NY Book Time

Layoffs at Random House, Simon & Schuster

2008-12-03T20:04:00.000-08:00

The economy has crashed down on an industry once believed immune from the worst — book publishing — with consolidation at Random House Inc., and layoffs at Simon & Schuster and Thomas Nelson Publishers.

"Yes, Virginia, book publishing is NOT recession proof," said Patricia Schroeder, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers. "It's sad day."

Read the article here : http://http//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081203/ap_en_ot/books_random_house_6

Book Review: Holy Headshot!: A Celebration of America's Undiscovered Talent by Patrick Borelli and Douglas Gorenstein

2008-11-20T05:18:00.000-08:00

Did you ever snicker at some hapless bride who trips and falls into her wedding-cake on America's Funniest Videos, only to feel guilty about finding humor in someone's humiliation? If so, then you might want to pass on this book. But for the rest of us insensitive jerks, HOLY HEADSHOTS will provide much more than a dirty little chuckle.

Collected are one hundred diverse, starry-eyed hopefuls with hunger and desperation on the breath, all-waiting for their big break. And for the lucky few, it comes in the guise of an extra on a afternoon soap opera, a local commercial pitchman, the lead in a community theater production of 42nd Street, or a supporting role on a direct to video horror flick. (While thumbing through, I did recognize some the actors from various projects; so now I have names to put to that faces in the crowd scenes on Law & Order and NYPD Blue.) Included with the 8x10 glossies are the actors' resumes, and some will give you chilling insights into their hopes and dreams (I'm looking at you Clement Dyer on page 34!)

This book is a must for anyone who ever dreamed of fame but woke up and got a civil service job.

Book Review: Marvel Masterworks Atlas Era Tales Suspense by Jack Kirby

2008-11-20T04:51:00.000-08:00

Before a Gamma bomb was detonated in the dessert, or a young student had a fateful run-in with a radioactive spider at Empire State University, and even before Marvel was Marvel, Stan Lee was in the monster business.

Under the banner of Atlas Comics, Lee and the amazing talents of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Matt Baker, Carl Burgos and Joe Sinnott assaulted young 1950s readers with bold five-page, nine-panel horror/sci-fi stories with surprise ending "inspired" by the Twilight Zone tv series. Some much so, Lee stated in an interview, "I used to get letters from readers `Hey, I just saw Twilight Zone, and they used one of your stories from issue so-and-so.'"

Marvel Masterworks Atlas Era Tales Suspense 1 beautifully reprints the first 10 issues of the title and brings out face-to-face killer robots, hulking behemoths the deadly Monstro, a killer Cyclops, invading Martians and many more oddball and off-beat menaces from the four-color universe - and beyond! This collection is a must have for vintage monster comic book fans who have also enjoyed Dick Briefer's The Monster of Frankenstein, Monster Masterworks and Zombie Factory.

Book Review: Valis by Philip K. Dick

2008-05-09T04:57:00.000-07:00

Like most of Philip K. Dick’s novels, the main characters around which the story of Valis revolves are engaging, sympathetic, and mirrors of the social and psychological complexities faced by mankind. Unlike his other novels, however, the main characters in Valis are actually PKD himself. This results in the occasional switch from first and third person narrative, and several instances in which the author and the author surrogate interact with one another.

Valis (the name assigned by the main characters to their vision of God) is less of a novel than it is a fictionalized account of PKD’s own spiritual journey. Because of this, a good portion of the middle becomes bogged down with in depth descriptions of PKD’s theological views and theories. Anyone not well versed in Gnosticism and Metaphysical Theory will be tempted to skim several pages of text at a time, and might even debate whether finishing the book is worth the trouble. This will be especially true of readers who are only familiar with his early science fiction work and not prepared for a crash course in PKD’s exegesis. In some ways, Valis could be considered PKD’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, except the focus of this road trip isn’t the American Dream, but the True Nature of God.

Above all else, PKD is a master storyteller, and this is what saves Valis from being a stuffy and unintelligible pseudo-memoir about a spiritual journey. The uncertainty of the narrator’s true identity (both to the reader and the narrator), as well as the sympathetic nature of his plight and the conspiracy-drenched plot twists reminiscent of Robert Anton Wilson (whom PKD mentions in the book) will keep you interested enough to struggle through the denser passages. But you also find yourself riveted as you gain closer insight into the mind of one of the greatest science fiction authors of the last century.

Valis is a perfect snapshot of a time not so long ago, when there existed a movement of authors that eagerly blended the lines between science-fiction and spiritualism. It was a time when optimism regarding mankind’s future potential was almost intoxicating, and the experimental expansion of the mind and spirit were deemed as important as technological advancements. Looking back, it may seem a bit naive and fanciful, but it was also full of hope and wonder, two traits that seem to be lacking more and more with today’s sci-fi authors.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Mystery writer Truman, daughter of president, dies

2008-03-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

Margaret Truman, the only child of former President Harry S. Truman who became a concert singer, actress, radio and TV personality and mystery writer, died Tuesday. She was 83.

For the complete article: http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/01/29/obit.trumans.daughter.ap/index.html

Book Review: On Becoming an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician by Catherine Maccoun

2008-03-24T04:26:00.000-07:00

Having read several self-help and personal-improvement books over the past few years, the recent trends are hard to ignore. Most of the books on the market covering these themes tend to simplify life changes and introspective reevaluation to the point of claiming it is as easy as saying ‘Yes I Can’. With the popularity of The Secret and guided imagery, even talking to yourself is taken out of the equation, and simply wishing or imagining personal improvements is supposed to be enough to bring about radical change.

So reading Catherine MacCoun’s book, On Becoming an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician, is a much needed breath of fresh air in what has always seemed a cliché and uninspired genre.

MacCoun’s title and subject matter may at first put some readers off with its references to arcane alchemical arts and magical properties. But what she has actually managed is to offer a fresh perspective into how people make choices, perceive the world around them, and live their lives. She does so by introducing us to an innovative blend of spiritualism and psychology, in much the same way that Alchemy itself blends scientific observation with objective mysticism.

Granted, chapters like the one that uses scenes and terminology from Harry Potter to illustrate a point may take the magician aspect of the book a tad too far for some people. But the message within is much more grounded in reality than some of the ‘guided imagery’ feel-good books cluttering the bookstore shelves these days.

The true test of any book of this nature is the ability of the reader to glean something constructive and useful from its pages, even if they do not buy into the author’s overall message. Readers of MacCoun’s latest will undoubtedly have no trouble walking away wiser and more aware, no matter their take on becoming a Modern Magician. And that, as they say, is magic.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and prophet of the satellite era, dies aged 90

2008-03-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

The science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke - famed for his visionary predictions of the future - has died aged 90.

He will be remembered as someone who for more than half a century popularised scientific reality through science fiction, and who lived long enough to see many of his most outlandish predictions become first fact and then history.

In more than 70 books, countless short stories, articles, film scripts and TV shows, Clarke painted his vision of the future that may at times have veered towards the romantically idealistic but was nevertheless always grounded in plausible scientific reality.

He provided the inspiration for what some fans claim to be the best science fiction film ever made - 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There are two kinds of science fiction writers - those who paint a picture of alternative, future or alien worlds governed by fantasy and whimsy, and those whose fiction is rooted firmly in the laws of physics.

Clarke, along with his American contemporary Isaac Asimov, was firmly in the latter camp.

His stories were often little more than an excuse to air a technological or scientific postulation. Clarke's astronauts mostly eschewed the “warp drives'”and “wormholes” beloved of most sci-fi writers and relied instead on good old-fashioned rockets.

Clarke, who was wheelchair-bound, had been suffering from heart and breathing problems when he died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at 7.30pm GMT yesterday, according to an aide.
In later life he had suffered from post-polio syndrome, a result of contracting a brief bout of the disease in his youth.

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore paid tribute to his friend last night, saying: “He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster.

“He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel - he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 - and he was right.”

Born the son of a farmer in Somerset in 1917, Clarke was a radar specialist for the RAF during the Second World War and took up writing full-time in the 1940s.

In 1945, Clarke made perhaps his most famous and accurate prediction.

He wrote an article in Wireless World predicting that, one day, it would be possible to use satellites in fixed “geostationary” orbits, 23,000 miles above the Earth, as in effect giant radio masts, allowing radio, telephony and television signals to be relayed from any point on the planet to another.

Although this was a dozen years before the first satellite would be launched, Clarke had come up with the idea for worldwide satellite-broadcasts.

In keeping with his visions of a future that others could barely imagine, he coined Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In 1953, while scuba diving in Florida, he met Marilyn Mayfield, marrying her a fortnight later. But she left him six months later. Clarke settled in Sri Lanka in

One short story made him famous. The Sentinel - a tale of a mysterious alien race which had accelerated human evolution - was noticed by the film director Stanley Kubrick, who met Clarke in Trader Vic's bar in New York to discuss how it could be turned into “the perfect science fiction movie”.

From the roof of Kubrick's Manhattan apartment, the pair spotted a mysterious object tracking across the sky.

The UFO was, they decided, a good omen and they signed the deal. (The UFO turned out to be a secret Pentagon spy satellite).

The result was spectacular. 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, has been hailed by its fans as the best science fiction movie ever made; its detractors claim it is incomprehensible gibberish, especially the ending, which differs from Clarke's more straightforward original.

Unusually for a celebrity writer, Clarke was always highly approachable - he described himself as a “failed recluse”, holed up in his luxury Colombo home.

His phone number was listed in the Sri Lankan directory. Until his health really started to go downhill in the late 1990s, he would always answer calls from fans personally, often spending half an hour or more chatting away about space elevators of the possibilities of colonising the Moon.

Book Review: Killer's Payoff by Ed McBain

2008-03-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

Killer's Payoff veers from the ensemble feel of the previous novels by adhering strictly to one crime, in this case the murder of a blackmailer. The lack of any secondary criminal investigations taking place in the background doesn't take away from McBain's usual layered narrative, as extra time is well spent exploring all of the different paths an investigation can take simultaneously, especially in a case complicated by victims that are as secretive than the criminals themselves. How do you track down and interrogate suspects to a blackmailer's murder, when even the innocent ones have something to hide?

The drama isn't as intense as in previous novels, which might explain the novel's absence of side stories to lighten the mood. Since the victim of the case is a criminal himself, the lack of sympathy allows for a lighter approach to the narrative that keeps the mood hovering between serious and humorous. The overall effect is that this installment comes off more like a straight Mystery novel, which can either be viewed as a welcome break in the series format or an unfortunate lapse in the author's recognized style.

Carella and Hawes take up the main brunt of the detective work, with Kling and Meyer doing their fair share, while Willis and Brown pull backup duty with minor roles such as stakeouts and wiretaps. Hawes actually spends a good portion of the novel flying solo, making up for earlier trangressions while gaining a reputation as a rather effective ladie's man by bedding a series of beautiful witnesses and strangers, offering a welcome change of pace from the serious love lives of Kling and Carella. McBain's stable of characters also grows beyond the precinct, as sympathetic informant Danny Gimp and the ex-husband of the previous novel's murder victim each lend a hand.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Press Release: Simon & Schuster Sets New One Week Record with Twenty-Four New York Times Bestsellers

2008-03-14T04:50:00.000-07:00

On March 23, 2008, the New York Times bestseller list will include a record-breaking total of 24 separate bestsellers from various imprints of Simon & Schuster, Inc. The previous Simon & Schuster record was set on the December 24, 2006 list, which featured 21 separate bestsellers.

Of the 24 titles, four are the #1 sellers on their respective lists: Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult (Hardcover Fiction), Losing It By Valerie Bertinelli (Hardcover Nonfiction), The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (Paperback Trade Fiction), and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous Hardcover).

This bestseller accomplishment highlights the breadth of Simon & Schuster's publishing programs, with at least one bestseller in each of the eleven New York Times categories. These include new titles as well as many long-running bestsellers, including The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (113 weeks), John Adams by David McCullough (29 weeks), 21: Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich (56 weeks), The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (61 weeks), and The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black (60 weeks).

Year-to-date, Simon & Schuster has had 55 New York Times bestsellers, six of which hit #1.
Simon & Schuster's New York Times bestsellers for March 23, 2008

Hardcover Fiction: Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult (Atria, #1) Duma Key by Stephen King (Scribner, #13)

Hardcover Nonfiction: Losing It by Valerie Bertinelli (Free Press, #1) An Inconvenient Book by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe (Threshold Editions, #10) The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx with Ian Gittins (Pocket Books, #15)

Paperback Trade Fiction: The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (Touchstone, #1) Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult ( Washington Square Press, #2) The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory (Touchstone, #16)

Paperback Mass-Market Fiction: I Heard That Song Before by Mary Higgins Clark (Pocket Books, #2) The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (Pocket Books, #10) Laced by Carol Higgins Clark (Pocket Star, #18)

Paperback Nonfiction: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Scribner, #8) John Adams by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, #11) 21: Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich (Free Press/Pocket Star, #14)

Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous Hardcover The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (Atria/Beyond Words, #1) YOU: Staying Young by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz (Free Press, #5) Become a Better You by Joel Osteen (Free Press, #6)

Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous Paperback The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey (Free Press, #10)

Children's Picture Books Smash! Crash! by Jon Scieszka (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, #6)

Children's Chapter Books Tweak by Nic Sheff (Ginee Seo/Atheneum, #3) The Nixie's Song by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, #5) Glass by Ellen Hopkins (McElderry, #9)

Children's Paperback Books Legacy by Kate Brian (Simon Pulse, #5)

Children's Series The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, #2)

Book Review: Atom by Steve Aylett

2008-03-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

This is the third book I've read by Steve Aylett, the first two being (in order) Slaughtermatic and Gothic Hall. Both of these are personal favorites of mine, which I eagerly force upon unsuspecting friends and family whenever possible. Compared to these two, however, his newest novel Atom falls short.

Now, this isn't a bad book, not in the least. The basic premise is that of a retelling of The Maltese Falcon in the future-cyber-surreal city of Beerlight, except that the mysterious object everyone scrambles after is not a black statue, but Franz Kafka's brain. That alone should give you an idea of the lengths of madness traveled, and Aylett does so with his gifted ability to throw unforgettable one-liners and curt descriptions at you until you're bruised and bleeding and begging for more. For this the novel is not lacking.

My only real problem was the lack of depth achieved. The characters (including our hero, Taffy Atom) run around only half defined and barely memorable as individuals. And the storyline felt thrown together, as merely an excuse to throw around the players. That's not always a bad thing, mind you, but Aylett is capable of so much more, and has proven it in the past. Slaughtermatic (which was only 20 pages longer) not only felt real and drew you into the bizarre and complex storyline and characters, but he even succeeded in drawing out the individual personalities of two people who were essentially the same person!

So, as I said, I'm not saying this is a bad book. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it to others, although new readers of his may want to try the other two titles I mentioned first. It is simply not his best. But here's to hoping it is his worst.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: The Crime Doctor by EW Hornung

2008-03-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

Is an ape-like murderous thug blackmailing your girlfriend for her jewelry? Missing a few top-secret military blueprints? Plagued by a few pesky arsons and murders at your sprawling country manor house? Is an archfiend planning your death? Need to have a criminally insane member of the upper crust quietly spirited away to a private asylum before the bloodlust strikes again? If so, call the Crime Doctor.

In the mid 1800’s England was an empire. Under British colonial rule, Queen Victoria’s armies occupied twenty-five percent of the nations of this planet, implementing parliamentary law and English culture across the globe. No other fictional character bolstered the perception of Anglo-supremacy and Christian virtue than Sherlock Holmes, the UK’s foremost consulting detective. But in the early 1900s, the English empire started to crumble. Their involvement in the Boer wars, a difficult and bloody campaign that saw the conception of concentration camps for women and children, had the British citizenry equally divided between support and protest. Out of this moral ambiguity and social turmoil comes EW Hornung’s Crime Doctor, a man who himself crippled in that horrific campaign. He is not portrayed as a superman who needs the intellectual challenge of pursuing criminals to sway his boredom, but as an all too human solider, who after being cured of his injury that caused a personality imbalance, has a deep seeded desire to help his fellow man by the eradication of crime, by using any means at his disposal.

THE CRIME DOCTOR was critically acclaimed when first published but unfortunately Dr. Dollar’s thrilling adventures came to a halt shortly after because of the death of the author. Such the pity because the Crime Doctor is an intriguing character, one whom could stand shoulder to shoulder with Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, Philo Vance as well as Hornung’s most popular creation, Raffles, the Gentleman Cracksmith.

Scribner Acquires Next Novel By John le Carré

2008-03-05T05:17:00.000-08:00

Scribner and Pocket Books have acquired U.S. publication and audio rights to John le Carré's next highly anticipated novel, A Most Wanted Man. The announcement was made today by Susan Moldow, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Scribner.

Nan Graham, Vice President, Editor-in-Chief of Scribner, who will edit the book, negotiated the agreement with attorney Michael Rudell for the novel which will be published in October 2008 simultaneously with le Carré's longtime British publisher Hodder & Stoughton and with Penguin Canada. The acquisition of A Most Wanted Man marks a return for le Carré to Scribner who published his runaway New York Times bestsellers Single & Single (1999) and The Constant Gardener (2000), which later became the award-winning film directed by Fernando Meirelles.

Set in Germany, A Most Wanted Man is one of le Carré's most stunning novels, an urgent, contemporary story delivering readers deep inside the intelligence agencies operating in the "war on terror."

"We are thrilled to be publishing John le Carré again," said Susan Moldow. "A Most Wanted Man will remind readers why he is one of the most important writers of our time, offering his unparalleled and timely examination of the world's most pressing threat."

"Le Carré is in a class of his own and he's at the top of it here," added Nan Graham. "A Most Wanted Man is a fiercely intelligent take on the way we fight terrorism now and an extraordinarily moving story about the integrity of some of the men and women on the ground. The characters are as complex and compelling as any le Carré has ever given us."

"I'm pleased with this novel and encouraged by Scribner's enthusiasm," said John le Carré. "It was one of those books that, once started, seemed to write itself. The end took me by surprise, then scared me stiff."

John le Carré is the author of twenty novels -- many of them number one bestsellers -- including The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Constant Gardener, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Little Drummer Girl,The Russia House, and The Tailor of Panama. His books have been translated into twenty-five languages and have been the basis for award-winning, format-bending films and television.

Book Review: Ku Klux Klan America’s First Terrorists Exposed

2008-03-05T04:08:00.000-08:00

In the first part of the century, the Klan’s influence on the American way of life was omni-present. They gathered at high-profile gatherings like parades, political events and war rallies. Their posts warning all enemies of the US to beware of KKK justice was seen by hundreds of thousands in many newspapers of the day while from the pulpit preachers exalted their moral Christian virtues. They even appeared (in mockery and satire) in an “Our Gang” comedic short, Lodge Night, and a Walt Disney cartoon, “Alice and the Dog Catcher.” But through the decades the KKK ranks dwindled as their violent and racist tactics came to light. Because of shame and embarrassment, magazine articles and other popular culture media, both pro Klan and anti Klan, was censored or buried.

Ku Klux Klan America’s First Terrorists Exposed brings the reader back to the time when the KKK was still the subject of debate. Then as the title of the book suggests, exposes them as a ruthless band of subversives by first-hand accounts, investigative news reporting, and law enforcement agencies files. The period vernacular in this book can be offensive and shocking at times, but is necessary to convey the nation’s attitude at that time to its citizens of color.

Book Review: Amazing Fantasy THE TERROR of TIM BOO BA Omnibus vol.1

2008-03-03T13:28:00.000-08:00

“Many are the wonders of the vast universe. But none so fantastic as… TIM BOO BA!” This bold statement scripted by Marvel’s founding father – Stan “the Man” Lee, foretells the terrible reign of the cruel reptilian dictator, who is finally bested by ….well, that would be telling, and unfair to the reader because most of this story’s charm, like many others contained in this volume, derides from Twilight Zone “inspired” surprise ending. Some much so, Lee stated in an interview with Will Murray regarding his Amazing Fantasy scripts, “I used to get letters from readers ‘Hey, I just saw Twilight Zone, and they used one of your stories from issue so-and-so.’”

Amazing Fantasy THE TERROR of TIM BOO BA Omnibus vol.1 beautifully reprints in their entirety: Amazing Adventures #1-6, Amazing Adult Fantasy #7-14 and Amazing Fantasy #15 -- that’s 416 pages (scripted and executed by Marvel’s A-list talent: Lee, Ditko, and Kirby) brimming with evil alien invaders, rampaging giant monsters, and the creation of Marvel’s greatest and most influential superhero -- Spider-man! This collection is a must have for vintage monster comic book fans.

Book Review: Give the Boys a Great Big Hand by Ed McBain

2008-02-27T04:20:00.000-08:00

Patrolman Richard Genero, the beat cop who made the initial body discovery way back in The Pusher, strikes gold again when he finds a discarded flight bag containing a severed hand. With nothing to go on but a printless hand and a vague description of the person who left it, the bulls at the 87th need to pull clues and suspects from thin air to discover not only who the killer is, but who the victim was.

Nothing too far from the norm here, the boys do their fair share of legwork to track down paper thin leads, the main guys on the case being Carella, Hawes. and Meyer. Parker also appears long enough to start a fist fight with Carella, already putting him above Haviland as far as chaos potential. The fight starts when Carella sticks up for Frankie Hernandez, who spends his second appearance in the city defending The Cause from Parker's relentless bigoted comments.

Nothing too spectacular takes place in this episode, although it is the second book in a row that sees Carella losing his temper, from shouting at the reluctant Douglas King in King's Ransom to taking a swing at Parker here. While he has never been portrayed as the calm one of the precinct (that would be Meyer), he has never been this hot headed.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: The Heckler by Ed McBain

2008-02-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

A naked man, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest, is found in the park by some children. At the same time, shopkeepers in the city are receiving crank calls by a "heckler" that threatens them if they don't move shop by the end of the month.

Could these two cases be connected? Apparently so, and although such a setup makes it obvious that these two storyline will intersect, an interest in the detectives of the 87th and their procedure keep it interesting. Also interesting is the first appearance of a new recurring villain, the Deaf Man. Playing Moriarty to the Precinct's Sherlock, the Deaf Man is a somewhat low-rent criminal genius, who works his vast plan to distract the city while robbing a newly constructed bank vault with a motley crew of second-hand crooks and punks. His role as Moriarty is blatantly pointed out by Kling, who mentions having just read The Red Headed League, a Sherlock Holmes story featuring a similar bait-and-switch scenario.

Possibly the most interesting thing about The Heckler is that in the end, he is not thwarted by brilliant detective work, but by a simple twist of fate and a moment of bad luck. McBain is refreshing in his willingness to show the limitations of the department, and how human error can sometimes work in its favor. This is especially evident when Kling practically solves the whole thing in reference to The Red Headed League, but isn't able to put his finger on its relevance until it is almost too late.

Also, over forty years later, the Deaf Man's plan to distract the police force by creating a state of panic and fear with simultaneous bomb attacks throughout the city seems all too possible.

Like King's Ransom, the narrative spends a bit more time than usual with the criminals involved. This is a relief in a book with a much lengthier time frame than his time compressed one-day scenarios, as it allows passage of time in the ongoing investigation while allowing us to skip the more dreary legwork.

Meyer opens and closes this story handling the Heckler calls, while Carella and Hernandez try to track down the identity and murderer of the naked man in the park. Carella is yet again nearly killed in the line of duty, raising the question of how many times can his imminent death be used as a plot point before it gets old.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Press Release: HARPERCOLLINS TEAMS UP WITH DECLARE YOURSELF

2008-02-20T05:21:00.000-08:00

HarperCollins Publishers will join forces with Declare Yourself, the national nonpartisan, nonprofit youth voter initiative aimed at empowering and encouraging America's youth to register and vote in the 2008 primaries and general election, to publish Declare Yourself: Speak. Connect. Vote. 50 Celebrated Americans Tell You Why (on sale: May 20, 2008) - a book to inspire, educate, entertain, and engage teens in the political process.

In the lead up to the 2008 presidential and general election, Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, will publish this collection of original essays and personal pieces about the importance of civic action. The contributors to Declare Yourself include young celebrities who will be casting their first ballot in 2008, comedians, actors, authors, athletes, musicians, political figures, and entrepreneurs. These well-known public figures will share their own experiences, relate personal anecdotes, and issue a call-to-action, encouraging young people to practice democracy and to register to vote for the upcoming election. Topics will range from "The First Time I Voted" to "Why the Personal is Political" to "Why Your Vote Counts," and more.

The book announcement comes on the heels of a record turnout of young voters in the recent Super Tuesday elections. MTV.com recently reported that, in practically every state holding a primary or caucus last Tuesday, youth turnout increased astronomically, doubling, tripling and even quadrupling the turnout in the 2000 and 2004 electoral seasons.

"We are excited and honored to partner with Declare Yourself and bring together this spirited collection of diverse and uniquely American voices," says Susan Katz, President and Publisher of HarperCollins Children's Books. "We are united in our goal, which is saying to young people: get informed, get connected, declare yourselves. Become lifelong voters.

"America Ferrera, star of the hit ABC show Ugly Betty, will act as the celebrity editor and spokesperson for the Declare Yourself book. In this role, Ferrera will write the introduction to the book and also support the book through media and public appearances.

Confirmed contributors for the Declare Yourself book include: Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, Maya Angelou, Ryan Bingham, Bonnie Bernstein, Cheryl Burke, Meg Cabot, Nick Cannon, Sasha Cohen, Lauren Conrad, Chris Crutcher, Rosario Dawson, Kat DeLuna, America Ferrera, Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, Anastasia Goodstein, Adrian Grenier, Hill Harper, Molly Ivins, Mike James, Marty Kaplan, Sean Kingston, James Kotecki, Nicole Lapin, Norman Lear, Maroon 5, Courtney E. Martin, Megan McCafferty, Naomi Shihab Nye, Hayden Panettiere, Amy Richards, Rob Riggle, Mark Ritchie, Henry Rollins, Atoosa Rubenstein, Stuart Scott, Holly Shulman, Amber Tamblyn, Aaron Tang, Aisha Tyler, Gabrielle Union, Sara Varon, Wilmer Valderrama, Alice Walker, Joan Walsh, Marcellus Wiley, and Judd Winick, and a piece by The Onion. A portion of the proceeds will benefit Declare Yourself's ongoing voter registration outreach initiatives.

"Exercising your right to vote is one of the most powerful-and personal-actions anyone can take in our country. We hope that sharing these very personal pieces will inspire millions of young people to vote for the first time-and write the next chapter in the on-going story of our democracy," says Norman Lear, founder of Declare Yourself.

In addition to HarperCollins Publishers, companies such as Cricket (Presenting Sponsor), Yahoo! (Premier Online Information Partner), MySpace (Premier Social Networking Partner), Google, Evite, Good Search, Clear Channel, Comedy Central, Good Magazine and American Eagle Outfitters have also signed on with Declare Yourself's 2008 campaign. Declare Yourself works closely with the most popular online destinations; young celebrities, sports figures and fashion designers; popular television shows; mobile content providers; retailers; video games; and media outlets to drive millions of young people, particularly first-time voters, to www.DeclareYourself.com to register to vote.

About HarperCollins Publishers

HarperCollins, one of the largest English-language publishers in the world, is a subsidiary of News Corporation (NYSE: NWS, NWS.A; ASX: NWS, NWSLV). Headquartered in New York, HarperCollins has publishing groups around the world including the HarperCollins General Books Group, HarperCollins Children's Books Group, Zondervan, HarperCollins UK, HarperCollins Canada, HarperCollins Australia/New Zealand and HarperCollins India. HarperCollins is a broad-based publisher with strengths in literary and commercial fiction, business books, children's books, cookbooks, mystery, romance, reference, religious and spiritual books. With nearly 200 years of history HarperCollins has published some of the world's foremost authors and has won numerous awards including the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott. Consistently at the forefront of innovation and technological advancement, HarperCollins is the first publisher to digitize its content and create a global digital warehouse to protect the rights of its authors, meet consumer demand and generate additional business opportunities. You can visit HarperCollins Publishers on the Internet at http://www.harpercollins.com and www.harpercollinschildrens.com.

About Declare Yourself

Declare Yourself is the national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign to energize and empower every eligible 18-year-old in America to register and vote in the 2008 primaries and general election. Partnering with leaders in education, the entertainment industry, popular online destinations and media outlets, the fashion industry and retailers, Declare Yourself registered more than 1.2 million people in the 2004 and 2006 elections at www.DeclareYourself.com. Declare Yourself, founded by Norman Lear, was launched in 2003 as the culmination of the Declaration of Independence Road Trip, a nationwide multi-media exhibit and tour of an original copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Book Signing: Otto A Berliner

2008-02-20T05:12:00.000-08:00

Award winning author Otto A berliner to attend book signing at Horizons Restaurant in the Woodcliff Hotel & Spa, Fairpoint NY on Feburary 23 from 3:30 to 5:30 pm. Period WWII music will also be performed live.

The award winning author of 'The Cobbler of Normandy' will visit with fans, autograph copies of his book and invites everyone to attend. The Cobbler of Normandy, (historical fiction), tells the exciting story of 5 people working in occupied France to help the coming Allied Invasion defeat the Nazi occupiers in France. Fast paced and filled with the real dangers faced by the French Underground, The Cobbler of Normandy is based on real persons and events in WWII France.

Otto A Berliner was announced as the winner of NewBookReviews.org's Best Historical Fiction Book of 2007 Literary Award. The Cobbler of Normandy has received other critical acclaim.

NewBookReviews.org's 2007 Literary Award winners are determined by votes cast by the reading public and the editors of NBR.org for excellence in the literature.

Press Release: Simon & Schuster's Atria Books Acquires Flynn's Next Four Novels

2008-02-20T05:03:00.000-08:00

CBS Films and Simon & Schuster/Atria Books -- both divisions of CBS Corporation -- have reached film and publishing agreements with best-selling author Vince Flynn for upcoming projects, it was jointly announced by Amy Baer, President & CEO of CBS Films, and Carolyn Reidy, President & CEO of Simon & Schuster.

Flynn is the author of nine best-selling novels, eight of which feature the popular character, counter-terrorism operative Mitch Rapp. There are over 10 million copies of Flynn's books in print in the U.S., and with his most recent book, Protect and Defend, he joined the ranks of those select few authors who can immediately claim the Number One spot on hardcover bestseller lists in their first week on sale.

CBS Films has optioned the rights for Flynn's Mitch Rapp character with the intention of creating a character-based, action-thriller movie franchise. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced two of last summer's hits -- "Transformers" and Stephen King's "1408" -- and Nick Wechsler ("We Own The Night") are in negotiations to produce the films.

Flynn's new agreement with Atria and Simon & Schuster is a four book global publishing deal for all world rights, including translation and audio. The worldwide simultaneous English language publication of the first book in the agreement by Atria and Simon & Schuster companies in the U.K., Canada and Australia will take place in 2010. Flynn will be published under the direction of Atria Executive Vice President and Publisher Judith Curr, and Vice President and Executive Editorial Director Emily Bestler, who made the acquisition.

"We have always passionately believed in Vince Flynn's star potential as a bestselling author, and equally that his books deserved the even wider audience and exposure that can be reached through feature films," said Reidy. "That this comes about through our relationship with CBS Films is even more exciting for us, and we look forward to seeing Mitch Rapp on the screen, and many more Simon & Schuster properties developed in conjunction with CBS."

"One of my first goals for CBS Films was to find a character-based movie franchise," said Baer. "With the Mitch Rapp series, Vince Flynn has created a relatable, modern, post-9/11 hero for the action/thriller genre. It is an amazing collection of creative material that offers tremendous potential for a smart, energizing new film franchise with appeal to a wide range of movie-going audiences. The publishing world has always provided abundant source material for motion pictures, and we're fortunate that our corporate cousins at Simon & Schuster attract and nurture some of the world's best literary assets."

"Vince Flynn's career has been steadily on the rise since he self-published his first book, Term Limits, and together we've watched his popularity grow with every successive publication," said Curr. "Now readers and moviegoers alike can savor more of the thrilling insider insight and verisimilitude that has made him a favorite of average citizens and the national security operatives who protect us."

"I couldn't be happier with this deal," said Flynn. "Signing up for four more books, keeping the movie in the family with CBS Films and getting Lorenzo and Nick to sign on as producers … it's the outcome I'd always hoped for. Loyalty is a big thing to me. Simon & Schuster, Atria and Pocket Books have stood by me for 10 years and done a magnificent job publishing my novels. Lorenzo and Nick have been trying to bring Mitch Rapp to the big screen since 2004, so there is a level of commitment on their part that is very comforting to me. They understand Mitch Rapp, as does Amy Baer and her team. It is going to be a lot of fun watching CBS Films hit this thing out of the park."

"Vince has created an unbelievably unique and dynamic character in Mitch Rapp," said di Bonaventura. "Nick and I can't wait to bring him to the screen and we feel lucky to be doing this in partnership with CBS."

Sloan Harris and Ron Bernstein of ICM represented Flynn for the publishing and film agreements.

A forgotten talent - Theodora Keogh

2008-02-18T05:29:00.000-08:00

One of America’s most interesting novelists died last month but her passing barely caused a stir in the literary world – only London’s Daily Telegraph recognized this writer’s achievements with a full obituary. Theodora Keogh, who was 88, died in North Carolina on 5 January. She was the granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt but that wasn’t her main claim to fame. She produced nine novels in the 1950s and 1960s that stood out from the crowd for their challenging and dark subject matter.

Born in 1919, Theodora began her career as a dancer. She married Tom Keogh, a theatrical designer, in 1945 and went to Europe where they led a socialite lifestyle in France. She hung out with the Paris Review crowd, including founder George Plimpton and other literary figures, while Keogh designed costumes for stage and film, and also worked for Vogue magazine.

Meg - her debut novel - was published in 1950 and it concerns a 12-year-old girl who goes to an up-market private school but mixes with the wrong crowd from the streets. The heroine is raped. Many critics were taken aback by the storyline but Theodore was just getting started.

In 1952, she published The Double Door, which has a homosexual storyline - daring for the day. That same year saw the publication of Street Music where a music critic falls in love with a child criminal. The Fascinator (1954) concerned a young girl being seduced by a sculptor. In 1961, Gemini examined the taboo subject of incest in a story about twins. Her 1962 novel, The Other Girl, was a fictional account of the Elizabeth Short’s notorious ‘Black Dahlia’ murder in 1947.

Theodora Keogh didn’t write again after 1962 but her life was rarely dull. She divorced Tom, married a tugboat captain and lived in the Chelsea Hotel. She later moved to North Carolina and married again.

Theodora’s literary legacy is that she pushed the boundaries of acceptance in literature. She paved the way for many authors.

Manson's Murder Movies

2008-02-13T05:56:00.000-08:00

“The last taboo would be to actually kill someone in front of the cameras.”
--Six years after Sharon Tate’s murder, Roman Polanski makes a cameo in CONFESSIONS OF A BLUE MOVIE STAR -- a film that includes a hoaxed interview with a snuff film director.

The television screen flickered to life showing a grainy and somewhat shaky close-up of a fifteen to eighteen year old Caucasian girl’s face. Her eyes are wide open and a strip of gray duct tape cris-crosses her mouth. The camera pulls back to reveal her naked torso handcuffed to a metal bed frame. Her head jerks side-to-side as low moans and the squeal of metal bedsprings can be heard. The camera pans down past the rest of her naked body and focuses on her feet -- each one wired to the ends of the bed frame.

The camera sways backward to show a larger view of the room... devoid of furniture, cracked crumbling plaster walls, black plastic trash bags cover the two windows. By the looks of the surroundings this was most likely filmed in an abandoned building -- maybe one located in your city or town. After some shaky camera movement, a large man wearing a gray sweat suit enters the picture. His head is covered by a blue wool ski mask. As he approaches the bed frame, the girl starts to twist and struggle.

The man beats the girl about the thigh and stomach with a closed fist. The camera swings around focusing between the impact spots of the punches and her face. The man then removes the bottom half of the sweat suit and rapes the girl. His hands are around her neck. Seven minutes later, he pulls his sweat pants to his waist and leaves the frame.

He returns moments later. The camera zooms in on his hand -- now holding gardening shears. He opens and closes them for the camera. The camera sways to the girls face. Her eyes are closed, and there is no indication of life. The man removes her nose and ears with the shears before cutting parts of her breast.

Four minutes later he rapes her for the last time before walking out of the camera’s view.

Moments later he returns with a hack saw and decapitates her corpse. He holds her head directly in front of the camera. It zooms in for a final close-up.

What you just read was the remembered transcript of a actual snuff film. The description of which was written in the least sensational style in the attempt not to arouse or inflame any unsound persons reading this article. It was viewed several years ago by Frank Schildener at the behest of a federal agent with whom he had a working relationship. It seems that this video was found by the Feds in the possession of a paroled sex offender in Frank’s caseload. Another video found in this creep’s collection was labeled BAGMAN TEN, in which a ten year old girl is bound and suffocated by a clear plastic bag placed over her head. Needless to say, Frank went above and beyond the line of duty to send “snuff-boy” back to prison. The sex offender later testified as the State’s witness against the people who sold these videos to him.

I asked Frank if these tapes could have been hoaxed. His response, “No Fucken way! As a Probation Officer in Newark, NJ, I have viewed autopsy photos of murdered children, victims of sexual assaults, and drug addicts so wasted they appeared to be inhuman. I’m not squeamish, but this display was more disgusting than anything I’d seen before or since. I know many people would like to claim snuff films, or now, video tapes, are merely special effects, but I will tell you this, if that was F/X, then the creator was both a sick pig and the possessor of technology dozens of years beyond Hollywood... and that’s not likely.”

Many people like to believe that snuff films are either nonexistent or the product of a lone murderer who is recording his violence so that he can relive them on a later occasion. They ite the evidence of SCREW magazine publisher Al Goldstein’s $25,000 bounty for anyone presenting him with a real snuff film, a reward that has never been paid to this date. These usually are the same people who deny any form of crime that they do not see before them or have immediate evidence of it’s existence. This brand of thinking has lead to the denial of the existence of the Sicilian Mafia, the sudden discovery of the cocaine derivative, crack (despite that it had been a common street drug for almost half a decade by then), and most terrifyingly, the underground market created for child molesters. In the latter case, child molesters are able to indulge their fantasies through illegal magazines, internet websites and even packaged tours of countries in which child prostitution is common.

“Pretty soon the girls would become victims of more than being sex objects. If outsiders moved in so easily for sex, they could just as easily started maneuvering some of the girls into heavier shit -- like chains, whips, blood-drinking, animal death and even human sacrifice.”
--Charlie Manson talks about some of the people he and his family met in Hollywood. From MANSON IN HIS OWN WORDS as told to Nuel Emmons

The term “snuff film” slipped into the backdoor of the American vernacular in 1971 when it was coined by author Ed Saunders in his assessment of the Manson homicides, THE FAMILY. Between its pages many startling claims are revealed. Saunders asserts that Manson and his band of true believers had in their possession three super-8 cameras at Spahn Ranch which they used to film many unusual events. According to ex-family member Vern Plumlee, most of the films made by Mason were “you know, just crazy movies.” A person tripping on bad acid, girls dancing naked around a bon fire slashing the air with knives, and the occasional orgy “with the added spice of a few famous faces and bodies”, would be shown on a screen made from a bed sheet at any given night at the ranch. I wonder who those “famous faces” were?

But not all of Manson’s films were harmless drug induced exploits of the free love generation. During one filming session a fifteen year old girl called Simi Valley Sherri was brutally raped by Manson’s clan with such savagery that Linda Kasabian (eyewitness to the Tate killing) declared, “The whole scene was perversion like I’ve never seen before.” Little did she know then that gang rape would be a cinematic appetizer for her leader Charlie.

Armed with the knowledge that photographic evidence of Charlie’s Family activity exists, Saunders went undercover posing as a New York pornographer with a taste for the bizarre. In no time at all he found an underground film broker who was selling seven hours of Manson’s porn films. The asking price for the films at the time of Manson’s pre-trial was a hefty $250,000.

He also discovered two most shocking rumors. The first: a man named Chuck, who claimed to be a close friend of “Family murder victim” Gary Hinman, maintained he had in his possession films of a “Malibu and San Francisco ax murders.” How pathetically ironic it would be if Hinman was involved with snuff activities at his beach house -- the same house where his own ear was sliced off by the sword wielding Manson before being stabbed to death by Bobby Beausoleil. Before the night of the Hinman carnage, Beausoleil had a promising film career of his own. In his first film he appeared as an angel in MONDO HOLLYWOOD with future “Family murder victim” Jay Sebring. Another time before the camera he and fellow Family member Gypsy played in the X-rated Western epic of rape, totture and murder, THE RAMRODERS. And in his most famous and only staring role, he acted opposite Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey (who play the devil as well being a technical advisor for Roman Polanski’s ROSEMARY’S BABY) in Kenneth Anger’s LUCIFER RISING. According to Bill Landis’ unauthorized biography of the 1960’s underground filmmaker, Anger himself had a run-in with the law in 1965 when he delivered raw footage of THE LOVE THAT WHIRLS to a local drug store for developing. The film contained scenes of a sadistic doctor “working guys over.” One of the masochists looked so beaten that the developer turned over the film to the police suspecting that “it was a possible snuff movie.” The doctor in the film was arrested and Anger was held for questioning. No charges were filed against Anger but all copies of the film were destroyed.

The second rumor: A famous New York artist purchased from a Los Angeles drug dealer a film “depicting the ritual murder of a woman.” (It is interesting to note that this passage only appears in the first printing hardcover of THE FAMILY, and in part two of this article you’ll find out why.)

Only after delving deeper into the muck of the porn film underground, Saunders finally unearthed an individual who witnessed a few of Manson’s snuff films. The anonymous source claims that Manson and his brood hooked up with a cult of devil worshippers known as the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Together they filmed nightly secessions at a unknown beach location that involved “two key Manson female followers” engaged in intercourse as blood from a recently killed dog is poured over their naked bodies. Another grizzly scene had a black-hooded group of five standing around the naked corpse of a decapitated woman. Saunders might have also suspected Hinman of being involved with this film due to the prior rumor, and also because of the snuff film’s location. He asked his source, “What was the name of the house?” Puzzled, his reply was, “It’s not a house. It’s just a beach.” Was Saunders trying to get him to implicate Hinman’s beach house? Maybe.

“We were invited to private parties in Beverly Hills, Malibu and other exclusive areas. A lot of the movie people shot up heroin, smoked opium, free-based and snorted cocaine... We had long ago chucked our inhibitions about sex, but chains, whips, torture, and other weirdness were not part of our routine.”
-- Manson enters Hollywood society, from MANSON IN HIS OWN WORDS as told to Nuel Emmons

Another interesting turn of events happened that could have advanced Manson’s snuff career just before Helter Skelter. Years before, Manson wrote the suicide-drenched tune CEASE TO EXIST for America’s favorite clean-cut band, the BEACH BOYS. With “death” not being part of the surf culture at the time, the group changed the lyrics to CEASE TO RESIST, now a song about sexual liberation -- groovy. Charlie wasn’t pleased with the change in context. He thought the children of the sixties would embrace his death-tripping vibes. Charlie decided that he wanted to be a rock star, so Dennis Wilson, friend and supporter of the Family, made a few telephone calls.

One of the people contacted was record producer Terry Melcher, the person that Roman Polanski rented the residence at 10050 Cielo Drive from. He and friend and soundman Gregg Jacobson took a ride to Spahn Ranch to hear Manson wail prison blues and folk gyrations on a beat-up acoustic guitar. According to Melcher’s side of the story, he took a pass on Manson’s musical talents, but, Charlie, and his ragged band of run-aways, interested Jacobson. He pitched a deal to Manson that he would produce a television documentary on Manson’s communal lifestyle. Charlie agreed.

During that time, Manson’s group ripped-off an NBC news truck. Though it is not mentioned, it is highly likely that this truck was sent to film Manson for Jacobson’s TV documentary. Charlie’s band got away with tens of thousands of dollars worth of broadcast quality video equipment. Equipment that could have made him a top player in the field of underground porn.

Shortly after the theft, the documentary was called off. Charlie had bigger plans in the works. (In 1978, Manson wrote a letter to a California newspaper claiming that Dennis Wilson supplied him with thousands of dollars worth of video equipment in order to penetrate a world-wide underground porno circuit. If Manson is telling the truth, Wilson could have been the one to encourage Jacobson to film a documentary about the Family in order for Charlie to steal the video equipment. Also the second part of the claim has Manson a fledgling player in a “worldwide” porno circuit. If this is true it is certainly not because Manson had an abundance of “pretty girls.” In fact his girls were so plain looking he couldn’t pimp them out as go-go dancers -- an idea he tried and failed. His only commodity would have been snuff films.)

SOURCES:

MANSON IN HIS OWN WORDS by Nuel Emmonns, 1986, Grove Press
THE FAMILY by Ed Saunders, 1971, E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc.
THE GARBAGE PEOPLE by John Gilmore, 1971, Omega Press
ANGER by Bill Landis, 1995, Harper Collins
KILLING FOR CULTURE by David Kerekes and David Slater, 1994, Creation Books

Book Review: WARTS AND ALL by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman

2008-02-11T08:57:00.000-08:00

Around a million years ago, I owned a comic book shop. One day a local neighborhood jackass (who will go nameless) stumbled in with a wide grin and slides a paper underneath my unenthused eyes. The caption screamed:

“GROWN MEN WHO SELL COMIC BOOKS?! THEY ARE… COMIC SHOP CLERKS OF NORTH AMERICA”

The highly detailed illustrations of eight inbreed imbeciles stared up at me. Although I was being mocked, and in my own store no less, I was at a loss for a retort, for I was completely captivated by the artist’s rendering of the emotionally crippled and physically deformed comic shop brethren.

How apropos it was to find that this little artistic gem was from a book entitled WARTS AND ALL by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman. The Friedman brothers creates a surrealistic black and white stippled world of the greats and near greats; the famous and infamous, all thrown into outrageous settings and situations. My favorite: TOR JOHNSON IN NEW YORK!

Book Signings

2008-02-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

Peter Walsh, star of “Clean Sweep”, signing copies of Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? on 2/11/08, 7:00 PM, at Borders Books – Old Country Road. Westbury, NY.

Kathie Lee Gifford, talk show host, will be performing and signing copies of Ask Me Again on
2/12/08, 6:00 PM, at Barnes & Noble – Lincoln Center. New York, NY.

Al Jarreau, jazz and pop star, signing copies of Love Songs on 2/13/08, 7:30 PM, at Barnes & Noble – Lincoln Triangle. New York, NY.

Kenny G will be performing and signing copies of Rhythm and Romance on 2/13/08, 7:00 PM, at Borders Books – Columbus Circle. New York, NY.

Idina Menzel, Tony Award winner and star of “Enchanted”, signing copies of I Stand on 2/14/08, 5:30 PM, at Borders Books – Columbus Circle. New York, NY.

Betty Buckley, Tony Award winner and star of “Eight Is Enough”, will be signing copies of Quintessence on 2/14/08 at Noon at Borders Books – Park Avenue. New York, NY.

Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate and other cast members of “The Howard Stern Show”, will be signing autographs on 2/14/08, 1:30 PM, at Borders Books – Park Avenue. New York, NY.

Suzanne Vega, singer/songwriter, signing copies of Beauty & Crime on 2/14/08, 7:00 PM, at Borders Books – Columbus Circle. New York, NY.

Kathleen Turner, star of “Body Heat” and “Romancing the Stone”, signing copies of Send Yourself Roses… on 2/18/08, 7:00 PM, at Barnes & Noble – Lincoln Center. New York, NY.

Chuck Schumer, US Senator, signing copies of Positively American on 2/19/08, 7:00 PM, at Barnes & Noble – Court Street. Brooklyn, NY and on 2/25/08, 12:30 PM, at Borders Books – Broadway. New York, NY. WARNING: Do not get between the Senator and a TV camera!

Deborah Norville, host of ”Inside Edition”, will be signing copies of Thank You Poweron 2/21/08, 7:00 PM, at Borders Books – Columbus Circle. New York, NY.

They Might Be Giants, pop stars, will be performing & signing copies of Here Come the 1, 2, 3s
on 2/23/08, 2:00 PM, at Borders Books – Columbus Circle. New York, NY.

Valerie Bertinelli, star of “One Day At A Time”, signing copies of Losing It on 2/27/08, 12:30 PM, at Barnes & Noble – Fifth Avenue. New York, NY.

Attention Monster Fans.... Get your plane ticket!

Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, & Forrest Ackerman, 3 legends of science fiction, will be speaking & signing copies of their books on 2/25/08, 7:30 PM, at Mystery & Imagination Bookstore - North Brand Blvd. Glendale, CA.

Book Review: Killer Instinct by Jane Hamsher

2008-02-08T05:06:00.000-08:00

The key to a really great "Behind-The-Scenes" book is an impartial perspective, and perhaps that is the one area this book falls short. Unfortunately, it isn't the only area.

Jane Hamsher can possibly be forgiven for not taking a step back and telling the facts without a personal slant to them; after all, she isn't a journalist, and this isn't really a straight forward making-of book (as the title says, its about the producers). What I can't bring myself to overlook is how badly one-sided and self-serving the book actually comes off as. To beleive this book to the fullest, you would have to go along with the idea that Jane Hamsher was the not only the sole reason this movie ever got made, but that it would have been a complete disaster if it wasn't for her. I really would have a problem with that, if she wasn't the one who kept underlining it as fact.

According to Jane, she was the lone sane voice amongst the madding crowd. She was responsible for the artistic choices that made the film great, and all of the decisions that made them happen. Of course, everybody else was wrong, so each choice she made was an uphill battle. Not just because she was the only smart and sane person, but also because she was the only woman amongst a crowd of stupid men.

Its sad, but it seems she spends half the time painting the ultimate feminist picture on how it took a woman to do a man's job. I'm sure in some cases that was true, but she makes it as if the weight of all responsability was resting on her shoulders. She seems to take great pleasure in repeatedly pointing out that she has to dress her own production partner, and shows contempt for the men that were afraid to let her on the set where convicted murdurers and rapists were running around loose "pretending" to riot. She also spends a great deal of time obsessing on Oliver Stones questionable attitude towards women, and successfully transfers those insecurities to most of the crew as well. Whenever someone disagrees with her, they are either stupid or afraid of a woman in power. Those silly men!

Between the holier-than-thou attitude and hear-me-roar male bashing, there was some great info on the shooting of the film, but not nearly enough. And what info there is must be taken with a grain of salt, when you realize that its all told to make her look good (see: perfect). If you want to hear a producer pat herself on the back (at the expense of everybody else involved in the film) over and over again than this is the book for you. If you want the real story on the making of Natural Born Killers, you might want to look elsewhere.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

N.Y. Times reporter gets subpoena on book

2008-02-06T04:52:00.000-08:00

A New York Times reporter has been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury in Virginia about a book he wrote on the CIA.

James Risen's lawyer, David Kelley, said that the subpoena involves one chapter in "State of War" on the U.S. intelligence agency's efforts to get information on the Iraqi nuclear program, the Times said Friday.

"We intend to fight this subpoena, so we'll likely be engaging in some sort of litigation," Kelley said. "Jim has adhered to the highest traditions of journalism. He is the highest caliber of reporter that you can find, and he will keep his commitment to the confidentiality of his sources."

Risen and Eric Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for articles in 2006 on warrantless wiretapping. The book took off from that series.

The book was published by the Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Martha Levin, the executive vice president and publisher, called the use of confidential sources "one of the bedrock principles of a free and open society."

Risen was ordered to testify Feb. 7 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va.

THE ANGRY RED PLANET on DVD

2008-02-04T05:22:00.000-08:00

Let's break the format of this blog so I can share with you some memories of a favorite childhood sci-fi flick now availble on DVD.

"SPECTACULAR ADVENTURE BEYOND TIME and SPACE... as CINEMAGIC TAKES YOU TO..." That is the tag line for AIP's 1960 super sci-fi spectacular, The Angry Red Planet, and as Walter Brennan used to say, "That's no brag, just fact!" Well, maybe just a little brag.

The two men responsible for creating this bizarre but enjoyable ride through space are Ib Melchior and Sidney Pink. Melchior, who in 1976 was awarded the Golden Scroll by the Academy of Science Fiction for Best Writing, served as the film's co-writer and director. Ib is also known for writing such films as LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG, WHEN HELL BROKE LOOSE, JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET, REPTILICUS, ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, AMBUSH BAY and DEATH RACE 2000. The other conspirator was legendary B movie producer and co-writer, Sidney Pink. Sidney's thirty year body of work, also impressive, is too numerous to list completely, so here are some of the highlights. PRYO, SECRET AGENT 007, REPTILICUS, JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET, BWANA DEVIL (the first color 3-D film), EXQUISITE CADAVER and THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y. (!).

Ib Melchior was introduced to Pink by AIP actress, Nora Hayden. He quickly struck a deal with Pink to re-write the first draft of THE ANGRY RED PLANET, (then called INVASION OF MARS), free of charge if he would be allowed to direct it for scale. Pink happily agreed, but would soon regret his decision. Pink recalls after reading Ib's treatment, "Ib finished the script, but none of us were pleased with the results. He had shortened or removed action sequences and devoted too much time in the spaceship to talking and explaining. This would have been fine if we had a Billy Wilder to write the dialogue, but Ib was a far cry from Wilder." Pink then had to re-write the script back to its original action formula, but kept many of Ib's scientific data about rocketry and celestial navigation that added a greater sense of realism. Pink also found fault in Melchior's direction, or lack of it, "From the first hour on the set, it was evident that Ib Melchior could never get the picture done. He was unable to set up even his first shot, and we lost three hours before Stanley (Cortez, the film's cameraman) took charge. He quietly but firmly took Ib by the hand and issued his own orders through Melchior." Both men also share writing credit for REPTILICUS, a reunion which, much to Pink's chagrin was to link their reputations. As a result, AIP, considering them to be a writing team, brought them together for a third and last time for JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET. Pink would later note that this last experience was not much better than the first. "As usual, Ib's script was wordy and full of banalities that hindered the action needed to keep the movie interesting. Ib thought the worth of the script was measured by the number of words and dialogue it contained." The reunion was not without some benefit, however. Pink admitted that Melchior did contribute the scientific data that gave JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET, "...a touch of reality".

Sidney Pink retired from films in 1970 and is living in Florida, where he patiently waits for residual checks. Today, Ib Melchior is also out of the movie business and is living in California, where he writes spy thrillers based on his experiences as a spy during World War II for U.S. Military Intelligence.

The film starts without credits but the usual stock footage of the Capitol dome and then fades to the Pentagon (remember, N.A.S.A. wasn't around yet). a military motorcade comes to a halt as General Kreger exits and makes his way to a guarded conference room, equipped with standard B movie props like an American flag and a chart of the solar system. The General, head of the Mars Rocket Project, recites this somber statement to civilian advisors and top brass alike. "At 03:00 this morning the expeditionary X 1 rocket ship, missing for sixty one days was sighted by Mount Palamar drifting in orbit some 90,000 miles in space. All attempts to establish radio communications have failed so far. We don't know if anyone is alive aboard. The MR1 appears to be a dead ship...Gentlemen, the Mars rocket must be retrieved and brought back to Earth in tact."

The group seems to be amazed by such an impossible task. The situation seems hopeless until one professor remembers that the X 1 rocket has a remote controlled auto pilot. Once activated, it will allow the X 1 to land safely at a Nevada Air Force Base. If this is a true depiction of the early days of our space program, this would explain Sputnik. After a short jet ride to the base via stock footage we are bombarded with scenes of radar operators staring at their screens, airmen adjusting a satellite dish, a 1960's state of the art digital countdown, and countless other military tableaus. It seems that Pink received permission by the U.S. Air Force to film on one of their bases. After working on Pink's nonsensical script, this threat of realism was perhaps too much for Melchior to resist, for it seems to go on forever. Knowing Melchior's reputation for long winded scientific jargon, his camera crew is probably still there, sending reels of film back to the now defunct production company.

Through a vignette of newspaper headlines, we join all of America in wondering the uncertain fate of the four astronauts who manned the MR1. News reel film is shown on television of Colonel Tom O'Bannon, Air Force pilot and ladies man extraordinairre. It's extraordinary that he could fly the rocket with his hands all over his female co-astronaut, Dr. Iris Ryan. The beautiful biologist was portrayed by Nora Hayden, who just recently wrote the best selling sex book, HOW SATISFY A WOMAN EVERY TIME. Chief Warrant Officer Sam Jacob is the good natured strongman and class clown. Every sci-fi B movie of this time had it's man-child sidekick for comic relief just in case the monsters were not funny enough. Veteran character heavy, Jack Kruschen, plays this part to the hilt (he smuggles comic books aboard the rocket and claims Mars in the name of BROOKLYN!). And finally Les Tremayne, who provided the voice of Dr. Quest in the JOHNNY QUEST cartoon series, is aptly suited to play Professor Theodore Getell, designer of the rocket and the world's foremost authority on space travel. Did you think that General Kreger would send this crew up without someone like the Professor? After all, someone has to keep the rocket on course when the rest of the crew is busy monkeying around. A cursory examination of the crew's make up resembles another space traveling quartet, namely Marvel Comics' THE FANTASTIC FOUR. At one point in the film our astronauts are in danger of being exposed to cosmic radiation. In case you're not well read, cosmic radiation was the source of The Fantastic Four's superpowers. Is it possible the comic's creator, Stan Lee, was influenced by Pink and Melchior's classic? But I digress.

It's zero hour at the air base. We are again tortured by endless scenes of technicians adjusting telescopes, radar operators viewing a screen, and airmen waiting by jeeps for the landing of the rocket, some of whom are less than optimistic. When the rocket does land, it is greeted by a flurry of rescue personnel. The MR1's only survivors are an astronaut lying on a stretcher who's identity is hidden beneath a sheet and a dazed Dr. Ryan. They assure her he will be cared for, but she asks, "How do you cope with that?" The unknown crew member's oozing arm dangles from the sheet as he, and Dr. Ryan, are transported to the base hospital. Once there, the condition of the unknown astronaut is grim. A parasitic growth is spreading throughout his body, and being of unknown origin, the doctors are helpless to treat it. The only key to the puzzle rests with Dr. Ryan, who is suffering from shock and exhaustion. Semi-conscious, she is questioned by General Kreger and the Base doctor. Dr. Ryan can recall the forty seven days spent in the rocket's impressive control room and the landing on the planet's surface, but when she remembers seeing a Martian face at the rocket's porthole, she starts screaming uncontrollably.

The Doctor surmises that something Dr. Ryan experienced on Mars was so horrible that it's causing her conscious mind to block it out. Fearing that the alien infection may be contagious, possibly spreading beyond the base to infect all the people of Earth, the General is desperate for the information that's contained in Dr. Ryan's sub-conscious. He then proposes the doctor treat her with narco-synthesis, a drug that will cause her to remember facts under interrogation. The doctor warns the General that any information gained by this procedure will be colored by the patient's own perceptions of the events. The distortion may be great since the initial experiences were too horrible for her to cope with in the first place. There is also the added risk that, "her mind might snap if we forced her to remember the horror she so carefully obliterated from her conscious level." Of course we know there is no such drug called narco-synthesis. The only existing drug at the time that has the same effects was lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD. During World War II the Nazis tested mescaline on prisoners at Dachau concentration camp. They were looking for a way to brainwash people, but soon found it was an effective tool for interrogation. After the war this project became known to U.S. Military Intelligence who, with the Central Intelligence Agency, continued the Nazi drug experiment using LSD on American service men. These experiments continued into the late 60's. It is altogether possible that Ib Melchior, being in Military Intelligence, knew of these classified experiments and incorporated them into the script. Could this be one of the touches of reality that Pink complemented Melchior for? Fearing for the life of her companion, our brave Dr. Ryan insists on the treatment and returns us to Mars.

The crew dons spacesuits and is ready to explore the surface, looking for the alien Iris saw at the porthole. An alien she describes as, "a huge distorted face with three bulging eyes!". Once outside, the film takes on a hazy red distortion to represent Dr. Ryan's drug induced remembrances of the Martian atmosphere. Pink named this process Cinemagic, and it was achieved by overlapping the positive and negative film print at a 45 degree angle, and then tinted with a red monochrome color. This procedure caused the film's budget to soar from $227,000 to $277,000, but was so effective that Pink used it again in JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET and REPTILICUS. The Martian landscape is represented by sprawling earth-like vegetation and painted backdrops of weird plants and mountains (courtesy of Cinemagic's inventor and TARP co-producer, Norman Maurer, who was the son-in-law of The Three Stooges' Moe Howard.). The expedition turn potentially deadly when Dr. Ryan is entangled in a man, or in this case woman, eating plant. After being hacked to safety by a machete wielding O'Bannon, the group returns to the ship. Once there Professor Getell informs the group of his theory of a superior alien intelligence that controls all life on Mars. The others are skeptical of his theory until the rocket is discovered to have an ionic field surrounding it that prohibits radio communication to Earth.

The quartet returns again to explore the surface, looking for any signs of intelligent life. This time the trouble starts when Iris mistakes the legs of a forty foot spider/bat creature (designed by Mauer) for a clump of trees. The creature attacks the party, pinning Professor Getell between two rock formations. The creature is thwarted when Sam Jacob blinds it with his ultra sonic freeze gun, causing it to shamble away. The team continues their survey, until they are stopped by a lake of oily black fluid. Unprepared to cross it at this time, the group returns to the rocket, unaware that a three eyed Martian spies on them from a distance.

Back in the rocket's controlroom, Colonel O'Bannon is in concurrence with the professor's "alien control" theory and deems it to dangerous to continue the mission. The crew initiates blast off, but the rocket is held motionless by a Martian forcefield a hundred times more powerful then the rocket's jets. Now captives, the crew's desperation prods them to look for answers that may lie on the other side of the lake.

The astronauts paddle a rubber raft across the black Martian lake. With the aid of binoculars, they see the Martian city located in the center of the lake, containing buildings over half a mile high. The group is hopeful that they can reason with the Martians, and that they will be allowed to leave in peace. But as the raft floats closer to it, a huge amoeba-like blob bubbles to the lake's surface. The crew quickly paddles back to the banks and makes a run for the rocket with the amoeba still in pursuit. At this part of the film, we must say good-bye to Sam Jacob. Lagging only seconds behind, he gets absorbed into the blob's center, where it's internal acid will eventually dissolve him. Mars draws first blood.

Once safely aboard, Colonel O'Bannon notices a small piece of the blob is burning into the arm of his space suit and he quickly sheds it. Still panicked from the loss of Jacob, their run of bad luck continues when the team discovers that the blob has engulfed their ship and is eating its way though the hull. Stranded, it is just a matter of time before the blob reaches them. Their only chance is to reroute the radar's electricity to the outer hull, in hope that it will fry the menace. The computers ( $1,000,000 worth, supplied by the Burroughs Company for the film) are rewired to the outer hull and the switch is pulled. A million amps later, the blob is reduced to a pool of slime. Just then the forcefield is lifted as a ominous message begins to be transmitted through the rocket's radio. "Men of Earth, we of the planet Mars give you this warning. Listen carefully and remember...". The three eyed Martian face appears at the porthole again, and Iris faints.

The ship is enroute to earth as Iris wakes. The Professor, slumped at its controls, is dying from internal injuries he suffered from the force of lift-off. His last words are, "Tom...the cabin...the cabin!" Mars claims its second victim. Dr. Ryan enters the ship's cabin to find O'Bannon in his bunk unconscious His arm covered with green growth, she tends to him as the rocket continues its long voyage back to Earth. Her tale ended, we once again find Dr. Ryan is at the base hospital. Now that the doctor knows the source of O'Bannon's infection, they have a chance of saving him. Days pass, and with Dr. Ryan's help, the doctor kills the amoeba with mild electrical shock and the Colonel is miraculously cured. All is finally well until a worried General Kreger enter the hospital room and plays the message from the MR1's flight recorder. "Men of Earth, we of the planet Mars give you this warning. Listen carefully and remember. We have known your planet Earth since the first creature crawled primieval slime of your seas to become man. For millennia we have followed your progress. For centuries we have watched you, listened to your radio signals and learned your speech and your culture. And now you have invaded our home. Technological adults but spiritual and emotional infants. We kept you here deciding your fate. Had the lower life form on our planet destroyed you, we would have not interfered. But you have survived. .Your civilization has not progressed past destruction, war, and violence against yourselves and others. Do as you will to your own and to your planet, but remember this warning. Do not return to Mars. You will be permitted to leave for this sole purpose. Carry the warning to Earth. Do not come here. We can and will destroy you, and all life on your planet if you do not heed us. You have seen us, been permitted to see our world. Go now and warn mankind not to return." The planet Mars fills the screen as the credits roll, leaving today's viewers with the question, "What really happen to the Mars probe Viking?"

Hour of the Wolf Radio Show: Ron Goulart Interview

2008-02-01T05:11:00.000-08:00

WBAI, NY's Peace and Justice radio Station just archived an interview heard on Hour of the Wolf sci-fi show with Ron Goulart , who discusses his life work of well over 200 books, including his Groucho mysteries and Tekwar novels (attributed only to William Shatner,) as well as his association with Philip K. Dick.

http://archive.wbai.org/

Book Review: Memos from Purgatory by Harlan Ellison

2008-01-30T06:09:00.000-08:00

In 1954, Harlan Ellison moved to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn with the intent of joining a street gang, research for his next tome. His experiences as "Cheech" Beldone, from his ritual deflowering of one of the Baron Debs to an Indian knife fight with a fellow Baron, are harrowing and disturbing images of gang life in the 50's.

Although the "when you're a Jet, you're a Jet" ideals are now "cute" compared to gang life in the new millennium, it's still horrifying. Memos From Purgatory is actually two books in one; Book One:The Gang deals with his gang life, while Book Two: The Tombs is an account of an occurrence six years later in which Ellison spends 24 hours in New York's jail system. Set up and tipped off to the police by a disgruntled acquaintance, Ellison is held on weapons possession (stemming from the weapons from his gang days that he used as display on his lecture tours about the book). It's at this point Memos From Purgatory loses me. Whine, whine, whine. That's all Ellison does in this second half. He does admit that there are those out there who would question his frenzied reaction at being incarcerated for only 24 hours (and acting like it's 24 years), and I suppose I'm one of them.

The whole time I was reading Book Two: The Tombs, I kept thinking, "Man, Ellison, calm down." He gives a good overview of the miserable conditions of jail in the Big City and the screwed-up judicial system that accompanies it, but the overreacting is just too much. I heartily hand it to Ellison for having the nerve to join a street gang and write about it, but Book One: The Gang should have stood on its own. Book Two: The Tombs seems a senseless afterthought, more so when Ellison admits that the inclusion of a one-in-a-million chance meeting with the head of the Barons, a fellow jailbird, was a fictional device suggested by the original publisher because he felt there wasn't enough linkage between the two halves of the book. Well, there still isn't.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Signing: Madison Avenue Maxi by Ben & Elke Gazzara

2008-01-28T04:51:00.000-08:00

Ben Gazzara, star of “Road House” and “Dogville”, and his wife Elke, will be signing copies of Madison Avenue Maxi on 1/30/08 7:00 PM at Barnes & Noble – Warren Street. New York, NY.

About the book:

When Ben Gazzara and his wife, Elke, reluctantly agree to adopt the pet dachshund their daughter no longer wants, the couple unknowingly takes a new member into their family.

Neither of the Gazzaras is a "dog person," and the sudden presence of a pet in the lives of these jet-setters appears at first uncertain. However, the ever-sweet, playful, and surprisingly smart Maxi immediately endears herself, and soon she becomes the Gazzaras’ unlikely "child" in the empty nest of their Madison Avenue townhouse. The little dog accompanies the pair everywhere — to the theater, restaurants, dinner parties, world-class hotels, receptions for heads of state, and even the dentist.

Madison Avenue Maxi is the story of a love affair between a dog and her owners. With heartfelt humor and a dog lover's eye, Gazzara chornicles Maxi's antics in Manhattan as well as at their second home in Tuscany and over travels to the French Riviera, Brazil, Spain, and other luxurious locales. Along the way she meets celebrities such as Roman Polanski, Gena Rowlands, John Voigt, Danielle Steele, Gay Talese, Peter Bogdanovich, New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Frank Gehry. Madison Avenue Maxi is a warm, touching memoir of man — and woman's—best friend.

Book Review: 58 Minutes by Walter H. Wager

2008-01-28T04:44:00.000-08:00

I would not have picked this novel up if it weren't for the giant "Basis For The Movie DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER" plastered across the front cover. Not that I'm a huge fan of the movie, either, considering its the worst example of cookie-cutter-sequel garbage, far worse than the two films that followed it. However, I'm always interested in how novels differ from their big screen counterparts.

The first two chapters are pretty much what you expect. Flowering scene-setting description of the Big Apple in the winter, and a sharp and brutal introduction to the villains. The lead bad guy and all of his henchmen are what you expect, and are handled competently. They are cold and calculating, diverse and colorful, and most of all, deadly and ruthless.Then we meet the hero, and it all falls apart.The irony is bittersweet. In the Die Hard series, the selling point of the John McClain character is his lack of superhero credentials. He isn't the best there is at what he does, he's just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, an ordinary man under extraordinary circumstances surviving by the skin of his teeth with a lot of luck and determination.

Now meet Captain Frank Malone. In just one six page chapter, we learn that Frank Malone is; a handsome blue-eyed blond,instantly intimidating, two-year best Ivy League Quarterback, an expert hand-to-hand combatant, NYPD pistol champion, cool under attack, admitted to both Harvard and Columbia law schools, a highly decorated hero, the youngest captain in the force, and recognized by all New York cops as a first-class commander, and powerful yet merciful role model.

Bored yet?

This kind of over-the-top jack-of-all-trades Super Cop, clones of which can be found littering Clancy-Lite terrorism thrillers like this by the dozens, are barely recognizable as human beings, let alone realistic characters that lend themselves to the reader's sympathies. When Doc Savage wannabes like Frank Malone swagger onto the scene, there's no doubt that the bad guys don't stand a chance. But where's the fun in that?

Thrillers usually work because we like to watch someone prevail against overwhelming odds, but stacking the chips in favor of a nearly perfect hero caricature leaves the reader betting on a sure thing, which assures a happy ending but destroys any real tension or suspense.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Flatsigned Press to Sue Don Imus

2008-01-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

A book publisher that bought an ad on Don Imus's radio show is suing the shock jock and his former bosses at CBS Radio for more than $4 million, saying Imus insulted the book he was paid to promote.

It was the latest controversy to follow the radio personality, who was fired by CBS Radio in April 2007 for insulting a women's basketball team with a racial slur. He has since returned to the air with another network.

Flatsigned Press said in a New York state court lawsuit filed late on Wednesday that Imus's show had agreed to a script for the 30-second spot in January 2007 to promote a book by former President Gerald Ford on the investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Imus laughed as he read the script, calling it "cheesy," the lawsuit said.

"These bastards have been waiting for him to croak so they can unload" the books, Imus said on the air, according to the lawsuit.

Ford served on the Warren Commission that conducted the official inquiry and his book "John F. Kennedy: Assassination Report of the Warren Commission" was published shortly after Ford died in December 2006.

"Imus unilaterally changed the language of the live read, which was completely contrary the agreement agreed upon by the parties," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also names Infinity Broadcasting Corp., Sports Radio 66-WFAN and CBS Radio. Infinity, which used to be a division of Viacom Inc., became part of CBS Radio when CBS and Viacom split in 2006.

"Imus in the Morning" was produced and broadcast by the CBS-owned WFAN radio station in New York and syndicated on some 60 stations nationally. The program also was simulcast on cable television's MSNBC, but MSNBC did not air the ad and was not sued.

Representatives for CBS and Imus were not immediately available for comment.

In December, Imus returned to radio with a nationally syndicated show broadcast out of WABC in New York in a deal with ABC Radio Networks, which is owned by Citadel Broadcasting Corp.

Book Signing: ICEMAN by Chuck Liddell

2008-01-24T04:46:00.000-08:00

On Jan 29 2008, 1:00 PM, Chuck Liddell will be signing ICEMAN at Borders, 100 Broadway.

About the book:

Iceman: My Fighting Life

“When I walk out of the tunnel, I can see the lights, hear the music, feel the crowd, but it all begins to close off as I near the cage. By that point I’m thinking, I’ve been training hard, it’s time to focus....Every man is born with a fight-or-flight instinct, and mine is to fight. It always has been.” —From the Prologue

What’s it like to have no fear, to make people cower in their shoes, to know the sweet satisfaction of knocking a guy out with a single, devastating punch? You have to read my book to find out. I’ve been called the baddest man on the planet. I’m the face of Ultimate Fighting Championship, the leader in mixed martial arts and the fastest growing sport in America. In 1998 I won my first MMA fight. Not long after, the UFC came calling, and eventually fought my way to become the #1 ranked light-heavyweight contender in the world. Not bad for a bartender with a college degree in accounting.

I was raised by a single mother and inspired by my grandfather, a first-generation Irish American from Mafia-run Brooklyn. I learned how to fight at a very young age. Now I’m 6'2", 220 pounds, and a trained lethal weapon, but I’m also fiercely loyal, maybe even a bit sensitive, and unexpectedly romantic. In raw detail, and with total honesty, I’m going to tell you the story of my fighting life—both inside and outside the Octagon—including my childhood in the poor section of Santa Barbara, gritty insider accounts of my major fights, stories behind my trademark mohawk and nickname, my ongoing rivalry with Tito Ortiz and deep-rooted friendship with Dana White, and how I balance life as a father, a UFC champ, and a superstar—or try to, anyway. With never-before-seen photos, Iceman is my true, no-holds-barred story of fighting my way to become a champion.

Press Release: SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT to Publish Jose Canseco

2008-01-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

Simon Spotlight Entertainment (SSE), a division of Simon & Schuster, announced today that it will publish Jose Canseco's VINDICATED, the follow-up to his #1 New York Times bestseller Juiced. Written with bestselling author and screenwriter Pablo F. Fenjves, the book is scheduled for publication on March 31, 2008.

Canseco's first book was largely responsible for breaking open the steroid scandal in baseball. VINDICATED goes even further, looking at the state of baseball post-scandal and Mitchell Report.

Jennifer Bergstrom, Vice President and Publisher of SSE, said "Since Juiced was published four years ago, the issue of steroids in baseball has only gotten bigger. VINDICATED is a compulsively readable book that should act as a call to action for Major League Baseball."

"Believe it or not, Juiced just scratched the surface of the steroid issue for me," Canseco said. "I still have a lot more to say to help save the game I love."

Bergstrom negotiated the deal, which includes world rights, with Bret Saxon of TMP.

Tom Wolfe to Publish New Novel Set in Miami, Back to Blood

2008-01-22T04:54:00.000-08:00

Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group USA, announced today that the company has acquired rights to publish the new novel by Tom Wolfe, the celebrated bestselling novelist and journalist, author of such American classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and most recently I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Titled Back to Blood, the novel will consider class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first. Characters include a young nurse of Cuban ancestry married to a famous French-emigre sex doctor, a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story, his wary editor, a second-generation Cuban police officer, a woman of Haitian background who passes for Anglo, and dozens more.

Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch said, "The opportunity to work with the American master Tom Wolfe is the kind of thrill and challenge that people entering book publishing dream of. I picked The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby off a library spinner rack in nineteen sixty- something and it tore the top of my head off-I'd never imagined a writer's voice could be that alive on the page. Everyone at Little, Brown is exhilarated to be working with Tom Wolfe to bring his new novel to readers in the Internet age."

David Young, CEO of Hachette Book Group USA, said, "Tom Wolfe is one of a kind, a master craftsman and social observer and comic writer of the highest caliber. I am thrilled to bring the many assets of the Hachette Book Group, publishers of great literary fiction and of enormous bestsellers, to bear in helping Tom Wolfe find the biggest readership of his already extraordinary career."

Mr. Wolfe was represented in the negotiation by his longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit. The book will be edited by Little, Brown senior editor Pat Strachan. Ms. Strachan was formerly Mr. Wolfe's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she worked with him on The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and four other books. Little, Brown acquired North American rights, and publication is planned for 2009.

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group USA. Founded in 1837, Little, Brown has long been recognized as a publisher committed to publishing fiction of the highest quality and nonfiction of lasting significance. Hachette Book Group USA is a leading trade publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the second-largest publisher in the world.

SOURCE Little, Brown and Company

Book Review: Tears of Rage by John Walsh

2008-01-21T04:29:00.000-08:00

Don’t ask me why, but John Walsh has always rubbed me the wrong way. That’s the main reason I read this book, because if I’m going to have an opinion on somebody, I’d rather it be an informed one. And that’s really the only difference this book has had on my opinion: it has informed it.

John Walsh isn’t a bad guy, and it is undeniable that both his political movements and his television shows have helped people and changed awareness and legal procedures for the better. But despite all he has done, it’s hard to actually like him.

The first fifty pages or so of the book deal with his personal background and personal history spanning from his childhood through the early years of Adam’s, and it is this completely self-indulgent section that really displays Walsh’s personality. By his own account, he is street-smart, a tough and skilled fighter, a great athlete as well as extremely bright, has never known fear or a lack of confidence, has saved lives without even thinking twice about it, and has never failed in any endeavor that he has pursued. Basically, he’s perfect. But what bleeds through this is the reality that he suffers from an oversized ego that motivates his self-centered world view. This self-centered (bordering on selfish) attitude is apparent in stories related by him in such away that you must assume that he doesn’t see it himself. When Adam is born, for example, he is told by the hospital where his sick father is that he can not bring the child into the cancer ward, at the risk of infecting the floor full of patients with little or no immunity left. Knowing only that he wants his father to his grandson before he dies (which he would have anyway, as later they all go to Disneyworld together), he sneaks the newborn into the hospital via fire escape, regardless of the risk he puts the others in the cancer ward. Also, it is impossible that anything done by him or his wife could be wrong or ill-informed. When mentioning Adam’s natural birth without the aid of Lamaze, he makes a point of saying “I don’t even think there were those classes back then.” Being 1974, Lamaze was already a string movement, especially on the east coast where they were. Later, for their second child, he states that she started Lamaze classes then, but only in her eight month, when the fifth or sixth is when you usually begin. Nothing out of the ordinary there, right?

This self-centered egotism extends immediately to his son, whom he declares was the perfect one in the hospital. “All the other little babies, some were splotchy, others a little misshapen. Adam was the perfect little baby everyone was looking at.” Granted, every parent feels that his or her child is special, but by John Walsh’s factual depiction, it is quite possible the Adam, had he lived, would have been revealed as the Second Coming. Apparently, Adam did not share a single negative trait with the other dirty, filthy, and ill-mannered children that wander the planet. And everybody loved him and wished he were theirs, and all of their adult friends felt more comfortable talking to him than to other adults, because he was that well-mannered and mature and responsible and perfect. Blech. Some of his praise towards Adam also reveals a sort of class elitism, as he takes great pride that “Adam had sharp clothes. On the playground all of the other kids looked kind of scruffy compared to him.” It seemed important to Walsh that his son wore “not sneakers, but Top-Siders. And small Izod shirts instead of regular tee’s.” And let’s not forget about the Captain’s Hat, “…an expensive one with a black braid and a visor.” In the course of Reve Walsh’s description of the day that Adam disappeared, she makes mention of the hat at least three times, pointing out at each instance that it was “a nice one, not a cheap knock off version” like the other children wear. She even goes as far as to complain that this detail (among others) should have been used when the store attempted paging Adam.

The actual disappearance of Adam at Sears is, of course, the reason for anything, and it is also the main reason that I lose respect for John Walsh, as the one the fact that he and Reve refuse to admit, to themselves or anybody else, is that they (or, more directly, she) are just as much at fault as anybody else. The simple fact is that Adam’s mother leaves him alone in the store for a period of time that, while she is unclear about (“I was gone a few minutes. Five. Maybe ten altogether.”), can logically be clocked at a good ten or fifteen minutes by examining the list of things that she claims happened while he was from view. Also, during this time, she points out that she had made sure that he was close enough that she “could have” peeked around the corner at any time to check on him, which of course means that she didn’t. Then, when she suddenly can’t find the child she had left alone in the store, she becomes frustrated and angry when her situation isn’t immediately made top priority. This may seem a bit harsh on my behalf, but anybody who works in retail can tell you that negligent parents let their children run around stores all the time, then automatically assume that it is the store’s responsibility to play babysitter and round up their strays. And this is the same attitude that Reve, understandably yet at the same time predictably and unfairly, assumes almost immediately when her initial concerns are not met with the utmost urgency. John is quick to say that this is because his wife “She had on shorts, she was a woman, and she looked nineteen years old”, but the truth is because she was acting like your typical negligent parent. They goes out of his way to imply that the store and the police were slow and unwilling to help, yet neither of them knows who called finally called the police (which would mean that the store did, and means that they certainly didn’t), and neither do they know who first informed the media during the first few hours of the search (which would mean that the police did, and again, that they didn’t). Does this make them bad parents? No, but their refusal to admit that others did take immediate steps to help them that they did not take themselves makes them stubbornly reluctant to share in blame. When they eventually dropped the lawsuit they brought against Sears, they claimed that they did so because the Sears lawyers were going to drag their names through the mud, and so they dropped the suit to protect their family as well as Adam’s Foundation. The truth hits a bit closer to home, that Sears was no more responsible than the mother who left the child unattended for up to a quarter of an hour.

Another distasteful trait of John Walsh’s is his tendency to use his dead son to win arguments. It is very evident throughout the book that Walsh has a short temper and a lack of emotional control, and in fact seems almost boastful of it. And while I like a “man of action who doesn’t play nice” as much as the next person, I tend not to trust people who describe themselves as such. And while Walsh rightfully argues against the bureaucracies and politics that repeatedly impede him, his arguments always seem to be punctuated with phrases indicating that not he, but his innocent, brutally murdered son, demands that justice be served. Being the savvy advertising executive that he never tires of describing himself as, Walsh seemed to learn early on that while you can argue with a hot-headed activist, you can’t argue with a dead child.

Again, I’m not painting Walsh as a demon, as he has done much good. And I am also not implying that he is completely bull-headed. He is the first to admit that he wouldn’t have gotten a fraction of the media coverage he did if Adam were a lower-class minority child, and I agree with him completely for his criticisms of the psychics and religious fanatics that attempted to use the situation for their own advantage, as well as when he defends his wife against claims by the media the Reve didn’t act the way a grieving mother should act, as if there is a right and wrong way for individuals to handle emotions that very few of us ever (thankfully) have to contend with. And while he at times seems to bend over backwards to both slam the cops and FBI for their bungling his son’s murder investigation while at the same time praising both agencies for the good they do, it never appears phony or heavy handed. And, unlike Jon Benet’s parents, both John and Reve were quick to cooperate when the investigators turned their attention to them, knowing that the quickest way was to eliminate themselves as suspects. You see? I’m not out to get the guy. But when he talks about teaching his six year old son how to use a diving knife (yeah, that’s safe), and when he recalls the humorous story of when he left his six month pregnant wife alone in shark infested waters, I can’t help but feel a little contempt for him.

Oh yeah, a pretty good book, tends to cover all of the bases. Just beware that it isn’t an objective view of the Adam Walsh case, but rather one man’s crusade to tell his own story the way he sees it.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Signing: Puff & Other Family Classics by Peter Yarrow

2008-01-18T04:56:00.000-08:00

Peter Yarrow, member of Peter, Paul and Mary, signing copies of Puff & Other Family Classics on 1/19/08 2:00 PM at Barnes & Noble – Ulster Avenue. Kingston, NY.

About the Book and CD

Those who grew up on -- or raised children to -- Peter, Paul and Mommy will be mesmerized by the fresh folk sounds of Puff & Other Family Classics. Joining the talents of Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul & Mary), his daughter Bethany Yarrow, and her musical partner, cellist Rufus Cappadocia (the pair also record as Bethany & Rufus), the disc reflects both a broad view of folk musics as well as an internationalist groove. For example, on "Blue Tail Fly," a tune most closely associated with Burl Ives, PB&R maintain the original's easygoing gait but liven things up with harmonies by Peter and Bethany on the well-known chorus ("Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care") and a folksy-jazzy fusion of electric and acoustic guitars. A deep admiration for Celtic folk ("Shule Aru") and American roots music ("Foggy Dew") is constant throughout, as is a blend of the familiar and the unexpected. Whether listeners know "Careless Love" from Bessie Smith or Madeleine Peyroux, they'll enjoy the expert finger-picking, loping rhythm, and sweet melancholy of the version here. The trio transform the soulful warning dished out by the old gospel number "You Better Mind" into a Stax-influenced workout, with a slithering bass line and swirling organ underpinnings. But the crowning moment here is certainly the title song, which finds Peter revisiting his best-known tune, trading verses and harmonizing with his daughter on a beautifully restrained update that reminds us once again why a good story bears retelling. Turns out that sometimes you can go home again.

Press Release: PUNAHOU BLUES by Lemon Shark Press reveals underbelly of private school attended by Barack Obama.

2008-01-18T04:42:00.000-08:00

Cast as a first person memoir, this book journeys through the multicultural high school attended by Presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Chapter titles include "The Drug Club," "The Fight of the Century," and "Bad Boys."

Experience the trials and tribulations of teenage life and the then tricky matter of interracial dating. The book is a series of narrations told by Jeffrey, highlighting events in his life starting from the first grade and leading up to high school graduation. One of my favorite chapters includes “The Ring,” in which Jeffrey, who is at this time in the first grade, has become obsessed with a diamond ring that his father possesses. This ring belonged to his father’s grandmother, and while Jeffrey knows his Ten Commandants (thou shalt not steal), he eventually gets hold of it and begins his task of taking the ring apart, prying the prongs open in order to take each tiny diamond for his own. What Jeffrey does not realize is the worth of these diamonds, not even understanding what a diamond really is. There is a scene in which Jeffrey plays with the gems in the bathtub, subsequently shoving them down the drain when he thinks he’s about to be caught. When the cleaning woman is blamed and fired for the “theft”, Jeffrey keeps quiet. The hilarious resolution at the end of chapter one will have the reader laughing out loud. Boys will boys, as they say.

The book reads like a memoir, with scene after scene of boyhood memories as Jeffrey grows up. He learns to stand up to his “enemies” when uncle Sharkey teaches him to box, and he also tells the tale of his first crush, on pretty girl in school named Debbie Mills who only had eyes for Wayne, one of Jeffrey’s tormentors. It’s tough growing up as a haole in Hawaii, but Jeffrey and his brother manage to survive and reach adulthood intact.

One of the delights of this novel is the author’s free use of the local language. This reader is quite familiar with some of the more common words and phrases spoken in Hawaii such as “haole”. With the help of the glossary at the back of the book, any reader not familiar with the Hawaiian slang will be able to pick up new vocabulary that is familiar to those born and raised on the Islands. Barack Obama undoubtedly picked up the local lingo while attending school at Punahou and I'm certain he would enjoy reading a book set on his old campus.

Book Review: The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Phillip K. Dick

2008-01-15T06:09:00.000-08:00

Very few Science Fiction authors manage to create memorable works that easily retain their relevance in the near and/or distant future. Phillip K. Dick is one of those talented few, and The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of those works.

Dick's not-so-distant dystopian future is one where global warming is an adaptable but growing dillema, with the bulk of humanity virtually sealed away in air-conditioned office buildings and apartment complexes. The solution, space migration to nearby planets, is such a bleak and arduous task that 'settlers' need to be drafted. These off-world settlers often resort to drug-induced shared hallucination involving miniature recreations of life back on earth. Within this structure we find corporations employing psychics to predict future sales trends, upper class elitists physically evolving themselves into 'superior beings', naturally created drugs that allow users to connect on different plains of reality and traverse freely throughout space-time, to name a few. In the center of it all is the titular Palmer Eldritch, a powerful and mysterious businessman who has spent decades communing with alien races, and has returned with what he claims to be mankind's mental and spiritual salvation.

What would normally be a one-trick-pony for other authors becomes a multi-layered examination of everything from religion and philosophy to physical/mental evolution and individual freedom versus responsibility. Dick doesn't bother with simple 'Good Vs. Evil' conflict, but instead shows us that both possibilities are sides of the same coin, and simply asks us to call it in the air. Highly recommended for those who like to think about a book long after reading it.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: Inhuman Beings by Jerry Jay Carroll

2008-01-10T04:34:00.000-08:00

Detective novels are nothing new, and neither are invaders from beyond stories, but you don't get many crossbreeds of the two outside of the hardcore futuristic sci-fi realm. In this regard, Inhuman Beings is an enjoyable treat.

Carroll's novel is tightly written, short and sweet the way detective novels should be. He doesn't skimp on the characters or back story, just the excessive pages of prose some authors veer off in to explain it.

It may seem unusual to complain about getting more than you asked for, but that is my major problem with the novel. The book description promises a lone detective suddenly involved in a subversive alien invasion, and Carroll delivers the goods right away, keeping a steady pace and developing the dangers at a quick and steady pace. However, the third part of the book changes gears with the involvement of government officials that eventually buy into the main character's claims of an alien attack, and a story of a lone man against insurmountable odds becomes a low-budget retelling of Independence Day or Invaders from Mars. It isn't exactly a bad change, but it was the former story I read the book for, not the latter.

Also, as good as the book is on keeping the reader interested in the main character, this is mainly due to the pace and tension his lone crusader status affords him. As soon as he becomes part of an underground force battling the aliens, the tone and feeling of the book is lost, along with a great deal of the tension.In short, I enjoyed the book that I first picked up to read, but it wasn't the same book I eventually put down.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Press Release: Former President Bill Clinton To Write Book For Knopf

2008-01-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK, NY — Former President Bill Clinton is writing a book on citizen activism and service to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, it was announced today by Knopf Chairman Sonny Mehta. The b o o k, an important and timely examination of how we can move our nation and world away from conflict and towards accomplishment, opportunity, and responsibility, will be published in late 2007 or early 2008. In the book, President Clinton will discuss the groundbreaking work of the Clinton Foundation as well as the work of similarly inspired non-governmental organizations and private citizens throughout the world. The book will highlight the remarkable stories of some of the many private citizens who are doing public good that President Clinton has met throughout his travels, and will provide information to readers about ways they can get involved in these efforts.

“Since leaving public office, I have met so many good people who are doing tremendous work to help improve the lives of people in the U.S. and around the world,” said President Clinton. “We all have the capacity to do great things like this, and I am writing this book to encourage others to join their ranks. My hope is that the people and stories in this book will lift spirits, touch hearts, and demonstrate that citizen activism and service can be a powerful agent of change in the world.”

The Clinton Foundation, the centerpiece of President Clinton’s post-presidential work, is a multi-million dollar non-profit that, among many other activities, provides HIV/AIDS treatment drugs and testing to thousands in the developing world, fights childhood obesity in the U.S., and has generated over $2.5 billion to combat poverty, religious conflict, and climate change through the annual Clinton Global Initiative.

“Bill Clinton is writing about the most substantive issues of our time,” said Mehta. “He is writing about people who are using their time and expertise to solve problems and save lives. This book will offer a blueprint for companies and individuals to make meaningful contributions to the world.” Robert Gottlieb, who worked with President Clinton on his bestselling memoir, My Life, will again serve as Clinton’s editor at Knopf. My Life remains one of the best-selling hardcover memoirs of all time, with over 2,000,000 copies sold in the U.S. Additionally, My Life has been published in over thirty different countries worldwide.

Alfred A. Knopf is the flagship imprint of the Knopf Publishing Group, which is a division of Random House, Inc., whose parent company is Bertelsmann AG, the international media company. For more information about Alfred A. Knopf, visit our website at http://www.aaknopf.com/.

Press Release: Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas is the Subject of a new Graphic Novel

2008-01-09T04:48:00.000-08:00

Del Rey Manga, an imprint of Ballantine Books at the Random House Publishing Group, announced today that it has acquired an original graphic novel starring Odd Thomas, perhaps the most memorable and beloved character Dean Koontz has ever created. The charismatic young fry cook from Pico Mundo, California, has appeared in three New York Times bestselling novels: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, and Brother Odd, which was one of Koontz’s fastest-selling hardcovers. Odd, who has the ability to communicate with the dead, has inspired more readers’ letters than any other of his characters, according to Koontz.

Koontz’s characters—including Odd, his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn, Pico Mundo Chief of Police Porter, the ghost of Elvis Presley, and many more—will be drawn by one of the top original-English-language manga artists working today, Queenie Chan. Chan, author of the popular mystery-horror series The Dreaming, will script the story as well. Publication is planned for Summer 2008.

The graphic novel will follow Odd’s race to solve the murder of a young boy whose killer appears to be stalking a second child. It is set in the time before Odd Thomas and takes place in Pico Mundo. The book will be edited by Del Rey editor-in-chief Betsy Mitchell.

Says Dean Koontz: "I'm delighted that Odd Thomas will come to life in manga, that the enormously talented Queenie Chan's beautiful art will define his world and the desert town of Pico Mundo, and that the project is being guided by such capable hands as those at Del Rey."

Queenie Chan comments: “It’s an honor to work with Dean on this project, and I’m glad he’s chosen me for this new story of Odd Thomas. I read his novels when I was in high school, and never did I imagine that I would have the chance to work with such a well-known and established author today.”

ABOUT THE CREATORS:

Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Trixie, in Southern California.

Queenie Chan was born in 1980 in Hong Kong, and migrated to Australia when she was six years old. She began drawing at the age of 18, and in 2004 began drawing a mystery-horror series called The Dreaming for Los Angeles-based manga publisher Tokyopop. Since then, the series has been translated into four languages, with the third and final installment arriving in November 2007. Apart from her professional work, she also draws a number of online manga strips on her personal site: http://www.queeniechan.com/.

ABOUT DEL REY MANGA:

Del Rey (http://www.delreybooks.com/) was founded in 1977 as a division of Ballantine Books under the guidance of the renowned Judy-Lynn del Rey and her husband, Lester del Rey. Del Rey publishes the best of modern fantasy, science fiction, alternate history and manga. Ballantine Books is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, which is a publishing group of Random House, Inc, the U.S. publishing company of Random House, the trade book publishing division of Bertelsmann AG, one of the world’s leading international media companies. In the summer of 2003, Random House joined together with Kodansha in a creative partnership to bring some of Kodansha’s top properties to the United States, making Random House the first major trade book publisher in the United States to do so.

Book Review: 253 by Geoff Ryman

2008-01-08T04:32:00.000-08:00

There are 253 passengers on a seven car Tube train that is about to crash. Every person, along with their thoughts and actions on their brief train ride (and including footnotes explaining their direct and/or indirect relationships with other people on the train), is described in exactly 253 words each.

While on the surface this may sound like nothing more than a mildly interesting experiment in constrained writing, the book manages to reach a deeper meaning than you would expect. Whether you read the book from beginning to or flip around to random parts at your leisure, the overall effect is the same; allowing you to freeze a moment in time and examine the lives and deaths of 253 people with more in common than they will ever truly realize.

Contrasting and comparing their personalities and motivations affords the reader an almost God-like chance to examine the fantastic and mundane worlds of a train full of strangers as an intrinsic whole.But don't let that scare you away. If you rather enjoy as a distraction rather than a perceptions-enhancing experience, it easily works on that level as well. No matter how you attack 253, it remains a truly unique book in both structure and subject matter, and equally enjoyable whether read in short bursts or cover to cover.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Jack Kerouac Exhibition at The New York Public Library Coincides with 50th Anniversary of On the Road

2008-01-07T04:53:00.000-08:00

Diaries, manuscripts, snapshots, and personal items of Jack Kerouac, the visionary author whose pioneering work helped to established the Beat Movement in the United States, will be on display in Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road, an exhibition on view at The New York Public Library November 9, 2007 through March 16, 2008. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's landmark novel, On the Road, which has captured the imagination of several generations and established its author as a major figure in American literature. The exhibition will be drawn almost exclusively from the contents of the Jack Kerouac Archive, housed in the Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and will display many unpublished Kerouac materials as well as typescript and manuscript drafts of On the Road. A major highlight of the exhibition will be the famous "scroll" typescript, on loan from James Irsay, owner of the National Football League's Indianapolis Colts, of which the first sixty feet will be unrolled in a specially-designed set of interlocking display cases. The scroll itself will be on display from November 9, 2007 through February 22, 2008; the exhibition continues through March 16, 2008. The exhibition will be located in the D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Admission is free.

A host of literary and physical artifacts displayed in the exhibition will bring to life Kerouac's career as a writer, from his earliest journals to typescript and manuscript drafts of his novels, short stories, essays, and poetry to diaries, journals and correspondence. Kerouac was an assiduous diarist and journal keeper. In a 1939 journal entry, recorded upon arriving in New York to attend the Horace Mann School for Boys, he wrote, "I wish to say that this journal is a continual refreshing resource for my castle, which surrounds me; it keeps me aloof from teeming humanity; it keeps me in contact with myself. By that I mean that a continual flow of ideas from my turbulent mind find their way into these pages invariably." His journals, diaries, and correspondence reveal a mind consumed with the goal of finding a way to give his experience of life on and off the road its most effective creative expression, and the drafts of his fiction, poetry, and essays record the history of those efforts. Kerouac's minutely detailed fantasy baseball and horse racing materials, which he created as a boy and played with throughout his life, will also be on display. In addition, the exhibition will include photographs of Kerouac, his family and friends, as well as objects that Kerouac treasured throughout his life, such as the crutches he used following a football injury while playing for Columbia University, and items memorably described in his writings, such as his harmonicas, his Buddhist bells, and his railroad track lantern.

Other sections of the exhibition will be devoted to Kerouac's youth and passion for sports; his early literary influences, such as William Blake, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Wolfe, illustrated by the Berg's rare editions and manuscripts, as well as by books from Kerouac's library; and his spirituality, which drew from both Buddhism and Roman Catholicism. Most of Kerouac's principal novels, such as The Town and the City (1950), On the Road (1957), Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Big Sur (1962), will be displayed in early drafts or rare editions, as will a representative sampling of his unpublished poetry. The richness of the Beat movement will be documented in a major section that will display a few selections from the Berg Collection's newly acquired William S. Burroughs Archive, as well as manuscripts, rare publications, and drawings by and photographs of Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other Beat notables. This section will also include a few examples of the media-driven "Beatnik" phenomenon, through the lurid cover art of pulp paperbacks.

A companion volume to the exhibition, written by curator Isaac Gewirtz, will look at Kerouac's life and works through the lens of the journals, diaries, and other materials in the Kerouac Archive, much of which has not previously been available to scholars. This hardcover book will be extensively illustrated in 4-color with items from the archive, including not only manuscripts and typescripts, but also Kerouac's paintings and drawings and selected items relating to his fantasy baseball games. In addition, the Donnell Library Center will organize a complementary film series.

Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road is on view November 9, 2007 through March 16, 2008 in the D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. Admission is free. For more information, call 212-869-8089 or visit http://www.nypl.org/.

Antiquarian book fairs; book print & paper show

2008-01-07T04:35:00.000-08:00

Books at the 25th Street Armory

January & 11 and 12, 2008 5:pm to 9:pm and 11:am to 5:pm

69th Regiment Armory 68 Lexington Avenue New York, New York

215-862-5828

This quality show features exhibitors from across the US and from England as it continues it's twice a year presentation of high-end antiquarian books, prints, maps and paper ephemera.

There will be something in every category of books, vintage prints, old maps, documents, manuscripts, photography, and ephemera. You will be able to find fine leather bindings, items about architecture, medieval and renaissance manuscript pages, literature, history, travel, first editions, natural history, vintage paperbacks, comic books, children's books and prints, crime, conjuring, Americana, sporting books, classics, decorative bindings, science, technology, autographs, art, erotica, signed books, early printed books, music, film, theater, and much more - all for sale to the public.

Press Release: New Imprint To Offer Omnibus Editions Of Popular Manga Series With New Cover Art, Color Pages And Bonus Content

2008-01-06T05:58:00.000-08:00

San Francisco, CA, January 3, 2008 – Viz Media, LLC (Viz Media), one of the entertainment industry's most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, brings a new perspective to the manga marketplace with the launch of a new imprint called VIZBIG Edition. The new imprint will release omnibus editions of top-selling manga series in a larger 5-3/4 x 8-5/8 size (larger than the standard 5 x 7-1/2 manga) with special premium presentations including new cover art.

Rurouni Kenshin will be the first series to receive the VIZBIG Edition treatment this month, with Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z set for May release and Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond will follow in Fall of 2008. These VIZBIG Edition titles have an anticipated initial cover price of $17.99 and will be released quarterly. Several other titles are also presently being considered for future VIZBIG Edition publication.

Each debut VIZBIG Edition will contain the first three volumes of the original graphic novel series presented with larger trim size, bonus color pages and added content such as author interviews, updated text and character art. The new editions serve as ideal comprehensive introductions for new readers to some of manga's best-known titles, and a great way for seasoned fans to see their favorite titles in a new perspective.

Rurouni Kenshin, the internationally bestselling series created by Nobuhiro Watsuki, depicts the adventures of Himura Kenshin, a “rurouni,” or wandering samurai, who was once an assassin of ferocious power but now fights to protect the honor and safety of those in need. The story, set during the Meiji era of Japan during the 1800s, has been adapted into a hit anime series, three films and several novels. This title was also the first manga to be placed on the notable USA TODAY top 150 list.

Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, created by Akira Toriyama, are universally recognized as modern manga classics. With a unique blend of martial arts, science fiction and memorable characters, they update the classic Chinese legend of the Monkey King. Dragon Ball follows the life of a monkey-tailed boy named Son Goku in a 16-volume series that has since become one of the most successful manga properties ever created. Goku's life changes when he meets a girl named Bulma and sets out to help her gather all seven Dragon Balls, which are scattered all over the world. If all seven are gathered, a powerful dragon will appear and grant one wish. The 26-volume series sequel, Dragon Ball Z, picks up when Goku has grown up. Earth's ultimate warrior now has a son named Gohan who is even more powerful than his father. Together they use martial arts and other powers to battle time travelers, aliens, deities and the mighty Super Saiyans to save the universe. Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z together have sold more than 500,000 copies in North America and the 400+ episode anime series was a consistent ratings winner on Cartoon Network.

Also coming out in a VIZBIG Edition in September 2008, Vagabond is an action-packed portrayal of the life and times of the quintessential warrior-philosopher--the most celebrated samurai of all time! Striving for enlightenment by way of the sword, Miyamoto Musashi is prepared to cut down anyone who stands in his way.

Alvin Lu, Viz Media Vice President, Publishing, is excited about the debut, saying, “VIZBIG Editions are more than just an alternative format to read your favorite manga — with full color pages, eye-opening larger trim size, and a premium presentation – they change the very experience of reading manga. For fans of these series, they are a great opportunity to relive their favorite stories from a completely new perspective, and for new fans, this is a great way to jump in and quickly get up to speed on what everyone's been talking about – the world-renowned stories and characters behind Rurouni Kenshin, Dragon Ball, and Dragon Ball Z.”

About Viz Media, LLC

Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Viz Media, LLC (Viz Media), is one of the most comprehensive and innovative companies in the field of manga (graphic novel) publishing, animation and entertainment licensing of Japanese content. Owned by three of Japan's largest creators and licensors of manga and animation, Shueisha Inc., Shogakukan, Inc., and Shogakukan Production Co., Ltd. (Sho-Pro Japan), Viz Media is a leader in the publishing and distribution of Japanese manga for English speaking audiences in North America and a global licensor of Japanese manga and animation. The company offers an integrated product line including, magazines such as Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat, graphic novels, videos, DVDs and audio soundtracks and develops and markets animated entertainment from initial production, television placement and distribution, to merchandise licensing and promotions for audiences and consumers of all ages.Contact Viz Media at 295 Bay Street, San Francisco, CA 94133; Phone (415) 546-7073; Fax (415) 546-7086; and web site at www.VIZ.com.

Book Review: Rules of Prey by John Sanford

2008-01-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

I find it amazing that John Sanford manages to take a half-dozen interesting character quirks and combines them all to create a hero you couldn't care less about.

Maybe it's because I grew up with detectives like Columbo and Nero Wolfe, but I tend to like my heroes to have the occasional flaw. Lucas Davenport is a tough and experienced cop who doesn't play by the rules. He also has rugged good looks and an animal magnatism that allows him to bed almost every woman he meets (except stupid girls and the nun with the skin problem, so I guess that proves he has standards). But he also has a sensitive side, as he enjoys reading poetry on the sly. And he's a genius, a popular game designer, which means he's also wealthy. Wow, this guy is good at everything. How boring. He's the kind of character I would expect a sexually frustrated high-school student to create.

Now let's add a serial killer into the mix, but make him a socially inept loser who is inferior to our man Davenport in every way imagineable (oh, he's clever, but not as clever as Lucas), and you have two main characters that you really don't care to read about.

Sanford has a habit of making even supporting characters appear shabby, incompetent and unappealing around Davenport (including TWO pairs of Fat Cop and Skinny Cop duos), and has him so on top of everybody else that he has to advise the Chief of Police how to handle the Media and information control (don't the police have people to handle that?).

Finally, Sanford proves repeatedly that he knows little about police procedure or the historical crimes he references (newsflash: David Berkowitz was not the lone killer in the Son of Sam case, and he wasn't caught because a cop looked in his apartment window and saw copies of the letters. He lived on the second floor, you see...). I can only assume by the success of the Prey series the books have improved. Actually, I can only hope.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Signing: Made In America by Matt Hughes

2008-01-04T15:45:00.000-08:00

Matt Hughes, 9 time UFC Champion, will be signing copies of Made In America on 1/7/08 7:00 PM at Barnes & Noble – Richmond Avenue. Staten Island, NY.

Book Description

If you know anything at all about mixed martial arts and the UFC, then you know the name Matt Hughes. With devastating slams and ground-and-pound -- and nine championship belts to his credit -- Matt is the most dominant fighter in UFC history.

Matt was raised with his twin brother on a family farm in small-town Hillsboro, Illinois. Behind the postcard-perfect fields of corn, beans, and wheat stood a home consumed by bankruptcy, tension, and interpersonal struggles, but Matt reacted to hard times by playing hard and working even harder.

In high school and college Matt was an unstoppable wrestler, and he ended up a two-time Division I All-American. Whereas every year's top eight graduating college football players become instant millionaires, Matt got to stay on as assistant wrestling coach, doing electrical work on the side for fourteen dollars an hour. All of that changed the day he met legendary MMA manager Monte Cox, as well as Pat Miletich, a trainer who also happened to be the welterweight champion of the world.

Rising through the ranks of the independent fighting circuit and the UFC, Matt saw things that fans could only catch glimpses of -- until now. For the first time, a major UFC superstar has decided to answer all the questions the fans have about him, the organization, and the sport. You'll learn which fighter almost sent Matt packing from mixed martial arts; why he refused to speak to his role model, Randy Couture; and what his relationship with UFC president Dana White is like. He reveals in which match he found himself praying to God for help, why he originally refused a shot at the world title, and what it's like training at the Miletich Fighting Camp. Matt describes working on TV's The Ultimate Fighter, what really happened to Tito Ortiz during the legendary brawl on the streets of London, just how personal his rivalry with Frank Trigg became, and what it was like to go up against the mythical Royce Gracie -- and destroy him.

Matt discloses his most private thoughts and feelings during both his epic victories and his crushing losses. But when the gloves come off, there's Matt Hughes the man. He talks with unflinching honesty about his early hell-raising and his near-death experience, the moment he let God into his heart, falling in love with his wife, the birth of his daughter, and all the important events of his life -- and he shares personal photographs never before seen by the public.

A Christian, a family man, and a fighter, Matt Hughes could only have been made in America.

Book Signing: Memo To the President Elect by Madeleine Albright

2008-01-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, will be signing copies of Memo To the President Elect: How We Can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership on 1/8/08 - 7:00 PM at Barnes & Noble – Union Square. New York, NY.

Book Description

The next president, whether Democrat or Republican, will face the daunting task of repairing America's core relationships and tarnished credibility after the damage caused during the past seven years. In Memo to the President Elect, former secretary of state and bestselling author Madeleine Albright offers provocative ideas about how to confront the striking array of challenges that the next commander-in-chief will face and how to return America to its rightful role as a source of inspiration across the globe.

Much more than a set of policy prescriptions, Secretary Albright's writing blends lessons from the past with forward-looking suggestions about how to assemble a first-rate foreign policy team, anticipate the actions of other key countries, make full use of presidential power without repeating the excesses of the Bush administration, and revive America's commitment to its founding ideals.

Albright's advice is candid—as conveyed in a confidential memo—and seasoned with humor and stories from her years in office. Drawing on her extensive experience as an advisor to two presidents and a key figure in four presidential transitions, she provides an insider's analysis of U.S. options in addressing the decisive issues of our era: terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rivalries in the Middle East, the potential for nuclear war, and headaches created by such troublesome leaders as Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and North Korea's Kim Jong-il.

The 2008 election promises to be one of the most dramatic in our nation's history. Memo to the President Elect offers indispensable guidance for the next occupant of the White House—and a wealth of insights for voters to think about before deciding who that person will be.

About the Author

Madeleine Albright served as U.S. secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. Her distinguished career in government includes positions in the National Security Council and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Madam Secretary and The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs. She is the founder of the Albright Group LLC and Albright Capital Management LLC, chairman of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, president of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, and the Mortara Endowed Distinguished Professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

James Ellroy, Author of L.A. Confidential, is the Subject of the Documentary available on DVD

2008-01-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

The celebrated author of police stories and reigning expert on the 1940-1960 Los Angeles crime scene takes center stage in the eccentric and mannered James Ellroy: "American Dog", a glossy documentary that covers the same ground as Ellroy's autobiographical book My Dark Pages. Ellroy's life and career is a chronicle of obsessions that would give any film noir protagonist a run for his money. His mother was murdered when he was a child, an experience that, if the author is to be believed, determined the course of his life from that point onward.

This documentary-essay puts James Ellroy front and center, and he's an overpowering character. As a speaker he's simultaneously very articulate and very profane, an uncomfortable combination. His descriptions of his childhood discovery of a sleazy underside to everyday life are peppered with words that are, depending on one's point of view, either frank and accurate or offensively aggressive. His disclosures about his own checkered past carry an intense charge of noir romanticism. Ellroy may not be bragging about his nefarious life as a homeless peeping tom, but he's not contrite, either.

The show examines Ellroy's world and the mystique of Los Angeles as a place that beckons the ambitious and the foolhardy: "They come on vacation and leave on probation." Backward looks into history set up the twin homicides that formed Ellroy's young consciousness, the savage 1947 Black Dahlia killing and his own mother's murder in 1958. Somewhere along the line the subject of film noir enters. Ellroy partially linking it with his own work by saying that real detectives love the fantasy of Otto Preminger's Laura, wherein an investigator carries on a romance with a murder victim!

James Ellroy: "American Dog" follows its subject to various crime scenes and allows him to address the camera directly, narrating his own inner thoughts or reciting relevant passages from My Dark Pages and other books. Other speakers comment on the author in interviews staged in appropriate locales. Los Angeles Police Chief and Ellroy fan William Bratton stands in uniform before a bank of flags and praises the effect of Ellroy's books on the image of the LAPD. Retired detective William Stoner sits at the bar in the Frolic Room on Hollywood Blvd. to explain how Ellroy hired him to investigate his mother's murder 37 years after the fact. Actress Dana Delany tells us that Ellroy used her real name as a character in one of his books, a murder story about depraved lowlifes. Ellroy discusses his work with author Bruce Wagner but is mostly on screen by himself, ambling through the courtyard of the American Cinematheque (formerly the Egyptian Theater) or loitering around atmospheric downtown street corners. With his distinctive walk and Hawaiian shirts, Ellroy seems born to the neon and dark alleys.

Cameraman Neil Antin's stylish videography unifies the show with 'video-noir' lighting schemes. One speaker tells us of the anxieties of the Cold War while standing in what appears to be a property house specializing in neon signs. Dramatic musical selections from Vivaldi, Wagner and Stravinsky are used as atmospheric glue to tie disparate episodes together.

Writer-directors Clara and Robert Kuperberg only lose their footing near the end, when the show's various themes fail to come together. The docu wishes to recap Ellroy's excellent My Dark Places book in digest form, but the content just isn't there to dramatize Ellroy's change from hating his mother ("She was really just a whore') to accepting and loving her ("I learned the power of compassion"). The camera instead swoops over Los Angeles in search of spectacular aerial views to serve as wallpaper for Ellroy's mannered commentary. Ellroy's honesty is a lot like the testimony one of his characters might give. We keep asking ourselves why exactly he feels he must confess all these personal agonies.

Ellroy is fully aware that he's exploiting his tragic family history and he barely stops short of describing himself as a sick man. He need not apologize for his excellent books, as he's certainly a talented man. But after viewing James Ellroy: American Dog the fascinating writer of My Dark Places seems much less attractive. Ellroy and the Kuperberg show their awareness of this by placing a shot of Ellroy's dog Nikkle at the end of the show. Like Norman Bates speaking with the face of his dead mother, Nikkle 'speaks' with Ellroy's voice and warns the viewer that Ellroy is really a malicious exploiter and a terrible man. It's amusing, but the joke's on us.

Arte's DVD of James Ellroy: "American Dog" is an excellent presentation of a show with a beautiful look; the views of Los Angeles are a slick tour of a noir city. The audio is good and the music editorial excellent, with those classical pieces weaving in and out of Ellroy's edgy speeches. An extras menu leads to several interesting sidebar videos. Two dinner conversations with Ellroy and his friends (Rick Jackson, Bruce Wagner, Dana Delaney, Joe and Matthew Carnahan, Michelle Grace) at the Pacific Dining Car are followed by a 2005 reading of American Tabloid at the Hammer Museum by Ellroy, Bruce Wagner and Dana Delany. Ellroy is presented with the 'Jack Webb Award' by the LAPD, an honor that must have been a prelude to the film's interview with the oddly worshipful Chief Bratton. Galleries of vintage L.A. postcards, and gruesome crime scene photos finish the presentation.

For more information about James Ellroy: "American Dog", visit Facets Multi-Media. To order James Ellroy: "American Dog", go to TCM Shopping.

by Glenn Erickson

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007

2008-01-02T04:31:00.000-08:00

"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.

Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.

But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time." The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."

In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them." Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical judgement" - to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1951-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.

Attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf "tries to live with the freedom of a man" - a point Lessing seems to confirm: "These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.

Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 and If the Old Could..., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 appeared in 1995 and received the James Tait Black Prize for best biography.
Addenda (by Jan Hanford)

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and In Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's personality, life and views.

In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote the book. In an interview she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview." And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996.

Late in the year, HarperCollins published Play with A Tiger and Other Plays, a compilation of 3 of her plays: Play with a Tiger, The Singing Door and Each His Own Wilderness. In an unexplained move, HarperCollins only published this volume in the U.K. and it is not available in the U.S., to the disappointment of her North American readers.

In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time, providing the libretto for the opera "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" which premiered in Heidelberg, Germany in May. Walking in the Shade, the anxiously awaited second volume of her autobiography, was published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. This volume documents her arrival in England in 1949 and takes us up to the publication of The Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her autobiography, she will not be writing a third volume.

Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind." 1999 also saw her first experience on-line, with a chat at Barnes & Noble (transcript). In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Annual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya.

December 31 1999: In the U.K.'s last Honours List before the new Millennium, Doris Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done "conspicuous national service." She revealed she had turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire because there is no British Empire. Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means "you're not called anything - and it's not demanding. I like that". Being a Dame was "a bit pantomimey". The list was selected by the Labor Party government to honor people in all walks of life for their contributions to their professions and to charity. It was officially bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II.

In January, 2000 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing.

Ben, in the World, the sequel to The Fifth Child was published in Spring 2000 (U.K.) and Summer 2000 (U.S.).

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Her most recent novel is The Cleft.

The Quill Book Awards Announce Quill Books of the Year

2008-01-01T16:18:00.000-08:00

Audio – presented by Mary Higgins Clark and Steve ShirripaTo Kill a Mockingbird

Written by Harper Lee; Read by Sissy SpacekPublished by Caedmon Audio, HarperCollins Publishers

Biography/ Memoir – presented by Tina Brown and Jonathan Groff Einstein: His Life and Universe

Written by Walter Isaacson Published by Simon & Schuster

Business – presented by Tina Brown and Jonathan Groff The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't

Written by Robert I. Sutton, PhD Published by Business Plus, Grand Central Publishing

Children’s Chapter/ Middle Grade – presented by Sarah Ferguson and Rocco DiSpirito The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Written by Brian SelznickPublished by Scholastic Press

Children’s Picture Books – presented by Jeff Dunham and Walter Flotsam

Written by David Wiesner Published by Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin

Cooking – presented by Sarah Ferguson and Rocco DiSpirito Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition

Written by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan BeckerPublished by Scribner

Debut Author – presented by Dan Rather & Catherine Crier The Thirteenth Tale

Written by Diane SetterfieldPublished by Atria

General Fiction – presented by Lorraine Bracco and Gay Talese The Road

Written by Cormac McCarthy Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Graphic Novel – presented by Jeff Dunham and Walter Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

Written by Scott McCloud Published by Harper Paperbacks

Health/ Self-Improvement – presented by Brooke Shields & Tiki Barber How Doctors Think

Written by Jerome Groopman, M.D.Published by Houghton Mifflin

History/ Current Events/ Politics – presented by Dan Rather & Catherine Crier The Assault on Reason

Written by Al GorePublished by The Penguin Press

Humor – presented by Stephen Colbert I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

Written by Amy Sedaris Published by Warner Books

Mystery/Suspense/Thriller – presented by Mary Higgins Clark and Steve Shirripa What the Dead Know

Written by Laura Lippman Published by William Morrow

Poetry – presented by Dan Rather & Catherine Crier For the Confederate Dead

Written by Kevin Young Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Religion/ Spirituality – presented by Mary Higgins Clark and Steve ShirripaReligious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't

Written by Stephen Prothero Published by Harper One

Romance – presented by Brooke Shields & Tiki Barber Angels Fall

Written by Nora Roberts Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons

Science Fiction/ Fantasy/ Horror – presented by Lorraine Bracco and Gay Talese The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One)

Written by Patrick Rothfuss Published by DAW Books

Sports – presented by Brooke Shields & Tiki Barber The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team

Written by Michael Weinreb Published by Gotham Books

Young Adult/ Teen – presented by Tina Brown and Jonathan Groff Sold

Written by Patricia McCormickPublished by Hyperion Books for Children

Special Awards:

Quill 2007 Variety Blockbuster Book to Film Award - presented by Joan Allen and Peter Bart
The Bourne Film Trilogy Universal Pictures

2007 Platinum Quill - presented by Lorraine Bracco and Gay Talese
David Halberstam

2007 Corporate Literacy Quill -- presented by Gerry Byrne

Press Release: A Memory of Light by Brandon Sanderson

2007-12-31T06:51:00.000-08:00

Tor announces that the final novel in bestselling Robert Jordan’s legendary Wheel of Time® fantasy series will be completed by author Brandon Sanderson.

Tor Books announced today that novelist Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to finish the final novel in Robert Jordan’s bestselling Wheel of Time fantasy series. Robert Jordan, one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, died September 16th after a courageous battle with the rare blood disease amyloidosis.

The new novel, A MEMORY OF LIGHT, will be the twelfth and final book in the beloved fantasy series which has sold over 14 million copies in North America and over 30 million copies worldwide. The last four books in the series were all #1 New York Times bestsellers, and for over a decade fans have been eagerly awaiting the final novel that would bring the epic story to its conclusion.

Harriet Popham Rigney, Jordan’s beloved wife and editor, said of her decision to have Sanderson complete the last book in The Wheel of Time series: “I have chosen Brandon Sanderson to complete Robert Jordan’s great work, and I am absolutely delighted that he accepted. I will of course be editing this book as I have all of the other books of The Wheel of Time.”

President and Publisher of Tor Books, Tom Doherty, also expressed his happiness with Harriet’s decision, saying: “I am delighted that Harriet has chosen Brandon to complete Robert Jordan’s magnificent and timeless epic.”

It is the perfect match for Sanderson, who gratefully acknowledges the role Jordan played as an inspiration to him as a writer. In the tribute piece “Goodbye Mr. Jordan,” posted on his blog, Sanderson writes to Jordan: “Personally, I feel indebted to you. You showed me what it was to have vision and scope in a fantasy series–you showed me what could be done. I still believe that without your success, many younger authors like myself would never have had a chance at publishing their dreams. You go quietly, but leave us trembling.”

Like Jordan, Sanderson was an avid reader and writer from an early age. His debut novel, Elantris, was an unagented gem discovered after Sanderson, then a college student writing during his late night shift at a local hotel, approached Tor editor Moshe Feder at a fantasy convention. Several months later, after reading the manuscript and deciding he had to have it, Feder tried to find the author, who had since moved. Using the internet, he tracked down Sanderson through a campus directory—and the rest is history.

Sanderson has since gone on to establish a loyal fan base as the author of three critically acclaimed fantasy novels: Elantris, Mistborn, and The Well of Ascension, as well as a YA novel, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. Publishing trade magazines Publishers Weekly and Library Journal gave Elantris starred reviews and it was the winner of the Romantic Times Award for best epic fantasy. The Washington Post also praised Sanderson for his creation of “a fascinating world” in Mistborn.

Sanderson will have large shoes to fill in his role bringing A MEMORY OF LIGHT to publication but will work very closely with Jordan’s longtime editor, Harriet Rigney, to be sure that the writing stays true to Jordan’s voice. Jordan himself worked on the novel almost daily for the last few months of his life and according to Harriet: “Some scenes were completed by Robert Jordan, and some exist in draft form; he left copious notes and hours of audio recordings.”

Jordan had known the ending of the series for a long time and, according to a blog posting by his cousin, Wilson W. Grooms, Jr., on the popular Jordan fan site www.dragonmount.com, Jordan had a few months ago revealed secret details about the end of the series to close members of his family which he had never discussed before. Grooms wrote: “During a recent family sit around, he [Jordan] became the Gleeman and told the bones of it ALL to Harriet and me. You read that right, I did say ALL. Don’t ask, ain’t telling. Two and a half hours of story telling by the Creator himself went by in the twinkling of an eye.”

Sanderson knows that fans are very anxious to read the last novel in The Wheel of Time series and says, “I’m both extremely excited and daunted by this opportunity. There is only one man who could have done this book the way it deserved to be written, and we lost him in September. However, I promise to do my very best to remain true to Mr. Jordan’s vision and produce the book we have all been waiting to read.”

At a recent Toastmaster’s address at the World Fantasy Con this past November, author Guy Gavriel Kay saluted Jordan’s enduring legacy, stating that his “impact on the place of fantasy in the culture is colossal.”

Jordan has also often been referred to as Tolkien’s heir and in an article about The Wheel of Time series, The New York Times lauded Jordan for his extraordinary story-telling ability: “The books’ battle scenes have the breathless urgency of firsthand experience, and the ambiguities in these novels—the evil laced into the forces of good, the dangers latent in any promised salvation, the sense of the unavoidable onslaught of unpredictable events—bear the marks of American national experience during the last three decades, just as the experience of the First World War and its aftermath gave its imprint to Tolkien’s work.”

John Clute said of Jordan’s magnum opus, “when complete, the sequence will almost certainly constitute one of the major epic narratives of modern fantasy.”

Now Brandon Sanderson has signed on to complete A MEMORY OF LIGHT, with scheduled delivery of the manuscript in December 2008 and a planned publication date of Fall 2009. “The Wheel of Time turns and ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time…”

Book Review: 13 Eyes by Joseph Ryan

2007-12-29T06:15:00.000-08:00

It is more than obvious after the first chapter that this book is a young author's first attempt at a finished novel, and while it is a good attempt, it is still not a complete success.

The main focus of the story is a troubled young man suffering from strange visions and uncontrollable emotions, and the disjointed narrative is meant to convey his confusion while simultaneously setting up the readers for a number of shocking surprise twists that never truly shock or surprise.

The premise is valid, it is the execution that falls flat. This is due mainly to the writer's use of a non-linear format riddled with hallucinatory imagery, a combination that even seasoned veteran writers botch regularly. Also fumbled are the inner monologues of characters, and maybe even the characters themselves, as they come across as overly simplistic in their thoughts and actions.

All of these mistakes help detract from the story, but it is the author's own epilogue at the end that puts the final nail in the coffin. His explanation of why he wrote the book and what it means to him emotionally and psychologically is somewhat touching, but ultimately unneeded and somewhat heavy handed. All writers have personal agendas behind their works, but those feelings and philosophies should be reflected in the prose. If you have to explain to the reader how the book was supposed to make them feel, then you haven't done your job as a writer.

A good effort and a worthy project, but with a couple years more work and a couple hundred more pages to help flesh out characters and story points, the end product would have more faithfully reflected the author's intentions.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: Hollywood Hell by Don Pendleton (Chuck Rogers)

2007-12-28T08:44:00.000-08:00

Mack Bolan, the black clad Executioner who learned his killing techniques on the jungle battlefields of Viet Nam, only to use them against the Mafia after they slaughtered his family, is headed to Hollywood to break into the film business --- snuff film business, that is.

Don Pendleton’s anti-hero is just as powerful in the world of publishing as he is in the dark alleys of any crime-infested urban hell. The Executioner series, including its many spin-offs, has published more than 675 novels, and that’s a whole lot of confirmed kills and spent rounds. And in case you haven’t guessed, he is also the inspiration for Marvel Comic’s The Punisher.

In number 77 of the series (written by Chuck Rogers), we find Bolan, and his brother/assistant Johnny, watching a porn flick starring Julie, the young daughter of a prominent politician. The girl’s movements appear to be forced, her eyes wide with fear. The outfit that discreetly distributes the film, and others with subject matter ranging from extreme S&M, bestiality, and kiddie porn, is connected to the mob. Could blackmail be the reason for Julie’s introduction into the grimy world of hardcore porn, or could the cause be something even more sinister? In any case, the Executioner has just strapped on his gun-belt in search for the villain of the book (besides Mr. Rogers.) After leaving a trail of dead goons behind him, he eventually meets Iceman (not inspired by the Marvel X-Man, but would have been a better book if he had), a west coast porno magnet with an unnatural attraction to world dictators and violent sex.

A hardcore subject written for the sensibilities of young adolescent males, complete with painstaking attention to the workings of all things deadly, and a plot that you could drive a Sherman tank through, Hollywood Hell is what you would expect for a series novel --- minus the fun.

Book Review: Angel In Black by Max Allan Collins

2007-12-27T06:35:00.000-08:00

It was in 1947 that radio stations played the hit song STREET OF DREAMS. Frank Sinatra crooned the haunting lyric “Dreams broken in two can be made like new on the Street of Dreams.” Frankie was wrong.

On a blustery morning of January 15, the nude corpse of a young woman was found in the Crenshaw District of Hollywood between the crossroads of 39th and Coliseum Street.

The tale gets even more frightening -- and diabolic. It was determined by the LA County coroner that the woman had been bound upside-down by ropes at the wrists and ankles and the letters “BD” were carved into her thigh.

Fingerprint analysis ascertained that “BD” was Beth Short, a.k.a.: the “Black Daliha.” Named the Black Daliha because of her choice of black clothing, she was just another young girl who traveled to Hollywood to become famous. Just like a Faustian deal with the devil, Beth got her wish. More than fifty years later, her unsolved murder still fascinates crime buffs and Hollywood archivists.

When a disemboweled creature is found at a crossroad, it is considered an ill omen. Beth was Hollywood’s ill omen, and one that causes alot of problems for Max Allan Collins’ ace gumshoe Nathan Heller.

In ANGEL IN BLACK, fact, fiction and speculation collide in this retro PI pulp novel complete with a colorful collection of tough guy and dangerous dame (most of which are Collins’ interpretations of real people) and sharp, snappy prose delivered in rapid session.

Heller is in LA to open a branch of his famous A-1 Detective Agency, and just happens to be with Bill Fowler of THE EXAMINER when Beth’s corpse is found. Things get a little “dicey” when he recognizes Beth’s sliced and battered face as a girl he used to know from Chicago, a fact which he keeps close to the vest. He is hired by Fowler’s newspaper to dig up some sleaze they can print, but the only things that Heller discovers are not suitable for the evening news.

Among the twist and turns of Collins’ 11th Heller novel are: a gang war brewing between mobsters, Jack Dragna and Mickey Cohen, an Orson Welles’ connection to DB (lifted from the book Childhood Shadows) and former G-Man Elliot Ness, still reeling from Cleveland’s own torso killing (lifted from TORSO.)

I will not spill the beans regarding the ending, which takes place in 1982 and involves Heller’s meeting with a thinly veiled version of a true crime author known for his writings on the BD case and a final fiery showdown the man that he fingered as the torso killer.

Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is now available on DVD

2007-12-26T13:19:00.000-08:00

In a quiet suburban town in the summer of 1958, two recently orphaned sisters are placed in the care of their mentally unstable Aunt Ruth (Emmy® winner Blanche Baker of HOLOCAUST). But Ruth’s depraved sense of discipline will soon lead to unspeakable acts of abuse and torture that involve her young sons, the neighborhood children, and one 12-year-old boy whose life will be changed forever. William Atherton (DIE HARD), Catherine Mary Stewart (NIGHT OF THE COMET) and Grant Show (MELROSE PLACE) co-star in this devastating drama adapted from the controversial best seller by Jack Ketchum that Rue Morgue Magazine called “one of the most disturbing reads in the history of horror literature.”

Features:
Widescreen Presentation
Theatrical Trailer
Audio Commentary with Director Gregory Wilson, Producer Andrew van den Houten and Cinematographer/Co-Producer William M. Miller
Audio Commentary with Novelist Jack Ketchum and Screenwriters Daniel Farrands and Philip Nutman
Interviews With Cast & Crew
Screenplay (DVD-ROM)
The Making Of THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

If you have enjoyed Ketchum's hard-hitting crime and terror yarns, this DVD with not disappoint you -- but be warned, it is not for the squeamish!

Book Review: 24 Declassified: Storm Force by David Jacobs

2007-12-26T07:15:00.000-08:00

David Jacobs, true crime and adventure author, skillfully weaves a tale of international intrigue and danger more intense than any of the 24 television episodes you might have seen. His writing style is brisk and kinetic... perfectly suited for an agent Jack Bauer adventure.

The plot: Going into an election year, the current administration is plagued by an oil shortage and the failures of FEMA’s rescue operations during and after the wake of a level five hurricane that decimated a coastal American city. The price of gas skyrockets at the pump, so with his approval ratings at an all time low, the President uses the implied threat of the might and muscle of the military to convince the Saudi government to produce more oil. If they comply to the wishes of Uncle Sam, helping the current administration lower gas prices – an action that could possible win the election, Islamic fundamentalists terrorists will target the Royal Princes for assassination. The shadowy figures in the Saudi government strike a deal with the terrorists. They will agree to America’s wishes and increase the flow of oil, only to use their newly found revenues to finance a multi-national terrorist attack on American soil --- one designed to cripple this nation and bring the President and his Cabinet to their knees.

What follows is riveting. The plan, one that could be implemented in reality, is both flawlessly conceived and monstrously horrific. The villains, whose sympathies varies from shades of darkest gray to pitch black, are well imagined and more than capable of killing anything that stand in the way of their Holy War of death and destruction. And if this wasn’t enough for any special agent to handle, one of the book’s more jam-packed action passages involves Bauer’s vicious battle with the terrorists in the ruins of flooded out New Orleans with another hurricane approaching!

If you are a fan of the television series, pick this book up. If you are not a fan, pick this book up and you will become one --- hurry, the clock is ticking down!

Reviewed by Riley

Book Review: Hollywood Kryptonite by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger

2007-12-25T06:38:00.000-08:00

This compelling book was the inspiration for Hollywoodland, a film that examines the mystery of the death of George Reeves, and uncovers a plot more sinister than any of Lex Luthor’s comic book scenarios. Here my take on the sad occurrences that led up to that fateful night.

George (Superman) Reeves was flying high in 1955. THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN was a smash hit, and the phrase, “Up, up, and away!”, delighted youngsters and red-blooded American women alike. One of them especially was the wife of M-G-M vice president Eddie Mannix, the man with organized crime connections whom the studio moguls used to crack the skulls of union organizers. Toni Mannix lavished her affections, as well as a house, car, and an extravagant lifestyle, on the handsome young leading-man in blue tights. (Hey, krypTONIte, George should have stayed clear of her.) She gave him the key to Hollywood’s high society, and he gave her a strong arm to escort her.

Many reporters and stars wondered about the wisdom of blatantly having an affair with the wife of M-G-M’s most feared and dangerous executive, but like his television counterpart, George feared nothing. Well almost nothing.

It was in a department store during a promotional appearance for his television show that George, dressed in full superhero regalia, did get a taste of fear. Scores of the 16,000 children in attendance decided to test Superman’s invulnerability. George fought back the tears caused by a barrage of kicks to his shins by his giggling fans. Maybe this was Karmic “payback” for all of those children who maimed and killed themselves imitating their hero by trying to fly out of high windows? But things got much worse for George when a young boy produced his father’s “World War II” memento, a loaded .30-caliber German Luger, and pointed it directly at the big red “S” on Superman’s chest. The boy wanted to have a slug than had been flattened from Superman’s dense skin as a souvenir of their meeting. Before the tike could squeeze the trigger, George convinced the lad that someone could get hurt when the bullet bounced off him then grabbed the pistol away from the youth. The boy took home a signed 8x10 glossy, and George kept the gun.

Then in 1957, just like his television counterpart, George’s world exploded. THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN was canceled. He thought this could be the opportunity to take other film roles. Unfortunately, nobody was offering them to him.

June 16, 1959, in the early morning hours, a drunk, naked, depressed Superman sat at the foot of his bed. His affair with Toni (and her money) had soured. His answering machine tape was filled with her frequent harassing calls, in which she threatened to expose his bisexual tendencies. (Did Superman like men? It would explain the red go-go boots.) But Toni was definitely not “all talk and no action.” Six months prior, she kidnapped his pet schnauzer from his parked car and killed it. Maybe it was her, using Eddie’s influence, that kept George from working in the film business.

Downstairs, the new love-of-his-life, Leonore Lemon, entertained some of the local ginhounds. There was always free booze at George’s house and the party raged on. George needed his sleep. Tomorrow he would pick up a small piece of change in a two-round exhibition boxing match with prize-fighter Archie Moore. Moore would badly bruise him just like the kids did at those Superman personal appearance tours so many years ago. On the dresser was a .30-caliber Luger. His mind raced faster than a locomotive.

Leonore Lemon amused her inebriated guests by making the comment, “He [George] is getting the gun now, and he is going to shoot himself.” Chugging drinks and laughter was their only response. The booze stopped flowing when a shot was heard from the bedroom. Was Leonore physic?

The next morning the most ironic thing happened. A message was left on George’s answering machine offering him the chance to produce, direct, and star in a movie about witchcraft. It would have been the only professional work for George since his show was canceled, and the chance to restore his self-esteem.

Incidentally, every SUPERMAN comic book reader knows that the only thing besides kryptonite that can kill Superman is magic. If George would have waited 24 hours before squeezing the trigger, magic (or in this case, witchcraft) would have saved him.

Book Review: Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling by Lourdes Grobet

2007-12-24T06:28:00.000-08:00

And in this corner of my coffee table, weighing at 2. 8 pounds and hailing from D.A.P, New York is Lourdes Grobet’s stunning LUCHA LIBRE, the pictorial history of the mysterious masked men of Mexican wrestling with images so vivid you can almost smell the sweat and salsa. They’re all here, folks, from Astro to Villano, and all their thrilling victories and bone-crunching defeats in the squared circle are all captured by Ms. Grobet’s unflinching lens. Santo and the Blue Demon, patron saints of the sport and gringo fan favorites, are heavily featured among the legion of lesser known luchadors like priest Fray Tormenta, who wrestles to raise money for a home for street children and is the inspiration for Jack Black’s Nacho Libre, The Wise Giant, strange visitor for the stars left on Earth to combat evil by an advanced alien race (represented in the ring by a dwarf in a yeti suit) and Gran Markus Jr. whose head was shaved after a humiliating loss (a stunt repeated again and again for revenge matches.) Written in both Spanish and English, the book is destined to be a hit (and kick) on both side of the boarder.

Introduction to: Criswell Pridicts by Criswell

2007-12-23T07:34:00.000-08:00

While rummaging though some musty boxes at a “Friends of the Library” book sale in upstate NY, I came across this once forgotten volume of crackpot predictions. Today, Criswell- the media physic from the 1950s who once claimed that flying saucers will land on the White House lawn, is best remembered as a bit player in the B-films of Ed Wood.

CRISWELL: THE MAN AND PROPHET

I wasn’t always “Criswell Predicts”:

Once I was Baby Criswell!

And even then, I was interested in the future!

I was born on a Sunday, August 18th, when the church bells were ringing. I was the first child on both sides of the family, and basked in the spotlight, which I never gave up. They thought I would be a cardinal or a governor!

I scribbled on the walls, floors, and papers, and did not talk until I was four. “Retarded,” they said. “Poor Baby Criswell will never talk.”

During an Indiana thunderstorm, I started to talk and have not stopped until this day.

I told my shocked parents, “The rain will stop!” My very first prediction, and a valid one!

In our family, the Criswells, the Kings, the Hopkins, the Mulhalls, the Neeleys, the Browns, and the Williamses were all proud of Indiana; becoming grocers, newspaper editors, doctors, druggists, politicians, bankers, and undertakers. School teachers competed for God and glory in the hot Hoosier sun. Princeton, Indiana, was in Gibson County, with the Wabash, the White, and the Patoka Rivers giving the five thousand natives a rich heritage. The Mason-Dixon Line was only twenty-seven miles away across the Ohio River.

I was raised in the King House, the family hotel. I thought any one who lived seven miles away was a foreigner, and I was shocked to find out that they did not know who I was. The town certainly knew who I was, as I would not let them forget.

On Sunday, I would join the minister in the pulpit. Once I sang a solo without music. The family could not keep me from getting before an audience, even at a funeral! In the Christmas plays, I would stay on stage until I was forcibly removed. I loved political rallies. My Uncle Earl would let me stand by him while he campaigned. Any school teacher knew better than to call on me because they could never quiet me. My Aunt Mayme would call on me at the very last, and the dismissal bell would cut my appearance down to ten seconds! Cousin Alice, who taught me history in the 8th grade, never received a simple answer, but an oration!

When the tornado blew down half the town, I proudly conducted tours for the sightseers. Everyone prefaced their conversations with, “Who was there besides Cris?” No club or audience could meet in secret without my somehow finding the way to the platform.

I was not really an extrovert— just impervious to criticism of any kind.

When they unveiled the Soldier’s Monument in the Courthouse Yard, they uncovered me standing there spouting Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

I yearned to work on Uncle Roy King’s DAILY DEMOCRAT, and he would pay me twenty-five cents for five personal items. My personal items were exclusive: I would write what people were going to do!

I had Vivian Draymeyer attending her sister’s funeral in Mt. Carmel when her sister was still alive, but her sister died the next day, and it saved me from embarrassment... And made me stop to ponder the occurrence.

I began to predict things more and more often. I would operate on these “hunches” and found myself able to help solve the problems of others.

After High School, I attended the University of Cincinnati, taking Public School Education at the Conservatory of Music, and then tried my hand at teaching. I gave it up after one term in Jersey City, New Jersey. After a pre-med course, further work in a mortuary and the city morgue, and as an ambulance jockey, I returned to newspaper work and newscasting.

As I predicted more accurately, I became less reticent to predict. I kept score, writing predictions for my eyes only, then checking to see if they came to pass. My accuracy increased with each year, and I began writing my predictions for others to see and hear.

Sometimes my predictions were laughed at. (I received a big laugh on Johnny Carson’s TONIGHT SHOW by predicting, after Pat Brown’s victory over Richard Nixon, that Ronald Reagan would defeat Brown in the next election and be California’s next Governor).
But even my most “outlandish” predictions, the public scorekeepers say, are eighty-six percent accurate.

When the publishers approached me to do this book, I merely released to them the “Journal of the Future” — my private collection of what will happen between now and the end of our civilization!

My predictions are not written to win literary attention. I am not sure what they all mean. Some are frighteningly explicit. Others are somewhat vague. All are based on conscious study and sub-conscious “realizations.”

I pass them along to you as I have recorded them.

Over the next remaining years, you may keep your own “score” as to their accuracy.

After that, it will not matter.

CRISWELL -- 1968

Book Review: In The Belly Of The Beast by Jack Henry Abbott

2007-12-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

With the recent passing of Norman Mailer, literary great and native New Yorker, I was compelled to re-read ITBOTB and share with you what Paul Harvey would call, “the rest of the story.”

TBOTB is a cold stark look into the everyday reality of life of a maximum security prisoner, written by one who knows. Jack Henry Abbott, a career criminal whose crimes range from forgery, bank robbery and murder, tells tales of life inside the Big House with a heavy emphasis on how the prison system is designed to crush a man’s soul and render him the equivalent of a caged animal. With maudlin, yet poetic, comments like, “When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life”, Abbott mythologizes his existence until he is completely transformed into a hypocritical version of Marley’s Ghost, a phantom that blames his unearthly torment on the evils of capitalism and not his own personal greed.

Every violent offense Abbott commits in prison is rationalized by him as a blow against a corrupt and morally bankrupted system of prison rule and regulations described in this quote: “Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.” Judging by his prison record, he lost control many times -- including fatally knifing a fellow inmate.

One part true crime, three part propaganda, Abbott’s book is an interesting read; a self serving testament that shows us why the word “con” is the first three letters in convict.

And now the rest of the story.

While Mailer was writing The Executioner’s Song, he receives a letter from a convict named Jack Abbott. Yearly, the author would obtain hundreds of letters for people all claiming that their life would be an interesting subject for his next book – but this letter intrigued Mailer. Abbott, after reading in the newspaper that Mailer was in the process of writing a book about prison violence and convicts, offers to help Mailer by sharing his true-life experiences. Mailer takes the con up on his offer, and in rapid succession a stream on letters floods the author’s office, each one more intense, more thought provoking on the subject of the flaws of the State’s penal system. So enamored by Abbott’s prose and radical beliefs, Mailer got some of his letters published in the New York Review of Books. Shortly afterwards, Mailer convinces his publisher to print the letters in book form with an introduction by him. ITBOTB is published and quickly becomes a national bestseller. Using Abbott’s new found literary talents and celebrity as a reason for early parole, Mailer petitions the board and wins Abbott’s release. When question by the Press if he thinks Abbott is still a risk to society, he states, "Culture is worth a little risk."

Six week after his release, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter named Richard Adan when Adan told him that he would have to use the restroom in the store next to the restaurant because their toilet was backed-up. After lambing-it for a few months, he was captured, charged with murder and sent back into what he refers to as "the belly of the beast. "

Richard Adan's widow successfully sued him and receives all the money from the book's sales, so pick up two copies today!

Rarity of the Month: The Way Out World by Long John Nebel

2007-12-21T17:40:00.000-08:00

Venture back to a simpler time, a time when all radio was regional; local news, local talk shows and local entertainment. It will be more than 23 years until syndicated shows will dominate all local markets subjecting listeners to the same endless flavorless debate on national politics, so enjoy it while you can by tuning your AM dial to New York’s WOR and prepare to be dazzled by the wit and weirdness of Long John Nebel.

Way before Art bell, Nedel and his co-host Candy Jones would mystify listeners with unusual guests who spoke on a series of strange topics including: ESP, UFOs, Extraterrestials, faith healing, time travel, and mysterious creatures. The Way Out World is culled together by Nebel’s reminiscences and quotes or transcripts from some of his most memorable shows. One highlight occurred when comedian Jackie Gleason (a fanatic UFO researcher and a fan of Nebel) calls in to challenge George King. King was known at the time for his incredible claims and did not disappoint the listeners when he bragged that he was commissioned to be a delegate to an interplanetary cosmic United Nations by alien lifeforms. King was in the middle of telling how he met Jesus Christ on a Martian saucer, when Nebel informed “Earth’s Ambassador” that a person called-in and wanted to speak with him. Below is the transcript of what occurred:

GLEASON: Are these people from outer space good friends of yours?
KING: I believe that they are friends of mine, yes.
GLEASON: Could you call on them for assistance? For instance, if you were in some sort of legal difficulty, embracing some part of their recognition of you, would they come to your aid?
KING: Under those circumstances, they would help, yes.
GLEASON: If I were, for instance, to say to you that you are a bare-faced liar, now you know you could sue me for libel, right?
KING: Yes, yes.
GLEASON: Now do you think that you could get any legal assistance from them in a case like this?
KING: No, I don’t.
GLEASON: Why?
KING: Why should they help?
GLEASON: Well, you’re championing their cause.
KING: No, no, I’m not. [cough] I’m trying to give a spiritual message, which I believe to be good for all people.
GLEASON: Why do we need a spiritual message from someone in a flying saucer? Don’t we have enough from Christ, Buddha, Moses -- men like that?
KING: Do we live by those teachings?
GLEASON: Yes, I do.
KING: You do? [cough] Then you're the first Christian that I’ve ever seen.
GLEASON: By the way, do you know that every time you are uncertain when you say something, you cough. Do you know what that means psychologically? In other words, you cough every time you tell a lie.
KING: Do I?
GLEASON: Now George, look at the juicy opportunity you have. Here’s a guy that you’re talking to that’s got a lot of dough. You can sue me for maybe a million dollars, and maybe get it. And all you have to do to get it is to bring one of your friends from Mars to O.K. this thing, and you will win.
KING: I’ve already answered this question. There isn’t a man on Earth who could do this.
GLEASON: In other words, you have absolutely no proof from these people whom you are championing? You have absolutely no backing from anybody from outer space for what you say?
KING: Just a moment, please. Just one minute...
GLEASON: I’m waiting, and cough a little bit.
KING: I shall put this phone down in a moment.
GLEASON: Yes?
KING: I’m a guest here, you see.
GLEASON: Not in my house, you’re not a guest. I think you’re a phony!
KING: CLICK!!!

Jackie was never sued for liable. Instead King chose to earn a meager living selling pamphlets about his adventures with his space pals. Jackie spent years trying to find proof of extraterrestrial life. He even offered a ten thousand dollar reward to anyone that could provide him that proof.

The Way Out World is filled with wonderful anecdotes like this one. It will entertain, and make you wish that Rush Limbaugh continued his career with the Kansas City Royals.

Book Review: Life Is But A Scream! by Ray Ferry

2007-12-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

Calling all Baby Boomers and monster fans, listen up, you don’t want to miss this!

Where you a kid in the sixties who read Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and thrilled to the exploits of Karloff, Lugois, and Chaney on TV’s Creature Feature? But when maturity beckoned, did you replaced your macabre interests with sports, girls, rock music, college and/or a steady job? If so, you probably don’t know the story behind the death … and rebirth of your once favorite monster mag.

Warren Publications, a magazine publishing giant with many horror and sci-fi comic titles, one of which was 1994, put out FM. In the eighties, Jim Warren approaches fantasy writer Harlan Ellis for the rights to the comic version of A Boy And His Dog. The negotiations broke down when they could not agree on an equitable price. So Warren, once confident in his ability to obtain the story rights, had his art department complete the comic artwork. He published the artwork in the magazine 1994 and changed all of the characters’ names and the title of the story. Ellis sued for infringement of copywrited material and won a hefty judgment thus bankrupting the publishing empire. Over the years, many of Warren’s trademarks were not renewed --- enter Ray Ferry.

Ray Ferry, a promoter and fan of the original FM, meets FJA and the two decides to throw a Famous Monster Convention in 1993. (I was there – where you?) The Convention was such a hit that Ferry decides to re-launch FM with FJA as its editor and in rapid succession begins to re-file all of FM’s trademarks under his own name. After a few issues hit the stands, Ferry and Forry part ways after a nasty dispute.

What follows is one of the most vicious and contentious legal battles in the history of fandom. It’s Forry vs. Ferry over the right to use the moniker “Dr. Acula” as fans choose-up sides! Things get so heated that Ferry receives anonymous death threats from fans still loyal to the original FM. This book is a scream and a testament to the truth of an old Universal horror film rule: when two or more monsters meet, they must eventually battle to the death. In this case, it was in a court of law.

Book Review: McMasters: Violent Sunday by Lee Morgan

2007-12-21T06:57:00.000-08:00

Don’t let the cover fool you! This is not some weak western romance novel injected with a splattering of violence but a violent pulp western fueled by horrific gore and perverted cruel sex.

When the Cattleman’s Protective Association is in a jam, they call in their specialist: the .70 caliber rifle-toting cowboy Boyd Mc Masters. Part tracker- all killer, McMasters makes his living off of the deaths of others, and in this adventure (#6 in the series) “the others” are the Hell’s Killers, a gang of sadistic cannibalistic butchers who are not just satisfied with rustling cattle, but are compelled to torture and mutilate the ranchers, their families, and any one else who is either foolish or unlucky enough to stand in their way. The Association has placed a rather large bounty on each one of their inbreed heads, and McMasters aims to collect every last cent.

The trail leads McMasters to Packer Point (could the name Packer be a reference to Albert Packer, a western cannibal?), a fortress-like mountain railroad station own and operated by the Tanner Family (isn’t a tanner someone who skins animals – well as you can guess, the author is having a lot of fun with the cannibal premise.) What follows, without giving away any spoilers, is an 1882 version of The Hills Have Eyes set in Montana’s snowy Blue Pine Hills. Two-gun action, sex and death, and more death abound in this delightfully mean-spirited horror western that kicks like a shotgun blast to the chest and ends with all the momentum of a runaway train –literally.

Book Review: The Badge by Jack Webb

2007-12-20T19:35:00.000-08:00

The quintessential 1950s icon of law and order made flesh, Jack Webb, at the height of his Dragnet fame authored The Badge, a 310 page wet kiss to LA’s “boys in blue” and their never ending war on crime and immorality. Its ten chapters, each detailing a different police division or department, highlight the dangers, heartaches, and bloodshed an officer must face at the hands of the insane, perverted and/or criminal. Once this volume was a prized collectible, one that many a true crime buff would gladly spend hundreds of dollars to obtain. But thanks to Thunder Mouth Press (a division of Avalon Publishing), anyone with the meager sum of $14.95 can possess this new printing which includes an introduction by that jive-talking, retro-crime writing hipster, Mr. James Elroy. When Mr. Elroy was a young boy, his father bestowed The Badge on him for an 11th Birthday gift. The effect on the boy was similar to the first meeting of Nitro and Glycerin. With his mother the victim of an unsolved sex-slay the prior year, the young James, now wise beyond his years, became obsessed with Webb’s white-hot descriptive narrative of some of the most brutal crimes in LA’s history. One of the chapters he found particular intriguing contained the torso murder of Beth Short, the Black Dahlia – and as the saying goes, “the rest is history.”

The Badge is like a R-rated extended Dragnet episode with out the names changed--- because nobody in this blood-soaked tome of murder, mayhem, and vice is innocent. So be advised to “pick up and detain” your copy today. That is all.

Book Review: Cop Hater by Ed McBain

2007-12-20T06:12:00.000-08:00

I've never been a fan of police procedurals. The majority of them tend to be more concerned with showing off the author's knowledge of obscure investigation technique trivia than telling any kind of cohesive, let alone down to earth, story. With this in mind, the only reason I offer for loving the 87the Precinct series, written by the man who practically invented the genre, is that he writes it better than anyone else. If you're sick and tired of the Law & Order clones, maybe you should take a step back and check out the series that defined the genre and has yet to be surpassed. And if you've never visited McBain's series, then there is no better place to start than the beginning.

Cop Hater is an able and worthy introduction to the world of the 87th Precinct's Homicide Division, walking the beat of its fictional city for over fifty years, right up until the author's death last year. Many book series suffer from weak openings and fluctuations in quality and style that often leave fans recommending later entries as a starting point for new readers. The 87th never felt any such growing pains, and Cop Hater still stands as strong as the 53 that soon followed.

Detective Carella, the anchor of the series, is introduced in this initial outing, along with other long-term cast members including his love interest and future wife Teddy, stoolie Danny the Gimp, Lt. Byrnes, hack journalist Savage, Bert Kling (still a patrolman before earning his detective's badge in The Mugger), angry bull Roger Havilland, and the diminutive but dangerous Hal Willis.

Cop Hater is one of McBain's more direct titles, and covers the plot simply. Someone is killing cops out of the 87th Precinct. A dead cop is always taken seriously by other cops, but things become personal for Carella when the third officer gunned down in cold bloody is his partner Bush, and even more so when newspaper reporter Savage turns his deaf girlfriend Teddy into a prospective target. With nothing more to go on than the killer's motive as a Cop Hater, the race is on to catch the killer before he kills anyone else that Carella cares for, or for that matter, Carella himself.

Many police procedural series try to go over-the-top with spectacular crimes or completely outrageous twists and turns, and mind-numbingly technical procedure descriptions. This is territory that the 87th Precinct never strays into. While McBain does take the time to explain how and why certain aspects of the job are undertaken, he does so not to flog the reader with facts, but to help them understand exactly what the bulls of the 87th are up against. The crimes and characters of the 87th are always believable, interesting, and never fail to ring with a truth and honesty that makes it seem as real as crime in your local papers. Cop Hater embodies this truth as much as any of the other books, despite being written over fifty years ago. The procedures may change over time, but the criminals and cops are still driven by the same beliefs.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: The Shadow Over Santa Susana by Adam Gorighty

2007-12-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

Adam Gorightly, self-professed “crackpot historian” and former zine writer, does a Herculaneum task of assembling all of the shadowy theories and speculations about Charlie’s family (and why “Helter Skelter” went down—or seven different versions of it) into one cohesive and enjoyable tome. It’s all here, true crime and conspiracy buffs, all of the allegations, painstakingly researched (and footnoted), that the other Manson books only hinted at. Topics include: the Church of Satan, MK ULTRA and LSD mind control projects, S&M Celebs, snuff videos, the Son of Sam, the RFK hit, ONI, New Age messiahs, the Process Church, the Mob (was Charlie a hitman?), Race Wars, Kenneth Anger, Scientology, the Zodiac Killer, Rock Stars, a national murder cult, drug and kiddie porno rings, and more witchy teenage girls and speed-freak bikers that you can shake a buck knife at! It is not Mr. Gorightly’s intention to make you believe that Manson was a key figure in all of the purported criminal and satanic activities laid out in his book, but merely to inform the reader how much of a true crime icon Charlie Manson is to have writers and historians try to link this little twitchy piece of nothing to every sinister event in the sixties and beyond. Also included is a photo index of Manson family members and a list of contact information.

Book Review: The Mugger by Ed McBain

2007-12-19T04:10:00.000-08:00

McBain's second novel in the 87th Precinct series delivers an alternate to the straight mystery that started the series, setting the tone that his novels would switch back and forth between, and gives the main mystery a bizarre and darkly humorous twist.

In this case, a mugger that courteously bows and thanks the women he abuses and victimizes ("Clifford thanks you, Madam.") is terrorizing the city, and the bulls of the 87th doing their best to stop him. The pressure already on them increases when one of Clifford's apparent victims turns up dead.

With Carella on a honeymoon in the Poconos with his new bride Teddy, Willis and Havilland team up to track down the notorious Clifford. They are assisted in the search with the introduction of bald jokester Meyer Meyer, the most patient man in the 87th. Also introduced is female detective Eileen Burke, who goes undercover as Clifford bait in a desperate attempt to trap the mugger.

At the same time, patrolman Bert Kling finds himself stepping out of bounds as he looks into the murder of an old friend's daughter, who just happens to be Clifford's homicide victim. His private investigation threatens to endanger his job, but also puts him in contact with the dead girls beautiful college friend, whom he falls for instantly.

The Mugger is one of McBain's less spectacular stories, by which I mean it is not the crimes themselves that keep you riveted, but the characters involved and the stories they tell. A good portion of the book is taken up by interrogation transcripts, but they give a deeper feeling to the city and its denizens rather than bog it down.

Reviwed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the "Bundy Drive Boys" by Gregory Mank

2007-12-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

From the Publisher, Feral House:

"They made fans go crazy and censors apoplectic, spent fortunes faster than they made them, forged Rembrandts and hung them in major museums, went on trial for committing statutory rape with necrophiliac teenage girls, reinterpreted Hamlet as an incestuous mama’s boy, and swilled immeasurable quantities of spirits during week-long parties on wobbly yachts.

"They were “The Bundy Drive Boys” and they made the Rat Pack look like Cub Scouts.

"Their self-destructiveness was spectacular, the misanthropy profound, but behind the boozy bravado was a devoted mutuaal affection. The Bundy Drive Boys’ un-Bowdlerized stories have never been illustrated so well or told so completely as within Hollywood’s Hellfire Club.

"Includes remarkable material on Ben Hecht, Gene Fowler, Sadakichi Hartmann, John Decker, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Roland Young, Anthony Quinn and Alan Mowbray.

"Gregory William Mank is also the author of It’s Alive!: The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein, Women in Horror Films, and Hollywood Cauldron.

"Cover Illustration by Drew Friedman"

___________________________

Review:

Greg Mank has left the haunted mansion of golden age horror film critiques and heads into Hollywood Babylon territory with his newest book; and what he finds would have Kenneth Anger gasping for breath. Mank, with his coauthors Charles Heard and Bill Nelson, tells the tale of the Bundy Drive Boys, a collective of fast living and hard drinking Hollywood actors, writers and artists--- all committed to their friendship and the right to destroy their careers, their families and themselves by any means necessary. Among the hell-raisers are John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn, John Decker, William Fowler, John Carradine, Ben Hecht and Sadakichi Hartmann; and their stories of childhood tragedy, incest, rape, cannibalism (in a POW camp), drunken brawls, sexual conquests, and even an art forgery scam, will have your jaw hitting the floor. --- I read HOLLYWOOD HELLFIRE CLUB in one sitting. My morbid curiosity (wondering just how much worse can things get for the Bundy Drive boys) simply would not let me put this book down. If you are a fan of Hollywood's Golden Age... or the last person to leave the scene of a train wreck, this book will surely entertain and/or horrify you! ---Reviewed by Riley

Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007

2007-12-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

10. The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

9. Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard

8. Harry Poter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

7. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

6. The House of Meetings by Martin Amis

5. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

4. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

2. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Book Review: Behold A Pale Horse by William Cooper

2007-12-17T17:58:00.000-08:00

Author Bill Cooper was killed some years ago during a shootout with police officers. The incident occurred after a high-speed pursuit while the heavily armed Cooper was in the process of helping a friend kidnapped his son from the court appointed guardian, his divorced wife and the child’s mother. He is gone, the militia movement he had founded has ceased… all that is left is Behold A Pale Horse.

Cooper’s Magnum opus (500 pages of paranoia and hate) is considered by UFO/Conspiracy theorists to be off the wall and totally bat shit! One of the theories Cooper purports is that JFK was assassinated because he had planned to tell the American people about the existents of Grey Aliens! Another one of his gems: the secret government created UFO and aliens to create a space religion to control the masses.

This book toboggans at the speed of light down the slippery slope of cracked-pot accretions about the AIDs virus, the New World Order plot, secret alien technology, and any other sinister plotting that would turn up in a rerun of The X-Files. 100% discredited in its assumptions but Behold A Pale Horse is never boring – especially when read as a document from an unbalanced individual. Once this book was only available through conspiracy mail order bookstores, now you can buy it on Amazon.com.

Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2007

2007-12-17T13:45:00.000-08:00

1. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

2. A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson

3. A long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beach

4. Legacy of Ashes: A history of the CIA by Tim Weiner

5. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

6. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

7. Animal, Vegetable, Miricle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

8. The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

9. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R. Saks

10. Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup

Book News: CIA Director of Public Affairs Statement on New Book

2007-12-16T13:10:00.000-08:00

CIA Director of Public Affairs Mark Mansfield issued the following statement today:

We generally don't comment on books, but we have departed from that on occasion, and have decided to do so in connection with Rowan Scarborough's new book, "Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA."

CIA employees work very hard to protect their fellow citizens and to help keep America safe. They take great pride -- and take great risks -- in serving our country. They know that the intelligence they collect, analyze and deliver to policymakers, diplomats, law enforcement officers, and military commanders makes a difference, each and every day.

The premise of Mr. Scarborough's book -- that CIA employees are working to undermine our government -- is both ridiculous and offensive.

From the Inside Flap of Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA

How Bush-hating CIA Bureaucrats Are Sabotaging the War on Terror

Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, intelligence collection has become the number-one weapon in the effort to defeat al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. A plot penetrated is an attack stopped. And to the outside observer, the CIA has performed well as a key partner in the Bush administration's War on Terror. But as Rowan Scarborough reveals in this groundbreaking new book, significant elements within the CIA are undermining both the president and national security through leaks, false allegations, and outright sabotage.

Using his first-rate sources in all levels of national security--from field officers to high-ranking analysts to former intelligence heads--Scarborough paints a disturbing picture of partisan politics endangering the success of our campaigns abroad and the very lives of our soldiers and agents.

Book Review: .357 Vigilante #2 - Make Them Pay, by Ian Ludlow

2007-12-16T10:43:00.000-08:00

Make Them Pay is the first book in the series I've read, and I am now eagerly searching out the others, as this book definitely falls in the category of So Bad It's Good.

This short-lived series was apparently ghost written by Lee Goldberg and Lewis Perdue under the series pen name of Ian Ludlow. After lengthy consideration, I have come to the conclusion that this series was written completely tongue-in-cheek, and was meant to be a mockery of Vigilante Men's Action Series such as The Executioner and The Destroyer, with an obvious nod to the Death Wish/Dirty Harry influences as well. I base this theory on the fact that a) Both authors still make a living writing and would therefore hopefully have a better grasp of good and bad concepts, and b) There is no way that it should have taken two people to write this slim series of nonsensical scenes.

There is simply too much corniness to fully cover. Brett Macklin, our heroic vigilante, is a professional pilot with his own air charter company. His father was apparently killed in the first novel by some street hooligans, and since he wiped them out he's been itching to get back into the vengeance business. He's given the opportunity right away when he investigates a supposed child pornographer for the Chief of Police that condones vigilante justice, and in the process botches a tail bad enough to be identified. The next morning his beautiful nurse girlfriend, after a night of smothering each other's naked bodies with ice cream and screwing on the kitchen counter, is blown up in a car bomb meant for him.

But even with a newly dead loved one to seek vengeance over, Brett is still weary of becoming Judge, Jury, and Executioner. Two out of three isn't bad though, and he settles for having an outside party oversee his Vigilante Prosecution, the position of .357 Judge filled by a bitter ex-judge who now acts as the TV Host/Arbiter on a bizarre show that is a cross between People's Court and Let's Make a Deal. Having trivialized the concept of due process beyond comprehension, our favorite vigilante is now free to seek justice/vengeance without guilt or plot complication.

Even so, Macklin still manages to find time between getting his girlfriend killed and killing the bad guys to endanger the lives of other friends and loved ones, bed a hot reporter who is convinced that he is Mr. Jury (the press is apparently better at naming action novel series than the publishers themselves), and dispatch the numerous perpetrators of other crimes that happen to occur in his path.

The punchlines delivered by Mr. Jury whenever he exacts justice on a criminal are so over-the-top ludicrous, they are my ultimate proof that the entire series is a joke. Example: he notices an armed robbery taking progress in a convenience store, quickly grabs a steel level from the construction site next door, and just before caving in the criminal's skull delivers the line "You're unbalanced, buddy." I'm sorry, there is no way you can write that line without total contempt for the intended audience. And they get worse, trust me.

There is a moment near the end of the novel, as the evil child pornography producers are dragging our trussed up hero onto a mock dungeon set, when Brett Macklin looks around at the fake stone walls and mediocre reproduction of a torture rack and mutters "You have got to be kidding me." Brett, its like you read my mind.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Press Release:Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark

2007-12-16T10:15:00.000-08:00

"Tim Lucas has devoted himself to getting the word out about Bava's greatness," writes film director Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, The Departed) in his Introduction to Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark (Video Watchdog), "[and] this book is the pinnacle of his efforts."

Indeed, in this massive new critical biography -- the product of interviews with more than 100 colleagues, friends and family members, and 32 years in the making -- Lucas explores in unprecedented detail the life and legacy of one of the most original, influential, and secretive filmmakers of the 20th century.

Best known as the maestro of many aggressively cinematic, candy-colored Italian horror and fantasy films (Black Sunday, Black Sabbath, Danger: Diabolik), Mario Bava spent the first twenty years of his career as one of Italy's leading cinematographers, during which time he was helped to cultivate the screen personas of such actors as Aldo Fabrizi, Gina Lollobrigida, and Steve Reeves. He was literally present at the beginning of each new form of cinema native to his country, from operettas to neorealism to sword and sandal movies to Spaghetti Westerns. Most importantly, he was the principal visionary behind the Golden Age of Italian fantasy, which lasted from 1957 until his death in 1980.

Now, for the first time in any language, Lucas explores Bava's first two decades of cinematographic achievement, as well as his next two decades as a director whose work has been acknowledged as a major influence by such filmmakers as Scorsese, Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, Joe Dante, and Guillermo del Toro. In the course of his research, Lucas discovered that Bava often contributed uncredited direction, photography or special effects to the films of friends in need, and provides entire chapters of documentation elucidating this "Secret Filmography." Also included is the story of Mario's father and mentor Eugenio Bava, a silent film cameraman and the father of Italian special effects, who rose from contributing set decoration to Pathe Fr�res shorts to photographing Quo Vadis?, from creating special effects for Cabiria to an executive wartime position in Mussolini's film factory, the Istituto LUCE. The cumulative result is not just the story of "the supreme visual poet of the Italian gothic cinema" (The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror), but a century-long family saga that occupies the first hundred years of Italian popular cinema -- a history not previously explored in English in such detail.

A staggering, 12-pound labor of love, interweaving biography, history and criticism, Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark consists of 1128 pages of four-columned type (nearly 800,000 words!), fully illustrated with well over 1000 stills and annotated poster art from all over the world, most in full color and all subjected to a three-year process of meticulous digital restoration. Included are never-before-published family photos, documents, and drawings by Bava himself, and an eye-popping array of images that Bava fans never expected to see: a wealth of color shots taken on the set of the B&W classic Black Sunday, the only photos taken of Catherine Deneuve while briefly cast as the female lead in Danger: Diabolik, and dozens of pictures of the notoriously camera-shy director himself. The extensive appendices include filmographies for Mario and Eugenio Bava, international discography and videography, name and film title indexes, and a generous gallery of storyboard art by Bava, including his complete art for an unproduced 1970s project, Baby Kong. With an Introduction by Martin Scorsese and a Foreword by the late Italian director Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark marks an exciting new development in the fields of film-related biography and book-making. Simply to page through this remarkable tome, as overpoweringly visual as any of Bava's own films, is to feel like you're watching an epic film.

Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark is available from Video Watchdog at http://www.videowatchdog.com/bava/(EmptyReference!).

Book Review: The Pusher by Ed McBain

2007-12-15T09:33:00.000-08:00

The third book in the 87th Precinct series is a more standard entry into the police procedural genre. But at the same time, it manages to reach an emotional depth somewhat unusual for the time period.

The plot is pretty straight forward. A pair of patrolmen stumble upon a apparent junkie suicide. But sometimes things aren't as easy as they seem, and the suicide squeal quickly turns into a multiple homicide investigation that threatens to become blackmail when Lt. Byrnes son becomes linked to the drug scene. The bulls at the 87th are relegated mainly to the footwork, as most of the behind the scenes action involves Byrnes as he struggles with his son's involvement. Byrnes goes as far as to fill Carella in on the situation, a decision that almost proves to be fatal.

Apart from some of the dated aspects one would expect from a well-reserched police drama from the fifties, the bulk of the novel is your typical expose on the brutal world of the street level drug trade. But as usual, McBain delves into the emotional causes and ramifications of the Heroin users and dealers. The most revealing of these is the personal and professional termoil faced by Lt. Byrnes with the revelation that his son is a Heroin addict. Adding to the emotional doubt of where he has gone wrong with his son, and the constant battle between anger and compassion, is the dilemma of whether or not to cover up his son's possible involvement in a crime, especially when a mysterious third party with knowledge of his son's connection attempts to blackmail him for police protection.

McBain doesn't just focus on the 87th detectives. Glimpses into the lives of low key players in the drug scene shows the many facets of human frailty and desperation and prevents the broad generalizations that many crime dramas easily fall into. Even the closer look at Carella's relationship with stoolie Danny the Gimp is both touching and revealing. But to McBain's credit, none of this detailed attention to the human element detracts from the gritty realism that is typical of this series.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: Conspiracies, Cover-Ups & Crimes by Jonathan Vankin

2007-12-15T07:06:00.001-08:00

There is a saying among conspiracies buffs: "Cui bono?" The term was coined by Roman Senators before the birth of Christ to analyze the complex schemes and duplicities of posturing politicians and generals of the Empire. "Cui bono?"--- Italian for, "Who benefits?"

The year is 1963. JFK is traveling in a motorcade in Dallas. The stage is set and the cast includes: the Vice President, anti\ pro Castro Cubans, the mob, a lone Marxist, ONI, G2, CIA, FBI, three hoboes, and a man with a black umbrella. Shots ring out-- the curtain drops.

Why was President Kennedy assassinated? Was it because he was soft on Communism, or maybe because of his opposition to the Vietnam War? Who benefits most from the death of the President?

Do you believe in UFOs? If so, do you believe that the extraterrestrials are superior to humans? Did they visit earth throughout the centuries and influence world history? Did they create our religions? Are we just an alien breeding experiment?

If you believe so, who benefits from your line of thought? Can unseen powers create the belief of an alien overseer in order to keep the population in line?

A terrorist plot to bomb a US airliner is discovered by CIA agents. After further investigation, the agents discover the time and target. After notifying their superior, they are ordered to do nothing to prevent the bombing. December 21, 1988. Pan Am flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland. The incident fuels the rift between the Arab controlled Middle East and the West. Who benefited most from the bombing?

These are just a few examples of conspiracies covered in Mr. Vankins 's newest book, CONSPIRACIES, COVERUPS & CRIMES. Some other topics include: the truth about the Jonestown massacre, CIA drug deals, mind-controlled assassins, partnerships between the mob, big business and the Nazis, Votescam, presidential candidate Linden LaRouche, those men of mystery-the Free Masons, and much, much, more.

Who benefits from CONSPIRACIES, COVER-UPS & CRIMES? If you are curious about the shadowy goings-on in this big world of ours, the answer is ... you do!

Book Review: Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel

2007-12-15T06:38:00.000-08:00

In May 1970, OPERATION TROJAN HORSE by John Keel was published by Putnam. While other authors of the day were trying to focus their attentions on UFO sightings in the skies, Keel alone widened his scope of investigation to include other unexplained phenomena in the American culture. Soon the others quickly began aping Keel's research.

"All over the world, hack writers sharpened their pencils, though, and stole from OTH as if the copyright laws did not exist. It became one of the most quoted and most plagiarized books in the field.", Keel wrote of his fellow colleagues.

So the question you might be asking yourself is: if this book is so important why didn't I hear of it? Well you can blame its rarity on Putnam publishing. In the early seventies the company decided to scale down it's UFO \ Occult division and focused more on adventure yarns and romance stories. So while Bantam was reprinting CHARIOTS OF THE GODS for the sixth time, OTH found it's way to the shelves of used book stores quickly to be snatched up by serious UFO researchers.

So what makes Keel's book so interesting? If I must sum it up to one thing it must be Keel's radical approach to viewing the unexplained such as UFOs, poltergeists, angels, and lake monsters as ultradimensional rather than extraterrestrial in origin. In other words, they're not from outer space but exist all around us - vibrating at different frequencies. And sometimes they cross over, or become part of our dimension.

Sometimes these occurrences became explained by the culture at the time as supernatural in origin. Here's an example: "Demonology is not just another crackpot-ology ... The manifestations and occurrences described in this imposing literature are similar, if not entirely identical, to the UFO phenomenon itself. Victims of demonomania (possession) suffer the very same medical and emotional symptoms as the UFO contactee." Keel also makes the same case for flying wheels and angels in the bible, voodoo, spiritualism, hauntings, and the occasional visit from a "man in black".

I would be remiss in my responsibilities as a book reviewer to insist that a UFO/Paranormal researcher should purchase a copy of John Keel's OPERATION TROJAN HORSE. The truth is that you should buy three copies; one for your personal library, the second to highlight, and the third to keep for the ages!

Book Review: Black Helicopters II: The End Game Strategy

2007-12-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

Black armored insectiods descend in swarms … Some are fitted with antennae and metal eyes for surveillance, while others bristle with weaponry, ready to transform an American neighborhood into a surrogate hell in a second. Around the country these dark marauders swarm the sky, ordinary citizens wonder if they are the harbingers of the end.

Is this the opening scene of a sci-fi flick? No. The insectoids are not giant alien bugs, but black helicopters. Is this a depiction of a possible future? No, they are here now!

Or so claims author Jim Keith in BLACK HELICOPTERS II: THE END GAME STRATEGY, a book that purports to reveal every frightening details of a vast government conspiracy. You may have read his first book on the phenomena, BLACK HELICOPTERS OVER AMERICA, but then he was not able to tell his whole story --- a story that will keep you up at night, perhaps, peering into the horizon.

It is Mr. Keith’s assertion that black helicopters are linked to everything from cattle mutilations to alien abductions and the Men In Black; and poses the questions that will be having all patriotic American reaching for their firearm, but wondering who to aim it at:

Just how are these helicopters involved in these strange occurrences?
Why are they photographing the home of ordinary citizens?
What is there relationship to the New World Order?
Are foreign troops already masses on our boards?
And is the media’s role in covering up this conspiracy?

Whether you believe in this conspiracy or not, this book is intelligently written and an interesting look at a more informed/paranoid segment of our society.

Reviewed by Cris Kollet

Book Review: 100 Bullets Volume 1 - First Shot, Last Call

2007-12-14T05:53:00.000-08:00

100 Bullets is an ambitious crime drama comic series, of which this graphic novel reprints the first five issues.

These first two story lines, "100 Bullets" and "Shot, Water Back", set up the premise the series is built upon. Individuals from all walks of live are approached by a mysterious man bearing an unusual gift; a suitcase containing a gun, one hundred untraceable bullets, and evidence pointing them to someone who has wronged them in the past.

But the offer of unpunished retribution is far from simple than it sounds, as the people suddenly faced with this blank check for revenge suddenly find themselves dealing with the concepts of Justice, Innocence, Morality, Loyalty, and Retribution.

Azzarello not only brings these philosophical dilemmas into the light, but also enhances them with mystery surrounding 'Agent Graves' and his offer. A chance at vengeance is a tempting offer, but what are the ulterior motives of the man with the briefcase? Does the chance to settle a score outweigh the risk of being used as a weapon for someone else's battle? What is truly at stake here, and who is really pulling the strings?

The first two story lines in 100 Bullets take us from crooked cops and greedy gang bangers in the urban jungles, to internet crimes and corporate power brokers. The stories and situations are modern, yet there is an undeniable Noir tone throughout, an unrelenting mood that never lets you forget that, despite the occasional moments of brightness and levity, there are no happy endings when violence and vengeance become a part of the background.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: Hellcats, Vixens & Vice Dolls edited by David Jacobs

2007-12-13T18:21:00.001-08:00

Violence and heartache on display on lurid detective magazine covers at the candy and cigar shops. Exploitation disguised as news designed to entertain and titillate the atomic generation with the exploits of axe murderesses, high-class call-girls and sex-crazed dope fiends. It worked then and it works now.

Hellcats, Vixens & Vice Dolls is a white-hot compilation of vicious retro crimes committed by the fairer sex so vivid in their detail of blood and perversion that they will leave the reader with the sensation of being worked over by a girl gang armed with a sack of nickels.

The no-nonsense, just the facts approach to this book reminded me of a spinning newspaper headline from a B&W crime movie or a radio announcer who interrupts the broadcast with news of a brutal crime. Because of it’s retro-reporting the vibe is pure noir with all the trappings, desperation and pathos of a sex-slay at Lovers Lane. Fetish and crime collide!

The man responsible for this ample lineup of doped-up and desperate dames is David Jacobs, true crime author from the popular Court TV paperback book series, and among the 50 true crime tales he selected are: Bloody Barbara, She Sawed Off His Head, The Sex Party Racket, and One Thousand Thugs and a Girl, She-Devil Running Wild, I’ll See You in Hell!, and Gateway to White Slavery.

If you are a true crime reader who likes your stiffs cold and your babes hot, be on the lookout for Hellcats, Vixens & Vice Dolls!

Book Signing

2007-12-13T13:19:00.000-08:00

Bill Cosby to sign Come On People! on 12/19/07, 7:00 PM at Barnes & Noble – Lincoln Center, NY.

About the book:

Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint have a powerful message for families and communities as they lay out their visions for strengthening America, or for that matter the world. They address the crises of people who are stuck because of feelings of low self-esteem, abandonment, anger, fearfulness, sadness, and feelings of being used, undefended and unprotected. These feelings often impede their ability to move forward. The authors aim to help empower people make the daunting transition from victims to victors. Come On, People! is always engaging, and loaded with heart-piercing stories of the problems facing many communities.

Book Review: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

2007-12-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

These days, with the abundance of books, movies, and television programs available on demand for instant entertainment, our knowledge tends to be informed by popular culture. Because of this, our intake of the dramatic simplification of most topics is outweighed drastically by factual representation.

With this in mind, it is no wonder that most of us envision dangerous people as wild-eyed lunatics noticeable a mile way, disheveled madmen that are encountered far and few between. As Martha Stout demonstrates in The Sociopath Next Door, there are people capable of unimaginable atrocities all around us, and not only do they appear like everyone else, but they might even be less conspicuous than one would hope.

If Good and Evil are opposites of the same coin, and Good people are those who care and feel for others, then it stands to reason that evil exists as people lacking the ability to care or love. These people exist, cold and calculating sociopaths unfettered by the restrictions of guilt or conscious, and they do so in alarming numbers reaching epidemic proportions. 4% of the US population are afflicted with Sociopathic Personalities, far greater than those afflicted with cancer. Meaning one out of every twenty-five people you meet feel no remorse or regret, and are capable of anything.

Martha Stout's book strikes an elegant balance between clinical facts and anecdotal examples, making this book an easy read that manages not to come off as either a fluffy fear-mongering diatribe or a stuffy jargon-laden medical tome. The examples created from personal case studies perfectly illustrate the points of each chapter, but don't detract from the factual or philosophical topics discussed. Despite chapters warning of the realities of the sociopaths among us, such as their alarming ability to blend in and even charm us into their confidence, her tone never reaches an alarmist level. This is a book that informs and prepares, without instilling false hope or blind panic in its audience. Also, while this topic is heavy with emotion, Stout never descends into supermarket tabloid prose. Apart from a slight detour into 9/11, which almost has no bearing on the topic at hand, the examination of the origins and ramifications of the human conscious remain informative and exploratory without becoming preachy. Especially interesting is the chapter that delves into the nature vs. nurture debate, in which she examines the genetic, environmental, and cultural influences that can help create or subdue a growing child's sociopathic tendencies.

If you have ever witnessed someone behaving extraordinarily ruthlessly or cruelly, and have wondered how someone could even bring themselves to act in such a manner, this book will go a long way towards satisfying your curiosity.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson

Book Review: 1984 by George Orwell

2007-12-13T04:22:00.000-08:00

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

My definition of a truly classic novel is one that is so talked about and referenced that you can know all about the book and it's message without having ever actually read it. 1984 is one of the most glaring examples of this, as terms such as "Big Brother" and "Doublespeak" are now mainstream concepts that no longer require explanation.

The book itself gained its popularity, however, by successfully reaching a broad audience through exaggerating and reducing the complicated debate of the illusion of free will and freedom of thought in any kind of government structure that strives to control and manipulate the populace for its own benefit in an almost unbelievable science fiction setting. The extremes that are reached in 1984 may seem only possible in a work of fiction (or, as the work is seldom referred to these days, Science Fiction), yet there is a truth beneath the pulp novel trappings that most readers can not avoid recognizing.

For those who have already read this, I have a suggestion. Read 1984 again, only assume that the book actually takes place in our modern times, and that the narrator is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Reviewed by S. Michael Wilson