... by H.W. Brands cloth $24.95 trade 978-0-292-72341-2 History/Economics

Tupelo Pr. - TRAFFIC WITH MACBETH: POEMS by Larissa Szporluk (at Bowling Green St U, Ohio) paper $16.95 trade 978-1-936797-02-8 Poetry

Wayne State Univ Pr. - DETROIT LAND by Ricahrd Bak paper $24.95 tarde 978-0-8143-3499-7 Regional History

Wayne State Univ Pr. - THE STOOGES - HEAD ON by Brett Callwood Foreword by Alice Cooper paper $19.95 trade 978-0-8143-3484-3 Music/Regional

Wicker Park Pr./Lake Street Pr. BEYOND THE PEWS: BREAKING WITH TRADITON AND LETING GO OF RELIGIOUS LOCKDOWN by Jillian Maas Backman paper $16.95 trade 978-1-936181-34-6 Religion/Spirituality

NIU Pr. – CHICAGO’S TRUNK MURDER by Elizabeth Dale cloth $32 trade 978-087580-440-8 True Crime/Regional

Michigan State Univ. Pr. – LAUGHING WHITEFISH by Robert Traver paper 19.95 trade 978-1-61186-014-6 Historical Fiction/Native American

Ohio Univ. Pr. – THE MIDWESTERN NATIVE GARDEN by Charlotte Adelman paper $26.95 trade 978-0-8214-1937-3 Gardening/Regional

Ohio Univ. Pr. – THE LOCAVORE’S KITCHEN by Marilou K. Suszko (from Ohio) paper $32.95 trade 978-0-8214-1938-0 Cooking/Regional

Ohio Univ. Pr. – MARIEMONT: A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF A MODEL TOWN by Millard F. Rogers, Jr. cloth $59.95 trade 978—0-8214-1972-4

Univ. of Minnesota Pr. - WHISKEY BREAKFAST: MY SWEDISH FAMILY, MY AMERICAN LIFE by Richard C. Lindberg (set in Chicago) paper $22.95 trade 978-0-8166-4684-5 Memoir

Univ. of Michigan Pr. – FAITHFUL ONTO DEATH by Becky Thacker Paper $22.95 trade 978-0-472-03469-7 Available Fiction/Regional History

Univ. of Michigan Pr. – THE WINDWARD SHORE: A WINTER ON THE GREAT LAKES by Jerry Dennis cloth $22.95 trade 978-0-472-11816-8

Univ. of Michigan Pr. – THE ART OF COOKING MORELS by Ruth Mossok Johnson – cloth $29.95 trade 978-0-472-11784-0 Cooking

Kent State Univ. Pr. - 1950’S RADIO IN COLOR (Photos of Tommy Edwards)
By Christopher Kennedy cloth $49 trade 978-160635-072-0 Music/Photo

3iBooks is offering Chicago Poetry Center Broadsides for sale

2011-07-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

3iBooks is a moon-unit of Wicker Park Press Ltd of River Forest, IL. In an effort to re-invent itself every so often this luminous body has gone thinking outside the box yet again and has power-partnered with the Chicago Poetry Center (www.poetrycenter.org) to offer a wide variety of rare limited edition broadsides featuring prominent Poets & Writers of the modern, post-modern, and post-human era.

The Broadside is an art form dating back to the 17th century, and they were printed as a political statement or bold opinion to the citizenry. The original meaning, a barrage of cannon fire launched by one ship to another, eventually led to the connotation to "let loose" or write a strongly-worded opinion, the most famous of which were the Dunlap Broadsides, first published copies if the Declaration of Independence. This tradition led to printing poems from the oral tradition of the ballad.

Today's broadsides are printed on letterpress, illustrated by an artist, and signed and numbered by the poet and the artist.

Some of the poets with broadsides: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mark Strand, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Liesel Muller, Ted Kooser, Kay Ryan, Natalie Merchant, and Billy Corgan

Some of the painters with broadsides: Ed Paschke, Tony Fitzpatrick, Laura Letinsky, Marcos Raya, and Stanley Tigerman

Joe Dan Boyd calls "Pope Mary" a fantastic read!

2011-07-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

A Review of Gene Logsdon’s Latest Book ...
By Joe Dan Boyd

Pope Mary & The Church of Almighty Good Food, called a “barnstormer of a book” by publisher Wicker Park Press, Ltd., is the latest effort, and the third novel ($24.95, PO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305), by my great friend Gene Logsdon. We met during the mid-1960s in Philadelphia, where Gene and I shared adjoining offices at Farm Journal Magazine on Washington Square.

The heroine of this great read is a feisty Ohio farm girl, Mary Barnette, who—like most of her neighbors—is offended when a high-handed Bishop arbitrarily closes St. Philodendra, a venerable Catholic church (with $200,000 in the bank) surrounded by corn fields and with deep roots in Mary’s community. She also challenges traditional “Canon Law” by which churches can be closed, buildings and property sold (without consent of the local congregations) and attendees forced to alternate worship sites. In this case the church is both closed and locked, denying parishioners use of the building, until a midnight avenger breaks the lock.

The heroine’s officious attitude prompts Mary to suggest she could probably do as well as “that old man over there in Rome,” and is thereafter called “Pope Mary” for the balance of this carefully crafted novel exploring virtually every aspect of rural ministry from the sharply contrasting viewpoints of the hierarchy, those who administer an often arbitrary church authority and the parishioners, those who must either comply with or challenge that authority.

And challenge is the message of this novel, which also features a bi-vocational pastor/priest, Father Ray, sometimes called The Lone Ranger, who spends as much time tending his flock of sheep as he spends in ministry to his human flock. Father Ray is called both to a spiritual ministry and a personal mission to encourage local food production and marketing for the preservation of agrarianism, traditional farming and a rural lifestyle.

What Pope Mary and Father Ray eventually champion is both unorthodox by modern standards, and refreshingly familiar to scholars of the early Christian Church. Readers will either scratch their heads in puzzlement or erupt in holy jubilation as the tables are turned on the clergy hierarchy and a rural church not only survives, but also thrives.

Miguel Del Valle for Chicago Mayor

2011-02-21T23:50:00.000-08:00

It's clear that Del Valle is the best man to lead Chicago in the post-Daley years. He is the only one among the major candidates who has been elected to city-wide office as the current City Clerk. He was the first to announce his candidacy and he has stayed on message the whole time. He also is the most qualified candidate to lead city government. He was a State Senator for 20 years, and his connections in Springfield will be a huge asset to the city.

Voters need to think long and hard about who they want for the next mayor of the City of Chicago. I'm not saying that Del Valle is perfect, and it's true that he is a politician. Here is a look at Del Valle's competition, and they all pale in comparison. Rahm Emanuel is using his Washington, DC beltway experience as tool to convince voters he is best for the job, and this is a ruse. He has the most money and buys expensive television and radio ads, but he never talks directly to reporters or to the people. He's trying to appeal to Chicago's inflated sense of itself as an international city, the home of President Obama, as if that is going to help anyone in the neighborhoods. Rahm is a smart fellow and a consummate back-room deal maker, but his brash style and carpetbagger ways are only going to help him and his buddies from corporations. He has a bad record on the unions and won't represent working families and people who have to live and work in this city. Rahm is a great chief of staff and majority leader in the legislature, but he would make an autocratic and weak leader for Chicago at this critical time.

Gery Chico was leader of the city schools while my daughter was growing up. He was Daley's point man on education. It was clear to me as a parent that the Chicago Public Schools system was broken, especially when addressing the achievement gap between black and white students, and even more so when it came to special education. Chico sponsored a college prep high school on the far North Side that was referred to as Chico High because he spent lavishly on the building so his own kids could go there. Chico is ambitious and clearly out for himself, and he didn't spend enough time as city schools chief to really make a difference. It looks good on his resume, and he seems to know the way the administration of city government works, but that is not good enough for Chicago at this time.

Carol Mosley Braun pulled off a stunning upset when she became the first African American woman elected to the US Senate in 1992. She botched the opportunity badly and became a one-term senator. There is nothing in her resume that says she can effectively lead the city at this time. Each time she has the limelight she seems to use it to stir controversy, like her sadistic comments about mayoral candidate Patricia Watkins and Police Superintendent Jody Weis. With Braun the whole campaign is smoke and mirrors and the cult of personality. I think her approach has backfired and she doesn't have a chance.

Patricia Watkins and Williams "Dock" Walls III seem like they have some good ideas for Chicago and are a lot stronger African American candidates than Carol Moseley Braun. But this is Chicago politics and they are not real contenders for the position of Mayor. I like Walls the best among the candidates running against Del Valle, but I understand he doesn't have a chance to win, and Del Valle is such a strong candidate, and he has built such an impressive grassroots organization that I need to put Walls aside. He appears like perennial Presidential candidate Harold Stassen to me.

State Senator Rickey Hendon says that politics is like a marriage and you have to coexist with your chosen mate. Del Valle endorsed Daley in 2006 and paved the way to the City Clerk's office in the 2007 election. He alienated some people from his Hispanic base when he did that. Del Valle has also endorsed Patricia Horton for City Clerk, over fellow Hispanic Susana Mendoza, a State Rep from Chicago. This was definitely the right move for Del Valle. Horton is a great candidate and will make a fine City Clerk.

Bottom line is that Miguel Del Valle is highly qualified for the job of Mayor. It has nothing to do with his ethnic background. He grew up in Chicago and loves the city. He is suitably humble and hard-nosed at the same time. This is the twenty-first century folks and the candidates for Chicago Mayor look like a cross-section of America. Del Valle is progressive and will fight for the people. We need more of these kinds of leaders in this day and age. A vote for Del Valle is a vote for the future and for someone who will lead the city at a critical time in history.

Wicker Park Press -- Spring-Summer 2011 List

2011-01-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

Food with Attitude
Cooking the Cuban-Rican Way
By Chef Papi Pérez

Join celebrated Chef Papi Pérez on a unique culinary journey where exotic flavors and health-conscious food go hand-in-hand. Cuban-Rican is a fusion of two distinct Caribbean cooking styles, and in the capable hands of Chef Pérez recipes contained in this book come alive as explosions of flavor and spice.

Drawn on his own experience of foodstuffs passed down from his ancestral home in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, Chef Pérez shares his secrets for creating whole menus and truly exciting and accessible food in this dynamic and colorful cookbook. There are zesty appetizers, savory side dishes, aromatic salads, hearty main courses, and delectable desserts that bear the stamp of a master craftsman in the kitchen. “I love what I do, and I believe in what I do,” says Chef Pérez. Readers are in for a treat as they delve into such classics as sazon papas, vegan arroz gondules, Cajun hummus, award-winning Angel sweet potato pie, and the inimitable Havana Hot Plate, a creative comida of steak, garlicky yucca, and red beans and rice.
This vibrant and imaginative cookbook has a delicacy for every palate and creed, from mac ‘n cheese to wheatgrass spicy rum cake, from garlic mashed potatoes to the Pérez original peanut butter and jelly smoothie, “my kids love it,” says the epicurean maestro.

The emphasis here is on recipes that are easily prepared, healthy in composition, and incredibly tasty. The dishes herein reflect the worldview of their creator. “This is what Food with Attitude is all about,” says Chef Pérez. “It’s about taking a lot of traditional recipes and making them better. So let’s take those leftovers and turn them into a gourmet dish!”

Born in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, CHEF PAPI PÉREZ bears the distinction of being one of the only certified Kosher chefs in Chicago. He has worked as a chef for many eateries throughout Chicago, and he owned his own restaurant in the Pilsen neighborhood called Café Aorta. He has been an award-winning pie maker, menu consultant, and innovator in the kitchen for the past 25 years. Having personally cooked for a large percentage of President Obama’s White House staff, Chef Pérez is considered a world authority on Caribbean cooking. -- see http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Chef-Papi-Perez-Fan-Page/241196621426

Cloth 200 pages $27.95 ISBN 978-1-936679-00-3 August 2011 7 ½ x 9 ¼ Cooking

"Joseph G. Peterson’s Inside the Whale is a part tall tale, part tragedy, part symbolist epic. His Jim O’Connor, the disastrous hero of this work, is a whorl of grief, reckless charm and surly poetic ambition. But as fascinating as it is to watch the antiheroic O’Connor churn through misadventures, oracular bursts of poetry and failed loves, perhaps Inside the Whale’s most moving passages are about Chicago, captured in Peterson’s beautiful coda to this boisterous yarn. From first word to last, this is a book infused with spirit, heart and awe."
—Gregory Lawless author of I Thought I Was New Here

Inside the Whale
A Novel in Verse
By Joseph G. Peterson

Chicago’s own Joe Peterson is back with a strikingly original novel that is at once both mythic and fanciful. It is a narrative poem that recounts the life of Irishman Jim O’Connor, a tragic figure who was born with a preternatural gift for poetry, that brought him early fame, but he is also an alcoholic who had his first blackout drunk at 12 years of age. The stanzas of the novel recount Jim’s tragic exploits as he leaves a wake of dark destruction in his midst. The ghost of his ex-girlfriend Anne, killed in a car crash on a slick, snowy road with Jim driving after an acute drinking binge, haunt Jim to the end of his days. And in a seedy tavern on Chicago’s south-side he writes an ode to her:

would it surprise you flaxen anne if i said
you sing to me a siren call
i hear you singing like the muse
today we’re starting out but
who knows where this will take us
will it take us across the decades
or will it merely take us across town
to a motel perhaps or perhaps to another bar

Inside the Whale is a novel that, in the spirit of Beowulf, imagines a bardic drone chanting the mnemonics of rhythm and rhyme to entertain, lyre in hand, a group of ruffians gathered around a keg of beer and the red-hot coals of a dying fire.

JOSEPH G. PETERSON is the author of Beautiful Piece, a critically acclaimed novel. His new novel, Wanted: Elevator Man, will be published by Switchgrass Books in Fall 2011. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two children, where he works for a large academic publisher. See: www.josephgpeterson.com

ISBN 978-1-936679-01-0 – Paperback - $16 – 225 pages – 5 x 8 – Fiction/Poetry – May 2011

Cavafy’s Stone and Other Village Tales
by Harry Mark Petrakis

Advance praise for Cavafy’s Stone and Other Village Tales:

“The book compares favorably to the work of such short-story writers as Sholem Aleichem and Anton Chekhov.”
- Mavis Manus, Hellenic Journal

“I am reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s naturalistic accounts of coal miners in England, but even more of Thomas Hart Benton’s paintings of small-town life in the American Midwest with ordinary people “enlarged” through the brightness of color—matched in Petrakis’s case by a meticulousness of description, dialogue, and narration that renders these unknowns not just knowable but memorable."
- Peter Bien, professor of English emeritus at Dartmouth College; translator of Kazantzakis's, The Last Temptation of Christ

Cavafy’s Stone and Other Village Tales is the twenty-third book by master storyteller and award-winning novelist Harry Mark Petrakis. In its play of voices reminiscent of the Winesburg, Ohio of Sherwood Anderson, this sequence of tales from a Greek village is at once tragic, moving, and poetic. The linked stories in which the inhabitants of the village of Fanaron in central Greece spin their tangled tales of love, hate, vengeance and despair create a microcosm of the world.

The storytelling craft of Harry Mark Petrakis, praised by writers such as Elie Wiesel, Kurt Vonnegut and Isaac Bashevis Singer, is poignantly and skillfully evidenced in these tales taking place in a land where three of the world’s four great tragedians once wrote their plays.

HARRY MARK PETRAKIS is the author of twenty-three books, short-stories, and essays, and has been nominated twice for the National Book Award. He was the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair in Modern Greek Studies at San Francisco State University (1992). In 2004, the American College of Greece in Athens presented him with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree. He lives with his wife in Northwest Indiana. -- http://www.harrymarkpetrakis.com/bio.html

ISBN 978-0-9789676-5-9 – Hardcover – 5 ½ x 8 ½
$24.95 – 234 pages – Fiction – April 2011

The Girl Who Applied Everywhere
by John J. Binder

Applying to college is a rite of passage experienced by thousands of high school students every year. For Sarah Jennings, a senior at fictional Oak Stream High School in suburban Chicago who wants to attend a top university, the task is a daunting one. She comes up with the highly unorthodox idea of applying to 101 colleges around the country, including her safety school, University of Illinois. Readers will find themselves rooting for Sarah and her two classmate helpers, Carrie Wilson and Rob Taylor, as she struggles to submit all her applications by the end of December deadline.
The pressure of getting into a prestigious school can be incredibly intense in a suburban environment. Worried about his own chances, Rob decides on a new, bizarre strategy. Embracing his Native American heritage, he changes his name from Rob Taylor to Running Elk Taylor; he then reapplies to the schools he has already applied to by submitting identical materials while listing his ethnicity as Native American. Rob ends up getting into many colleges that might have otherwise rejected him. While Carrie, Sarah’s other friend, contends with undue pressure from her mother who went to MIT, and who sees her going there as a fulfillment of a multi-generational legacy. There is no question in Carrie’s mother’s mind where she will go. But Carrie has other ideas.

In the strange world of college admissions it becomes clear that acceptance decisions are based on all kinds of things beyond the applicant’s academic ability. Because she is famous due to media coverage of her application odyssey, Sarah gets admitted by most of the schools she applied to. Then comes the really hard part, where to go? And herein lies the moral to this spirited and entertaining novel.

JOHN J. BINDER is a faculty member and former administrator at a university in the Chicago area. His previous book, The Chicago Outfit, deals with rackets other than higher education. He wrote this book partly to help put his children through college.

ISBN 978-1-936679-02-7 – Hardcover - 5 ½ x 8 ½
$19.95 – 160 pages – Fiction/Young Adult - April 2011

Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food
by Gene Logsdon

"Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food is a wicked satire of religion and small-town oddballs."
- Barbara McIntyre, Akron Beacon Journal

Vinal County, Ohio is a place where corn is king and soybeans are a distant cousin. The spires of regal Catholic churches rise out of the farm landscape and are living manifestations to the faith of God-fearing farm families who contributed to the collection plate every Sunday for generations. Little changes as seasons’ progress, until one day the higher-ups in Rome decide to shut down these churches and make way for some good old-fashioned 21st century style efficiency. A mini-revolution occurs in the churchyard of St Philodendra’s; the lock on the venerable church door is shattered, leaving it swinging in the wind, and the sanctuary open to all. A cast of zany characters populate this romp, from Mary Barnette who dubs herself Pope, to the horse-riding, sheep-tending priest Fr. Ray, to a greedy parish priest who tries to cash in on the ethanol boom, to a group of Catholic royalists calling themselves the Defenders of the Door.

The original contrary farmer himself ruminates on the nature of religion and belief in this barnstormer of a book. Razor sharp satire, flawless characterization, telling dialogue, and formidable comic situations make this third novel by veteran farm and nature writer Logsdon a must-read.

Gene Logsdon lives and raises sheep in north central Ohio with his wife, Carol. He is the author of 26 books, including The Lords of Folly (published by Wicker Park Press), The Mother of All Arts, You Can Go Home Again, The Contrary Farmer, The Pond Lovers, and All Flesh is Grass.

ISBN 978-0-9789676-4-2 – Hardcover – 6 x 9
$24.95 – 200 pages – Fiction – April 2011

The Book of Raymond
A Journey from Prison to Praise and Poetry
by Raymond Richard

Raymond Richard tells it like it is in a powerful collection of poems that are electrifying, terrifying, and awe-inspiring. Richard has been to the big house, lived in poverty on the streets of Chicago, and took to crime and drugs to survive. Here is poetry that literally crackles off the page. Richard is the real deal. He has put his life back together against almost insurmountable odds. He’s back to tell his story in poems that are honest, heart-breaking, violent, and tender. This book is a thoroughly unique look at how religious experience can transform lives for the better.

The Ghetto

...for I have seen violence and strife in the city. Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof; mischief also and sorrow are in the midst of it. Wickedness is in the midst thereof; deceit and guile depart not from her streets. Psalms 55: 9b-11

Growing up in the ghetto
Broke dreams was all I seen,
From athletes, entertainers, lawyers, doctors and teachers,
All becoming fiends,
Still hear the families scream
As their loved ones lie dead
With a hole in their head,
On the streets another life gone,
This can’t go on.

Police and paramedics arrive on the scene
Too late to do anything,
Nobody is talking,
Don’t want to get involved
Senseless murders go unsolved
Black on black crime
Or gang violence is what its called.

The media report its government support
Its “case closed” that’s the way they want it.
Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior
Never intended for us to live this way,
Satan led us astray.

Strung out mother’s
Locked up fathers,
A child is born with no one to guide them,
So they turn to the gangs,
The gangs become their family,
Only because parents didn’t live up to their responsibilities.
No one was there to teach them the facts of life,
Violence has become a way of life.

RAYMOND RICHARD lives in Chicago and he has devoted his life to helping men and women put their lives back together after incarceration. He has founded Returning Citizens, a nonprofit organization that empowers former prisoners through job training, literature, and the power of the spoken word.

ISBN 978-0-9789676-7-3 – Paperback – 5 ½ x 8 ½
$15.95 – 68 pages – Poetry/Religion – Now Available

Here, There Are No Sarahs
A Woman’s Courageous Fight against the Nazis and Her Bittersweet Fulfillment of the American Dream
by Sonia Shainwald Orbuch and Fred Rosenbaum
“Here, There Are No Sarahs is especially salient because it deals with little known phenomena of Jews who fought back and explores the difficult role of women in the resistance … uncommonly frank.”
- Michael Berenbaum, Founding Director, United States Holocaust Museum

From a frail teen hiding in German-occupied Poland to a fighter in the forests with the Soviet Partisans…

Stripped of her name, 18 year-old Sonia Shainwald went to war without basic training, without equipment, without food, or any of the essentials necessary to fight the Germans. Urging her family and neighbors to leave a wretched hiding place during the liquidation of their ghetto, she and her parents and uncle spent a brutal winter in the forest. There she joined the Fyodorov partisans and resisted Nazi oppression. After the liberation, her family spent three years in a Displaced Persons camp near Frankfurt, and eventually reached America.

SONIA SHAINWALD ORBUCH was born and raised in Lubomi, Poland. In 1945, she married Holocaust survivor Isaak Orbuch and the couple had two children. She currently lives in the Bay Area and is active in numerous Jewish organizations in New York and California.

ISBN: 978-0-9789676-8-0 – Paperback - $17.95
5 ½ X 8 ½ - 276 pages – Illustrated - Judaica/World War II/Autobiogtaphy – February 2011

Also Available
Taking Risks
A Jewish Youth in the Soviet Partisans and His Unlikely Life in California
by Joseph Pell and Fred Rosenbaum
ISBN 978-0-9789676-9-7 – Paperback - $15.95
5 ½ x 8 ½ - 228 pages – Illustrated - Judaica/World War II

Out on a Ledge
Enduring the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Beyond
by Eva Libitzky and Fred Rosenbaum

“Eva Libitzky’s personal story … opens a valuable window with frank discussions of the traumas and stresses of suffering and survival.”
- Robert Moses Shapiro, Professor of Judaic Studies, Brooklyn College

An account of one woman’s uncommon resourcefulness and perseverance, this book uncovers some of the secrets of Jewish suffering and survival in the twentieth century. Related in her plainspoken voice, it will be of consider¬able interest to scholars and the general public.

This book owes much to a trove of documents on the Holocaust, 150 million pages that were recently digitized and made accessible to researchers by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Fred Rosenbaum was among a team of twelve scholars assembled by the USHMM to examine the archive in summer, 2009. It revealed a great deal of information about Eva Libitzky, and her times. Original documents, including transport lists, medical records, and identity cards are reproduced in the appendix of this volume.

EVA LIBITSKY was born in Lodz, Poland, where she was confined by the Nazis for over four years in Europe’s most impenetrable and longest-lasting ghetto. She was later tortured at Auschwitz-Birkenau, enslaved in the Oederan munitions factory, and quarantined in There¬sienstadt during a typhus epidemic. In 1946, she married Martin Libitzky in a DP camp near Munich. The Libitzkys immigrated to America in 1949. They live in Florida where Eva speaks to groups about her wartime experiences.

FRED ROSENBAUM is the author of numerous books in Jewish history, his most recent book is Cosmopolitans: A Social and Intellectual History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area.

ISBN 978-0-9789676-3-5 – Paperback - $16.95
5 ½ x 8 ½ - 276 pages – Illustrated - Judaica/World War II/Autobiography Available

The Uncanny Valley
Waxworks Photographs of Eleftheria Lialios
by Eleftheria Lialios
Introduction by Dan Georgakis
Text and Notes by Hatto Fischer
Poetry by Vincent Berquez

“ART is a lie that makes us realize TRUTH.”
– Pablo Picasso

The very nature of representation is on graphic display in these outrageous color photographs by veteran multimedia artist Eleftheria Lialios. The color photographs in this book were taken in various wax museums from Cyprus, Greece, London, Paris, and Berlin. They were taken with a regular film 35 mm camera, and were shot “on the fly.” As part of a tour group traveling through a wax museum, Lialios was one of the crowd and did not have time to compose a photograph or implement special lighting. She took the photograph, and later worked with her assembled images.

The wax figures that populate this book form a facsimile of humanity, a representation of life, graphically displayed. The cult of celebrity and the reflexive recognition of historical figures compiled in this book add to its overall unreality, or surreality. Lialios is an artist with an agenda to make readers look inward at themselves as raw observers, she asks us implicitly, what is the quality of our own gaze? What preconceived ideas do we bring along with us?

What is especially uncanny about this book is its ability to entertain, inform, and shock readers all at the same time. As a functional work of art, this collection of photographs challenges more than our expectations and goes right to the heart of what it means to be human, and even post-human.

Eleftheria Lialios is an international artist: -- she’s a filmmaker, a photographer, and is experienced in making photographic transparencies and using them in installations. Appropriately, Lialios’ first name means “freedom” in Greek, which is what many of her friends call her. From immigrant scholar to political artist, Lialios made her art world debut in the late 1970s and has gained notoriety ever since. Born in 1956 in Ioannina, Greece, her family, Greek refugees from Albania, migrated to Canada and then to the United States, where Lialios completed her undergraduate degree at Wayne State University. Early in her career, she won numerous awards and grants, including the prestigious Fulbright Scholar grant in 1986. From 1988 – 2010 she was Associate Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently resides in Paris.

ISBN 978-0-9789676-6-6 – Paperback - $35.00
10 x 10 - 120 pages – Photography (color) - September 2011

ISBN 978-0-888160-75-8 – Cloth (laminated) - $65.00
10 x 10 - 120 pages – Photography (color) - September 2011

Carbon- Free and Nuclear- Free
A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, Updated Edition IEER PRESS
by Arjun Makhijani

“Argun has produced a study which fulfills my greatest hopes – an urgent action plan to move Earth in a dignified way out of intensive care.”
- Helen Caldicott, M.D., President, Nuclear Policy Research Institute

This important book shows how energy needs can be met by alternative sources: -- wind, solar, biomass, microalgae, and geothermal are all part of a comprehensive solution. In a world confronting global climate change and other critical issues, the U.S. must assume a leadership role in moving towards a zero-C02 emissions energy economy. This book is a blueprint for bringing America closer to energy independence and environmental safety.

ARGUN MAKHIJANI is an engineer and President of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).

ISBN 978-0-9645168-2-3 – Paperback – 5 ½ x 8 ½
$17.95 – 265 pages – Science/Environmental Studies – February 2011

Joe Peterson's INSIDE THE WHALE is lauded by fellow author

2011-01-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

"From first word to last, this is a book infused with spirit, heart and awe."
—Gregory Lawless

INSIDE THE WHALE: A NOVEL IN VERSE
by Joe Peterson
ISBN 978-1-936679-01-0
Paperback $16 5 x 8 Release date: April 2011
--
Joseph G. Peterson
is the author of the novel,
"Beautiful Piece"
http://www.josephgpeterson.com

Let's not wait until we smell the corpse on this one...

Gene Logsdon's new novel, POPE MARY & THE CHURCH OF ALMIGHTY GOOD FOOD reviewed in Akron Beacon Journal

2010-12-21T19:40:00.001-08:00

Another person Kline quotes in his book is Gene Logsdon. The self-styled ''contrary farmer'' writes and blogs about sustainable agriculture and living in a ''sort of hostile harmony with the wild food chain.'' His nonfiction books have covered topics like organic whole grains and the relationship of alcohol and farming. His new novel Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food is a wicked satire of religion and small-town oddballs.

The central character is Father Ray Tulley, a modern-day circuit riding-priest who is quite satisfied with being assigned to the joint pastorage of two rural churches, as it will enable him to live in the country with a large garden and small flock of sheep, which interests him as much as his vocation does. The farmers markets he has added to each church's summer festivals have been popular, and Ray is happy to have encouraged the local economy.

But trouble is on the horizon. The bishop has told Father Ray that his parishes are going to be ''clustered,'' or merged into a third parish. Already, the door to one church has been locked, and at the beginning of the book an unseen person has broken the lock in defiance.

Just arrived back in Vinal County is Mary Barnette, who's been working in a Chicago commodities brokerage. She's a nonbeliever, but so self-assured that her family recruits her to be their spokesperson in a meeting Ray is holding about the situation. The confrontation does nothing but cause the church members to choose up sides: Those who will do whatever the bishop says, and those considering suing the church.

Logsdon's characters demonstrate greed, fanaticism, enterprise and a variety of other rustic traits. Mary's enlightenment is Logsdon's point: ''Small churches shutting down in favor of large ones was a reflection of the same kind of economy that shut down small farms in favor of large ones.''

Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food (193 pages, hardcover) costs $24.95 from Wicker Park Press. Gene Logsdon lives in Upper Sandusky.
— Barbara McIntyre
Special to the Beacon Journal

In Memorandum – Paul C Williams, 1959 – 2010

2010-08-24T01:52:00.000-07:00

The world of publishing lost a giant yesterday when Paul C Williams past away at the tender age of 51. As operating director of the small publishing house Bunim & Bannigan, Paul developed an artistic vision of publishing house that offered “books for general and academic readers that embody progressive ideas, including contemporary fiction, literature, classics, children’s books, politics, philosophy & religion, and personal wellness.”

Paul had a leader's vision and energy, and his commitment to producing and distributing quality literature never wavered. He had deep integrity about his business practices. As the Executive Director of the National Association of Independent Publishers Representatives (NAIPR), Paul was proactive in reforming and streamlining that organization so that it ran seamlessly. Independent reps across the country owe Paul a debt of gratitude as he shored up the finances of NAIPR and spearheaded an innovative electronic ordering system that saved countless hours for reps and booksellers alike. His legacy will live on as this system, Frontlist Plus Universal, will continue to serve the book selling community, saving time and money and being brilliant in its simplicity and execution.

Paul had an impressive background as a bookseller. He starting out with Encore Books in Philadelphia in the 1980s, he moved onto Doubleday Bookshops in New York. He was sales manager at the publishing company Rizzoli, and then for Routledge, and Thompson. He knew the old legendary commission sales reps like George Scheer, Oscar Schonenfeld, and Ned Melman, and he had a deep respect for them. He maintained a membership for a time at the venerable Players Club in Manhattan (http://www.theplayersnyc.org/members/). His apartment at Stuyvesant Town on East 14th Street was always open to friends and colleagues. He was a gourmet cook, a wicked sushi chef, and a true renaissance man.

Paul was not adverse to taking risks. In the 1990s he founded Herodias, an eclectic publishing company that was a precursor to the current Bunim & Bannigan. One of the great books that Paul was responsible for was Art, Music and Education As Strategy for Survival: Theresienstadt 1941-45 by Anne Dutlinger, published in cooperation with the Payne Gallery of Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This is an incredible book which is a testimony to the power of the arts to sustain life under the most brutal and inhuman conditions imaginable. It collected for the first time in one volume the children's art of Theresienstadt concentration camp in World War II, unpublished work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, and historical photographs, as well as numerous essays of interest to historians, art educators/therapists, and Holocaust scholars: – providing an important new interdisciplinary approach to exploring the power of art to teach, express, commemorate, and perhaps, most importantly, to heal.

I know that this book was one of Paul's personal favorites. The business of Herodias didn't work out, and Paul ultimately lost control of the inventory. But this setback didn't stop him from continuing to pursue his dreams of being a publisher. Paul made adjustments to his business and started B&B on a less grandiose scale. He learned important lessons running Herodias, and these served him well in developing the list for B&B, and for the business of NAIPR, where he made himself irreplaceable.

Highlights from the B&B list include Daniel Berrigan's, A Sunday in Hell: Fables & Poems, Eliot Asinof's dynamic novel Final Judgment, and a new translation of the classic 19th century novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, translated from the Russian by Stephen Pearl, with an introduction by Galya Diment, and a foreword by Tatyana Tolstaya. These books and others were consistently of the highest quality and had Paul's trademark style of being a book for the ages to come.

What more can I say? I've lost a dear friend and a dynamic colleague. Paul was a smart and enthusiastic practitioner in publishing and in life. A dedicated family man, a world traveler, a marvelous cook and host, a true friend. Paul will be sorely missed.

State Sen. Rickey Hendon's book BACKSTABBERS makes the New York Times

2010-08-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

August 6, 2010 New York Times

Settling Scores and Looking Out for No. 1, Hendon-Style
By JAMES WARREN
James Warren is a columnist for the Chicago News Cooperative

As President Obama was back in town Thursday, in part to raise millions of dollars, Rickey R. Hendon, a k a Hollywood Hendon, was surely green with envy. The qualms of Mr. Hendon, the West Side state senator, about his onetime colleague have been thinly veiled and are now memorialized in his unbridled political primer, “Backstabbers: The Reality of Politics.”

“A wannabe will usually try to form a clique within your organization, a small group of people who band together against you,” wrote Mr. Hendon, a Democrat who besides a life in politics also fancies himself a musician-filmmaker. “There was a time when President Barack Obama was a part of Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer’s organization.”

“She got kicked off the ballot by members of that organization, and Obama became their candidate,” he wrote. “The rest is history. I know Senator Palmer, and I know she feels as if someone stabbed her in the back.”

Well, Mr. Obama gets treated just a tad more charitably than Emil Jones, the former State Senate president, of whom Mr. Hendon wrote, “He stabbed me in the back on the way out the door, after my years of loyalty.” Or Maria Pappas, the Cook County treasurer, whose first campaign Mr. Hendon ran. He wrote that she “dropped me and many of her close friends as soon as she won” the treasurer job.

Or Senator Roland W. Burris, whom Mr. Hendon said let him down more than anyone else when Mr. Burris did not support him for lieutenant governor in the Democratic primary in February, which was won, briefly, by Scott Lee Cohen. Or an unnamed Hispanic political organization that “played games and did not help me” in the primary.

But those are mere asides in a street-level, how-to guide by an author as hot and raucous as Mr. Obama is cool and restrained. Mr. Hendon’s world is all tactics, scant policy and driven by all-consuming suspicions and a craving to bring home the pork.

His credo is that one has no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.
“Watch those whom you trust, including even your family and friends,” he wrote. It’s shaft or be shafted, a somewhat less aspirational notion than what took Mr. Obama to the White House.

Mr. Hendon’s book provides local political wannabes with a tour d’horizon of the game, at least as played in his neck of the woods, including pages of dos and don’ts of petition drives. For example, it advises aspiring candidates to personally double check that their petition circulators aren’t producing “garbage.”
There are tips on the best places for billboards and posters; on rehearsing for debates in front of a mirror but not feeling compelled to answer a moderator’s questions; on using low-cost buffets for fund-raisers rather than pricey sit-downs; and on how to uncover “saboteurs” and “informants” in your organization.
When it comes to a politician’s most important moment — Election Day — the stylistic devotee of the upper case urges candidates not only to “GRAB SOME LAST MINUTE CASH” to have on hand, but also to be wily in procuring the favor of election judges, especially in a close race.

“If you’re in a situation where you must do these kinds of things, remember that men will let their guard down with attractive women, especially if the woman flirts with him and pretends to like him.”

No one, certainly not any board of elections, can be trusted. “IF THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH CHEATING YOU, THEY WILL CHEAT YOU,” Mr. Hendon wrote.

Published by Academy Chicago Publishers, the book concludes with a self-pitying passage in which Mr. Hendon calls his February loss the day “my political life ended.” But he is serving out his State Senate term and may well run for re-election, “to protect my district from the vultures who lie in wait for my political carcass.”

His unfettered rhetoric is in sync with a man who once asked a female colleague on the Senate floor if she was a “true blonde.” His West Side office is festooned with giant blow-ups of state checks he has arranged for churches, businesses and individuals.

If only it had been him, not Mr. Obama, to have soared from the muck of the state legislature, imagine a different course for America — or just the parceling out of federal stimulus dollars.

One can imagine a President Hendon, “Hollywood” style, repaving every street in the Fifth District and proudly buying a Cadillac Escalade for each of his old precinct workers — though not necessarily in that order.

Larry W Green to be featured artist/author at National Kidney Foundation Gift of Life Gala

2009-11-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

Larry W Green, author of Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy (2007, Wicker Park Press -- www.wickerparkpress.com) will be a featured artist at the 24th Annual Gift of Life Gala. They will feature Larry's colorful paintings and his book

Gift of Life Gala Saturday, November 14, 2009
Navy Pier Grand Ballroom | Chicago, Illinois
For more information go to: http://www.nkfi.org/ and scroll down to Upcoming Events and Programs

Images from forthcoming book, THE UNCANNY VALLEY: WAXWORKS PHOTOGRAPHS by ELEFTHERIA LIALIOS

2009-10-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5398089607681945090" />

Happy Halloween from Wicker Park Press Ltd: -- proudly announcing the 2010 publication of THE UNCANNY VALLEY: WAXWORKS PHOTOGRAPHS OF ELEFTHERIA LIALIOS
By Eleftheria Lialios
Introduction by Dan Georgakas
Text and Captions by Hatto Fischer
Bibliographic information to come ...

Biography of the author/artist can be found here: http://fnewsmagazine.com/2005-dec/faculty.html

Revisiting WATER TANKS OF CHICAGO by Larry W Green

2009-10-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

This book continues to sell and generate wide interest. People get really emotional about this book. Here is an online review I uncovered from the online version of FOREWORD MAGAZINE in November 2007:

Photography. WATER TANKS OF CHICAGO: A VANISHING URBAN LEGACY by Larry W. Green (Wicker Park Press, 37 b/w photographs, 50 pages, softcover, $19.95, 978-0-9789676-0-4): digital photographs and paintings depicting the art of historic tanks, iconic symbols of the city; preservationists and architectural enthusiasts are concerned about saving their distinct grand beauty and stark expediency.

Key titles forthcoming in Fall 2009

2009-10-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

Nibble & Kuhn: A Novel, David Schmahmann Academy Chicago, Nov 09
ISBN 978-0-89733-592-8, $24.95, Cloth, Fiction
A legal thriller set in Boston; Robert B Parker calls it a “great book!”

Never Trust a Thin Cook, Eric Dregni, Univ. of Minnesota, Sept 09
ISBN 978-0-8166-6745-1, $22.95, Cloth, Travel/Memoir/Cuisine
The author of In Cod We Trust goes to Italy & learns culinary lessons

Triple Time: Stories, Anne Sanow, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Aug 09
ISBN 978-08229-4380-8, $24.95, Cloth, Fiction/Short Stories
2009 Drue Heinz Award -- fascinating tales set in Saudi Arabia

The Last of His Mind, John Thorndike, Swallow Press, Dec 09
ISBN 978-08040-1122-8, $24.95, Cloth, Memoir/Health
Bittersweet account of a son’s final year with his father; a candid portrait
of Alzheimer’s Disease

Kevin Kling’s Holiday Inn, Kevin Kling, Borealis Books, Nov 09
ISBN 978-0-87351-766-9, $22.95, Cloth, Essays/Humor
A playful romp through a year of holidays from the bestselling author of
The Dog Says How

Deadly Voyage: The SS Daniel J Merell Tragedy, Andrew Kantar,
Michigan State Univ. Sept 09, ISBN 978-0-87013-863-8, $16.95, Paper, History
The harrowing story of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history

What Comes Down to US: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, Jeff Worley,
Univ. Press of KY, Nov 09, ISBN 978-0-8031-2557-2, Cloth, Poetry
An accomplished collection of KY poets including Wendell Berry, Nikki Finney & James Baker Hall

Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples, Karine Moe, Univ of Georgia, Oct
ISBN 978-0-8203-3404-2, $19.95, Paper, Women Studies/Current Events
A comprehensive and provocative account of the opt-out revolution

Inside Fallujah, Ahmed Mansour, Interlink, Sept 09
ISBN 978-1-56656-778-7, $20.00, Paper, Politics/Middle East/Current Events
A courageous work of journalism by one of the few reporters on the gorund during the US siege of Fallujah in 2004

Hold Onto Your Dreams: Arthur Russell Tim Lawrence, Duke Univ. Nov 09
ISBN 978-0-8223-4485-8, $23.95, Paper, Music/Biography
The first biography of musician and composer Russell, one of the most important but least-known contributors to the NY C downtown scene in the 1970s and 80s

Wrong Place, Wrong Time is a timely analysis of young Black men's lives

2009-10-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

John A Rich is a medical doctor from Boston's inner city. He managed to escape bad odds and create an impressive life for himself. And he's also written a great book here - Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men (Johns Hopkins UP, Dec 09, 978-0-8018-9363-6). It's all in the first-person, which makes the writing style accessible, and you can see the author's point-of-view throughout the book. Rich relates the stories of Black men such as Roy, a sensitive young man from the streets of Jamaica Plain in Boston, who Rich met in what's called pre-release, a kind of halfway house between jail and freedom. Rich talks to Roy and engages him in a fundamental way so he can be inspired to turn his life around. The stories related here are fascinating, and they teach us compassion and the ability to look deeper to the real people who are struggling with trauma and perpetual violence in their communities. He lets them speak for themselves, and their voices are eloquent. This is a needed book and hopefully will reach a wide audience.

University of Texas Press issues English-language translation of a modern Mexican classic

2009-06-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers, by Gonzalo Celorio
Translated from Spanish by Dick Gerdes, Foreword by Rubén Gallo

The world comes crashing down at the very center of the Mexican universe as the hero of this contemporary novel by scholar Celorio feels his life ebb away from excessive drinking and an inexplicable gunshot wound. He lies naked and vulnerable at the base of the flagpole that supports the huge red, white and green ensign, in the very midst of Mexico City’s own version of Tiananmen Square called the Zocalo.

The hero and the reader can see the irony of his situation in the predawn hours in the abandoned main square: -- dying utterly alone in the most populous city in the world. Statues in the Main Cathedral start to come loose from their perches where they have stood since the Spanish tore down the immense Aztec Pyramid and used the stones to build the vast Zocalo. Our hero is getting swept away much like the native culture of Mexico was by the colonists. In many ways it’s his own damn fault, but you get the sense reading this incredibly urbane and profane novel that essential history is being forgotten with the passing of our hapless hero. And especially Mexico City itself, the downtown area (El Centro) of which is also a main character in the book; Mexico City is found to be hurling itself forward into an unknown oblivion, its past crushed and relegated to mere garbage.

And let the earth tremble at its centers is a line from the Mexican national anthem. You have the idea of rebirth and redemption when you walk along the dark and seedy confines of the Zona Historico in Mexico City with our well-read and knowledgeable hero. It’s all so uncertain, but Celorio is a master storyteller and the reader is riveted by our hero’s fateful walk through history, and then onto the next world.

Dick Gerdes and University of Texas Press have done English readers an immense favor by bringing this stark and original novel to print.

Northern Illinois University Press to debut new fiction series

2009-06-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

NIU Press is taking a departure into fiction with the establishment of a new series called Switchgrass Books - http://www.switchgrass.niu.edu/switchgrass/ - and they are billing it as “authentic voices of the Midwest.” One of the first books in the intriguing new series is by Chicagoan Joseph G. Peterson, called Beautiful Piece. What follows is a brief review of this book:

Plinking at the dump

Joe Peterson hits a bull’s-eye with his new novel, Beautiful Piece. The narrator of this stark tale, set during a brutal heat wave in Chicago, acquires a Glock 10 mm automatic almost by accident and through sheer happenstance. “Odd, a gun,” he says. “I wouldn’t own a gun even if I could.” But that’s not all he comes to own, as he takes up a torrid affair with Lucy, a girl he meets at the gas station in the middle of a blistering hot day. Problem is that Lucy is engaged to another man, a certain Matthew Gliss, who the narrator, named Robert, knows and likes. This realization of love is new to Robert, who finds himself at thirty-five years old living alone in a one bedroom dump, as he calls his apartment, and desperately lonely.

The unrelenting heat of the Chicago summer goes a little bit to Robert’s head and he starts fantasizing about dying alone in his one bedroom dump. His upstairs neighbor, simply called the Vet, also lives alone. The Vet is severely damaged from his tours of Vietnam during that war. These two unlikely types form an alliance, and they agree to call each other every morning just to make sure each one is still alive. Robert has a rough time getting along with the Vet, who is so much older and worldly wise, but comes to respect and admire him with all his eccentricities. Robert has another friend named Epstein. Epstein is a mystic who can turn into a stone while they go fishing on the Des Plaines River. Epstein is well-adjusted and has a wife and kids, and lives in a different world from Robert. Robert has Epstein call him up every third morning just in case he was to expire from the heat and no one would know. This is his contingency plan to stay connected with the outside world.

Robert goes to the dump on the outskirts of town with the Vet to go plinking with the Glock. There is a certain poetic meaning to the way the gun goes off and rearranges everything. The Vet loves the mechanicals, and Robert starts to rethink his relationship with the world. His instincts tell him to try and be more like the mystical Epstein and try to be one with the natural world, but his love for Lucy upends everything for him.

There is a wry humor and interesting sentence construction that make up this raw tale of urban lost souls. There is a compulsive repeating of information and unorthodox narrative construction that reminded me of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. It’s more than just a stylistic exercise in fiction writing; Peterson has something fundamental to say about human nature here, and the tale is funny and heartbreakingly wise.

Printed catalogs are vital to the publishing process

2009-02-20T07:30:00.000-08:00

American Association of University Presses (AAUP) President Alex Holzman recently sent an email message to his colleagues concerning seasonal catalogs where he states he is “utterly befuddled” by why his fellow university presses bother to print them. The color ink used in the catalogs is pretty, Holzman says, but is a complete waste of money, and he castigates the university presses for being behind the times by still issuing catalogs on paper. “Do folks genuinely find that more beautiful catalogues lead to better sales? To better acquisitions? To better university relations? Can you quantify that somehow?” The economic rationale of Holzman’s argument seems to hinge on the fact that university administrations would applaud the cost savings of eliminating catalogs, therefore slashing marketing budgets, and there would be very little collateral damage because independent bookstores are going the way of the Dodo, and the reps who call on these bookstores are just as behind the times as the marketing departments at the university presses whom they represent for continuing the use of paper catalogs as essential sales tools.

I am one of the sales reps for Temple University Press where Holzman is currently the director. I have no recollection of howling in protest over his suggestion, as he stated was the case with his reps, but I have to say that with all due respect that paper catalogs reflect the essential character of a university press, and I have yet to see a better alternative for selling books than the use of a catalog, color or not. Furthermore, the catalog transcends the mundane process of selling books to retailers, librarians, wholesalers, and teachers: it serves multiple purposes such as list development, publicity, and public relations. A catalog enhances the personal expression of the authors whose books are listed there. A catalog expresses the worldview and outlook of the publisher, be it programmatic or a special series of books that the publisher is developing. It’s there for the world to see in a cohesive, integrated format that has stood the test of time.

A publisher can lose creative control over the development process when you take catalogs out of the mix. One could argue that the dissemination of information is now relegated to the Internet, ceded to Google, to Microsoft, to Intel, to Amazon.com, and to the electric utilities powering computers, polluting the air with coal-burning power plants. There is a political element to this that should not be ignored. How are various books represented in culture? Who controls the process of how books are distributed, digested, and reviewed in the greater quotidian? The cost to the publisher should not be measured here in money saved or set-aside, but in something greater, something more important, and something akin to saving their souls.

My guess is that the bound book itself will be next on the digital hit list, and university presses will be harshly criticized down the road for not saving money by going exclusively digital with their offerings. With Pandora’s box thrown open, ultimately we need to ask: what is the role of a university press in the world today?

Midwest Book Review cites Tom Palazolo's At Maxwell Street

2009-02-15T16:05:00.000-08:00

The Photography Shelf
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/feb_09.htm#photography
At Maxwell Street
Tom Palazzolo
Wicker Park Press PO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305-5318
9780978967611, $45.00, http://www.wickerparkpress.com/

Chicago's Maxwell Street had its beginnings as an old-world style European market place in the 19th century and evolved into Chicago's official open-air market in the 20th century as a tri-part combination of sidewalk storefront shops, curbside vending sheds, and vending plywood table-tops on wooden horses lining each side of the street. A pedestrian only area because of the density of vendors, Maxwell Street was a true Chicago and enduring cultural landmark. Now in "At Maxwell Street: Chicago's Historic Marketplace Recalled In Words And Photographs" by Tom Palazzolo, we are provided with a wealth of black-and-white captioned images along with informative commentaries by Lori Grove, Jack Helbig, Lionel Bottari, Linda Platt, and others. Enhanced with an accompanying DVD, At Maxwell Street is an especially recommended addition to personal, community, and academic library Photogaphy and American History reference collections in general, and Chicago History supplemental reading lists in particular.

St Lawrence Seaway’s 50th Anniversary Inspires Two New Books

2009-02-05T20:44:00.000-08:00

You can look at the St Lawrence Seaway from a number of perspectives. You can see it as a spectacular feat of engineering, a brash and bold opening of world trade routes across the North American continent, or as an unmitigated ecological disaster. Jeff Alexander takes the last view in his book, Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway ($29.95, 416 pages, ISBN 978-0-87013-857-7, Michigan State University Press). Alexander pulls no punches in his book, and shows how the opening of waterways reeked havoc on the Great Lakes as invasive foreign species moved in along with the trading vessels from the high seas. Eric Reeves, a former Coast Guard Staff Officer for the Great Lakes ballast-monitoring program, says Alexander’s book, “tells the twisted story of this exotic disaster – and the story of our abject failure to prevent it.”

In a 2004 article in the Star Tribune, Few ships checked for invasive species, writer Tom Meersman spells it out, “These untested ships -- nearly 3,500 since 1995 -- are loaded with cargo, rather than ballast water. In theory, their nearly empty ballast tanks shouldn't be teeming with foreign creatures. But they are, scientists have discovered. Even ships with nearly empty ballast tanks can carry millions of tiny invaders in residual water and mud that can end up dumped into Great Lakes ports. Once established in the world's largest freshwater lake chain, an invader like the European round goby can become a permanent resident, out-eating, out-reproducing and overpowering native species. Two-thirds of the 79 non-native species discovered in the lakes since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959 almost certainly arrived in ballast tanks, according to recent U.S. and Canadian research analyzed by the Star Tribune.” http://www.greatlakesdirectory.org/ny/061604_great_lakes.htm

And so it seems that ocean freighters are laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, and little was done has been done about it. Alexander is an award-winning writer, and author of a previous Michigan State book, The Muskegon: The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan’s Rarest River. He blends science with first-hand accounts in a readable, journalistic style.

The St Lawrence Seaway may be bad news for the wondrous lakes on both sides of the United States-Canadian border, but the story of its construction is well-told by Calire Puccia Parham, a history instructor at Siena College in Loudonville, NY. The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project: An Oral History of the Greatest Construction Show on Earth ($34.95, 328 pages, 40 b/w illustrations, ISBN 978-0-8156-0913-1, Syracuse University Press) is a vivid tribute to the hard work and dedication of the project’s 22,000 workers. It was a phenomenal feat of engineering and manufacturing, and involved unprecedented cooperation between the governments of the United States and Canada.

The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project consisted of a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St Lawrence River. Perham’s book draws on first-hand accounts of various engineers, laborers, and carpenters who built the Seaway in 1959. This book offers a human side to the massive international public works project. Perham is an expert on the history of the area, and she wrote a previous book on two towns that are separated by the St. Lawrence River: in Canada, Cornwall, Ontario, and in the United States, Massena, New York. The book is From Great Wilderness to Seaway Town (State University of New York Press) and offers various perspectives on the people inhabiting the area. Her new book is tells an important and almost forgotten story of how the St. Lawrence Seaway came to be built, and vividly recounts the experiences of the people who labored to make it a reality.

Tom Palazzolo captures Maxwell Street Market in his Unique Lens

2009-01-31T13:06:00.000-08:00

Steve Balkin, professor of Economics at Roosevelt University in Chicago, had this to say to Tom Palazzolo, compiler and editor of At Maxwell Street: Chicago's Historic Marketplace Recalled in Words and Photographs:

" I was very impressed with your book. Of all the photographers that shot the Maxwell Street area, your photos best capture the soul and spirit of the place. They are works of art -- the subject matter and the photographs. It was the last place that connected the old world to the new, a remarkable place of authentic folk culture. I appreciate your sensitivity to Maxwell Street's gritty urban beauty. You are a hero for history. But for all the bastards that destroyed Maxwell Street, they should spend eternity in Schaumburg. "
-- http://faculty.roosevelt.edu/balkin/

And also, the following excerpted comments about this book:

"His book serves as a historic record about the phenomenon that was Maxwell Street … To see Maxwell Street through the eyes and lens of Tom Palazzolo with the help of photos and stories of his students, friends and wife, is to be transported back to a place that engages all the senses: images of the people, including merchants, shoppers and street performers, the products, and outsider art on a massive scale; the sounds of jazz and blues; the smells of street food, of Polish sausage sandwiches (of particular interest to Tom); and the feel of the market and the goods being sold by vendors, hawkers and pullers who drew people into the stores."
-- CHRISTINE VERNON Contributing Reporter -- Chicago Journal
see http://chicagojournal.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=6713&SectionID=5&SubSectionID=5&S=1

Bob Sirott, host of WGN AM 720 Radio, the Noon Show, calls this book, “quite a nice little keepsake.” http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46757&Itemid=557

Book Information:
AT MAXWELL STREET: CHICAGO’S HISTORIC MARKETPLACE RECALLED IN WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
Compiled by Tom Palazzolo
With Introduction by Jack Helbig & Foreword by Lori Grove
$45, Hardcover with DVD, ISBN 978-0-9789676-1-1 Wicker Park Press -- http://www.wickerparkpress.com/

Author of Water Tanks of Chicago to be featured on WGN TV’s Midday News with Steve Sanders on Tuesday, January 27, 2009

2009-01-21T18:13:00.000-08:00

Larry W. Green, a Chicago artist, will talk about his 2007 book Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy ($19.95, paperback, ISBN 978-0-9789676-0-4, Wicker Park Press) on WGN TV Midday News program on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at approximately 11:25 am. This is local Channel 9, and nationally syndicated on Cable TV through WGN America.

Water Tanks of Chicago remains the only book on the subject of Chicago’s disappearing rooftop water tanks. Tony Jones, Past President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Green is a 1975 graduate, says in his foreword to the book: “Chicago’s crumbling water-tanks take on a new significance when seen in Green’s paintings – surely we knew they were there, they’d registered, but they weren’t the star of the street-show. But we’ve woken up to them, become part of his celebration of them as dynamic incidents in what is clearly a Chicago landscape.”

Water tanks have been omnipresent in Chicago for the past 136 years, but are often overlooked and/or taken for granted in the urban environment. Green’s vibrant images of these iconic structures gently remind readers of their historical and cultural significance to the city. The tanks, strong symbols of the city’s industrial past, are rapidly becoming extinct. It is a primary mission of this book to call attention to the plight of the water tanks, and to raise awareness of the urgent need to preserve them.

Green’s paintings are currently being featured in the Museum of Science and Industry’s ongoing Black Creativity Exhibit and Program (January 15 – March 1, 2009). This is a juried art show, and it is a good chance for museum visitors to see Green’s colorful and distinctive paintings of the city’s water tanks up close. For more information about this groundbreaking exhibit, visit www.msichicago.org

Mayor Richard M. Daley was quoted in the Chicago Tribune in 2005 in a speech at the Chicago Cultural Center saying, “This is all about the history of the city of Chicago, the architects, engineers and tradesman who built these wonderful tanks basically reflect the great history of Chicago.” Water Tanks of Chicago is both an artist’s bold statement about the plight of the tanks, and a clarion call to save these picturesque rooftop structures from demolition and the industrial scrapheap of history.

Harry W Schwartz Bookshops: An Appreciation

2009-01-20T08:01:00.000-08:00

On Inauguration Day, a day filled with hope and promise as Barack Obama takes office as President in Washington, D.C., I just got the news that this storied bookstore chain in Milwaukee is closing in a couple months. I cut my teeth selling books to A. David Schwartz in the mid 1980s. He was a tough buyer, and always swore by his weekly reports which he poured over while I sat there. I would daydream, staring out the window while he worked, and one time I had the audacity to yawn, and he would look up from his printout and say, “Am I boring you?”

David would mumble things like “unacceptable” as he looked over the printouts, sighing over the poor sales, and getting him to order from certain publishers was like pulling teeth. On the other hand he was a raging lefty, and publishers that had books that were left-of-center he would buy in bulk and load them up in his stores. Sometimes I could not write fast enough ...

He was supportive in other ways. I went to his house on more than one occasion to do holiday title presentations to the bookstore staff. I got up there and gave my spiel, and I remember David once telling me that my talk was laced with equal parts humor and terror. It made me think, and I respected him as an elder statesman in the business, one that we inherited from his father, Harry W. Schwartz.

Over time Schwartz stopped buying books direct from publishers and instead went to Ingram Book Company, a major distributor in Tennessee . They would buy some books direct from publishers, and when they moved into their Third Ward downtown offices it was always a pleasure to meet with them. David sadly passed on, but his wife and daughter took over the business, and they had incredibly loyal employees like Daniel Goldin, senior buyer, Elly Gore, children’s buyer, Nancy Quinn, coop manager, Jason Kennedy, small press buyer, and Jack Covert of 800-CEO-READ. These are all fine people, consummate professionals who know their business inside out.

It’s sad when a bookstore chain dissolves, and this one was extra special. The good news in all of this is that Daniel Goldin is planning to open a store, called Boswell's, in their flagship location on Downer Avenue, doors down from the original Schwartz location that opened in 1925 or 1926. Their Mequon location, a suburban store that always surprized me with the kind of books they could sell, is also being brought back by Lenora Hurley, manager of the Schwartz store there. It will be called Next Chapter Books in the same location. Life goes on, but it's always important to remember the past, as I'm sure President Obama will eloquently reiterate later today in his Inaugural Address.

For more, check out the story in the Miwaukee Journal-Sentinel and ShelfAwareness.

Filmmaker Tom Palazzolo records Maxwell Street Market history in his new book

2009-01-18T18:18:00.000-08:00

Memoir of Place
from Wednesday Journal - Oak Park, IL - 1/13/2009
CHRISTINE VERNON Contributing Writer

Tom Palazzolo's new book, At Maxwell Street, is described by his wife, Marcia, a contributor to the book, as a "memoir of place." Over the years, Tom has filmed what has become, with the passage of time, historic, archival footage of the city of Chicago, going back to his days as a student at the School of the Art Institute more than 40 years ago.

Growing up in St. Louis, he watched as many landmarks were torn down but when he arrived in Chicago in 1960, he was happy to see that many landmarks still remained here. The 50 or so films he has made include footage of Riverview, Clark Street, and the '68 Democratic Convention but Palazzolo always had a particular love of and appreciation for Maxwell Street, or The Maxwell Street Market, as it was properly called. The book serves as a record of the phenomenon that was Maxwell Street. Along with oral histories in the book, there is a DVD made with students from the School of the Art Institute in 1982. The book includes still shots of the people, places and things, showing the market in three layers: storefronts, tables on the street, and small huts.

Maxwell Street, as seen through the lens of Tom Palazzolo and friends, is a collection of merchants, shoppers, street performers, products, found and outsider art on a massive scale, jazz and blues being performed by original artists, food being cooked and prepared by street vendors (including Polish sausage sandwich, of which Palazzolo seems particularly fond), and the dynamics of the market-goods being sold by vendors and hawkers and "pullers" who drew people into the stores.

The documentary accompanying the book opens with Casey Jones, Chicken Man (aka Chicken Charlie), a one man band who was seen around Chicago, often at Maxwell Street, with his accordion and trained chicken. Populated with characters from all aspects of society, there are no bad actors on this set; everyone contributes to the festivities, which Palazzolo calls "more fun and more real than modern malls, sometimes dangerous, and often funny." Accompanied by students, he found the people he filmed more open and interested in talking to him.
Asked if Maxwell Street should have been saved, he responds, "Absolutely. It is an antidote to the slickness the city is becoming." The book is a manifesto of his love of the sociology, culture and aesthetics of Maxwell Street. "Chicago soul," he calls it and "a distinctly American phenomenon." The book and accompanying DVD, brings a heightened awareness of what Maxwell Street was really about and what has been lost in the sanitizing and extinction of a unique street market.

Many Chicagoans have personal memories of Maxwell Street. William Cowhey, former real estate professional with Arthur Rubloff & Co. and former head of the Civic Federation of Chicago, recalled that Maxwell Street was always the place to go on Sundays when the other stores were closed, and he remembers how much fun it was to go there as a teen. The heydey of Maxwell Street he said was in the 1930s and late '40s. Kathy Coleman English has memories of her great grandfather Katzen, a rabbi, who came to Maxwell Street from Georgia in Russia. Jose Alvarez, owner of Renaissance Furniture Restoration, in business 40 years, says that you will find "real" Mexican food there but shares Palazzolo's passion for the "Polish and black" sandwich, which he says you can smell from a mile away and is best with grilled onions and mustard.
Palazzolo began documenting Maxwell Street for a class at the School of the Art Institute taught by Ken Josephson. He would complete an assignment at the last minute by rushing to Maxwell Street on a Sunday and getting his prints ready for Monday class. "Socially conscious work" he says he favored back then. As he visited Maxwell Street with his girlfriend, Marcia Daehn, a photography student at IIT, he would pick up the tab for her "Polish," a sure sign for the woman who became his wife, collaborator, and mother of his three children.

Market history

Often referred to as the largest open air market in the U.S., Maxwell Street was named after Dr. Philip Maxwell, an early settler and it first appeared on a map in 1847. From 1880 to 1920, the area was a magnet for poor Eastern European Jews and even as late as 1982 when Palazzolo made his documentary, one black clerk in a store referred to the area as "Jew Town." His Jewish boss noted there were only 10 Jewish merchants left at that point. But as one historian wrote, "the only color that mattered was green."

Maxwell Street Market became the official name in 1912. It was a gateway both for foreign immigrants and domestic immigrants who relocated from the South, providing them with an outlet for their entrepreneurial skills, a livelihood, a social network and a sense of community, not to mention goods and services needed for everyday living. It ran from the late 1800s until 1994 when the University of Illinois at Chicago expanded and developers positioned themselves for the coming real estate feeding frenzy. The area was labeled "blighted," buildings were condemned, services and improvements were withheld and the decline to justify redevelopment was assured.

Although preservation authorities cited numerous buildings of significance, many were taken by eminent domain and lost to by the 1970s and '80s "erasing yet another chunk of the city's soul," as Palazzolo says. The area shrank with the construction of the Dan Ryan in 1957. At one time, the center was Maxwell Street and Halsted but the market eventually shriveled to five blocks, from Morgan to Halsted, then one block from Halsted east to Union. By the time preservationists mounted an effort to save this unique treasure, it was too late. They judged it "an irretrievable loss of historic integrity." A rich repository of information about the battle to save Maxwell Street can be found online.

After a stint on Canal Street, the market moved to DesPlaines Street between Harrison and Roosevelt (2008) and it is there you will find it today with space for more than 500 vendors every Sunday of the year, weather permitting. Roosevelt University Professor Steve Balkin, who maintains a website on open air markets, wants the public to know that the New Maxwell Street needs consideration and encouragement from the City of Chicago in order to thrive. He calls the area now "a sliver of a sliver, at great risk because of mismanagement by the city." In order to thrive, he suggests the city lower vendor fees (there was a recent substantial fee hike); allow vendors to park near their sites (rather than at remote parking areas); provide more parking; provide easy access for blues and other entertainers to perform there; and, eliminate "the harshness, capriciousness and corruption of market regulations enforcers."

Camera-ready couple

Tom and Marcia Palazzolo first met in the Art Institute of Chicago where Marcia was a waitress in the Garden Restaurant and Tom was a guard outside. They didn't even speak the first year except through a glass window.

As a couple, the Palazzolos' involvement on the Chicago and Oak Park art scene is extensive. Marcia was president of the Oak Park Art League for six years and before that a board member. Tom was frequently enlisted in the mechanics of maintaining the building. Now Tom serves on the OPAL board. Marcia has been involved in the Historical Society of OP-RF for over 30 years.
Oak Park historian Gary Schwab says the new book helps him to recall his own roots-a grandfather who took him to Maxwell Street almost every Sunday morning. "Our house and my father's camera shop were filled with stuff from Maxwell Street, much of which I still have," Schwab said. "My father was born in the neighborhood of Maxwell Street in 1910, and his family lived there until moving to the North Side. Maxwell Street was a great place to learn about Chicago outside of one's usual insular neighborhood experience."

Both Palazzolo resumes include years of teaching. Tom spent 36 years at Daley College where he taught photography, art and art history. He also taught film at the School of the Art Institute.
Marcia's jobs were closer to home. She spent 17 years teaching at Dominican University, two years at Concordia University and 21 years on the faculty of Elmhurst College where she has taught photography, bookbinding, water color, and printmaking.

With this labor of love concluded, Tom Palazzolo is interested in painting and completing forgotten projects from the past, mining old work that is still meaningful to him. In filmmaking, he admits he doesn't find learning all the new technology very interesting. At the same time, he notes the quality of modern filmmaking is improving. He appreciates the recent explosion of social documentaries, a genre he prefers over "artsy" works. When he was making his films, there were only about 10 other people doing the same kind of work in Chicago. He still finds people and places energizing but doesn't expect to be "in the thick of things," filming events on the street, as he did at the Democratic Convention of 1968.

When he shot Maxwell Street with his students, he had an inkling it might be a historic opportunity. There were rumors that Daley wanted to eliminate the market and make the city a showcase. He said it was the perfect venue to teach sound and lighting. He loved the "ruggedness" of it and the fact that it was the antithesis of Hollywood. "No one paid attention to the people at the lower end of society. People loved it when the students paid attention to them; they opened up, were sweet."

Honolulu Star-Bulletin's Amazing Feature Story on all things Charlie Chan

2009-01-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

The return of Charlie Chan
By Burl Burlingame
POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Jan 11, 2009

Authors know that sometimes novels take on a life of their own during the writing. Sometimes a secondary character is so full of verve and life that they wind up taking center stage, and the writer doesn't know where it comes from, because it's magical and unbidden, but there the character is, and the spotlight shifts to where the action is.

So it was with mystery novelist Earl Derr Biggers, who paid a lot of attention to Honolulu during a sojourn here and knocked out a murder mystery, "House Without a Key," that is chockablock with keen observations about Hawaii in the early '20s.

And there's a minor character, Honolulu Police detective Charlie Chan, who grows to dominate the book, which became a best-seller. Biggers immediately knocked out a sequel, "The Chinese Parrot," which made Chan a central character, and this was such a hit that it became a film.

Biggers, knowing now that Charlie Chan was buttering his bread, wrote four more novels featuring the rotund policeman who lived on Punchbowl's slopes and spoke in aphorisms. Biggers died in the early '30s, about when Charlie Chan films became a cottage industry, even spawning also-ran competition like Mr. Moto. Although Detective Chan himself was generally played by Caucasians, his extended family gave work to a whole generation of struggling Asian actors.

The original Biggers' novels are coming back into print, courtesy publishers Academy Chicago and copyright owners 4Kids Entertainment, who also represent, among other things, the Royal Air Force. The first two, "The House Without a Key" and "The Chinese Parrot," are out now. "Behind That Curtain" and "The Black Camel" will be published in May, and "Charlie Chan Carries On" and "Keeper of the Keys" will be released in the fall.

"The Chan novels by Biggers have lasting appeal because they are such compelling reading. Biggers was a great writer," said Eric Miller, vice president of Academy Chicago. "Whether he was writing about Punchbowl Hill in Honolulu or about San Francisco where he once lived, Biggers was the consummate stylist. His books have stood the test of time very well. In fact, in some ways they were ahead of their time."

Hawaii pop-culture guru DeSoto Brown said Charlie, as an Asian character, was groundbreaking in American culture at a time -- the 1920s into the '40s. Asian immigration was restricted, and Asian characters in fiction were usually sinister and mysterious. "Charlie Chan, conversely, was not only the good guy, but was in fact actually better at crime-solving than the haole characters. In the movies, he is always treated with respect for his intelligence and talents."

This is certainly the year for the return of Charlie Chan. Biggers will be "Ghost of Honor" at the "Left Coast Crime" annual mystery fans convention, to be held in Hawaii this year, March 7 to 12 at the Marriott Waikoloa Resort.

Here's another point of relativity, courtesy Brown: "Both Charlie Chan and Barack Obama have a similar sort of background -- both originated in 'exotic' Hawaii, but they also went on to greater fame in the larger outside world. Their actions and abilities are rooted in their innate abilities, and, they move beyond what others of their respective races had previously been able to accomplish."

Case closed.

Original novels put Chan back in perspective

The books that launched Charlie Chan are pretty much forgotten today, hidden behind the many movies and comics and TV appearances by the Chinese detective, whose presence even today raised raises a suspicion of subliminal racism. Academy Chicago's relaunch of the original series puts Chan back into his proper perspective, that of a literary sleuth acting within a well-plotted page-turner.

"The House Without a Key"
and "The Chinese Parrot"
By Earl Derr Biggers
(Academy Chicago)
$14.95 each

Reading these books is a definite pleasure. Author Biggers is a smooth strategist, clever plotter and keen observer, and the novels give the same escapist tingle as the best of Agatha Christie. No less than Rex Stout -- creator of the Nero Wolfe series -- declared that Charlie Chan was one of the best fictional detectives ever, right up there with Sherlock Holmes.

"The House Without a Key" focuses on the travails of young John Quincy Winterslip, a stuffy Boston-Brahmin investments broker who is paying a visit to the family black sheep, a rich swindler who lives in a mansion on Waikiki Beach -- found dead the day John Quincy arrives.
Honolulu at the time is described most vividly by Biggers, who has a discerning eye for the polyglot social structure of the islands, including a detective of Asian origin in a position of authority and respect. This was written at the height of "yellow peril" hysteria, mind you.
In "The Chinese Parrot," Chan is taken out of familiar tropical surroundings and plopped into the California desert, and still manages to outwit incompetent local police.

In both books the central character is a young, feckless chap who manages to grow up over the course of the investigation, as well as fall under the sway of a charming young lady. But Chan is the polarizing figure, the catalyst and clearly the smartest guy in the room.

Is Chan a racist stereotype? Maybe. But he'll track down whoever killed you and solve the case.

New York Times Book Review chimes in about Charlie Chan

2009-01-11T22:05:00.000-08:00

"When did publishers get so smart about reissuing out-of-print mysteries? For the longest time, paperback reprints were just last year’s best sellers, but not anymore. Pioneers of 1950s American noir like Ross Macdonald are shown true respect when Vintage Crime’s Black Lizard imprint reissues their books in sturdy editions with properly sleazy covers. The classic English mystery of the 1930s and ’40s also lives on so long as Rue Morgue keeps the faith by reprinting master craftsmen like Nicholas Blake and Michael Gilbert. But it takes a special kind of wit to resurrect Charlie Chan, as Academy Chicago has done with THE CHINESE PARROT and THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY (paper, $14.95 each), ingenious puzzle mysteries written by Earl Derr Biggers in the 1920s. Another brainstorm, on the part of Felony & Mayhem, has brought THE PEKING MAN IS MISSING (paper, $14.95) back into print. This speculative novel was written by Claire Taschdjian, an amateur archaeologist who was one of the last people to handle the bones of Peking Man before they were lost — or stolen — during World War II. Last year’s best seller? Don’t make me laugh."
-- Marilyn Stasio - from CRIME - Revenge Theory

Enter Charlie Chan, hero of the Honolulu Police

2009-01-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

Academy Chicago will launch (bring back) Charlie Chan in the fall of 2008! The books, 6 total by Earl Derr Biggers about the legendary Chinese-Hawaiian Police Inspector, still are compelling to read. A list of the titles is below. ACP will do two each for the next three seasons in paperback at $14.95.

An interesting back story: -- considerable research went into finding the rights to the books. Biggers wrote them in the mid-1920s to early 1930s after a trip to Hawaii. They were renewed by his widow, Eleanor Biggers, in the mid 1950s, and assigned to a company called Leisure Concepts. LC were the ones that sold the rights to all the movies you still see on television, primarily with Warner Orland playing the dimunitive detective. CC became a Hollywood icon. The last movie was made in 1971. However, Twentieth Century Fox, a News Group Company, and the owners of Harper Collins are the license holders for all things CC. They renewed their last option to make a movie in 1996 (or 1997). Since the mid 1980s, LC became a mega-licensing company called 4 Kids Entertainment (type "4 Kids Entertainment" into Google or Yahoo and you will see the have a ton of cartoon-like characters). They are located on Ave. of the Americas in NYC and do a land-office business.

ACP (that is, me) called 4 Kids (once I found out they owned the rights) and said we were interested in publishing the 6 CC mysteries by Biggers. Because of the late Rep Sonny Bono (R-CA), copyrights were extended another 90 years beyond the life of the author, that's life + 90 years. 4 Kids didn't even know they owned the rights (as a trademark) to CC until I called them! They had to get the contract out of a cold storage vault! They were required to ask Twentieth Century Fox if they wanted to do the books, and they declined! So 4 Kids was free to sign a contract with ACP, and now we are doing the first two in September 08.

It gets better. Two English companies had Biggers CC books that they published in 1996 and 1997, figuring they were in the public domain. Leonaur and Echo Library are selling POD editions of the first two CC titles, primamrily on Amazon.com, Amazon has since promised to yank those titles from their site, since they violate 4 Kids as the copyright holder to the books.

Charlie Chan books by Earl Derr Biggers:

Academy Chicago has already issued the first two books in the series, The House without a Key and The Chinese Parrot. In Spring 2009 they will issue three and four in the series, Behind that Curtain and The Black Camel. In Fall 2009, Academy Chicago will complete the series by publishing numbers five and six, Charlie Chan Carries On and The Keeper of the Keys.

Pre-Socratic Philosophy Publisher Turns to Genre Fiction with a Big Bang

2009-01-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

The words Suspense, Thriller, and Philosophical Fiction don’t go together very often, and when they do the result will likely be intriguing. And so Parmenides Publishing of Las Vegas, and late of Zurich and Athens, has published its first two mysteries in their Parmenides Fiction line. Pythagorean Crimes (paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-930972-27-2)
by Greek author Tefcros Michaelides is being called “a masterfully-told story” and “a thriller of the mind.” Michaelides is a professor of Mathematics at Athens College in Greece, and the tale starts out in fin-de-siècle Paris at an international mathematics conference that is attended by such math heavyweights as Bertrand Russell, Hilbert, Poincaré, and Gödel. The whole mix will add up to murder and mayhem as the story jumps back and forth in time.

The book I want to write about is Black Market Truth: Book One of the Aristotle Quest (paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-930972-31-5) by Sharon Kaye, a professor of philosophy at John Carroll University. Kaye is the author of Philosophy for Teens and Lost and Philosophy, and she brings her pop-infused training to good use here in a crackerjack story that is being called “rip-roaring,” fast-paced,” “daring,” and “very entertaining.” I really dug this book. It draws circles around books like The Da Vinci Code, which it invariably gets compared to, and The Dante Club, and instructs readers while it has them eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next.

The main character is Dana McCarter, a famous academic expert on ancient Greek philosophy and paleography, and in particular, Aristotle. One day Dana, living in New York, is approached in her office by a mysterious stranger who has an ancient parchment manuscript he would like her to decipher. It turns out to be, as the story goes, one of the lost dialogues of Aristotle. This is incendiary stuff that was pilfered from the dark recesses of the Vatican, no less, and several people will lose their heads over the secret recovery, and ultimate cover-up of the existence of these dialogues. The contents of Aristotle’s lost dialogues turn out to be controversial in the extreme. The amazing thing is that while Dana’s character gets to take a peek at each of stolen Aristotle manuscripts that come her way in the course of the tale, she lets the reader actually read the dialogues themselves, and they develop into a story all their own. We learn about Aristotle the man, and Aristotle the great thinker. Or, as Michael Tierno points out, this “brings Aristotle to life in an entertaining and dramatic way.”

There is more than one parallel story being told in Black Market Truth. There are scenes played out in Second Life, a virtual world of avatars in cyberspace that eerily mirror what is going on in the story. The plot thickens, the blood flows, and nothing is what it seems. This is fascinating stuff, and the best part is there are two more books in the series. Parmenides will announce Book Two in the Aristotle Quest for Fall 2009.

Abraham Lincoln’s Life Outlined in 2,024 Pages

2009-01-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Random House balked when historian Michael Burlingame, a professor at Connecticut College, turned in his massive biography of Lincoln at over 2,000 pages. They had to say no to the eminent Lincoln scholar. Burlingame turned to Johns Hopkins University Press and they have produced a regal two volume boxed set ($125.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8018-8993-6) simply entitled Abraham Lincoln: A Life. It might take a lifetime to read such a tome, but the book is getting rave reviews and is selling briskly off the shelves, despite a severe economic downturn. Ingram Book Company, the national wholesaler based in Tennessee, is sold out as I write this. This book is becoming a hot commodity.

Burlingame’s book is billed as the first multi-volume biography of the iconic 16^th president in many decades. Publishers Weekly says, "This book supplants [Carl] Sandburg and supersedes all other biographies. Future Lincoln books cannot be written without it, and from no other book can a general reader learn so much about Abraham Lincoln. It is the essential title for the bicentennial."—James L. Swanson. Others have weighed in, including Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals, “No one in recent history has uncovered more fresh sources than Michael Burlingame. This profound and masterful portrait will be read and studied for years to come." And the publisher itself says, “Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, this landmark publication establishes Burlingame as the most assiduous Lincoln biographer of recent memory and brings Lincoln alive to modern readers as never before.”

Americans love an anniversary, and so do librarians and the media. 2009 marks 200years since Lincoln’s birth in Kentucky on February 12, 1809, the basis for President’s Day along with George Washington. So the buzz for this book seems to be just beginning.

"At Maxwell Street" featured in Chicago Journal

2009-01-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

Often referred to as the largest open air market in the U.S., Maxwell Street was named after Dr. Philip Maxwell, an early settler, and first appeared on a map in 1847.
From 1880 to 1920, the area was a neighborhood of poor Eastern European Jews, a legacy that lingered as late as 1982 when Tom Palazzolo made his documentary. One black clerk in a store refers to the area as "Jew Town."
His Jewish boss, looking on, tells the filmmaker that at that time there were only 10 Jewish merchants left in the area and that he expected the area would soon be Korean.
But from all the photographic and film records of Maxwell Street, it is clear that the market was diverse, "a thriving marketplace with a vibrant and lively street culture" and as one historian has written, "the only color that mattered was green."
The Maxwell Street Market became official in 1912. It provided immigrants with an outlet for their entrepreneurial skills, a livelihood, a social network and a sense of community, as well as the goods and services needed for everyday living.
It ran until 1994. As buildings were gradually condemned, services and improvements were withheld. The decline to justify redevelopment of the area was assured.
After a stint on Canal Street, the Maxwell Street Market moved to Desplaines Street between Harrison and Roosevelt, and it is there you will find it today with space for more than 500 vendors every Sunday of the year, weather permitting.

Remembering Maxwell Street
New book includes DVD documentary of historic market
By CHRISTINE VERNON Contributing Reporter -- Chicago Journal

Tom Palazzolo's new book At Maxwell Street (cloth, $45, ISBN 978-0-9789676-1-1, Wicker Park Press) is described by his wife, Marcia, a contributor to the book, as a "memoir of place."
Over the years, Tom Palazzolo has filmed what has become, by the passage of time, historic and archival footage of the city of Chicago from as far back as his days as a student at the School of the Art Institute more than 40 years ago.
Growing up in St. Louis, he watched as many landmarks were torn down, and arrived in Chicago in 1960 enthusiastic to see that many landmarks still remained.
Included among the 50 or so films he has made is footage of Riverview, Clark Street, and the 1968 Democratic convention. But Palazzolo always had a particular love of and appreciation for Maxwell Street and its eponymous, now gone, market.
His book serves as a historic record about the phenomenon that was Maxwell Street. Along with the oral histories in the book, there is a DVD made with students from the School of the Art Institute in 1982. The book includes many still shots, images of the people, places and things where the market was in three layers-storefronts, tables on the street and small huts.
To see Maxwell Street through the eyes and lens of Tom Palazzolo with the help of photos and stories of his students, friends and wife, is to be transported back to a place that engages all the senses: images of the people, including merchants, shoppers and street performers, the products, and outsider art on a massive scale; the sounds of jazz and blues; the smells of street food, of Polish sausage sandwiches (of particular interest to Tom); and the feel of the market and the goods being sold by vendors, hawkers and pullers who drew people into the stores.
The documentary accompanying the book opens with Casey Jones, Chicken Man (aqua Chicken Charlie), a one-man band who was seen around Chicago and often at Maxwell Street, with his accordion and trained chicken.
There are no bad actors on this set; everyone contributes to the festivities which Palazzolo calls "more fun and more real than modern malls, sometimes dangerous, and often funny."
Accompanied by students, Palazzolo found the people he filmed more open and interested in talking to him. When asked if Maxwell Street should have been saved, Palazzolo responds, "Absolutely, it is an antidote to the slickness the city is becoming."
Palazzolo book combines his love of the sociology, culture and aesthetics. "Chicago soul" he calls it, "a distinctly American phenomenon."
At a public reception for Palazzolo's new book the week before Christmas, each person in the audience seemed to have a personal story to tell about their experiences at Maxwell Street.
William Cowhey, a West Sider, former real estate professional with Arthur Rubloff & Co. and former head of the Civic Federation of Chicago, remembers that at one time, the rents on Halsted Street were more than the rents per square foot on State Street.
Cowhey recalled that Maxwell Street was always the place to go on Sundays when the other stores were closed and how much fun it was to go there as a teen. He said the heyday of Maxwell was in the 1930s and late 1940s.
Kathy Coleman English spoke of her great grandfather Katzen, a rabbi, who came to Maxwell Street from Georgia in Russia.
Palazzolo says he started out documenting Maxwell Street for a class at the School of the Art Institute. He would fill an assignment at the last minute by rushing to Maxwell Street on a Sunday and getting his prints ready for Monday class. Soon he found out that he loved the images.
Gradually, as he visited Maxwell Street with his girlfriend, Marcia Daehn, a photography student at IIT, he would pick up the tab for her "polish," a great investment for the woman who became his wife, collaborator and mother of his three children.

Usagi Yojimbo Rabbit Dynamite

2009-01-01T23:28:00.000-08:00

The thing that prompted my interest in this series of manga books was a request from my 7-year-old nephew for volumes 6 and 7 of the series. I’d never heard of it before, and I quickly discovered that there are some 22 books in the series and bookstores didn’t carry the whole series, even ones with a concentration on comics. For the most part they had the most recent books on their shelves and that was it. Through searching online, and consulting specialty stores I figured out that volumes 6 and 7 were still in print. I ended up ordering them from a comic book bookstore in Chicago called Challengers Comics and Conversation. The staff there was super nice, and they even suggested some other books my young nephew would like that were related to Stan Sakai’s samurai rabbit.

I went to a superstore and they had this huge manga section – two entire walls and a double-sided kiosk of books – and it seemed this was the only section in the store where buyers were actually seriously shopping. They didn’t carry one Usagi Yojimbo book! That didn’t seem to bode well. It amazes me how far comic books have come since the days we sold them with LPC Group. LPC was the distributor for Marvel, Dark Horse, Image Comics, Tokyo Pop, and a host of other publishers before they went out of business as a distributor. Bookstores at the time were just getting hip to the idea of comics as a real goldmine, and we were on the cutting edge of a comic book revolution.

Comics are also used more by teachers to encourage reading, especially with reluctant boys and late readers across the spectrum. I remember sitting in a parent-teacher group session and the teacher telling parents how she was going to utilize comics to engage the kids to read in a 7th grade class. One parent raised her hand and said, I think the new term for comics is graphic novels. The teacher got really excited and said, wow, graphic novels - I’m going to have to remember that! I almost fell out my chair trying to repress my laughter. I had sit in so many sales meetings with publishers in this genre, and pitched the books to bookstores countless times, that it amused me to no end to see the teacher’s epiphany with graphic novels.

We do still sell some cutting edge books about comics, and they are published by University Press of Mississippi. Every season they have new and interesting books about comics and the art of comics, or graphic novels as they are called in the trade – see this link http://upmississippi.blogspot.com/2007/08/journey-into-comics.html for more detailed information about their books. It seems to me every self-respecting comic bookshop should carry their stuff.

Comic book readers and specialists in popular culture always seem to be looking for the latest thing or trend in comics. One of the things that came out of the Japanese comic book craze was producing books that read from right to left, which is Asian style. That was a big thing at one point. Then it was comics from places like Korea that were all the rage, and whatever was being shown on Cartoon Network that could be turned into a book series. A new book from University of Texas Press seems to be exploring new territory, and is worth noting here: -- Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, by Frederick Luis Aldama. Aldama is professor of English and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He’s also the director of their Latino Studies Department. He seems well-qualified to write a book such as this. He’s the author of a previous book called Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Artists and Writers. The book explores Latino representations in comics, from Marvel superheroes, and the likely suspects, to Latino masters such as Richard Dominguez. Shedding a much-needed spotlight on a vibrant segment of comics, Your Brian on Latino Comics illuminates the world of such superheroes as Firebird, Vibe, and the Blue Beetle, as well as profiling creative artists actively working in the genre, such as Laura Molina, Frank Espinosa, and Rafael Navarro. There are twenty-one interviews in the book and readers will get a real sense of the evolution of Latino expression in this format, as well as the influences, innovations, and many Latino transcendences of mainstream techniques. The amazing creativity of the people involved will inspire as well as entertain readers of comics and graphic literature.

The cultural dynamics of speed outlined in new book from Duke

2008-12-27T20:18:00.000-08:00

Egg-headed car lovers are lumped together with scholars of modernism, historians of technology, and “materialist critics” as the audience for The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism, by Enda Duffy. We’ll see if this book crosses over from an academic readership to say, readers of Car and Driver Magazine. Duffy illuminates speed as a logic for and genuine pleasure of modernity. That would be pedal-to-the-metal all the way. He draws on what he calls “adrenaline aesthetics” in such works as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ballard’s Crash, and even the cautionary consumerism of Ralph Nader. He doesn’t stop there. As a cutting edge social theorist and professor of English at UC - Santa Barbara, Duffy takes news stories, photography (think of the old-fashioned racecar images of Lartigue, and the classic Robert Frank picture of a couple speeding along in a convertible), advertising, movies, and safety media to provide a breakneck tour of speed and how it continues to define American culture.

Duffy looks at the marketing of cars and how their mass-production enabled masses of people to experience speed, and by extension know modernity: -- to feel modernity in their very bones. Speed became the chief thrill of leisure. Duke did a recent book called Mobility without Mayhem, by Jeremy Packer, and that book looked at America’s fear and fascination with driving in general, a cool cultural history of a phenomenon. Duffy’s book is different and equally valuable in that it takes on speed all by itself, and eloquently explains its political as well as cultural connotations. Speed explains who we are, where we are going (getting there fast), and the whys and wherefores of the sometimes reckless impulse to get a move on.

Gastronomy deconstructed through the naughty Victorians in quirky literary study coming from Ohio

2008-12-22T20:29:00.000-08:00

Leave it to a gourmet chef, food writer, and general woman-about-town to write an unpredictable and fascinating study of Victorians and their alimentary behaviors as displayed in their literature. Here we have food, drink, drugs, and whatever they could stuff into their mouths. The book is Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Gwen Hyman, an assistant professor of humanities at Cooper Union in New York, and the co-author of a recent cookbook, Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food. And it seems that those appetites were voracious indeed. The very act of eating, drinking and getting high, along with whatever else is left to the imagination, seems to be the very thing itself that makes a man a man in this world. And boys will be boys. Drawing on food history, theory, literary criticism, anthropology, economics, and social criticism, along with close readings of novels of the time, especially those of Jane Austen, Professor Hyman breaks it all down for endlessly uptight, gorging, anxious, and generally hot-and-bothered Victorian culture. In this world you really are what you eat.

You also have the monster metaphor, Count Dracula and his uncontrollable thirst for blood, and the men who obsessively hunt him down. There is the drawing room, the dining room, the opium den, and the cocaine lab as manifest sets where Victorian males act out their power and uneasiness. The act of consuming, or even starving himself, can be the hinges that make or break the nation. This is an innovative, thought-provoking, and meaningful social study of what it means to be Victorian, and offers an original thesis about the embodiment of power and how alimental behavior can make, unmake and even remake the man.

Harry Potter Lexicon to finally see the light of day

2008-12-21T21:54:00.000-08:00

January 12, 2008 will be a faithful day for all champions of fair use in copyright law. This is the day RDR Books of Muskegon, MI will publish The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials, by Steve Vander Ark ($24.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-57143-174-5). RDR has been embroiled in a lawsuit over intellectual property rights with author J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment since October 2007. The Lexicon is an encyclopedic reference work that covers all seven novels in the Harry Potter series, and is based on a web site that was heavily used by Rowling and her publishers concerning all manner of things from the fictitious world of Harry Potter – http://www.hp-lexicon.org/

The decision by Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr. to allow the book to press, with some minor changes and stipulations, is a triumph for the doctrine of fair use. It’s clear that over-zealous copyright holders can reek havoc on well-meaning chroniclers, as is the case outlined eloquently in the book Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, a comic book primer on fair use doctrine for documentary filmmakers, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins. RDR also enlisted the lawyers at Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project to testify in their favor. The Patterson ruling will most certainly help authors of similar books in the future.

Brookings Institution Press chimes in creatively to help guide a new Obama administration and congress

2008-12-19T23:27:00.000-08:00

Brookings is taking its place as a creative nerve center in Washington, with several important books coming out by key authors on issues of critical importance to the new leaders in Washington. Acting in Time on Energy Policy, edited by Kelly Sims Gallagher of the Harvard Kennedy School, comes out in May 2009. Gallagher gathers together her colleagues from the Kennedy School and they tackle important issues that pertain to energy policy – climate change, oil and security - and explain why acting in time, and not waiting until politics demands action, would make a huge positive difference. Obama made energy policy a cornerstone of his Presidential campaign, so this book will be a welcome addition to the ongoing debate about energy.

Plug-In Vehicles: What Role for Washington is edited by David B. Sandalow, an experienced expert on energy policy at Brookings, and comes out in February 2009. With the big three automakers scrambling for a bailout from lawmakers in Washington, the contributors to this timely volume discuss what can and should be done to advance the role of plug-in electric vehicles. It would seem that this book could be very influential, especially since it gathers experts from government, business, and academia. The other thing is that Obama comes from Illinois, a state with a powerful coal lobby. Obama talked about investing in clean coal technology in his Presidential campaign, and while it’s not clear just what clean coal involves beyond the flashy advertisements, it would seem that electric cars are the wave of the future, riding a wave of replacing electricity for oil products in the future.

Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform is edited by Benjamin Wittes of Brookings, and will be published in July 09, at a critical time for new leaders in Washington: -- it is being published in cooperation with Hoover Institution and Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law. This book shows that the US desperately needs a new legal framework to fight terrorists. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the many controversial laws that were enacted as a reaction to that event under Bush, it’s clear that an entirely new statutory law is needed to govern this fight. Contributors to this essential book look to balance the need for security with the rule of law and constitutional rights of freedom. Restoring the Writ of Habeas Corpus for accused terrorists would be a good start. There are a whole host of issues discussed here, from improving interrogation laws to immigration to modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Act. Congress will have its hands full trying to sort out these challenging dilemmas as it tries to set new ground rules for the war on terrorists, and this thoughtful book should be a big help to them.

Finally, there is an eloquent book called Repairing Paradise: The Restoration of Nature in America’s National Parks, coming out in July 09 by William R Lowry, a prolific author and professor of political science at Washington University in St Louis. This book is a departure for Brookings because Lowry writes a highly personal and persuasive account about reversing the mistakes of the last eight years to preserve four National Parks: -- Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades, and the Grand Canyon. Lowry has spent considerable time in these iconic American parks, in addition to making concrete and sensible policy recommendations for the good of nature and animals there, he also is a master prose stylist and makes a poetic case to restore the natural health and glory to some of the world’s most wondrous places.

Wire and Tower

2008-12-14T17:38:00.000-08:00

Chicago fashioned itself over time and became a distinctive place as a result of its own unique history and various natural and unnatural forces at play. The city has a history deeply ingrained in its rebirth as a mighty industrial metropolis after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Rudyard Kipling came to Chicago and hated it … it was like taking a bite of raw wild onion and cringing. Eager for American experiences, Kipling the world-wise traveler, only saw greed and avarice there, from his 1891 book, American Notes:

“I know thy cunning and thy greed,Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,And all thy glory loves to tell of specious gifts material.”

I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

The sense of place can be overwhelming, and if you’re not prepared for its extreme conditions, or if you have never encountered it’s like before, Chicago can be like a slap in the face. Some things never change. The city grew up quickly out of the lakeside wilderness and became larger than life, a microcosm of the New World, America in all its guts and glory. Wave upon wave of immigrants made their way to Chicago and formed it into a mass of humanity and blood. The people made the town tick, as the poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently stated, "The people yes. The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on."

The landscape, Calcutta-like, is uncompromising and harsh, the four seasons reeking havoc with wind and rain, snow and ice, intense heat and humidity, subzero temperatures, and spectacular thunder and lightening storms. With a certain fearlessness and innovation, the people molded Chicago into a kind of urban jungle, a place of high and low culture, again recalling Calcutta, and used their 19th century innovations to transform the landscape into the international city we know today.

The water tanks that dot the urban terrain of commercial and factory buildings in Chicago hawk back to a different time and place. They were built to last, made from the finest clear-cut redwood and cypress boards. No imperfections were allowed, and each board was 18 feet straight and 2 ½ inches thick. As long as the tanks have water in them they will never rot.

-- Alternative introduction to Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green -- http://www.wickerparkpress.com/WToC.html

.

Georgia to publish a different kind of bird book

2008-12-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

Spirits of the Air: Birds and American Indians in the South is what you might well call “a passionate read.” Wonderfully illustrated in color, author Shepard Krech III, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, is a lifelong birder and naturalist. One reviewer has called this book “superbly researched and splendidly illustrated tour of Southeastern Indian ethno-ornithology.” – Raymond D. Fogelson, University of Chicago. Krech is the author of the previous book, The Ecological Indian (Norton, 1999), and here he explores bird mythology, and he examines the complex and immutable influences of birds on Native American culture and their unique worldview. It moves beyond mere identification and habitat to really seek out the many cultural connections between birds and native peoples.

Birds were clearly important as spiritual beings, and many natives’ donned feathers and plumage, and sought to evoke avian powers in their ceremonies and dances. Bird imagery is adorned on pottery, cravings, and jewelry. Birds also played a central role in ritual healing practices, folklore, religion, and even warfare. The winged creatures of the air clearly had a remarkable and lasting impact on Native American life in the South, and probably elsewhere, and what is being called the whole Indian-bird dynamic. It takes a distinguished ecological ethno-historian like Professor Krech to put it all together for readers in one dynamite package.

Chicago Neon Signs reviewed in Midwest Book Review

2008-12-03T20:58:00.000-08:00

Chicago Neon Signs
Dan Zamudio
Wicker Park PressPO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305-5318, ISBN 9780978967628, $24.95, www.wickerparkpress.com

Once a ubiquitous feature of Chicago's landscape, the neon sign is gradually disappearing because of the deleterious impact of Illinois winters. The result of the harsh climate and the entropy of neglect, the neon signs of neighborhood businesses are decaying, fading, rusting, and manifesting empty spaces where colorful glass tubes used to be. Chicago librarian and artist Dan Zamudio photographed many of Chicago's neon signs with a camera called 'Diana', which is made of plastic (including the lens) and thus produces as slightly blurred focus that creates beautiful and memorably surreal images. In "Chicago Neon Signs", Zamudio has compiled sixty of these black-and-white photographic images that will prove to be enduring monuments to this once great commercial advertising art form to be found in every Chicago neighborhood but which is now, year by year and decade by decade, disappearing from the scene. "Chicago Neon Signs" is an original compilation which is highly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library Photography reference collections -- and would serve as an excellent template for similar photographic studies with respect to other American cities.

At Maxwell Street: Chicago’s Historic Marketplace Recalled in Words and Photographs

2008-11-27T10:21:00.000-08:00

Tom Palazzolo approached me in late 2007 with the idea of turning his 1983 cinema
verité documentary, At Maxwell Street, into a book. We had just published Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green, and that book was striking a chord with people who had never noticed these aging wooden behemoths in their midst. Tom, like Larry, was a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In fact, I had taken Tom’s filmmaking class during the summer of 1977 at SAIC, so we had known each other for 30 years. One of Tom’s most remarkable films is called Caligari’s Cure
(http://www.facets.org/asticat?function=buyitem&catname=facets&catnum=/207), and I actually had a bit part in that movie.

Tom’s concept for the book was to approach his friends and acquaintances and get them to write about their experiences of the old Maxwell Street marketplace. He got veteran arts journalist Jack Helbig to write the introduction, and Lori Grove of the Maxwell Street Foundation, and coauthor of Chicago's Maxwell Street (IL) (Images of America) to write the foreword. The other contributors are the eminent painter Robert Guinan, the Sun-Times critic Bill Stamets, local merchant and wonderful prose stylist Lionel Bottari, poet John Platt, local artist Linda Platt, and an oral history from old-timer Leland “Sugar” Cain, Jr. A DVD of Tom’s original movie accompanies the book, along with a slide show of extra images with harmonica and guitar music, labeled Maxwell Street Blues by local musicians Little Jukela and Willie Poor Boy, recorded at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap in Hyde Park.

For those who are not familiar with it, Maxwell Street is an avenue that runs E/W two blocks south of Roosevelt Road (12th St) and is intersected by the Dan Ryan expressway leading into downtown Chicago. The open-air marketplace started there around the turn of the 20th century, and was active up until 2000, even though it was undergoing painful urban renewal in the last 10 years of its existence. It is now under the auspices of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and is called University Village. The city kept moving the marketplace, and it got smaller and more insignificant with each displacement. I’m not sure exactly where it’s located now, but it was in the news this past week because the city was considering raising the vendor fees for selling at the marketplace, and people thought that would spell its ultimate demise.

The market on Maxwell Street was a unique and colorful place, where shoppers could get just about anything extremely cheaply. It was a photographer’s paradise, and this is where Tom and his wife Marcia cut their teeth as artists in the mid 1960s. The book also includes amazing photographs by Tom’s friend and fellow SAIC classmate, the painter Bernard Beckman. He has a keen interest in blues and gospel music, and there are many poignant photos in the book from Beckman of the street performers at Maxwell Street. The book as delayed because we kept adding and changing things right up to the last minute, even while the book was at press. We wanted the best book possible, and now that it’s finally published we feel like we accomplished putting together a great book.

Bob Sirott of WGN AM 720 radio called this book, “quite a nice little keepsake.” http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46757&Itemid=557 – I had a call yesterday from the painter Robert Guinan who loved the book, and lamented that there were no surviving pictures of Johnny Young, a pioneering blues artist who made Maxwell Street his main hangout, and who Guinan profiles in the book. Guinan told me he thought a book of this kind on Maxwell Street was long overdue. There are some good promotional things coming up for this book, an event at the Oak Park (IL) Public Library at 7 pm on December 18 where Tom and his wife Marcia will sign books and they will show the movie. Tom will appear on Ray Hanania’s Radio Chicagoland show WJJG AM 1530 on December 5 at 8:30 am. And, this is big, Tom will be live on WGN TV (channel 9 in Chicago, and nationally syndicated on cable TV) on the Midday News program on December 18 around 12:20 pm, where they will interview Tom about the book and show snippets from the movie.

Is the book business recession proof?

2008-11-21T05:02:00.000-08:00

Alan Greenspan is in the news once again, his grizzled face increasingly haggard as he looks on with shock and awe at the tanking international economy. A recent cover image on the New Yorker magazine shows Wall Street traders bleeding from their eyeballs as the Angel of Death and Destruction holds up a broadsheet with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting straight down to Hell. There is finger pointing on both sides of the political aisle, as the fallout from irrational exuberance affects everyone. The upcoming presidential election offers two starkly different approaches to resuscitating the damaged economy, and columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman, this year's Nobel Memorial Prize Winner for Economics, tells us that the pain is only just beginning . . .

The book business, on the other hand, remains as quietly quirky as ever. In tough economic times, as publishers both large and small tighten their belts and rein in their advances to unknown authors who are not yet established with the reading public, one thing becomes abundantly clear: Commission reps, those feisty independent sales people who ply their trade in different territories throughout North America and beyond, offer incredibly good value for all publishers. Commission selling is fixed-cost. Commission reps pay their own expenses, including transportation, taxes, and insurance, and they only get paid when orders ship into their designated territory. Selling on commission is a time-honored practice, and if you take a look at the history of this noble profession you will see that it goes all the way back to eighteenth-century Europe as well as the North American colonies, where an intricate network of booksellers and travelers was established.

Independent reps bring more than good economics to the big table. Besides being resilient, cost effective, and an integral part of the operations of the book industry, independents can and often do freely speak their minds to good effect. This is an added value, and the self-directed rep can offer valuable advice to help publishers succeed in the marketplace. It's simple. If the publisher succeeds, the rep does, too. NAIPR reps are a talented bunch of folks, and in some cases have more than five decades of experience to draw upon. Because independent reps carry a mixed bag of publishers and go into a variety of accounts, this means they are flexible and can adapt to many situations. The durability of the relationship between publisher and independent rep counts for a lot as well: over time the rep develops into an expert on his publishers’ backlists, and the specific disciplines they publish. Booksellers rely on this breadth of knowledge in making their buying decisions. Everyone wins when you employ an independent rep.
So the answer to the question in the title of this piece is: YES! Publishers and booksellers can make good things and strong sales happen with a little help from their friends at NAIPR.

Missouri to publish a new collection of stories by Rudolph Fisher

2008-10-11T02:58:00.000-07:00

Rudolph Fisher was a great writer. He wrote short stories that depicted life in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, the so-called Jazz Age, with a rare sense of humor, grace and objectivity. He was also a true a renaissance man: -- a full-time doctor, musician, and orator, he also wrote two novels and a number of book reviews and scientific articles. One of the novels is a mystery, a favorite of mine published years ago by University of Michigan Press, called The Conjure Man Dies.

The University of Missouri Press anthology collects all of his short stories, and is called The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher. It’s edited with an introduction by John McCluskey, Jr., a professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. This is a new and expanded edition.

This definitive collection of stories by Fisher shows his remarkable range as a writer. It includes seven unpublished stories that take up such themes as martial infidelity and passing for black, and relate the further adventures Jinx and Bubber, characters that appeared in Fisher’s novels. In all Fisher offers vibrant tales of inner-city life, laced with humor from black folklore, and infused with music from Harlem’s many cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs. It offers a multifaceted portrait of Harlem that is unmatched in depth and range by Fisher’s contemporaries or successors, as the New York Times Book Review said, “one feels, smells, and tastes his Harlem; its people come alive and one cares about them.”

This book also includes a famous article Fisher wrote called “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” which describes the craze for black music and dance. McCluskey’s introduction has been updated to include the new works, and places Fisher’s work and career in a broader context of American writing during the 1920s.

Hopefully this new edition will gain Fisher a wider readership, and enhance his stature as a major American writer. Booklist noted about Fisher’s work, it shows “the complexity of black urban life in its encounter with the dangers and delights of the city.”

Fall 2008 - Pick of the Lists

2008-09-29T05:49:00.001-07:00

Fall 2008 - Pick of the Lists

Breaking the Spell of Binge-Eating Kortink, Paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-0-89733-577-5, October, Health/Self-Help, Academy Chicago

A runaway bestseller in Holand in 2006, this empowering book has now been translated from the Dutch. Kortink is a spiritual psychologist who has formulated a unique therapy for the effective treatment of binge-eating and an array of eating disorders.

Chicago Neon Signs Zamudio, Cloth, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-97869676-2-8, October, Photography, Wicker Park Press

Zamudio takes pictures of familiar and exotic neon signs throughout the city with a Diana, a toy camera made completely from plastic, including the lens. The photographs are striking images that will remind readers of a bygone era in an ever-changing urban environment.

Anatomy of a Trial: Public Loss, Lessons Learned from People Vs OJ Simpson Hayslett, Cloth, $29.95, November, History/Journalism, University of Missouri Press

A compelling insider’s account of the trial of the century: -- Hayslett was a media liaison who had unprecedented access during the trial. This is a page-turning narrative of the incredible events that took place in the courtroom.

Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, Religious Right and Culture Wars Lindlof, Cloth, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-8131-2517-6, August, Film/American History, University Press of Kentucky

The film version of The Last Temptation of Christ caused a storm of controversy when it appeared in 1988. Lindlof interviews all the principles involved in the release of the film, and shows how this key event became a tipping point in the ongoing culture wars. This is fascinating reading.

Intelligence Matters: CIA, FBI, Saudi Arabia, & the Failure of America’s War on Terror Graham, Paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1626-8, September, Current Affairs, University Press of Kansas

Senator Graham chaired the historic joint House-Senate inquiry into intelligence failures leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This book tells a riveting tale and is an unflinching exposé of breakdowns, incompetence, and deceit at the highest levels of government.

Charles Darwin: Concise Story of Extraordinary Man Berra, Cloth, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8018-9104-5, November, Biography, Johns Hopkins

2009 is the 200^th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (Feb 12), and this compact and heavily illustrated biography reveals the man behind the great scientist. This book digs deep to reveal Darwin the Man,

Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland Friese, Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-8881603-6-9, September, Cooking/Travel, Ice Cube Press

Iowa City chef embarks on a journey around the Midwest and chronicles a variety of Slow Food Movements. This includes micro-breweries in Ann Arbor and smoked trout from Lake Superior region. Readers will be amazed at the remarkable diversity of culinary offerings of the Midwest. This book is a delight.

Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008 Barks, Cloth, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3237-6, November, Poetry, University of Georgia

Coleman Barks is well-known as the translator of 13^th century mystical poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi. Barks has reached a devoted and inspired worldwide audience with his translations of Rumi’s work. Here is a luminous collection of over 400 pages of Bark’s own playful poetry.

Gallery Ghost: Find the Ghost Who Paints the Most Nilsen, Cloth, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-59960-036-9. August, Children’s/Art, Birdcage Press

Something spooky is happening at the museum. At night the ghosts of 24 famous artists come out to play. Published in association with National Gallery in Washington, DC, it features 24 of their greatest masterpieces. This book will provide hours of fun for kids 7 and up, as they learn about each artist and their paintings through poems and stories.

Waters of Michigan Dempsey, Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-0870138300, April, Photography/Regional, Michigan State University Press

80 duotone illustrations present Michigan's greatest resource as seen through the lens of a camera.

Pittsburgh to Publish a Panorama of 19th Century Printed Views of the City

2008-08-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

Historical print and antique map expert Christopher W. Lane has put together a stunning collection of reproductions of various views of the Pittsburgh, PA from books, magazines, illustrated newspapers, lithographs, and other types of material from the 19th century. A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views offers 140 full-color illustrations, and is published in conjunction with the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh. The book offers various views of Pittsburgh, from an idyllic little village on a confluence of rivers in 1817, to the Great Conflagration in April, 1845 where over 1,000 houses burned to the ground. We see the development of Pittsburgh as an industrial powerhouse and how this was depicted in everything from fine art to advertising materials.

2008 is the 250th anniversary of the founding of Pittsburgh in 1758. This book is a fitting tribute, and belongs on the shelf next to the classic book University of Pittsburgh Press published originally in 1990, Arthur G. Smith’s Pittsburgh Then and Now. Lane’s book is an instant classic as he provides visual and written examples of prints, and he has provided here the most comprehensive listing of depictions of Pittsburgh ever assembled.

Prometheus Books to publish rare Mark Twain collection

2008-08-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

S.T. Joshi has done it again. He’s come up with an incredible collection of uncommon writings by Mark Twain in What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays. As an editor and literary sleuth Joshi, an independent scholar who has edited collections of great American writers such as H.L. Mencken and H.P. Lovecraft, among others, has weeded out key writings by Twain on religion. Reminiscent of the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire, Twain had an unbounded contempt for religious hypocrisy and obstructionism. He peppered his essays with a razor sharp satirical wit, and his writing is characteristically sardonic and humorous in these essays.

Many of the essays in this book have not been readily available before, and Joshi provides helpful annotations to explain various historical, literary and religious references. The main essay in the book is What Is Man? (1906), a long philosophical dialogue about the nature of religion, where Twain asserts that altruism does not exist, that every human action is the product of outside influences, and we help others primarily as a means to make ourselves comfortable. Twain condemns religious exclusivity, the dreadful treatment of animals by a supposedly moral human race, and what he calls the hypocritical Christian thirst for money. Twain pulls no punches here, as he did in the posthumous collection of his writings, Letters from the Earth.

Although Twain maintained until the end of his life that he believed in God, he expressed a deep skepticism toward such religious beliefs as “special Providence” (God’s interference in the affairs of individuals), the concept of hell, the religious basis of morality, and the divine inspiration of the Bible. He had serious concerns about central religious tenants, and it’s clear that these weighed on his mind for much of his life. Twain’s family was uncomfortable with some of his writings (for instance, Letters from the Earth was not published until 1962, well after his death in 1910), and editor Joshi and Prometheus Books have done readers a great service by bringing Twain’s obscure but lively philosophical writings on religion to a wider audience.

There are many surprises to be had in any Twain collection, he was an undisputed master of many styles of writing, and Joshi provides a comprehensive introduction that elucidates Twain’s shifting attitudes towards religion in general. What we have here is a true American original, Mark Twain, thought by many to be the Father of American Literature, taking a straight aim at the multifarious claims of religion – metaphysical, moral and political – and exposing what he saw as their fallacies and deliberate obscurantism.

.

Tennessee revisits its Vernacular Architecture series with a powerhouse Victorian Studies book

2008-08-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

Anna Vemer Andrzejewski is an assistant professor of art history at University of Wisconsin at Madison and she had written an unusual and innovative book about how surveillance played a key role in the building of prisons in 19th century America, and how this dynamic spilled over into the construction of post offices, factories, offices, and even houses. Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America shows how surveillance influenced a diverse array of the built environment in this country from roughly 1865 to 1918. She goes so far to say that surveillance not only motivated a range of common buildings but also was and is a defining practice of modernism.

French philosopher Michel Foucault is the author of Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and the classic Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, and his ideas are what informs Andrzejewski’s arguments. Foucault wrote extensively about the idea of ever-present gaze and control, and the kind of insidious power that “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.” The argument is complex and way too multilayered to paraphrase here, to say nothing of the fact that it’s been translated from the French, but Foucault also goes back to English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s central idea of the Panopticon, that is, a building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point.

Andrzejewski’s title and the very concept of Building Power is an interesting play on words, a reference to Foucault’s panoptic theory. Even so, she builds and expands on Foucault’s creative arguments and illustrates how diverse American spaces were built with close scrutiny in mind in Victorian America, and how this complicated landscape influenced all aspects of everyday life and the principles of modernism. The book is illustrated with 80 photographs, and, according to architectural historian Ken Breisch from the University of Southern California, Andrzejewski’s “comparative method is original and yields new insight into the widespread role of surveillance in American life.”

1968 Games in Mexico City are recalled in a new book

2008-07-31T22:57:00.000-07:00

As the 2008 Olympic Games heat up in Beijing, China in August, it’s educational and extremely important to look back and see how other Olympic Games fared. That’s why the new book from Kevin B. Witherspoon is so important. It’s aptly named Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico and the 1968 Olympic Games. It reminds me how edgy countries can be when they take the international stage and host the games. In 1972 in Munich, the Germans botched security and allowed a disaster to ensue when Israeli athletes were held hostage and ultimately killed by a Palestinian terror group. The Germans did not know what to do, and even restarted the games in the face of a hostage crisis. Mexico in 1968 had its serious problems as well, and Witherspoon, a professor of history at Lander University in South Carolina, highlights the intersection of sports held on an international stage with the historical, political and social climate of 1968.

The “Mexican miracle” of the previous twenty years came to a screeching halt in Thatelolco, a neighborhood in Mexico City where riot policeman gunned down hundreds of peaceful student demonstrators in cold blood. These protests were part of an international student movement for peace and reform, and Mexico’s President at the time, Gustavo Diaz Ortiz, was determined to stop the protests at all costs. It gives pause to think if the government of China today might not stop at mass murder to allow the games to go on without a seeming hitch. Appearances can be deadly, and the desire for apparent normalcy in the games, and the idea of the splendor of the host country can reach proportions of sheer mania. Reading Witherspoon’s account of what happened in Mexico will offer valuable perspectives.

Racism took center stage in Mexico when award-winning American Olympic runners Tommie Smith (gold metal) and John Carlos (bronze metal) raised their black-gloved fists in the Black Power salute while on the Olympic stand. This gesture galvanized the Civil Rights movement and became a lasting symbol of struggle of African Americans for their freedom and self-determination. Smith poignantly recounts the backlash and death threats he received after the protest in his cool autobiography from Temple University Press called Silent Gesture, written with David Steele, a sports columnist for The Baltimore Sun. This simple act has become an iconic image in Olympic history.

Witherspoon recounts how the cold war between the USA and USSR was played out at the Mexico games, and various machinations that took place. There were protests over whether South Africa should be allowed to compete because of their policy of Apartheid. In addition to this, the pollution in China today that is reported to possibly threaten to mar the games and affect the athletes ability to perform, is recalled in the Mexico games because of the high elevation and thin air in Mexico City. The 1968 games were also the first to introduce drug testing of athletes. All in all, we have a fascinating history of the 1968 games, and Allen Guttman, sports history expert and professor of English at Amherst College, calls Witherspoon’s book, “one of the best books I have read on Olympic sports.”

Enjoy the games, but take an instructive look back with Witherspoon’s excellent history and come to know what transpired beforehand. The book is published by Northern Illinois University Press in De Kalb.

The vagaries of history come through loud and clear in two new books from Brookings

2008-07-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

History is a tricky thing to ignore, and it tends to repeat itself under different guises. A poignant new book, just being issued in paperback from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Brookings, distributor), is Savage Century: Back to Barbarism, by French global affairs expert Thérèse Delpech. The critics raved about this one, as Rolf Ekéus reminds us “contemporary leaders of the West {are} sleepwalking into the new century without any strategic concepts and suffering from collective historical amnesia.” Ekéus is a former UN official with experience in Iraq, and currently serves as a commissioner with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Delpech is a French academic, and director of strategic affairs with the French Atomic Energy Commission.

You might not expect a book that’s been described as philosophical, psychological, or even literary from a professor of International Relations, but this book vividly reminds us that clear warning signs were ignored, and the “civilized” world failed to prevent two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet death camps, the Cambodian killing fields, and a host of other atrocities that plagued the 20th century. Delpech warns that these things can easily happen again, and she describes various flashpoints throughout the world where violence and lawlessness could slip out of control. There’s a “fierce argument against repeating the mistakes that have led to our dire straits,” says Peter Brooks, professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Continuing with Brookings French connection, we have a new book by Hubert Védrine, author of a previous book from Brookings called France in an Age of Globalization (2001), with Dominique Moïsi, translated from the French by Philip H. Gordon, a senior fellow at Brookings. The new book is called History Strikes Back: How States, Nations and Conflicts are Shaping the 21st Century. This is also translated by Gordon, and carries a foreword by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It was a bestseller in France. Védrine offers an overview of world politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he illustrates the pitfalls that the U.S. has experienced in their erroneous beliefs that with the collapse of the East bloc they had won a complete battle of history. Védrine thinks that the U.S. has been too bellicose in dealing with the world, and the Europeans have been too meek to overcome such daunting challenges as relations with emerging powers, managing runaway globalization, and dealing with the devastation of the environment. Nations still matter in Védrine’s brave new world, and this is a hyper-realistic look at the past, and it shows how Westerners have been misguided by illusions that globalization and free markets will ultimately make a better world for everybody. Leaders need a good tonic of history and common sense to fashion a better world, and Védrine lays out for Europeans what they can expect from the new U.S. Administration to come. He lays out his arguments with an acerbic wit and a French sensibility that will reward readers with a renewed sense of “Realpolitik.”

Two books that offer a much-needed historical perspective on presidential elections

2008-07-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

Click here for an interesting report on a late-breaking development from the 2004 election in Ohio
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/electionstrikeforce/2008/07/ohio_attorney_files_motion_to.html

The presidential election in Ohio in 2004 is still very much in dispute, as the link above will attest. Electronic tabulations of votes are clearly wide open to manipulation and fraud, and this is one of the most under-reported stories in the country. The New York Times recently ran an editorial in its July 16 issue stressing the need for a paper trial in elections to verify votes (even these election receipts need to carefully checked, according the book, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, since hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/opinion/16wed1.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Check+That+Vote%22+&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Kansas is putting out two books by eminent historians as part of their series, American Presidential Elections. A recent book in this series, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932, by Donald A. Ritchie won the George Pendleton Prize. The forthcoming books have strong relevance to our time, and can be extremely instructive and enlightening reading as the campaign season for 2008 starts up in earnest after Labor Day. By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876, by Michael F. Holt, a professor of American History at University of Virginia, outlines this key election between the ultimate winner, Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, and Samuel Tilden, a Democrat who actually won the popular vote (shades of the infamous 2000 election between Bush and Gore). In fact, the Hayes defeat of Tilden by one electoral vote was dubbed “the fraud of the century.” Professor Holt is a first-rate scholar of the period, having done previous books on the Whig Party, and the lead up to the American Civil War. He looks for answers to what exactly happened and why. He shows how the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives erred in the timing of admitting Colorado into the Union, when without its votes in the mix Tilden would have won. He notes there was a huge turnout in the election, as fears of a Confederate takeover of the government were successfully stoked by the Republicans. In fact, this election helped establish the label GOP for the Republicans, and the outcome was particularly notable as the Republicans were able to hold onto the presidency in the midst of a severe economic depression, after having lost the congressional elections of 1874. Professor Holt shows that the specter of the Civil War was still very much hovering over the American people, and he manages to convey the political mood of the country in that time, in what is being called “a masterly retelling of this controversial episode.”

Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Election of 1888, by Charles W. Calhoun, a professor of History at East Carolina University, is another example of an incident where the ultimate winner won the election in the Electoral College, while losing the popular vote. This election was hotly contested, as Professor Calhoun outlines, in a horse race between incumbent President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, and his Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison. It is said that Harrison was a firebrand campaigner, and could give a dozen riveting speeches on different subjects in a single day. The front porch campaign reference in the title of the book is to Harrison’s penchant for espousing his views almost daily from a front porch for visiting voters and reporters. Professor Calhoun notes that this campaign set an important precedent for future campaigns, leading up to the present day. It also shows how economics played a significant role in politics and in the election, and how Harrison as President adopted innovative new leadership strategies and governing techniques, including extensive travel, legislative intervention, and a focus on foreign affairs that would be a forerunner to modern times.

Harrison was the grandson of the 9th President William Henry Harrison, who died in office after only 31 days. He was what is called a “one term wonder,” as Cleveland came roaring back in the election of 1892 and recaptured the White House with the popular vote and the Electoral College counts. Another interesting thing about Harrison he is the subject of an enduring song from a cool Walt Disney movie from 1968 called The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. That movie has an awesome soundtrack, with songs written by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, including the classic song, “Ten Feet Off the Ground.” There is a scene where competing Democrats and Republicans sing festive campaign songs in the heat of the 1888 election, even though this happens in the Dakota Territory which has yet to claim statehood. “Let’s Put It Over With Grover” is paired with “Oh, Benjamin Harrison,” which has the classic refrain, “Oh, Benjamin Harrison, you’re far beyond comparison …” For more information about this movie, click here
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063389/plotsummary

As the 2008 election intensifies between Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain, it is instructive to go back and look at previous elections, even if it is through these two fascinating books, the ongoing controversy over the 2004 election that is making the news, or through an old Hollywood movie that teaches us various things about the past and entertains.

Lament for the White Haven Motor Lodge

2008-07-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

I have been staying at the White Haven Inn in the greater Kansas City area for twenty years. I was checking out today and I told the proprietor I would see her when the snow flies next time around, and she told me nope, she had sold the place. This after 51 years in business and 4 generations of the same family running it: -- is someone going to keep it open, I asked her. She told me the buyers were going to knock it down. It’s really a shame because the place is an icon.

I once told another sales rep about how I always stay at the White Haven, and he replied, “Oh, Eric, you’re so old-school!” That’s what the place was, my friends, a real throwback to the 1950s. It features real keys with the room number etched in on a copper plate; walk-in closets; Rococo furniture and antique fixtures; leaded glass windows in every room; a grandiose neon sign in the front that belongs in a book about kitsch; free coffee and donuts in the morning for 5 cents; a swimming pool; a gazebo in the back courtyard; rooms of various sizes, but all the rooms were oversize; and the friendliest service you’ll ever expect to get anywhere. They know me by name, and all I had to do was call up and say I was coming, and they made me welcome with no credit numbers necessary.

Someone told me that the White Haven Inn was one of the original motels in the Kansas City area. The place is a compound with two sprawling buildings and two parking lots, located on Metcalf Avenue and 80th Street in the City of Overland Park, Kansas. A really fine location, on a main drag: -- some of the houses around the joint are built in the same style, and were clearly constructed at the same time. There’s a permanent sense to the place, and it shocked me that it was going to be knocked down. I lingered at breakfast this morning in the gazebo and wondered at how progress can sometimes be bad.

I’m sure the place is really hard to maintain. You don’t ever get a break, the proprietor told me. Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving you are always on call; people staying all the time. She was looking forward to freedom, and she said the next time she sees me she wants it to be in a bar! But I’m going to miss this place, and after October 1, 2008 it’s going to be toast.

There was another place that I had less of a personal connection with, but I thought also had great character: the New Tower Inn on Dodge and 72nd Street in Omaha, NE. It was almost a village onto itself, and I remember the swimming pool was in a separate building in the front parking lot. The rooms had outside entrances going all along two sides, and there may have been other buildings on the grounds as well. There was also an incredibly long hallway with poor lighting, and you could reach the rooms from the inside in the winter. The breakfast place was funky, and it had some wonderfully eccentric neighborhood characters in there every morning. The motel was pretty rundown in spots, but had a real urban feel to it that I really appreciated.

The thing that was most memorable about the place was the bar called the Crystal Tree. It had the original crystal tree from the Hollywood set of the Julie Andrews Hour on ABC TV in 1972. I remember I really liked that show when I was in high school. It was a really cool place to have a drink late at night. It was delightfully cheesy, and it was located in its own building next to the pool. http://www.tv.com/the-julie-andrews-hour/show/6816/summary.html

I never used to make a reservation whenever I want to Omaha. The New Tower Inn was so huge they always had rooms, and I would show up at any hour and I was always accommodated there. One time I went and the place was razed! I remember it was during the day and I drove around and I just couldn’t believe it. They built another strip mall there. Just what the City of Omaha needed, another strip mall!

Texas is coming out with another great book from photographer Keith Carter

2008-07-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

A Certain Alchemy is the name of Keith Carter’s new book. It has an introduction by Bill Wittliff, another renowned Texas photographer who founded the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University – San Marcos, and is the author of the recent bestselling book from University of Texas Press, A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove. There is also an afterword by Patricia Carter, Keith’s wife, who offers another perspective on his work. Carter has made himself a major name in fine art photography circles in the last twenty-odd years, and this new book will attest to his relentless creativity. Photography has to do with what is chosen to be inside the frame, what is left out of the frame, how the image is lighted, and what the perspective is, among other things. Carter has been called a “poet of the ordinary” and he has taken mundane happenings around his home in East Texas and made these seemingly everyday things look extraordinary. His photographs of animals are legendary, see the book he did with Texas in 2000 called Ezekiel’s Horse (Booklist called the book, “Majestic, intelligent, sculptural”), and here he does not disappoint readers. He expands his range of subjects and locations to put together a gallery of photographs that is haunting, arresting, and attempts to seeks out the profound hidden meanings of the real world.

You can view photographs by Carter and get some deep background on this key artist by going to his web site http://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/ -- a Keith Carter book is always entertaining to look at closely, and you never know quite what to expect from his camera. A Certain Alchemy is his tenth book, and here we see a visual artist at the absolute top of his game.

Minnesota to publish a book on radical Serbian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev

2008-07-07T23:09:00.000-07:00

Lorraine Mortimer is a social science lecturer from Melbourne (La Trobe University), and she has written a critical assessment of the films of Makavejev, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev. Amazingly, this is the first book-length critical study of this key Serbian filmmaker. The book spans his career from 1965 to 1994.

Man Is Not a Bird (1965) is an amazing film, his first feature, and the film "blends actuality with fiction in a manner so unselfconscious as to seem almost natural …” according to International Film Guide.

WR: Mysteries of an Organism (1971) is an offbeat, counter-cultural classic. Inspired by the writings and life of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the WR in the title, Makavejev describes it as "a black comedy, political circus, a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others...If you watch for more than five minutes, you become my accomplice." It’s interesting to note that Tuli Kupferberg, legendary beat poet and band leader of the 1960s group The FUGS, has a role in the film.

Sweet Movie (1974) helped establish Makavejev as “one of cinema's most controversial, original and exciting directors,” according to Facets Multimedia in Chicago. This is one hard-to-find movie, since it was banned in several countries, and helped get Makavejev exiled from Serbia for close to 15 years. Facets has several Makavejev films in their video collection, among which is an early experimental film called Innocence Unprotected (1968). This film is described by Facets as a “cinematic collage” that is “a funny and daring (in both content and form) mix of a wide variety of film footage--including documentary, narrative, agitprop, and various other bits and pieces of found footage.”

Any Makavejev film is going to be interesting to watch, especially the early ones. He did make an attempt at doing a Hollywood film. In Australia, he directed The Coca Cola Kid (1985), starring Eric Roberts and Greta Scacchi. That was a pretty entertaining film, his stab at doing a romantic comedy, but it ultimately failed at the box office.

Mortimer’s book is a groundbreaking look at seven of Makavejev’s films, and she puts his films in historical context with political upheavals such as World War II, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the fall of communism. True to the spirit of Makavejev, Morimer takes what the publisher calls “a radically interdisciplinary approach” in her critical assessment of Makavejev’s work. Complete with 25 b/w photos, this should be one cool book.

For more information about Makavejev, along with an extensive interview with the director and lots more information, visit this web site http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/11/makavejev.html

Catholic University of America Press to publish a key 19th Century Spanish novel

2008-07-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

Juan Valera’s The Illusions of Doctor Faustino (Las illusions del doctor Faustino) came out in 1875, and was considered to be one of the most important novels of its time in Spain. It was favorably compared to Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education (L’Education sentimentale) because of the negative affect of Romanticism on Faustino’s life. Valera had written a blockbuster the year before, Pepita Jiménez, and that book clearly established Valera as a writer of brilliant prose. This previous book deals realistically with the struggle between love and religion in an ardent young man who is studying for the priesthood, and who falls desperately in love with the title character, who is supposed to marry his widowed father. Valera takes it one step further with Doctor Faustino’s character, who seems to be unlucky in love at every turn, through no fault of his own. His love life is a series of nonstarters and missed opportunities, as he either scorns or is scorned by three different women in the course of his life. The story starts out in Andalusia, in Southern Spain, and then moves on to Madrid, where the denouement takes place and Faustino meets his sad end in a Romantic malaise.

This edition is deftly translated by Robert M. Fedorchek, a professor emeritus of Spanish at Fairfield University., with an introduction by Agnes Money, a professor of Spanish at Temple University. Fedorchek is a veteran translator, and he previously translated another Valera book for CUA Press in 2006, Juanita la Larga. According to an expert, Harriet S. Turner, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “Fedorchek’s translation of Juanita la Larga captures the light, sinuous line of the original Spanish. In a masterly series of sleights of hand—transpositions, pauses, and ellipses—Fedorchek informs his translation with the wit, delicacy, and playfulness of Valera’s novel." It is evident that Fedorcheck does the same thing with The Illusions of Doctor Faustino, and allows English readers a rare opportunity to encounter a classic Spanish-language work.

Personal Struggles and Triumphs Can Make For Great Reading

2008-07-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

Ohio University Press published a pioneering book in 1997 with Linda Spence’s Legacy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Personal History. The book was designed to prod a story out of people about the different phases of their lives. The focus was on getting older people to talk about their experiences, and the end-result was a set of writing that was “mesmerizing and revelatory,” according to Booklist. A new book along the same lines is coming out from Ohio, it's called Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History. The book has five authors, all of whom are professional historians and researchers: -- Donna M. DeBlasio, director of the Center for Applied History at Youngstown State University; Charles F. Ganzert, a communications professor at Northern Michigan University; Davis M. Mould, a research dean at Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University; Stephen H. Paschen, an archivist and librarian at Kent State University; Howard L. Sacks, director of the Rural Life Center at Kenyon College. These experts tell readers with little or no experience how to plan and implement an oral history project. These are the kind of stories from everyday people that the media and certain history books tend to overlook. The guide is practical in that it tells readers everything thing they need to know, from recording devices, legal issues, and the interview process, that will assist readers in the important work of documenting memories, and in collecting the stories of community and family. This book should find a place on library shelves and in bookstores across the country.

University of Washington Press is all over the Map, and loving it from Seattle

2008-06-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

From Coulee Dam to the Monterey coast, from the far-flung territories of Native American art to a quaint hillside garden in Seattle, from the frontlines in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s to the origins of the Shan state in Myanmar, this university press continues a tradition of eclectic excellence in its seasonal book offerings.

There is an eerie Thai mystery, featuring the ace detective Father Ananda, in a book distributed for Silkworm Books called Killer Karma by Nick Wilgus, chief sub-editor for the “Outlook” section of the Bangkok Post. A grisly spectacle of ghostly heads bobbing on the surface of the sea attracts a crowd near Wat Phloi, a tiny monastery on the coast of Chanthaburi Province in central Thailand. Ananda, an urban monk and former Bangkok police officer, is sent to investigate. This becomes his most challenging case to date, and he is accompanied by Jak, a former temple boy, who assists the good Father in unraveling the case. Wilgus’ previous books include Adventures of Birdshit Foreigner under the pen name of Sulayman X. Previous books in the Father Ananda series are Mindfulness and Murder and Garden of Hell, both available from Silkworm through Washington. Booksellers and librarians should order up.

Towards the back of the Washington catalog for those readers with curiosity and perseverance there is a really interesting book distributed for UNSW Press (University of New South Wales Press in Australia). The F Word: How We Learned to Swear by Feminism by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox is a topical new book that addresses the crucial work/life balance that women face in Western society. They dispel the idea that the balancing act women go through as they juggle work and family is a no-win situation for them. In vivacious prose they offer practical suggestions for effectively combining work and social life with parenting and marriage for women. There are a range of women profiled here that provide readers with a big picture, and the book helps women in forgiving themselves, having fun and not giving up while holding it all together. The cover hangs its hat on a big lowercase F, along with a brassier, a frying pan, and a brief case. See the cover: http://www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9780868408231.htm

Books from Washington referred to above are B Street: Notorious Playground of Coulee Dam by Lawney L. Reyes. This is Reyes’ memoir of growing up in the Depression-era in and around the town where the Grand Coulee Dam was built. The Reyes’ were a mixed-race family of a Indian mother and a Filipino father and they faced racism as white workers on the dam came after-hours to the bars and the brothels along B Street to let off steam after a grueling work day. Based on his own experience and those of his little sister, Luana, and from his mother’s diary and stories told to him by his parents and members of the Sin-Aikst tribe, this is a fascinating and important document about a way of life that was irrevocably changed forever when the Grand Coulee Dam was built.

In Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast, Connie Y. Chiang, explores the history and development of this key town, which was the setting for John Steinbeck’s classic novel, Cannery Row. What makes this book distinctive is that this is an environmental history of a key region that pays as much attention to human interactions as it does changes in the natural world. She draws on such hot-button issues of race and class, and integrates it with how events in the outside world affected the town and overall region. Monterey began as a quaint seaside resort and developed into a fishing center, as Steinbeck wrote about it in Cannery Row, and then a world-class aquarium was built and this turned the town into a tourism powerhouse. This is being called “a compelling narrative” by Carol McKibben, author of Beyond Cannery Row, and by Richard White of Sanford University says this is “a revealing story of people of Monterey and the sea that gave them life.”

Judith Ostrowitz, the author of Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Washington, 1999), provides a close reading of the contemporary art of native tribes such as Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshain in her new book, Interventions: Native American Art for Far-Flung Territories. These artists cross borders and boundaries in more ways than one, and many are from Canadian First Nation groups, along with their native counterparts in the States. Among many key issues discussed in this thought-provoking book, Ostrowitz explores the impact of modernity on Indian art, and the extraordinary use of the Internet to establish an Indian territory there. This has to do with complex issues dealing with construction of self-identity, and a wacky update to what was previous known as Indian Country. Native American art is becoming more and more familiar to the mainstream art world, and Ostrowitz offers what is being called “an invaluable and timely contribution to the increasingly complex debates around Northwest Coast Native Art” (Charlotte Townsend-Gault, University of British Columbia). Janet Catherine Berlo of University of Rochester pegged it when she said Ostrowitz’s “first-rate” book “brings many intellectual worlds together.” “Interventions” appears to be an apt title for this ground-breaking book.

Streissguth Gardens is a hillside park in the City of Seattle that was founded by a couple who work at University of Washington there. Daniel Streissguth is a Architecture and Urban Planning professor, and his wife Ann is a professor in the School of Medicine, and an avid gardener. Together with their son Benjamin, the Streissguth family worked diligently over 40 years to convert a steep forested hillside in the heart of Seattle into a beautiful woodland garden with vistas of the city and lake. In an engaging narrative, In Love With a Hillside Garden, they discuss their philosophy of creating a green park in the middle of the city, and they describe the process in detail about how they achieved their dreams. There are 147 color illustrations in an oversize 7 x 10 format, with 128 pages in paperback. This beautiful book should travel well beyond the city limits of Seattle, and be a source of inspiration for readers in cities around the globe who would like to try this very thing.

There are several books published every year about the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s and the various things occurred during that tumultuous time period. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is publishing a riveting photography book on the period called Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968 by Julian Cox, a curator at the museum. The introduction is by Charles Johnson, a professor at University of Washington, and Congressman John L. Lewis, a key civil rights leader at the time, provides the afterword. The 120 unforgettable images in the book are by many different photographers – photojournalists, artists, activists and amateurs. This book is a significant visual record of some of the key events that took place then, such as the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Birmingham hosings of 1963, and the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965. This is a fascinating collection of images that speaks directly to the struggle of another generation as they helped to change the nation for themselves and their children.

The Shan people in Myanmar (formerly Burma) are one of the largest and most influential ethnic groups in the country. They settled in the rugged eastern part of the country, the Shan Plateau in the first century, CE from their native China. Sai Aung Tun, a historian and native of the Shan, is writing a useful and fascinating history of the region and its people. History of the Shan State: From Its Origins to 1962, published by Silkworm Books, describes how the Shan dominated the political stage in the country for several years, and how they played an important part after World War II in gaining independence from the British and creating an autonomous state. Sai Aung Tun does a remarkable job of tracing the cultural and political history of the Shan from their immigrant origins to the constitutional crisis of 1962. He highlights the period of 1946 to 1962, and discusses the historic Second Pang Long Conference in 1947 where all nationalities in Myanmar agreed to work together for independence. He concludes with an account of the military coup in 1962. This book provides a sorely needed historical perspective on Myanmar, and will help readers gain a greater understanding and insight to current events unfolding there today.

Readers of all stripes are encouraged to get a hard copy of Washington’s Fall 2008 catalog, or go to their website http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/ to view some really cool books.

The Underground Railroad Comes to Vibrant Life in a New Book from Mississippi

2008-06-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

Passage on the Underground Railroad is an arresting book of color photographs by Stephen Marc, a professor of art in the Herberger College of Art at Arizona State University. Click here for a sample of these remarkable photographs: http://herbergercollege.asu.edu/marc/montages.html -- some are montages and others are composites, and you can view samples of both on this cool website. Mississippi aptly describes Marc’s digital photographs as “thought-provoking, unconventional, and haunting.” Detailed captions and multilayered narrative photographs weave together various elements from the landscape of slavery. The freedom sites along the Underground Railroad are also depicted in this book, and there is an essay by Diane Miller, director of the Network to Freedom division of the National Park Service. There is also an interview with Marc by Carla Williams, editor of the journal exposure. An essay by Keith Griffler, a professor of African American Studies at SUNY - Buffalo, rounds out the book. The horror and historical drama of slavery is rendered powerfully in this book, as Marc embarked on a seven year journey photographing the route of runaway slaves. This is one photographer’s evocative interpretation of the history and places along the slave’s path to freedom. This book is a potent combination of photographic innovation and historical documentation.

Iowa Press Celebrates Its Very Own

2008-06-07T20:34:00.000-07:00

In November 2008, University of Iowa Press is publishing two fascinating reprints by Iowa native sons. The first is Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home by novelist/teacher Douglas Bauer. This was originally published in 1982 by the now defunct Iowa State University Press. The book is a memoir of returning home to Prairie City, a town East of Des Moines in central Iowa. Philip Lopate called this book “one of the finest books about place I know.” Bauer spent time in Des Moines working for Better Homes and Gardens, and then in Chicago working as an editor and writer for Playboy Magazine. In 1975 he returned home to work on his father’s farm and to mingle with people in his hometown. The reviews say it all, this book is a regional classic: -- according to Bill Bryson, “Kindly, shrewd and endlessly absorbing – this is as good as a book gets.” The Des Moines Sunday Register said, “Bauer’s book is, at least, the most brilliant report of an Iowa small town ever written …” This book is neither wistful nostalgia nor a harsh look at those who choose to stay on in a small town (so-called Stay Morons), but a unsentimental and loving account of life in a small Midwestern town. This could be a town anywhere.

John Madson is considered to be the father of the modern prairie restoration movement, and his book Out Home is a collection of essays on hunting, fishing and wildlife management, originally published in 1979. Iowa previously reprinted Madson’s brilliant book, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie, called “a lovely little study” by the New York Times, and “instructive and entertaining” by the New Yorker, and now they are following up with this gem of a book. The essays herein were originally penned for such venues as Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Audubon, and Guns and Ammo. Madson died in 1995, and the Kansas City Star said of his books, “Reading Madson is like reading some of his more illustrious and heady predecessors in the American experience … namely Emerson and Thoreau.” This is the first paperback edition of these ageless wilderness tales. All readers and writers of natural history need to take notice of this amazing book.

Message on the eve of Book Expo America, 2008

2008-05-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

As we head into the Book Expo America convention in Los Angeles this week, recent press reports about the possible acquisition of Borders Group, Inc. by Barnes and Noble has fueled fires of speculation. If federal authorities allow the sale to go through, and if shareholders of both companies agree to it, the bookstore landscape in the United States could be forever altered. Is this ultimately a bad thing? It would not be as bad if BGI were to declare bankruptcy and effectively go out of business. In that event many publishers across the country would be inundated with returns from them, and BGI’s ability to return books is legion. So if there were to be a merger of B&N and BGI that would create one colossal account, and while this would be awkward, it would simply be another blip in the big box retail landscape, with bookstores joining hardware stores, drug stores, pet stores and grocery stores in having huge national retail brands.

This occurrence would actually be a good opportunity for smaller regional chains and independent store owners across the country. Big box retailers cannot be all things to all people, and the establishment of one giant bookstore chain across the country will have wide-ranging cultural repercussions. Given the idea that having a bookstore is the ultimate form of self-expression for people, bookstores of all kinds would be able to continue concentrating on customer service, reach out to local readers, and become important destinations in their communities. They could strengthen their core businesses while the two behemoths struggle with their acquisition and with pleasing their stock holders. The rising price of gasoline may be another factor for people to shop closer to where they live, and not getting into the car to motor to free-standing shopping centers, where many big box retailers have their locations.

The various fortunes of super-sized bookstores in the marketplace is always a fascinating thing to watch, but too much of a good thing can be counterproductive. A B&N-BGI amalgamation could easily backfire and cancel itself out. Meanwhile, the market for books in the United States would proceed abated.

Kentucky Press to publish Hollywood Under Seige

2008-05-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

University Press of Kentucky is taking an interesting turn with its distinguished film studies list with the August 08 publication of Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right and the Culture Wars, by Thomas R. Lindlof, a professor of journalism at University of Kentucky. Lindlof explores the major controversy surrounding the release of the movie The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, and how the Christian right in America galvanized itself around the issue of a single sex scene in the movie between Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdelene. Lindlof sees the moral outrage and publicity uproar surrounding the release of the film as a tipping point in the American culture wars.

The film was directed by Martin Scorsese, from a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. In 1988 there were protests outside theaters where the film showed, and the film was actually banned in some countries. In Chicago the film played at the famous Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, and my wife and I actually crossed a picket line to see the movie. The picket line had a young girl dressed up as a nun among the protestors, and this was so striking that this girl was featured on the from page of the Chicago Tribune the next day. The Jesus character was played by Wilhem Defoe and Mary Magdelene’s character was portrayed by Barbara Hershey. Everything was quiet during the performance, but when the sex scene between Jesus and Mary came on screen, you could hear the crowd on the street chanting “no, no, no!” The interplay between the film and the street crowd’s timed reaction to events on the screen made for a genuine surreal experience for moviegoers.

The ironic thing about this hullabaloo was that this film was a deeply religious, very personal interpretation of the Kazantzakis novel by director Martin Scorsese. Author Lindlof interviews all the key players involved with the film – Scorsese. Dafoe, screenwriter Paul Schrader, producers Jeffery Katzenberg and Michael Orvitz – and chronicles their many setbacks, from the production problems to the uproar over the release of the film, to the studio’s crisis control plan. Lindlof makes a very strong case that the controlled protests across the country by the Christian right over the release of this movie was the thing that solidified their political efforts, and has far-reaching consequences for today’s political landscape.

NAIPR Economic Message for 2008

2008-05-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

“That-that don’t kill me, can only make me stronger ….”
-- Kayne West

Independent reps are the wave of the past, present and future. It’s possible to lose sight of this natural fact in times of economic chaos and the age-old Chinese curse about living in interesting times. There is a slippery slope which self-governing sales agencies can slide down, and more often-than-not they have to work harder just to get back to ground zero. The adversity creates tension and a degree of hopelessness, and I’m here to tell you that acute hardships always create hidden opportunities and build character, and while we may lose money in the short term and be required to cut-back, business can still be viewed as thriving in spite of harsh conditions. Reps are in a unique position to make things happen for themselves, and they need to realize how lucky they are because they control their own destiny and choices. Experience counts for the essential qualities here, and members of our organization know how to weather a storm, and even take special advantage of happenstance and apparent disorder.

Take a look at the history of our profession. We reps go way back to before the American Revolution, and our roots hark back to Europe in the 18th century where a complicated network of book peddlers was established, and the sale of books, maps, clocks, calico, and printed cloths were controlled by entire towns (see the excellent book on the subject: History of Pedlars in Europe by Laurence Fontaine, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Understand that we as independent reps have made ourselves indispensable in the world of publishing, and our contacts and ability to make deals is what makes commerce churn in the volatile world of publishing today. We have created NAIPR, an association that speaks with one voice, and yet is unique in and of itself because it is made up maverick characters and specialist human beings who know their own markets intimately and bring various strengths and talents to the big table. Furthermore, our members level the playing field for publishers large and small, for profit and nonprofit book producing organizations, who use our services as their sales and marketing arm. We have something tangible to contribute not only to commerce and the act of selling books to retailers and distributors of every stripe, but also to the broader culture as well. Our role as independent sales agents is time-tested and rock solid, and we are not going to let our publishers, booksellers, families and fellow travelers down as we carry on our core activities.

As President of NAIPR it is my job to try and bring members together and get them to see beyond fierce competition and bitter rivalries, and that we can all benefit from coming together as an organization to prosper. Our web site is a clearinghouse of information about the practicalities of selling on commission; our organization exhibits at Book Expo America and sponsors events and supports regional bookseller associations; we are revising the program of Frontlist-on-Floppy (FROF) to become available on CD ROM and be web-based to offer the most up-to-date information about new and forthcoming titles, that is edited by reps on the ground and is not available from any other source. We are open-minded and open-ended, and we request the honor of hearing from you about what your major concerns are. I have always been preoccupied by history and think we need to honor the key reps who came before us with an Independent Publishers Rep Hall of Fame at the New York Public Library. That is a dream of mine that probably won’t come true during my tenure as association President, but I want to make it clear that NAIPR fills an important place in the book business today, and it is crucial to realize that NAIPR can and will perform a critical functions in the book business of the future.

Eric Miller
President, NAIPR

Paperback verison of a masterful retelling of Icelandic Sagas

2008-05-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland
By Jeff Janoda

"As focused as Jane Austen, as macabre as Stephen King, Jeff Janoda traces out the hidden springs of power in the micro-society of an Icelandic fjord. He tells a tale of complex feud with all the fullness and detail of a modern novel, but leaves its violent and treacherous heroes as enigmatic as before. A brilliant blend of scholarship and insight."
-- Tom Shippey, author of The Road to Middle-Earth

“Debut novelist Janoda paints a richly textured portrait of Icelandic culture … a gripping recreation of an ancient genre.”
-- Kirkus Reviews

“This detail-rich novel is a retelling of a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga … does what good historical fiction is supposed to do: put a face on history that is recognizable to all.”
-- Brad Hopper, Booklist

Jeff Janoda brings us a masterful retelling of the ancient Saga of the People of Eyri, set in feudal Iceland “the Free State” of 965 AD. Saga tells the story of the savage rituals of feud and sacrifice brought by settlers from Norway, and their new competing beliefs in a democratic legal assembly and a code of restraint.

When Thorolf the Viking trades away his valuable lands to spite his son, Arnkel, the ruthless Norse chieftain vows to regain the land at all costs. Robbed of his rightful inheritance, Arnkel begins a venomous feud with his neighbors and with rival chieftain Snorri – a lawless dispute destined to end in betrayal and death.

Janoda’s characters are eloquently wrought, their passions and pagan beliefs brought to life in a tale over a thousand years old. He renders fantastical elements like spirits and elves as vividly as their human counterparts, illuminating the harshness of life in a society on the brink of modernity, yet isolated in the farthest reaches of the planet.

Medieval expert Tom Shippey says of this book, “Sagas look like novels superficially, in their size and layout and plain language, but making their narratives into novels is a trick which has proved beyond most who have tried it. Janoda’s Saga provides a model of how to do it: pick out the hidden currents, imagine how they would seem to peripheral characters, and as with all historical novels, load the narrative with period detail drawn from the scholars. No better saga adaptation has been yet written.”

June 08 Fiction/Fantasy Paperback $17.95 360 pp 5 ½ x 8 ½ ISBN 13: 978-0-89733-568-3 ISBN 10: 0-89733-568-6 Academy Chicago Publishers

Aacdemy Chicago to publish history of the Jews in Chicago

2008-05-18T01:43:00.000-07:00

Avengers and Defenders
Glimpses of Chicago’s Jewish Past

By Walter Roth

The presence of Jews in Chicago goes back to 1841 with the arrival of four Jewish pioneers. Within five years the first synagogue in the city was a reality. Walter Roth, a scholar of Jewish history in the city, looks at the more colorful and little-known aspects of the rich history of Jews and their involvement in all aspects of city life.

In this compelling new collection of essays, Roth looks at trouble in the city – Jewish connections to the Haymarket Bomb tragedy, to the Peoria Street Riots of November 1949, to the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, to the Iroquois Theater fire, and to the murder of Jake Lingle. In a section called Business in the City, Roth discusses Albert Lasker, the father of modern advertising, Ernest Byfield, founder of the Pump Room, William Paley, the head of CBS, Benjamin Rosenthal and the Chicago Mail Order Company, and the demise of the Foreman State Bank. There are sections on culture in the city (Meyer Levin and Isaac Rosenfeld), and science in the city (Leo Strauss, Martin D Kamen and Gunther Stent). Further sections deal with such subjects as the Mexican adventure of Paul Rothenberg, Shalom Schwartzbard, Julian Marx, and the Lovers of Zion.

“Walter Roth’s meticulous research brings alive in equal measure some of the best-known and least remembered, but fascinating, episodes in Chicago Jewish history. Roth clearly loves Chicago and its Jewish community.”
-- Michael Feldberg, Executive Director, American Jewish Historical Society

Walter Roth is an attorney and President of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, and author of The Accidental Anarchist and the critically acclaimed Looking Backward: True Stories from Chicago’s Jewish Past, both available from Academy Chicago Publishers.

Academy Chicago to Publish Oral History of Belgium in WWII

2008-05-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

Lost in the Fog
Memoir of a Bastard

By Rachel Van Meers as told to Daniel Chase

In 1943, shortly after her 13th birthday, Rachel Van Meers stood on a railway platform in German occupied Belgium waiting for a train that would take her and twenty other girls to a “State Camp for Rehabilitation and Labor” in Wertach, Germany.

I remember my Grandmother wore a black shawl. She told me, “I don’t think I’ll see you back in a month. You never know with the Germans. It can take you two weeks. It can take you three weeks. It can take maybe a year.”

Lost in the Fog is the courageous story of Van Meers, born in a home for unwed mothers in the city of Ghent, Belgium in 1930. Raised in a Flemish working-class district by her strict grandmother, two aunts, and three uncles, Van Meers recounts her struggles growing up “a bastard” in Belgium during the Great Depression. When the war breaks out, Belgium, abandoned by its king, was quickly swallowed up by Germany, and the people were left to fend for themselves against the overwhelming occupying forces, and shattering Allied air strikes. Van Meers was torn between her family’s continuing allegiance to Belgium and her mother, a radical social outcast, who became alienated from the family after she joined the S.S. When a violent argument erupts between Van Meers and her Nazi-sympathizing stepfather, she was sent to a child labor camp in Germany and later returned to witness Belgium turned on its head after the war. Now a strong spirited young woman, she refused to go the way of her mother, or give in to the brutal attacks of her ex-Nazi stepfather. She was eventually able to sustain her independence from her family and emigrate to America in 1961.

This is a rare and personal look at Belgium during one of its most significant periods of history. Van Meers tells her story in plain language with humor and honesty, and is based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with Daniel Chase, a writer based in Oregon. Van Meers’s unique view of “a family not quite normal” in extraordinary times, her strong faith and refusal to back down in spite of abusive and degrading treatment, being labeled as a bastard at a time when this amounted to complete societal isolation, and her upbeat attitude and singular forms of expression are a joy and inspiration to read.

Rachel Van Meers achieved many milestones in her life. She’s been a maid, a hat check girl, an electronics assembler, and an assistant apartment manager in Belgium, Amsterdam, and in the United States. Now retired, she resides in Oregon and is the matriarch of her family. This is her first book.

Daniel Chase is a freelance writer and editor living in Oregon. He spent most of his youth writing stories with his sister. This is his first book.

IPM Adds Five New Publishers to its Distribution List

2008-05-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

International Publishers Marketing (IPM – www.internationalpubmarket.com) out of Sterling, VA has bulked up its distribution offerings for Fall 2008. Dicmar Publishing is from Washington, D.C. and is known locally as the publisher of the lavish book, The Willard Hotel: An Illustrated History, by Richard Wallace Carr and Marie Pinak Carr, a husband and wife team. The Carr’s new project is Prepared Parent’s Operational Manuel: Sending Your Kids to College, where Marie writes this book with her three children, Katherine, Ann and Elizabeth. The book provides comprehensive information for parents getting ready to send their kids off to college. The series is going to expand with college-specific guides in a standardized format: -- guides to Boston University, Texas A&M University, Emory University, and Georgetown University. It’s my understanding that the Carr’s have first-hand experience sending their own kids to these schools.

Garnet Publishing is from England and they specialize in books about the Arab world. They are new to the US market, and they have a surprising depth of offerings. They have two books on Iran: -- Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, edited by Malu Halasa and Mazier Bahari serves as an introduction to the vibrant artistic and cultural scene in the city: -- the anthology includes fiction, essays, journalism, photography, and rap lyrics. An Eye for Iran is by Kazem Hakimi, a photographer from Shiraz who relocated to London in 1974. This book of photographs is based on a visit he made to the cities of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashad in 2004. He documents the immediacy of movements from an Iranian way of life that could be lost forever.

Strokes International is a publisher of language study set that includes DVDs, audio CDs and CD ROMs, all in a high-quality slipcase package. The languages are German, Italian, Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic. The product were developed by international language experts and are made for self-learners.

Double Storey is a South African publisher that is new to the US market. They have a beautiful book called African Trees: A Photographic Exploration, by Charles Bryant and Brita Lomba. The book is oversize and features gorgeous color photographs that feature trees not as disembodied objects but as living, breathing organisms located in exotic environments and locations throughout Africa. Another book that looks interesting is Spit or Swallow: A Guide for the Wine Virgin, by Jenny Ratciffe-Wright. This is an offbeat look at the mystique of wine and a guide to drinking and appreciating it for fun and pleasure. Wright-Ratcliffe was born into the wine industry, and her mother, Norma Ratcliffe, has the distinction of being South Africa’s first female wine maker.

30 ˚ South Publishers is also from South Africa and they publish a wide variety of books on South African culture, history, memoirs and travel. Manzovo: Place of the Elephants is by Gary Albyn and Craig Bone, a noted wildlife artist. There is a 110 verse poem that is illustrated with Bone’s breathtaking paintings, and it also includes a DVD of the recited poem by John Whiteley, a South African Shakespearean actor. This looks like quite a beautiful package. There are guidebooks to Swaziland, by David Fleminger and The Whale Trial, by Allan Davie, a guide to whale watching in South Africa. Both these books are 4 x 7 with color photographs, and 176 pages, and appear to be solid travel books.

IPM always seems to have intriguing books from its staple of client publishers. There is an early novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, published by the American University Press in Cairo. AUC Press is Mahfouz’s primary publisher, and this book, Khan Al-Khalili, is translated from the Arabic by Tony Allen, It is billed as a modern Arabic novel, and it is set during the Second World War in Cairo’s bustling, historic KhanAl-Khalili neighborhood. A middle-class family, the Akifs, seek refuge from the ravages of war in the crowded alleyways, busy cafes, and ancient mosques of the Khan, feeling sure the German forces will never bomb such a famously religious part of the city. The story is a family saga played out against a deeply textured portrait of sights, sounds, smells and flavors of the city. This is an engaging and sensitive portrayal of a family at the crossroads of the old world and the new, as only Mafhouz could write it. .

Twilight Visions in Egypt’s Nile Delta, by Ann Parker is a collection of haunting duotone photographs of rural village in Egypt, all taken from the same vantage point. This is Parker’s second book on Egypt; the first one was an award-winning book from Smithsonian Institution Press in 1997, Hajj Paintings: Folk Art of the Great Pilgrimage. In the same way that Parker documented paintings from the Hajj that were painted on outside walls that were ultimately temporary and soon to be lost forever, she captures everyday events in a Nile Delta village crossroads where she patiently sits and waits for what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has called “the decisive moment” on the road in front of her, framed by two trees and curtained by hanging branches at sunset. Parker has succeeded in documenting the remains of a rich traditional village lifestyle, and the result is an extraordinary collection of one hundred sepia-toned images filled with the comings and goings of a procession of the village’s people, animals and vehicles.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my friend Jean Riescher Westcott’s new book she is publishing with her husband Sean Westcott, called Digitally Daunted: The Consumer’s Guide to Taking Control of the Technology in Your Life. Capitol Books in Washington, D.C. is the publisher here, and Jean is on staff at IPM. The book is a consumer’s guide par excellence, and is filled with practical information to help educate everyday folks about choosing, using, and maintaining a whole host of gadgets and gizmos. For those of us who are “daunted by specs,” this is a stress-free way to get the most out of technology ranging from computers, phone systems, televisions, cameras, and more.

One Trippy Book from Johns Hopkins University Press

2008-05-09T16:34:00.000-07:00

Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus is by Erika Dyck, an associate professor of history at University of Saskatchewan. She traces the history of medical experiments with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) from the 1950s, and explains that by the1960s medical researchers were just starting to learn more about it as a good clinical tool when it was criminalized. In the early days of LSD research two Canadian scientists, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, claimed incredible advances in treating alcoholism, understanding schizophrenia, and achieving empathy with their patients using LSD as medicine. Some patients were helped only taking one dose. Dyck recounts it was the drug counter-culture of the 1960s, the “Timothy Learyism” of LSD, led to its almost complete prohibition.

Not so any more. Reporter Benedict Carey reports in the New York Times this week ('A Psychedelic ‘Problem Child’ Comes Full Circle') that Albert Hoffman, the chemist who invented LSD in 1943, “spent the latter part of his life consulting with scientists around the world to bring his ‘problem child,’ as he called the drug, back into the lab to study as a therapeutic agent.” Hoffman died last week, but now, according to Carey, “several trials testing psychedelics are in the works, thanks in part to the steady example set by Dr. Hoffman.”

Dyck outlines the history of LSD as an experimental substance, a medical treatment, and a tool for exploring psychotic perspectives – as well a recreational drug. It is interesting to note that while big drug companies and the medical establishment have embraced anti-depressants and anti-psychotics and marketed them aggressively to unwitting millions of people, LSD has been branded as belonging to a radical counter-culture and was criminalized despite having proven in some clinical trials to offer people help with their psychiatric problems. This is a fascinating book about LSD, a book in the history of medicine that shows the rise and fall of psychedelic psychiatry, and offers a corrective to the medical community to show through its history that LSD is a legitimate substance that warrants serious re-consideration and study.

It’s important to point out at this juncture that all Johns Hopkins books are printed on acid-free paper.

University of Michigan Press has some Hot Books for Fall 2008

2008-05-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

A book being published in November, in time for the national elections, is Politics in the Pews: The Political Mobilization of Black Churches, by Eric L. McDaniel, an assistant professor of Government at University of Texas at Austin. McDaniel offers insights into how these churches have made politics part of their mission, and he gauges their various successes and failures. It seems very timely to have a cogent analysis of this phenomenon, especially with the ascendancy of Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. As the ex-minister where Senator Barack Obama goes to church, Wright has used national exposure he has gotten as a result of his association with Obama to drive home fiery points of black liberation theology. Normally militant rhetoric of this kind would not be so prominent in the news media, but the runoff between Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary race has shifted it to the front page. Some people would view Wright’s message, forged in the legacy of slavery and continued fight for equal rights, as being essentially political rather than religious. Books like the new one from Professor McDaniel will help readers understand the forces that motivate black churches and their leaders to engage in politics.

An unusual futurist approach is taken in the new Herbert J. Gans book, Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together after Bush, A Utopian Narrative. Gans discusses seven different election cycles, 2008 – 2032, and outlines how politics will change and go into a more progressive direction. Gans is a renowned social scientist, now in his eighties, and he writes with clarity and has an innovative vision for a whole range of pertinent policy questions that will no doubt be looked at seriously by law and policy-makers.

Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty, by Paul W Kahn, a professor at Yale Law School, is a book that is much less optimistic about the future than the Gans, Where there is terrorism, Kahn posits, there will be torture. In a provocative argument and almost conversational style, Kahn comes across with rare honesty in saying that torture happens in this day and age and there is little anyone can do about it. Kahn, according to Sanford Levinson at University of Texas Law School, “…forces the reader to grapple with troubling questions that we would prefer to ignore.”

Sometimes it works to a publisher’s advantage to be more focused and have the ability to make big decisions quickly. Harper Collins was the publisher of the first two editions of Betty Jean Lifton, Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience, and Lifton was not happy for whatever reason with the marketing efforts Harper made for her book, so for the third expanded and updated edition, she turned to Michigan. It’s safe to say this book is a classic. Publishers Weekly called it “an articulate and convincing account.” Kirkus Reviews said it was “a provocative, comprehensive survey.” Psychology Today dubbed it “important and powerful.” For thirty years this book topped the “Recommended Reading” lists for those who seek to understand the effects of adoption. Lifton, the author of fourteen books on the subject, is a writer and psychotherapist by trade and here she provides new material on the controversies concerning adoption and new reproductive technologies. She has been a leading advocate for adoption reform, and she continues to add to the discussion on this important topic. There is an expanded list of resources, including those on the Internet. This is a valuable book for both adopted children, parents, caregivers, and anyone who goes through the foster care system.

Academy Chicago to Publish Guide to Overcoming Binge-Eating

2008-05-03T20:02:00.000-07:00

Breaking the Spell of Binge-Eating
A Road to Balance in Your Life

by Joanna Kortink
Translated from the Dutch by Anita Miller and Valerie Thompson

“Joanna is my European soul sister.”
- Peggy Claude-Pierre, author of The Secret Language of Eating Disorders

Joanna Kortink is a spiritual psychotherapist from the Netherlands, and this book is a runaway bestseller in Holland. Kortink fashions a truly different approach in treating an array of eating disorders, including stress-induced eating, compulsive eating and bulimia. Her unique approach combines psychotherapy with creative expression, body training and natural medicine. Kortink has spent many years in support of people with eating disorders, and she knows first-hand the acute struggles her clients face since she actually suffered from bulimia herself. Bringing an intimate knowledge of what readers and her clients confront with eating disorders, Kortink has written a multifaceted and inspiring book that shows another side to eating patterns and includes many practical examples, tips and clear step-by-step guidelines for recovery and self-acceptance, and to making appropriate food choices.

Kortink says that eating differently starts with thinking differently. She inspires readers to start a journey to recovery by profiling compulsive eaters and the role that food plays in their lives. She looks at the causes of compulsive eating, and she notes that compulsive eaters are “rarely themselves, invariably they are playing a role.” She profiles some of her clients and conducts a dialogue between clients and what she calls “their inner saboteur.” Along the journey to physical and emotional detoxification, Kortink describes ways to increase vitality, feed the spirit, get back to basics, and listen to the signals of your body. This leads to greater energy and a comforting sense of self-forgiveness. There are tips for taking immediate self-action, and vital information for partners and friends of binge-eaters. Kortink sensitively describes difficult moments along the way, and combines compassion with a deeper understanding of what she calls the ‘biopsychsocial” aspects of eating disorders.

Kortink lives in the Netherlands and runs Artiva Food and Vitality Coaching.

Up, Up and Away with Johns Hopkins University Press

2008-05-03T19:52:00.000-07:00

For serious steam-heads and rail fans, there is A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946, Volume 3: Indiana, Lower Michigan and Ohio, by Richard C. Carpenter. This is a continuation of a monumental project to create a comprehensive atlas of the rail system as it existed in 1946. The previous two volumes were Volume 1: The Mid-Atlantic States, published in 2003, and Volume 2: New York & New England, published in 2005. The New Yorker Magazine called this “surely one of the most appealingly eccentric projects of the year.” Carpenter, a retired railroad executive, hand-colored 276 individual maps for this edition, and it depicts major rail centers such as Indianapolis, Gary, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Chicago. The critics have been astounded by the accuracy and rapt attention to detail for the first two volumes. There have been absolutely no mistakes!

We have a new publication from renowned psycho-historian Michael Burlingame, a massive oversize two-volume set, 1,952 pages in all, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. Each volume is self-contained: -- volume 1 covers his early childhood, his experience as a farm boy in Indiana and Illinois, his legal training, and the political ambition that led to a term in Congress in the 1840s. Volume 2 covers his presidency and the civil war years. There is a particularly harsh view of Mary Todd Lincoln, and Burlingame offers new interpretations of Lincoln’s private life and the untimely death of his two sons.

This book was originally signed to Random House, but they gave up on the project as each book neared 1,000 pages. This is destined to be a landmark publication, and is published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. With this amazing book, Burlingame has established himself as the 21st century’s premier Lincoln historian.

To commemorate the upcoming 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (November 2009), Johns Hopkins is publishing Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man, by Tim Berra. This book offers a complete life story of Darwin, well-written with 60 halftone and 20 color illustrations. Berra is a Fulbright scholar and professor emeritus at Ohio State University. His lecture, "Darwin and Man," fetches up to $2,500. A few hours with Berra’s book will give readers a real sense of what Darwin was really like – his personality as a scientist, father, husband, friend and a great intellect. Johns Hopkins is modeling this book on the Penquin Lives series, and it will be appropriate for all readers, including young adults.

Another cool short biography from Johns Hopkins is Saladin: The Sultan and His Times, 1138 – 1193, by Hannes Möhring, translated from the German by David S. Bachrach. What is different about this book is it is the only account in English written from Saladin’s point of view. The great Muslim emperor led Arab forces in the re-conquest of Crusader kingdoms, and captured Jerusalem in 1187. He was the great enemy of King Richard the Lionhearted of England, and was a central figure in uniting Arab lands in the Middle East. One of his big military accomplishments was his triumph over the Franks. Möhring uses Christian and Muslim sources to tell the story, and scholar Thomas F. Madden says, “This book provides a lively introduction to Saladin, a medieval sultan whose deeds and legend still loom large today.”

Paradigm Publishers Looks at Presidency with a Jaundiced Eye

2008-05-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

Paradigm’s lead title for Fall 08 is Ambushed! A Cartoon History of the Bush Administration, by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jim Morin. This book, according to marketing and sales people, is not so funny, and is actually a serious indictment of the missteps taken by Bush and his 7 + years in office. It discusses issues in detail, from Enron to Katrina, the budget deficit to the “global war on terror” that lost America many friends and inspired enemies worldwide. Morin, a political cartoonist for the Miami Herald, draws his caricatures of Bush, Cheney and their cronies in a whimsical style. Pat Oliphant, legendary editorial cartoonist, says of Morin’s work, “he has all the attributes of a first-rate cartoonist, including a fine design, and drafting sense and a cunning eye for the unusual.”

Another interesting new book from Paradigm is Spinner-in-Chief: How Presidents Sell Their Policies and Themselves, by Stephen J. Farnsworth, a communications professor at George Mason University. A journalist by trade, Farnsworth lays out a well-written history of how presidents frame the issues to their advantage, and attempt to limit the amount of public debate over important policies to favor themselves. It includes a primer on the 2008 election and how candidates use or misuse the media. With this book readers can learn to be smart consumers of government and the media.

A book that Paradigm was successful with in Fall 2007 was Barack Obama: The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson. That book laid out Obama’s essential ideas and his viability as a presidential candidate in a pretty favorable light. Wilson worked with Obama on his early campaigns from his home base at University of Chicago. Now Paradigm is coming out with a much more nuanced work, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, by Paul Street, a former director of the Chicago Urban League. This is a critical and unfiltered look at Obama’s career, his connections, and his remarkable campaign for the White House. Street worked with Obama in various primary campaigns, and witnessed first-hand the rise of the Obama phenomenon in American political culture. While Obama is aggressively touted as the agent of change in the 2008 election, Street dissects his financial profile and his connection to specific corporate and financial interests. He shows that Obama progressive persona is marketed by campaign strategists, filtered through the media, and that in fact Obama is no magical exception to the narrow-spectrum political culture that has prevailed for so long in American political tradition. He is in fact more of the same.

Broadview Press Starts Freehand Books

2008-05-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

Broadview Press has shored up their literary list with the creation of a new imprint, Freehand Books. The first four books in the series are Good to a Fault, the second novel by Marina Endicott, a renowned Canadian writer; It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, by Jeanette Lynes, an up and coming poet in Canada; Pathologies: Essays by Susan Olding, an award-winning writer; Mother Superior: Stories, by Saleema Nawaz, a Montreal writer who writes stories that are steeped in sexuality.

In addition to Freehand Books, Broadview continues to publish classics and lesser known literature in attractive, comprehensive editions. Notable this season is Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century, edited by Laura J. Rosenthal, a professor of English at University of Maryland, College Park. This provocative anthology includes fiction and nonfiction, some written by prostitutes themselves. There are high and low courtesans represented here, from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. “Offering a range of narratives from the conservative and reformist to the unabashedly libertine, this book provides a fascinating alternative look into eighteenth-century culture.”

From 1752 we have what is called an “it-narrative,” written in this case from the perspective of a lap-dog. The History of Pompey the Little, by Francis Coventry, who was a British novelist. There are no competing editions of this book. The appendices include material from Samuel Johnson, poems by the author, and essays on animal rights.

Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798 and 1800, is by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Both editions are represented here in their entirety, and the 1800 expanded edition has no competition. Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are both included, and this was the book that helped launch the Romantic era. The appendices has reviews, including a piece by William Hazlitt, correspondence, and poems Coleridge originally intended for Lyrical Ballads. This is a ground-breaking collection by two of Britsih literature’s greatest poets.

Another book with no competing edition is A Sunless Heart, by Edith Johnstone. From 1895, this is a proto-lesbian novel about a “romantic friendship” between two women. Called “a startling re-discovery from the late-Victorian era,” it explores issues of race, sexuality, and class in melodramatic, compelling prose. The appendices explore early notions of lesbianism and homosexuality, including A. Hamilton, Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts, American Journal of Insanity (1896), and Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1901).

We also have an autobiography of an early feminist and her militant struggle to gain the vote for women. Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences(1914), by Constance Lytton. Lytton was the granddaughter of the famous Lytton, and when she was imprisoned as a suffragette they let her go because of her aristocratic background. Next time she was arrested she pretended to be a commoner, and she chronicles being forcibly fed while on hunger strike, an act that permanently damaged her health. However, Lytton became the pioneer of a singular movement in the history of women’s and prisoner’s rights. The appendices include further writing by Lytton, and primary documents from the suffragette women’s movement.

Other Interesting Forthcoming Books from Duke University Press

2008-04-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

Duke is doing a series of anthologies of Latin American countries and the latest release, scheduled for February 2009, is The Ecuador Reader: History, Culture Politics, edited by Carlos de la Torre and Steve Striffler. Duke does a whole series on Latin America, and Striffler was co-editor of their book Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas. The new book contains many Ecuadorian pieces translated into English for the first time. Of the previous books in the series, The Peru Reader has been reprinted in a second edition, and The Mexico Reader has sold the best. These are handy, well illustrated books that serve a real purpose. They are going to expand the series with some countries in Asia, like Indonesia, and also include readers on different Latin American cities.

Did anyone know that James Baldwin spent 10 years of his life, 1961 – 1971, living and hanging out in Turkey? James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade by Magdalena J. Zaborowska, a professor of American Culture at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, frames a literary biography of Baldwin, and re-introduces readers to an important part of Baldwin’s life. The book has 55 “stunning photographs,” to quote Harvard University’s Werner Sollors. “A small throwaway reference to Istanbul in Another Country now appears momentous.” Zaborowska interviewed many people who know Baldwin in Turkey, and she comes up with fresh material about artists and intellectuals who were in his inner circle. “Baldwin’s Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity …”

Anthropology is one of Duke’s strong areas of publishing, and a really interesting new book is High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty, by Jessica R. Cattelino. It appears the Seminoles revolutionized the gaming industry when they opened their first casino in 1979. They made a lot of money and proceeded to take care of their own people with free health care and education, and to buy the Hard Rock Café franchise. This book is an accessible ethnography of the Seminole Tribe and their efforts at self-determination. It discusses the interplay between economics, political power and culture and how their renewed political self-governance and economic strength has reversed decades of U.S, settler control.

A book for all sports sections and the anthropology bookshelf would be The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and the Mexican National Identity by Heather Levi. This is an insider’s view of professional wrestling in Mexico. There are some great stories here. Duke did a previous book on professional wrestling called Steel Chair to the Head. Levi traces the history of wrestling in Mexico, starting with a match in Eagle Pass, TX in 1933, and explains in fascinating detail how this sport became an iconic symbol of Mexican cultural authenticity.

A pretty off-the-wall book, but none the less fascinating, is The Assassination of Theo Van Gogh, by Roy Eyerman. Van Gogh was a controversial Dutch filmmaker who was killed in the streets of Amsterdam in November 2004. A twenty-six year old Moroccan-Dutchman shot Van Gogh and proceeded to mutilate his body. He then pinned five-page indictment of Western society to his body. The murder set off a wave of anti-Muslim violence in the city. Eyerman, a professor of sociology at Yale University, uses what he calls social drama and cultural trauma theory to evaluate the reactions to and effects of the murder. In a highly theoretical argument he takes a performance studies approach to the event, and goes on to discuss its effects on the wider culture of the Netherlands. He relates it to significant events in Dutch history, such as the country’s treatment of the Jews in during the German occupation, and the failure for Dutch troops to protect Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia in 1995. There was a big trade book that came out about this event called Murder in Amsterdam, by New York Review of Books columnist Ian Buruma. This book adds another element to the mix.

Duke does film and TV studies, and a book about a cool Japanese director will come out in August: -- The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, by Catherine Russell. Russell is a professor of Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal, and she brings well-deserved critical attention to Mikio, the director of 89 films in Japan between1930 – 1967. He was known as a director of “women’s films,” and four of his films are available on DVD now (Russell wrote the liner notes). One of the films is called When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Criterion Collection). This book also sheds important new light on the Japanese studio system of the time.

Fair Use on Trial

2008-04-30T19:09:00.000-07:00

In our meeting today with the marketing and sales folks at Duke University Press one book in particular caught my interest. Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain is a comic book primer on fair use doctrine for documentary filmmakers. The authors include a cartoonist named Keith Aoki, who is also happens to be a professor of law at University of California at Davis. The other two authors, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, are law professors at Duke. Jenkins runs the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The reason this book caught my eye is because it’s a graphic comic book format, something that’s a departure for Duke. It has a feel like Tales from the Crypt, with the narrator/host resembling Justice William Rehnquist. The idea of the book is that there needs to be a balance between fair use and copyright, and the current rules are way out of whack. What Aoki and company are saying with this book is that we need a robust sense of fair use for our culture to survive: -- and Bound by Law “reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.”

I like that line about remixed culture. This comic book about fair use and filmmaking has far reaching consequences in many different fields of creative expression. My friend and colleague Roger Rapoport of RDR Books in Muskegon, MI is being sued by JK Rowling and Warner Brothers over a book he announced to publish called The Harry Potter Lexicon. Roger has gone to federal court in New York to defend himself against a suit that claims copyright infringement. The author/complier of the book, Stephen Van der Ark, runs a web site which is a resource of information about all things Harry and his magical world - http://www.hp-lexicon.org/index-2.html

JK Rowling herself admitted to using Van der Ark’s site regularly while writing her books, and her publishers at Scholastic wrote a glowing letter to Van der Ark saying how indispensable his work was to them when they were editing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Rowling seems to have a personal obsession with this lawsuit, and claims to want to do her own encyclopedia in a few years. RDR Books enlisted the lawyers at Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project to testify in their favor.

See this link from the Times of London -- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article3746609.ece

The lawsuit is ridiculous and the book is simply a guide to navigating the seven books in the Harry Potter series, which seem to get longer and longer with each passing book. Rowling has no case, and she doesn’t seem to realize that the Lexicon actually embellishes and compliments her work. It’s clear that Van der Ark is an avid fan of Rowling’s work. One of the things that Rowling was complaining about in her testimony was that Van der Ark got some of his sources wrong – for instance, a certain spell cast by one of the witch characters in the book was said to derive from the Hawaiian language, and Rowling claimed it was an African dialect. The fact that the Lexicon might be mediocre, or that it gets a few obscure points wrong does not make it a violator of copyrights! Fair use rights need to be protected in this country, and as with the poor documentary filmmaker character in the Aoki comic book coming out in September from Duke, people need to fight to protect themselves from overwrought and greedy copyright holders.

Ambit Energy Strikes in New York and Texas

2008-04-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

http://mars.joinambit.com/index.asp

The great American poet Walt Whitman states in Leaves of Grass, “… every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Energy deregulation in the 21st century is good for me and you. Selling electrons and thermal units seems to be the perfect sideline, in an old-fashioned publishing sense. It provides light and warmth for reading, the power to produce books, even e-books, and like books that can be opened again and again, electricity and natural gas keep on flowing: -- everybody on the grid uses it all the time. Ambit Energy customers have the chance to save money on their bills; Ambit Energy sellers have the chance to earn money as re-sellers, and everybody wins!

With a small piece of the electricity marketplace in selected areas of Texas, Ambit Energy was able to grow into a major corporation. See the Texas state-sponsored web site on Electric Choice -- http://www.powertochoose.org/ -- it’s essentially empowerment for the customer! And with their expansion into the five boroughs of New York City, and suburban Westchester County, NY, Ambit Energy has tapped into a major marketplace for both electricity and natural gas. Illinois is pending with natural gas, and with this development the floodgates will open. A total of eighteen states are in some stage of deregulating their utilities: -- and Ambit Energy is said to have its sites set on areas in Ohio and Pennsylvania next. In Illinois, which is in a pre-launch stage right now, they are going into the Nicor Gas territory. Nicor Gas serves a wide swath of Northern Illinois, http://www.myutilitychoice.com/custom/index.cfm?id=152645&winpop=1 – They have something like 2.4 million customers. Many of these folks have not yet switched their accounts, so it’s another huge market for Ambit Energy.

Ambit Energy focuses on servicing its current customers well. It has taken time to build the infrastructure of Ambit Energy, and to get approval from the Better Business Bureau. BBB is like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval: -- who wouldn’t want to save money, anyway? For the two months since I signed up as a beginning marketing consultant with Ambit Energy – see the site http://mars.energy526.com/ - I’ve found it hard to attract re-sellers to join my fledging organization. It’s a ground floor opportunity, I tell people, but it’s something big coming in the future, and it’s hard to for them to imagine. But think about it, I’m smack-dab in the middle of Nicor Gas country – I live in River Forest, IL – and for a mere $399 one-time fee, and $24.95 a month for seven different web sites, and a back office frontloaded with selling and marketing tools, Ambit Energy re-sellers have a real chance to grow their Ambit business into residual powerhouses! As Old-Blue-Eyes Frank Sinatra once sang, “Come fly with me, come fly, let’s fly away!”

I’m heading to New York City – Ambit Energy land for electricity and natural gas for heating – and I’m setup to start signing up customers. It’s a real benefit for them! I’m there for some 10 days at publisher sales meetings, and I used to live there. My brother Mark Crispin Miller lives there, my nephews and extended family are there, so I’m going to switch gears and focus on selling this great Ambit Energy service in an around New York City. Sign up and get free airline miles. Continue to use the service and get a free cruise on the South Seas. Get five other people to be customers and Ambit will reward that enterprising customer with 25,000 free airline miles. It’s a bit of a no-brainer. You can go to this site - http://mars.thinkambit.com/index.asp - click on the customer enrollment link, type in your zip code, and see if you’re in the Ambit territory. It’s easy as pie. Customers are going to like it. It’s an incredibly good deal for them – a veritable free lunch – and they will come to understand that Ambit Energy is for real and definitely the wave of the financial future for them.

Pick of the Lists for Spring Books, 2008

2008-04-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

Spring 2008 – Miller Trade Book Marketing

Contact: Eric Miller 363 W Erie St. Ste. 7E Chicago, IL 60610 orders@millertrade.com
Toll Free Phone 1-866-829-0824 - Fax 1-312-276-8109 http://www.millertrade.blogspot.com/
Charter Members: National Association Independent Publisher’s Representatives – http://www.naipr.org/

Sunday Afternoon on the Porch: Reflections of Small Town Iowa
Photographs by Everett W. Kuntz – Text by Jim Heyen
ISBN 978-1-58729-653-6 Cloth $29.95 June 2008 Photography Univ. of Iowa Press

“These pictures, resting like treasures from 1939 until now are delights … The photographs are garnished by Jim Heyen’s witty affectionate commentary … If 2007 looks insane to you, pursue for a while this lovely, charming book …” – Bill Holm

9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press
David Ray Griffin
ISBN 978-1-56656-716-9 Paperback $20.00 May 2008 Current Affairs Interlink Publishing

“David Ray Griffin has established himself – alongside Seymour Hersh – as America’s number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths.” – Richard Falk, Princeton University

The Color of Loss: An Intimate Portrait of New Orleans After Katrina
Photographs and Introduction by Dan Burkholder – Foreword Andrei Cordescu
ISBN 978-0-292-71713-8 Cloth $50.00 March 2008 Photographs Univ. of Texas Press

Using an innovative digital technology that creates photographs that look like paintings, Dan Burkholder offers a powerful new way of seeing New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons
Rick Van Noy
ISBN 978-0-8203-3103-4 Paperback $16.95 June 2008 Nature Univ. of Georgia Press

This book answers the call to action raised by The Last Child in the Woods.

What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
Toni Morrison
ISBN 978-1-60473-017-3 Cloth $30.00 April 2008 American Literature/African American Studies Univ. Press of Mississippi

Thirty years of the Nobel Laureate’s reflections on life, writing, and other writers. This edition includes her Nobel Prize speech in 1993.

Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers
Edited by Kathryn Kyser
ISBN 978-0-87351-614-3 Cloth $24.95 April 2008 Literature/Anthology MN Hist. Soc. Press

With honesty and extraordinary self-knowledge twenty-one accomplished authors illuminate the mother-daughter relationship – intimate, complicated, loving, flawed – with humor and clarity.

Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan’s Minnesota
Toby Thompson
ISBN 978-0-8166-5445-1 Paperback $15.95 May 2008 Music/Regional Univ. of Minnesota Press

A young writer uncovers Bob Dylan’s past, back when music mattered. “Dylan fans will not
want to miss this book.” – Sioux City Journal

Hitler’s Priest: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism
Kevin F. Spicer ISBN 978-0-87580-384-5 Cloth $34.95 April 2008 World History/Religion N. Illinois Univ. Press

Notre Dame professor Spicer use of archival materials is almost superhuman and he has done a true detective’s job in tracking down priests the Catholic Church leadership would rather be stricken from the historical recor

Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac, Updated Edition
David Amram
ISBN 978-1-59451-544-6 Paperback $19.95 March 2008 Music/Literature Paradigm Publishers

David Amram’s musical career has spanned 50 years, and he participated with the first jazz-poetry reading in 1957 with Jack Kerouac in Greenwich Village. Now updated, this is the rollicking story of this legendary musician and his adventures with his close friend Jack Kerouac.

Jackie Ormes: The First African-American Cartoonist
Nancy Goldstein
ISBN 978-0-472-11624-9 Cloth $30.00 February 2008 Art/Comics Univ. of Michigan Press

A richly illustrated biography of a pioneering woman artist and the characters she created.

A Time to Dance
Heinz Poll
ISBN 978-1-931968-52-2 Paperback $22.95 Dance/Regional Univ. of Akron Press

Heniz Poll was an internationally known choreographer who founded the Ohio Ballet. Through all unexpected twists and turns of his adventurous life he displayed a total dedication to the art of dance.

A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland
Kurt Michael Friese
ISBN 978-1-8881603-6-9 Paperback $26.95 Cooking/Regional Ice Cube Press

Iowa City Chef Friese explores the Slow Food Movement in the 13 state Midwest region. We learn about the remarkable diversity of foods throughout the region. This book will be a stunner.
The Long Journey Home: A Novel
Laurel Means
ISBN 978-0-89733-569-0 Paperback $ 16.95 Historical Fiction Academy Chicago Publishers

A fascinating saga set on the Minnesota prairie of the 1860s. Filed with shifting shapes and graphic action, this book is set in the aftermath of the Civil war and tells a compelling story of 19th Western America.

Gallery Ghost: Find the Ghost Who Paints the Most
Anna Nilsen
ISBN 978-1-59960-036-9 Cloth $18.00 Children’s Birdcage Press

Bestselling children’s author Nilsen (Art Fraud Detective) joins up with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and features 24 of their masterpieces where a spooky time is has by all.

The Informed Gardner
Linda Chalker-Scott
ISBN 978-0-295-98790-3 Paperback $18.95 Gardening Univ. of Washington Press

This is a solid introduction to sustainable landscape practices that is of interest to a wide variety of designers, architects, arborists, foresters, and the home gardener.

Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology
Edited and Translated from Arabic by Shakir Mustafa
ISBN 978-0-8156-0902-5 Cloth $22.95 World Literature Syracuse Univ. Press

The first anthology of its kind in the West: -- here is the work of sixteen Iraqi writers that sheds important new light on the rich diversity of the Iraqi experience. Themes range from childhood and family to war, political oppression and interfaith relationships.

Bang: The Complete History of the Universe
Brian May, Patrick Moore, and Chris Lintott
ISBN 978-0-8018-8985-1 Cloth $29.95 Science/Astronomy Johns Hopkins Univ. Press

This all-color book was a bestseller in the U.K. This fascinating book includes photographs, short biographies of key figure, glossary of terms, and suggested resources for further exporation. Brian May, recently awarded a PHD in Astrophysics, was the founding guitarist of the rock band Queen. Pick up a copy of Bang - it will rock you!

At Maxwell Street: Chicago’s Historic Marketplace Recalled in Words and Photographs
Compiled by Tom Palazzolo
ISBN 978-0-9786976-1-1 Cloth with DVD $40.00 Photography/Film/Chicago Wicker Park Press

Legendary Chicago filmmaker and artist Tom Palazzolo has assembled photographers, musicians, journalists, writers, and everyday people to bring the classic marketplace of Chicago back to life in a vibrant multimedia book. Maxwell Street started in the first years of the Twentieth Century before being razed by City officials and the University of Illinois at Chicago. A DVD of the 1983 film produced by Tom Palazzolo, along with a slide show of color images, accompanies this book.

An Offbeat Column from a Publishing Insider

2008-04-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

Written for KC Generations, Kansas City, Missouri

“The whole culture grapples with who is in charge and what can be known, who must be listened to and what must be remembered. As authors, authors sense acutely the complicated relationship they have with authority. ‘Author’ and ‘authority’ – it goes beyond the mere suffix following the word. In the classroom or out of it, what one speaks, what one writes is always seeking a purchase, looking for traction, hoping this word will take.”
Michael Martone, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art, 2005

Literature and the world of ideas revolve around authors taking chances, and making efforts to put words together to form a meaningful message or a story that will inspire readers. The job of the author is not easy, and it takes a very special individual to make their living at writing anything. I knew a writing teacher once from Connecticut who always used to say, “cut and trim, cut and trim, write with vigor and with vim.” He was a pragmatic mentor to housewives and schoolteachers who longed to write books for children. He kept up correspondence with his students, and I remember he was sometimes merciless in his criticism. I remember his telling me about the never-ending quest for the right word would have his students chomping at the bit, struggling for just the right turn of phrase, and to do this you literally needed to get down on your hands and knees and “bite the rug.” From the perspective of a book salesman, I can tell you the market for children’s books is one of the most cutthroat of all. I would never dream of publishing a children’s book, no matter how polished or cute it was. Children’s booksellers, librarians and book reviewers view themselves as a kind of guardians-of-the-gate for children’s literature, and the smallest mistake or problem with the format or content will spell instant doom for a children’s project. And this not only counts for small publishers’ books. Big publishers can get caught in this bear trap as well.

The struggle that authors go through to create their books is legendary, but I have seen the process from the other side, from a couple of different sides in fact. As a book salesman, you have something like 15 to 30 seconds to present a book to a bookstore buyer. Booksellers need to make swift judgments in the interests of time and economy. The thing that makes my sales job interesting is that booksellers can be very engaging people, and the books always change with each selling season. You never have the time to read all the books you sell, so you become adapt at coming up with a sales handle, a pitch, if you like, to say about each title. Never mind that an author could have poured blood, sweat and tears into creating the book, which may or may not be a masterpiece, and a key way it’s going to get on the shelf at Borders or Rainy Day Books is if the stars are aligned right and the business gods smile down on the transaction.

And the process does not end there. If books do not sell, or if nobody checks it out at the local library, they can be returned to the publisher for credit against future purchases. That’s why a standard publishing agreement for authors states that royalties will be paid only on “books sold, paid-for and not returned.” The whole business of returns is sad and awkward for everybody in the book business. You can have a big bestseller that garners a goldmine of publicity and exposure, and the publisher will gleefully print and re-print copies of the book. At the end of line, though, they risk their book not becoming a perennial seller and they can become awash in a sea of returns. This peculiar predicament has affected publishers both large and small. The process starts with the author and their private writing space, and once it goes out into the marketplace it can be ignored, marginalized or scorned. If the book catches on, the publisher needs to play their cards right not to end up with too many books. There is an annual overstock and remainder book show in Chicago every year in the fall where publishers unload their wares. One wit called it “the show where turkeys fly!” The residual market for unsold books pours into the Internet as well where, if you are willing to pay shipping, you can sometimes buy some books for as little as a penny a piece.

It seems that in the 21st century the book itself is becoming supplanted by the computer screen. The e-book has been slow to catch on, but it has never really gone away, and now there are big flashy ads in glossy magazines and marquees for electronic readers from corporations like Microsoft and Sony. These newly updated devises can hold an entire library in its clutches, and readers can even manipulate the text and interact with it. This file-sharing phenomenon changed the face of the music business. I remember walking into a Starbucks where they were playing Theodius Monk and I had a conversation with the young clerk who expressed a passionate love for the music. I told him about pianist Wynton Kelly and bassist Paul Chambers, classic jazz, and he eagerly wrote it down and said he was going straight home to download it onto his computer. Technology changed the face of that transaction, no money changed hands, and it gives me pause to think about what could happen to the content of books in the future.

I hope I am not come across as pessimistic in this article. In fact I am a kind of cockeyed optimist when it comes to books and the state of literature today. As a book salesman I’ve made the jump to publishing my own books. My parents are 81 years old and they still come into the office everyday and run Academy Chicago Publishers, a small but fiercely independent house that has published books of general interest for the past 31 years. You could say that publishing books is hereditary, and that I got the idea to do my own books by observing the ups and downs of my parent’s company. In a way this is true, but I also saw selling and marketing books as a way to do my own thing. I came up with my ideas for books through my job as an independent book salesman for the past 25 years, and from helping Academy Chicago Publishers develop its own list of books. I started my publishing company, Wicker Park Press, in 2002, and while I made many mistakes as a rookie publisher, I have learned by example and through experience. I have seen the fortunes of many books play out in the marketplace from manuscript to finished product. I feel blessed that I can contribute to the greater culture by helping publishers distribute their books, and that I have the opportunity to participate in my own form of self-expression with Wicker Park Press. Writers have their inspiration and their muse that motivates them to sit down and write books, publishers have their own special brand of incentive that keeps them producing books, and the whole shebang can be a fascinating journey for those involved in the world of books.

Wicker Park Goes Regional

2007-11-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

By Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 11/6/2007 6:47:00 AM

Eric Miller, a commission sales rep with Miller Trade Book Marketing, is giving a new direction to Chicago-based Wicker Park Press, the small press he launched in 2002, shifting its focus from publishing primarily satire to specializing in regional titles about Chicago landmarks. Wicker Park's first regional title, Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, photographs and paintings by Larry W. Green, has just been released, and Miller has shipped 500 copies of a 3,200-copy print run.

“There's a lot of people out there, who identify with Chicago,” Miller explained about his switch in emphasis. “There's a strong market for regional books.” His next title, which doesn’t have a pub date yet, will be on Chicago's celebrated Maxwell Street Market.

While ordering only a few copies of Water Tanks of Chicago for her store, Kris Kleindienst, co-owner of St. Louis's Left Bank Books, believes that Wicker Park's offerings will find their audience. “Regional is a niche that works, no matter what the region,” Kliendienst said. “And [Miller] chooses interesting books on interesting topics.”

Along with the change in publishing direction, Miller has revamped Wicker’s distribution. He is now selling the list to his accounts and has hired Partners Book Distributing to sell to the chains. Wicker Park titles had been distributed by Academy Chicago Press, founded in 1976 by Eric Miller's parents, Jordan and Anita Miller. Academy Chicago releases are in turn distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center.

Wendell Berry on Gene Logsdon's novel, The Lords of Folly

2007-11-23T22:09:00.000-08:00

"I know. You're going to insist that all that stuff you put into The Lords of Folly really happened, but I'll never believe it. You kept yourself awake hard to tell how many nights, rolling around in bed and giggling at the productions of your comic genius. Actually, truly I think the book is a delight. The funny parts are very funny. The humor is never overstated or off key. The book moves right along at the right pace. Except, I think, for too much of 'oh wow' , the dialogue is wonderful. The characters sometimes say some fairly preposterous things, but what they say is never improbable; one never doubts it. The comic questions of who is sane and how can you tell are also convincingly serious.
"I don't think anyone who knows you will be surprised at what a romantic novel this is."

-- From a personal letter written by Wendell Berry, poet, novelist, essayist and farmer to the author.

Books of interest for all discerning readers -- Fall 07

2007-11-22T22:29:00.000-08:00

Art Spiegelman: Conversations
Edited by Joseph Witek – September 07 – 6 x 9, 17 illustrations, paperback, 320 pages $20, ISBN 978-1-934110-12-6 Comic Studies/Biography UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI
“Comics have a pipeline to something very basic about the way people think.” Spiegelman, bestselling author of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, is the most famous alternative cartoonist in America. With his wife, Francoise Mouley, he found the journal RAW, a showcase for avant-garde and comics in America. This collection of interviews and profiles goes from 1976-2006.

Barak Obama: This Improbable Quest
By John K Wilson – October 07 – 6 x 9, 12 photos, cloth, 192 pages, $22.95, ISBN 978-1-59451-476-0 Politics/ Biography PARADIGM PUBLISHERS
This is an in-depth profile of the Senator from Illinois and current Presidential candidate, and it outlines what has shaped Obama’s political views. Wilson studied Law with Obama at University of Chicago and has watched his career from the Illinois State Senate to the US Senate to his existing Presidential campaign.

Extraordinary Circumstances: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
By David Hume Kennerly – Introduction by Tom Brokaw – October 07 – 10 ½ x 13 1/2, cloth, 125 tritone photos, 224 pages, $49.95, ISBN 978-1-4243-3656-2 Photography/History UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
This is a fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary record of Gerald Ford’s presidency by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer David Hume Kennerly.

Sedaris
By Kevin Kopelson – September 07 – 5 x 8, paperback, 224 pages, $17.95, ISBN 978-0-8166-5085-9 Biography/Literature UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
This is an engaging and essential introduction to the work of America’s premier satirist, David Sedaris, by an English professor from University of Iowa.

Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President
By Edward Steers, Jr. – October 07 – 6 x 9, cloth, 288 pages, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-2466-7 History UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY
The folklore surrounding a towering figure in history often overshadows actual scholarship. Here noted historian and Lincoln expert Steers carefully scrutinizes some of the most notorious tall tales and distorted ideas about America’s iconic 16th president.

Owls of the United States and Canada: A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior
By Wayne Lynch – November 07 – 9 x 11, cloth, 200 color photos, 272 pages, $39.95 ISBN 978-0-8018-8687-4 Nature JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
There is no group of birds more fascinating and mysterious than owls. The loudmouths of the raptor world, they peep, trill, toot, bark, growl, shriek, whistle, chuckle, whoop, boom and buzz. They rarely ever actually “hoot.” This is a gorgeous book that is chock full of information about these amazing birds of prey.

Surviving Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories
By Elise Forbes Tripp – October 07 – 6 x 9, paperback, 288 pages, $18.00 ISBN 978-1-56656-693-3 Current Affairs/Politics/Oral History INTERLINK PUBLISHING GROUP
“This fascinating collection of testimonies underscores the universality of all war” – Ken Burns, filmmaker. The Iraq War is being fought by an all-volunteer army mostly from working-class America, and these men and women are the stars of Tripp’s powerfully moving book. This is the result of a close collaboration between Tripp and 30 veterans who tell their stories of the invasion, occupation and ongoing quagmire in Iraq.

A Very Private Enterprise
By Elizabeth Ironside – October 07 – 5 ½ x 7 ½ - paperback, 200 pages, $14.95 978-1-933397-94-8 Mystery FELONY & MAYHEM
A few years ago Ironside’s Death in the Garden took the mystery-reading world by storm. It was reviewed everywhere, won many awards and citations, and was a top-selling book in many bookstores across the country. This is the first US edition of Ironside’s debut book, set in India and the wilds of Tibet, and it is rich in elegant prose and exquisitely etched characters that Ironside’s readers have come to expect.

Bad Karma: Confessions of a Reckless Traveler in Southeast Asia
By Tamara Sheward – October 07 – 5 x 8 – paperback, 316 pages, $17.95, 978-0-89733-565-2 Travel ACADEMY CHICAGO PUBLISHERS
This hilarious travelogue comes to us from Down-Under, where it was first published, and is probably unlike any travel account you have ever read. Sheward hits the road with her twenty-something chum, Elisa, as they head for Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia with nary a plan. “Sheward’s writing is fast and furious. A roller coaster off the rails, with beers”- Adventure Travel Magazine

Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe
By Tom Batiuk – October 07 – 10 x 7 ½ - 252 pages, paperback, $18.95, ISBN 978-0-87338-952-5 Comics/Literature/Medicine KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
This is a story from Batiuk’s widely syndicated and popular comic strip Funky Winkerbean that will make you laugh and make you cry. Lisa Moore is a main character who discovered she had breast cancer. After treatment and recovery and continuing on with her life, the cancer then returns to her. This is an ongoing story in the comic strips today, and it also includes valuable resource information on breast cancer, including early detection, support systems and health care.

Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy
By Larry W Green – Foreword by Tony Jones - October 07 – 5 ½ x 8 ½ - 50 pages, 37 illustrations, paperback, $19.95 ISBN 978-0-9789676-0-4 Photography/Art/Chicago Architecture WICKER PARK PRESS
Green is a Chicago artist who has been photographing and sketching water-tanks in Chicago for the past twenty years. The book contains arresting black-and-white digital photographs with captions, and a section with paintings in the back. Jones, President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says “Chicago crumbling water-tanks take on a new significance in Larry Green’s paintings.”

Midwest Book Review reviews Water Tanks of Chicago

2007-11-22T22:20:00.000-08:00

Midwest Book Review October 2007

The American History Shelf

Water Tanks Of Chicago
Larry W. Green
Wicker Park Press Ltd.PO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305-53189780978967604, $19.95 http://www.wickerparkpress.com/

Water tanks, constructed for the purpose of supplying water through a gravity driven system for businesses, buildings, neighborhoods, and communities, were once ubiquitous components of an industrial past, but are now rapidly disappearing as crumbling, obsolete relics as technologies and the city have continued to evolve. For the past twenty years, Larry W. Green is a Chicago artist who has been photographing and sketching water-tanks in and around Chicago, Illinois. Now compiled and presented to the public in "Water Tanks Of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy", Green showcases and captions 37 of those images he has preserved or recreated. The purpose in publishing his work was to inform and alert the public to the need to preserve those (often crumbling) monuments to a yesteryear Chicago for their esthetic and historical significance. A superb presentation, "Water Tanks Of Chicago" is very highly recommended and could well serve as a template or example for photographically preserving similar landmark constructions in other American communities wanting to treasure and preserve their historic past in a rapidly changing present for the sake of future generations.

On the aging demographic of commission reps

2007-11-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

NAIPR President Eric Miller reflects

An Independent Rep Reflects at Fifty

In this issue of NAIPR News Online we are reprinting Sara Huneke’s thought-provoking and remarkable story on commission reps from Publishing Trends. The thing that really struck me in the article was the aging demographic of independent reps. Ouch, the truth hurts. Especially since I just had my 50th birthday last month, and I was recently invited to Chris Kerr’s (of Parson Weems’ Publisher Services) 60th birthday bash in NYC. I remember when our group (Miller Trade Book Marketing) used to hire reps fresh out of the bookstores, young ones, and bring them to NYC for sales conference marathons. These reps were in great physical shape, but they could not handle the meetings, day after day. They would crack under the pressure, and sometimes it was amusing to see and sometimes it was frightening. My partner Bruce and I would look at each other as if to say, what's wrong with so-and-so? So, being a commission rep is not for everybody, and maybe that's one reason why the people who are in it, stay in it, and figure out a way to thrive.

While age and wisdom do not necessarily go hand in hand, years of experience count for a lot. It’s both art and practice that allow reps to put things together and to make important connections. Rep work, and especially independent sales, is a right brain kind of activity. It’s the ability to make people laugh, to synthesize widely differing elements, and to apply a deeper understanding to all kinds of situations in which sales reps find themselves. These unique elements are part and parcel in rep’s overall ability to survive in a fiercely competitive market, and still come out ahead while continuing to do their own thing. We are curious creatures, we old-timer reps, and the fact that we are still here in the 21st century—and making plans for the future—is a testament to the unique qualities a rep must demonstrate: the ability to promote a publisher of home improvement guides and a poetry press at the same time—to figure out how to succeed with both in a given territory.

I am not sure that the critical success factors as a commission rep or as an independent bookseller can necessarily be learned. One must already be an individual who can think flexibly and nimbly; one must understand innately how to make connections between seemingly disparate ideas; and one must be by nature a bit of a cockeyed optimist. A good sense of humor is also essential. Perhaps it’s not surprising that young people are not flocking to this business in droves because there are legitimate fears of dealing with the uncertainties and all of the vicissitudes of a very dynamic business. And yet there is no employer but yourself to turn to in your darker moments. Heck, you could starve to death in this business! And so it goes. But the fact that we have NAIPR, a unique and thriving association of independent reps who work successfully in the marketplace of ideas, who constantly adapt themselves to changing realities on the ground, who manage their businesses on their own terms, who have developed their own comfort zones and inimitable styles of doing business is, in my humble opinion, a beautiful thing.

Maybe the young ones will eventually figure out that they may be missing out on a on a significant opportunity. But in the meantime, we in the business, sprouting gray hairs and developing osteoporosis, will continue to soldier on and make the most of our hard-won freedoms and continue with our own brand of management and personal fulfillment.

Eric Miller
President, NAIPR

'Publishing Trends' On Commission Reps

2007-11-22T22:02:00.000-08:00

The Bookstore Effect The Saga of the Independent Rep Continues
FROM PUBLISHING TRENDS (SEPTEMBER 2007)To see the charts that accompany this piece, please download the PDF issue here .

The effects of one independent bookstore closing are felt throughout the delicate ecosystem of publishing, and independent reps are bellwethers for what’s in store for the rest of the industry. When Publishing Trends checked in with commission reps three years ago (see PT Nov 04), the prevailing mood could be called reservedly optimistic. Since then, even with the recent spate of legendary independent store closings across the country, consolidation across the board, and an aging rep demographic, the mood, style, and MO haven’t changed all that much. By and large, the publishing industry and independent reps themselves are both eager to discuss the recent changes afoot, but not ready to succumb to them. “I’m not at all negative about the business; it’s changing all the time and you must adapt,” said Eric Miller, a 20 year veteran who, with his brother, Bruce, runs Miller Trade Book Marketing in the Midwest. “Reps are great whiners.” Others, like Dan Fallon who’s been with the Rovers Group for 15 years, is jovially incredulous at the staying power of indy reps. “It’s hard to believe we’re still here,” he commented. “I’m completely mystified. It’s great to even have a future to peer into at this point.”

Passing on What Torch? To Whom?

In what used to be a business where reps handed down an account relationship carefully cultivated over decades to an appointed heir, these days, the heirs aren’t quite apparent. “It’s harder to find younger people who want to go into the business. I don’t see that happening as much. The commission population is aging,” said Fallon who thinks most reps seem to be at least 45. Angie Smits of Southern Territory Associates thinks she’s the youngest of the breed at 42 and if she had to replace a rep in her group, she’d be at a loss to know where to find one, but probably from the bookselling side. For the rep on the brink of retirement, doling out a few lines to another group is turning out to be a viable way of selling off an intangible business. “Dedicated New England reps are an endangered species,” said Michael Watson of Watson and Woodward in New England. “I’ve been approached by Mid Atlantic reps [to share the territory]. Whether it’s formalized with a subcontract or informal, it’s happening more and more.” Indeed, the Rovers Group took on a few publishers from Frank Moster (Melman-Moster Associates) and Steve Williamson (New England Book Reps) in New England this year, but consolidation, such as the merger of Fuji and Heinecken, two major Midwest groups, and the consolidation at Tony Proe’s Empire Group is a new phenomenon. “I think consolidation will happen a lot more in the future. It follows from the consolidation in the publishing and distribution industries,” commented Fallon. “It’s good for people like us as it gives more access to publishers. Though it also makes some companies viable and some not at all. For us, it’s important.” However, not everyone is thrilled about consolidation, especially booksellers who have developed longstanding relationships with their commission reps, and quiet protests pop up across the country. “There are some booksellers who, of course, buy from whoever is selling what they need, but who grumble about the groups being from outside the territory,” said Nanci McCrackin of McCrackin & Friends in New England. “One prominent bookseller claims he restricts his buys to a few lines from those fellows to make his point.” But it looks like booksellers will have to get used to being pitched to in a different accent.

Weeds of the Northeast

What else can be done to stay afloat? The Parson Weems Group in New England/ Mid Atlantic has developed a robust client list of university presses. Their regional SKUs, such as the perennial bestseller Weeds of the Northeast from Cornell University Press, backlist strongly, commented Chris Kerr. Children’s picture books that need an in person presentation also work to the commission rep’s advantage. And Parson Weems isn’t the only group to go academic, regional, and juvenile. Smits, of Southern Territory Associates, along with just about everyone else, reported a ramping up of these categories too. She reps the University of North Carolina Press and one of her accounts, Quail Ridge in Raleigh said their Encyclopedia of North Carolina “saved their year.”Before (and if) merging becomes inevitable, some independent reps are finding other strategies to cope with changes. “Our approach is to stay the right size and increase our business by working closely with our clients and to help them grow with their publishing and distributing,” commented Stu Abraham of Abraham Associates, Inc. in the Midwest who’s been in the business for almost 30 years. Miller Trade has taken on a more active role in marketing, setting up “mini-trade shows” in key cities in its territory. In Traverse City and Lansing, Miller invited regional authors they rep to give readings and sign books. He and his brother also started a blog (www.millertrade.blogspot.com) where they feature “picks of the lists” and comment on the industry. “It’s a good way to expand our customer base,” said Miller. “One rep group can’t have all the lines or there will be fall-out. Different groups fit differently with accounts.” Out West, the thriving museum store market just might save the commission rep. “We couldn’t survive without them,” reported Howard Karel of the San Francisco-based Karel/Dutton Group who makes the rounds to the Seattle Asian Museum, De Jonge, and San Francisco MoMA. Karel also partially reps Globe Pequot, sharing territory with GP house reps who peddle their books from vans to all manner of accounts.

Publishers Respond

At the end of 2005, Simon & Schuster’s response to the shrinking retail market was to reorganize their field sales rep force and combine adult and juvenile teams. Claimed as a way of avoiding similar layoffs at other publishers (such as Random House), the shake-up resulted in replacing commission groups with all in-house field reps to handle non-traditional accounts. The newly re-trained S&S group sells only books, a novelty to specialty store buyers used to picking up ashtrays, tchochkes, and picture books from the same rep. “Expanding past traditional markets gave reps more to do,” said Frank Fochetta, VP, Director of Field and Special Sales. “We might be missing opportunities at very small specialty stores, but we’re growing in the middle area. We’re opening fewer accounts, but the average dollar is higher.” He reported S&S is up 15-20% in non-traditional, non-bookstore accounts. Compare with Globe Pequot which has also been moving toward a multi-focused in-house team over the past few years, calling on various accounts with their camping, travel, and outdoor lines. However, Chris Grimm, Director of Field and Specialty Sales, said he would not dream of disbanding his network of commission sales groups which have proven invaluable. Shuffling the rep deck isn’t the best way to a healthy bottom line for every publisher. Matty Goldberg, Group VP and Director of Sales at Perseus, doesn’t think a multi-tasking in-house force alone could work for their list, saying it wouldn’t provide enough coverage to satisfy their distribution clients. With the recent mélange at Perseus Distribution Services (which now, of course, includes the varied lists of PGW, CDS, and Consortium), careful attention had to be paid to what kinds of reps would work best for which lines. Sabrina Bracco, VP Client Services at PDS, tried to bring on as many of the PGW sales force as possible which meant commission reps lost out again. But Julie Schaper, President and COO at sister company Consortium responded to her publisher clients who begged not to be deprived of the commission reps who’d spent years selling their literary fiction and poetry collections in face-to-face meetings. “We still think [independent reps] are the best bang for the buck,” she commented. “Obviously you get more control with house reps, but the Consortium list can be a challenge. It’s very eclectic and you can’t explain these titles in one line. Independent reps have the ability to put in more time and effort.” She’s not ready to change at the moment, but the bottom line will always be how to best benefit their publisher clients.For independent reps, and not just those who work with Consortium, Schaper’s dedication even after the PGW/Perseus merger is a welcome vote of confidence.

On the Merger of Fujji & Heinecken Associates

2007-11-22T21:53:00.000-08:00

The View from Chicago

The merger of Fujii Associates and Heinecken & Associates here in the Midwest will be a watershed event in the history of selling on commission in the US. It creates a super-group from two of the largest organizations already in the territory, and it also perhaps opens up opportunities for other Midwest groups as the publisher deck inevitably gets reshuffled and realigned. I’m sure all NAIPR members will join me in wishing the new Fujii Associates great success. We look forward to their continuing support of our association, as well.

When Ted Heinecken, veteran group head who started up in 1978, talks about attempting to “raise the bar of service to a new industry standard” with this new association, I believe he is referring to the considerable talents of their group members, which, even just between the two principals equals fifty-three years of combined experience. That’s a formidable advantage going in, and Fujii’s ability to court mainstream publishers and large distributors should be enhanced. This is a good thing for all of us. I’m sure the new, improved Fujji Associates under the direction of Don Sturtz will attract a premier lineup of publishers, and that bookstores will stand up and take notice.

Yet how many publishers can one commission group reasonably sign up? There are many other talented and experienced rep groups across the country; the combination of two key groups is just one example of the creative energy and innovative thinking that goes on all the time among independent sales reps. There’s room for many different kinds of sales groups, and a merger of this kind will only attract positive attention to our industry segment. NAIPR itself grows stronger as its members continue to think outside the box and utilize their varied resources.

Even as our sales meeting marathon is under way in New York, we should look ahead to Book Expo America, where we will have our own “Enjoy Your Independence” party on Saturday night, complete with top-flight musical entertainment, where we will be able to say “thank you” to our buyers, our publishers, our membership, and to our many other colleagues throughout the industry.

And for all of us, life continues apace with some exciting times ahead. . . .

Eric Miller
President, NAIPR

An Alphabetical Life

2007-11-22T21:32:00.000-08:00

Eric Miller reviews memoir by Wendy Werris due out in November

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the Business of Books
by Wendy Werris
New York: Carol & Graff, ISBN 0-7867-1817-X Paperback Original $15.95 November 2006

“The whole culture grapples with who is in charge and what can be known, who must be listened to and what must be remembered. As authors, authors sense acutely the complicated relationship they have with authority. ‘Author’ and ‘authority’ – it goes beyond the mere suffix following the word. In the classroom or out of it, what one speaks, what one writes is always seeking a purchase, looking for traction, hoping this word will take.”
-- Michael Martone, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art, 2005

Wendy Werris has written a corker of a book: a memoir that is a brave, honest, and thoroughly engaging narrative of her coming of age in the book business in 1970s Los Angeles and beyond. We join Werris on her journey from the venerable Pickwick Bookshop of Hollywood, cutting her teeth in an urban melting pot of high glamour and downright squalor, to the 1973 ABA book convention in downtown LA where she scores her first publishing job at a company called Straight Arrow in San Francisco, a subsidiary of Rolling Stone. Werris quickly figures out that an office job in marketing is not for her, and she lands a sales gig with a newly formed distributor called Two Continents Publishing, run by the legendary Leonard Shatzkin. This brings her back home to LA where she hits the road and becomes for all intents and purposes a “young lady salesman.” She joins a commission group, Nourse-McKay, and gets the Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico territory. She has the experience of handling a bestseller —The World According to Garp — for EP Dutton, for which she will later become a house rep. Werris forms her own commission group, I – 5 Associates, with George Carroll and Jack O’Leary. She deftly describes the many eccentric bookshop characters she encounters; my favorite is the proprietor of Anne Chiquoine Books in tiny Ventura, CA, an heiress who runs her shop out of the local Elks lodge and affectionately calls Werris “Poopsie.” It is oddball characters like this one, both famous and infamous, that populate Werris’ memoir that make it crackle with energy.

There is also quite a bit of pathos in Werris’ life story, the decline of her father’s writing career in Hollywood, the diminishing bookstore landscape in her territory, the early death of a close friend, and her own experience with sexual assault. Werris weathers the worst of it with humor and authority, and we begin to see a life that has been sustained through the business of books. Through it all she still has her customers, the lines she is selling, and the new books and personalities she encounters along the way. It’s a rich ride, and I always knew that Wendy was cool, sitting in many publisher sales meetings with her year after year. I just wasn’t sure exactly why she was so cool, and now I know and I’m very glad of it. Werris has blazed a trial with her new book and become the poet laureate of publisher’s reps.

Eric Miller
President, NAIPR