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June 25, 2009

Within Manhattan's most publishing houses, it still remains a mystery why some extraordinary new books released with high expectations don't sell and end up on remainder tables, a phenomenon that filters down to the retail level.  Following cues from New York, we do more than our fair share of reading advance galleys, selecting those that we believe to be the best for our customers, and then personally promoting them in the store.  And again the mysterious rules of attraction are evident: there are novels, histories, and biographies that we praise as exceptionally enjoyable only to see them languish without buyers on our shelves. Over time, many of our customers discover a shared affinity with the enthusiasms of Carla, me, or one of our booksellers.  This week I'm brimming with excitement for my unexpected and never-flagging, wondrous, page-turning pleasure in BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS, a novel by Louis de Bernières.  Despite de Bernières's critically-acclaimed Corelli's Mandolin and despite over-the-top reviews, for some unfathomable reason, none of us at P&P chose to spend their off-work hours reading this novel when it was new.  It flew into the store beneath the radar. and that is where it has stayed for the last three years, but now I want to give de Bernières the attention he deserves. His novel's length, over 500 pages, could be considered a drawback, but that makes it perfect vacation reading - stretching out the pleasure of its pages.  In this rich, dense, multi-generational historical novel, de Bernières revisits the region of  Corelli's Mandolin and settles into an ethnic cauldron of Greeks, Ottomans, Italians, Balkan Serbs, and many more.  Within this micro world of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, there are see-sawing savage conflicts as well as fluid identities that allow for peaceful diverse communities tolerant of intermarriage.  De Bernières masterfully succeeds in presenting this grand epic with the narrative powers of Tolstoy.  One reviewer described Birds Without Wings as "a mesmerizing patchwork of horror, humor, and humanity." Expressed more succinctly, I was simply bowled over.

June 20, 2009

P&P at Shakespeare's birthplace. I'm having a good time. The weather is surprisingly good. Its strange to see England in sunshine. Matt

June 03, 2009

YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE YOU'LL FIND US This past weekend, I was at the information desk when Sarah Pickup-Diligenti, the Education Director of the Alliance Française, came in to pick up a book she had ordered. When I handed it to her, I heard the most extraordinary tale: The story began with a compliment, that Politics and Prose had been her lifeline ever since she arrived in Washington from her native France 14 years ago.  An incurable bibliophile, she had become anxious about what she would do for books when she came to our city.  One day shortly before her departure from Colomiers, a town outside Toulouse, she went to pick up her five-year-old son at his local judo class. Another young boy was there wearing a colorful T-shirt with the words "So Many Books, So Little Time" across the front. On the back, of course, was Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington D.C.  Immediately, she knew what her first stop in Washington would be, and she's been back countless times since then. Help Politics and Prose go global by putting a T-shirt in your bag wherever you go! Buy a t-shirt online through this link or come into the store to shop our selection. And if you send us a photo of our T-shirt in some foreign land, we'll put it on our website!

April 2nd, 2009

LOOKING BACK OVER 25 YEARS Welcoming Christopher Buckley back to Politics and Prose for Losing Mum and Pup last Friday night was such an enjoyable experience for both of us. Starting with his first comic political novel, The White House Mess in 1986, when Politics and Prose was only two years old and Christopher Buckley was only 34, we've been literary friends ever since. For those who have shunned us as too liberal, Politics and Prose has been supporting conservative Chris Buckley's funny fiction from his days as a speechwriter to President George H.W. Bush, through his allegiance to the George W. administration until last year when he defected to support Obama and immediately was fired by his father's ballast, The National Review. I'm thinking more and more about our upcoming 25th anniversary, and I was fascinated about one small slice of Christopher Buckley's event that showcased so well what has happened in the last 25 years. (You may remember that we were using 3X5 cards for our inventory the first year we were open.) Fast-forward to today's technology: My bookstore boyfriend in Oklahoma City - whom I have written about before - called me late last Friday afternoon to report that Chris Buckley had just appeared on Chris Matthew's MSNBC show, Hardball. Chris Matthews opened the conversation by recounting how I had told him many months before about the impending Buckley memoir. He had come running into Politics and Prose to purchase the book as soon as I had alerted him to its arrival. He continued by saying, that, just as I had predicted, he had loved the book and immediately invited Chris Buckley to be on his show. As you can imagine, this was all great fun to hear. What has changed in 25 years? Cable television, low-cost or free long distance calls on cellphones, email, and television on the internet. (I watched Chris Matthew's interview with Christopher Buckley later that evening on the MSNBC website.) Of course in 1984, Chris Matthews was modestly known as the Bureau Chief for the San Francisco Chronicle and former aide to the Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill. He didn't really become a mega-media presence until the publication of Hardball in 1988. Likewise, Chris Buckley was a journalist, and had not yet published any books. When Politics and Prose opened in 1984, Carla and I thought of ourselves as thoroughly modern because we knew how to use a word processor, but we never suspected then how many other technical skills we would have to acquire in the upcoming 25 years.

April 2nd, 2009

I felt a great deal of personal pleasure from hearing about three of the Pulitzer Prizes in the letters: for Annette Gordon-Reed's THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO; for Jon Meacham's biography of Andrew Jackson, AMERICAN LION; and for Elizabeth Strout's OLIVE KITTERIDGE.  The first two appeared at Politics and Prose to talk about their books.  I've been a big fan of Annette Gordon-Reed, and I did all that I could to find the large readership that she deserves.  Jon Meacham has been writing about the burgeoning concept of democracy in American history; and he found his perfect cauldron of advocacy and ambivalence in President Jackson. My biggest surprise and delight was for the choice of OLIVE KITTERIDGE, but not everyone is so pleased - my partner Carla, for one. She liked the book but hated Olive.  “She’s mean,” Carla says.   So now I've committed to myself to go back and reread these thirteen connected short stories hoping to better articulate my reasons for so loving the book, and so loving Olive. Elizabeth Strout's own explanation of why she chose thirteen linked stories helped me to understand our differences:  "Olive is a very powerful force on the page, and to have her at the center of a traditional novel would be too intense."  Louisa Thomas wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "The pleasure in reading 'Olive Kitteridge' comes from an intense identification with complicated, not always admirable, characters...There's simply the honest recognition that we need to try to understand people, even if we can't stand them." Many of our customers have thanked me for recommending the book to them; several have tepidly told me that they didn't like it all that much. This is a great choice for bookgroups because of the controversy it incites, and for this reason, I'm all the more anxious to experience Olive again. All three of these, along with M.S.Merwin’s Poetry collection THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS and Douglas Blackmon’s General Nonfiction winner SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, are on display in the front window in limited quantities with more to come soon. Click here to buy one of them today (or, if we do run out, to be notified first as soon as our stock is replenished). .

April 2nd, 2009

I'm halfway through Arthur Phillips's THE SONG IS YOU, the new novel that has been so enthusiastically received by Marie Arana in Book World and Kate Christensen in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, and now, trying to use an appropriate metaphor, I wholeheartedly join the chorus of praise. We booked Arthur Phillips back in 2002 for his first novel, Prague,  and since then he has returned twice, for The Egyptologist and Angelica. As we've been with him from the very beginning, I’m eagerly anticipating our event with him on April 30th. Although I enjoyed his first three novels, nothing prepared me for the rapture of The Song is You.  Don't read this if you require a straightforward story because you won't get that here.  What you will get is fine lyrical writing, metaphors and similes to die for, and most of all, the magical recreation of how the mind, the heart, and the body open their gateways to the recalibrating process of music and its beat. This morning's Washington Post carried an interesting article about a dull-sounding e-book that has made quite a splash in the e-publishing world only because of its rapid assembly and moderate sales. Although e-books will have to wait a generation beyond me before they hit the big money, I had a clear vision, for the first time, of the possibilities that media futurists could provide with a book like The Song is You.  First, it would be searchable for every fragment of a Billie Holliday line, as well as any older melodies echoing through the iPod's current siren song.  Then, there could be countless clickable digressions on riffs, Reflex concert reunions, Ella, Janis, Glenn, etc., plus the never-ending genealogies of a singer, a song, who influenced whom, who sang with whom, ad infinitum. And the final extravaganza of this multimedia fantasy would be the soundtrack for the song on the page, or in this case, on the Sony Reader. No. . ., you don't need any of this to enjoy The Song is You, . . . but it is fun to fantasize.

April 2nd, 2009

I’m just back from a trip to Morocco-Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, and Marrakesh, a fascinating encounter with Muslim culture in this exotic former French colony on the Mediterranean basin.  Whenever Carla or I travel, one of the most important decisions is the selection of what to take to read.  Right before I left on this trip, it was my luck that a new edition of Marguerite Duras’s THE SAILOR FROM GIBRALTAR ($12.95), published by Open Letter, an imprint from the University of Rochester dedicated to literature in translation, arrived on my desk.  It turned out to be the perfect pick for the voyage. Years ago in the sixties, I saw the Tony Richardson film based on this novel, starring Jeanne Moreau, Vanessa Redgrave, and Orson Welles, and I retain a faint, but fond recollection of this sultry story of obsessive love under the Mediterranean sun.  Marguerite Duras is best known to us for the Prix Goncourt she received in 1984 for The Lover.  The Sailor From Gibraltar dates from several decades earlier, 1952, and it’s easy to see the influences of Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) and Albert Camus (The Stranger), with a little bit of Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) towards the end.  You can hear the disaffected voice of Camus’s Mersault in the narrator’s offhand recital of the end of an affair followed by his story of a beautiful wealthy widow who owns a yacht that meanders around Mediterranean ports in an obsessive, alcohol-fueled search of a lost love from the past, the sailor from Gibraltar.  Only gradually does it slip that the time spent together with her passionate love was one of boredom and malaise. And in other ports, there have been many other lovers.  Self-delusion and lack of insight penetrate this hypnotic existential tale, but that didn’t keep me from turning the pages under the warm Moroccan sun.

March 19th, 2009

If you're in the mood for a good adventure yarn, there isn't one much better than David Grann's THE LOST CITY OF Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, an Indiana-Jones type saga that is sure to be picked up by some movie producer!  In fact, the National Geographic Society has already hosted an evening with David Grann at their "Quest for Adventure" series at their headquarters in downtown Washington. In the early 20th century, Colonel Percy Fawcett set out for the Amazon in search of a lost civilization that reportedly possessed several tons of gold.  The Amazon, which is about the size of the continental United States, also boasted cannibals, rodents the size of pigs, flesh-eating bees, and Indians with poison-tipped arrows. In his repeated return trips, Fawcett carefully recorded his findings and adventures. His diaries are so filled with jungle horrors that it's difficult for a 21st century urbanite to understand the depth of his obsession for this fabled city of riches. On his last trip, Colonel Fawcett recruited his son and the son's friend as fellow explorers.  You just know that after so many brushes with death, his luck had to end.  And end it did; at some point, the three completely disappeared.  As a measure of the adversities that Fawcett encountered and recorded, David Grann, who unsuccessfully tried to track down the three explorers, conjures up such fantasies as poisoning by lethal frogs or bodily consumption by carnivorous worms.  It sounds gruesome, but it is a fantastic adventure!

March 12th, 2009

Last fall I was a big fan of Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello, which went on to win the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction.  Gordon-Reed's painstaking research of Monticello historical documents led her to the conclusion that the existence of a close relationship, including sexual, between Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson was an incontestable fact.   Now, a new book has appeared that should be of great interest to Jefferson scholars, lay and professional. With the encouragement of experts at Monticello, B. Bernetiae Reed, an amateur genealogist, has written a new study, THE SLAVE FAMILIES OF THOMAS JEFFERSON (Sylvest-Sarah), an impressive two-volume work that documents the lives of 619 slaves living at Monticello. Reed researched the work with Jefferson's Farm Book, a journal used to record births and deaths of the 619 slaves.  Aside from broadly annotated genealogy charts, Reed has filled her volumes with many photos, illustrations, and maps. The Jefferson Library has praised her book as "massive and magnificent", and the new study has been already praised by Choice Magazine and the Journal of Southern History.  It’s expensive, $250, but until June 30th, there is a pre-publication price of $200.  We will be happy to pre-order it for you, and call you when it arrives at the end of June.

March 5th, 2009

JAMES GOODE AND SCULPTURE IN WASHINGTON James Goode, the art and architecture historian who has authored such elegant books as Best Addresses: A Century of Washington's Distinguished Apartment Houses, and Capital Losses: a Cultural History of Washington's Destroyed Buildings, has revised and reissued his volume on the outdoor sculpture of Washington. This gorgeous new edition, WASHINGTON SCULPTURE: A Cultural History of Outdoor Sculpture in the Nation's Capital (Johns Hopkins Univ., $75), now covers all the regional sculpture since 1974 (date of the original edition), including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and works in nearby Maryland and Virginia. From my neighborhood, Friendship Heights, the friendly bronze policeman standing on South Park Avenue is featured, as is the commanding statue of General Stonewall Jackson astride his horse, Old Sorrell, that graces the Manassas National Battlefield Park. It was here that Jackson got his famous nickname, when General Barnard Lee cried out to his troops, "There stands Jackson like a stone wall." For all who love local history, this volume is a must. Dick Cavett with Updike, Cheever & Mailer Friday, March 13th, Blake Bailey will be at the store to talk about his new biography of John Cheever.  For those who want some enjoyable homework before they come, read Dick Cavett’s February 13th column in the New York Times about Cheever and John Updike when they appeared together on his show in 1981. There’s a link in the blog to a wonderful video clip of the three, Cavett, Cheever, and Updike sitting and talking. The two fiction giants are cordial to each other to a fault.  Cavett writes, “They elevate praise to an art form.” (to watch the clip click here) For a sharp contrast, see another twosome, Vidal and Mailer, on Dick Cavett’s show (here)  A couple of weeks later, Cavett returned to his earlier blog with some additional stories about these two literary lions. (here).  I loved an anecdote reported by Cavett: Chatting along with his host,  Updike slipped, “I could have sworn in court that I am not smoking these days.  Then yesterday I edited some pages and, amazed, looked down and there were eleven butts in the ashtray.”   Read it all, you’ll enjoy every bit of it.

February 26th, 2009

A Second Valentine’s Day Valentine's Days is the name of a chapter about a Chicago mob trial in a tremendously entertaining paperback I've read this past week, RULE 53: Capturing  Hippies, Spies, Politicians, and Murderers in an American Courtroom. The author, Andy Austin, is a Chicago artist who sketches trial participants for the media because Rule 53 prohibits cameras in courtrooms. Austin began her career in 1969 when she was hired by ABC to cover the conspiracy trial of the Chicago 7; the defendants included Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and Bobby Seale.  From the beginning, in this courtroom circus, Andy displayed a talent not only for sketching but also for reporting the daily tumult.  She has a special gift for describing the proceedings as simultaneously shocking and funny, outrageous and worthy of sympathy. Chicago writer Nelson Algren wrote that Cook County Criminal Courthouse was essential to every young writer's education. Andy's descriptions of the players in these legal dramas prove she's learned the Algren lesson well. "The stories I heard as I drew fascinated and educated me. I learned that the courthouse is the grand bazaar of American life."  She's very, very funny in recounting the preening Chicago mobsters on trial for a long list of charges, from tax fraud to racketeering to murder.  The trial began appropriately on Valentine's Day, 62 years after the notorious Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.  Austin writes, "They looked like a casting call for a Mafia movie."  One defense attorney, attired in cowboy boots and a nylon bomber jacket, and who spoke with a Shakespearean actor's voice, was known as the most entertaining lawyer in the city.  Another defense attorney protested, with injured innocence, that the government had a hidden vendetta, persecuting these men of Italian descent simply because all "their names ended in vowels." I would ruin your enjoyment of this great treat if I told you more.  Rule 53 comes with quotes of praise from Scott Turow, Studs Terkel, and Sara Paretsky.

February 19th, 2009

I celebrated Valentine's Day by going to a book party for Abigail Trafford's AS TIME GOES BY. With the subtitle, Boomerang Marriages, Serial Spouses, Throwback Couples, and Other Romantic Adventures in an Age of Longevity, it gives you the  idea that later-life relationships can cover a wide range. Some of the couples profiled in the book also appeared at the book party.  Among them was a couple who each had their own relationship to Politics and Prose.  They met, they discovered their common interest, they became engaged, and they married--at Politics and Prose!  It's our only bookstore wedding so far, a relatively simple ceremony at 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning, followed by lots of popping Champagne corks.  This was such a wonderful story that I didn't want to interrupt it with my own, but this Post-Valentine’s week, I'm going to go public with my own boyfriend. First, the flowers pictured above are this year's Valentine gift from my boyfriend. The arrangement stands about three feet tall and it boasts many kinds of roses, an equal mixture of orchids, Calla lilies, iris, protea, and several other species that I can't identify.  If you would like to order a similar arrangement for yourself, call Greenworks (202-265-3334).  My flowers invite a wide array of reactions. Amongh the staff, no male bookseller can allow himself to think of sending Valentine flowers after he's seen this in all its ostentation.  For the females receiving a little bouquet of roses, they wilt when holding them next to this vase.  On the morning of the 13th, when the flowers arrived (always order Valentine flowers the day before, my boyfriend advises), one woman exclaimed "Good grief, he must really love you."  When I repeated this to my friend, he said, "Well, I do!" In the life o fthe store, the most important thing any new employee learns is the sound of the soft drawl of Barbara's Boyfriend from Oklahoma City.  He calls every day, sometimes twice, even three times.  And I call him, too! Many times it is to check on whether a present has arrived.  Over the years, I have received 2 15-inch birthday cakes for one birthday, the best that Cake Love has to offer; cherry pies; apple pies, candied apples, cookies, cheese, several whole smoked hams from the vendor named for the best smoked hams in the country by the Rosengarten Report; Ortrud Carstens' handmade Haute Chocolature from Manhattan; four live lobsters shipped from Maine; cartons of Taylor Butter Bean Soup from Carlinvillle, Illinois, a real gourmet treat. But he doesn't just send gifts.  He's a omnivorous reader and orders lots of books, many as gifts and many for himself.  In return, I send him lots of advance galleys of books that I think he would enjoy.  He's as every bit as appreciative as he is generous. Everyone here wants to clone my boyfriend from Oklahoma City.  I told him that I'm sending medical consent forms to make this possible.  He's so in demand that I could never reveal his name, but I will tell you one little secret:  I have never met my boyfriend from Oklahoma City.  Several years ago I threatened to fly out to Oklahoma to meet him and here was his reply:  "This relationship means so much to me that I could never risk how our actually meeting could change it.”

February 5th, 2009

My one consolation from the folding of the Washington Post's "Book World" is that editor Marie Arana will have more time to write fiction now that she has taken off her green shade.  Some two years ago, what I think is her first novel, Cellophane, appeared, a novel that I loved and have handsold to many customers.  In rich, dense, sensuous writing about four generations a Peruvian family in the Amazon, Arana's imaginative story is memorable in its characters.  Now I have just finished Arana's second novel, the just-published LIMA NIGHTS. Just as I suspected, the characters are outsized and colorful; the story travels along with many unexpected twists and turns. Arana loves all her characters, and in writing about them she spreads her affections, even to meandering husbands. But what I loved most about Lima is the way in which Arana turned what could have been a moral tale into a bang-up ending featuring a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a fortune-teller, and a psychic all richly adding their interpretations to the failed relationship of our heroine, Maria.

January 22th, 2009

On Monday night Leonard Downie, formerly the executive editor of the Washington Post, read from his new Washington thriller, THE RULES OF THE GAME, his first venture into the world of fiction.  I had just finished reading it over the weekend and had many dog-eared pages to ask Len Downie about. The first most obvious question we all wanted to ask was whether his female vice-president, who becomes president, was modeled after Sarah Palin.  The answer was no; the character was conceived some five years ago, but Downie humorously brushed aside a suggestion that his predictions for the future were remarkably accurate.  A customer asked whether the main character, a female investigative reporter who receives constant 4 a.m. phone calls from an anonymous source, was modeled on anyone, and Downie revealed that actually it was he who had been frequently wakened in the early hours of the morning when the Post was investigating Oliver North's role in Iran-Contra, and warned about terrible consequences if the Post continued its coverage.  Aside from the little juicy tidbits about the real world's rearrangement into fiction, Downie's Rules of the Game is a great page-turner with an attendant higher purpose: the ethical conundrums of politics and journalism as they are both played out in Washington.

January 22th, 2009

It would be difficult to exaggerate the euphoria here in the store.  Customers from out of town are buying piles of souvenirs: pins, playing cards, trading cards, hats, sweatshirts.  In the midst of all this frenzy we completely sold out of our Obama tribal scarves from Ghana, but we will have more back in a couple of weeks.  From our perspective, we are witnessing a fervor that we have never seen in the 25-year history of Politics and Prose.  People of all ages in the store have been openly weeping.  My imagination has been leading me to conjure up local hospital emergency rooms overcrowded with completely overwhelmed and/or overexcited Obama fans desperately in need of smelling salts. Sometimes during the day today we remember we are a bookstore. Simon Winchester called a customer from Geneva with the message to convey his inaugural good wishes to us.  Newsweek journalist Jonathan Alter called requesting to stop in to sign copies of his THE DEFINING MOMENT, an  assessment of the first 100 days of FDR's administration. We now have two dozen signed copies of this book that has so interested Barack Obama.  On television here we have been watching our friend Doris Kearns Goodwin comment on the inauguration ceremonies.  Goodwin's book, TEAM OF RIVALS,  is another volume that has been on Obama's reading list.  After its publication three years ago, it remains one of our bestsellers.

December 18th, 2008

No sooner had I finished Francine du Plessix Gray's new colorful biography, MADAME DE STAEL: The First Modern Woman, than I ran into the author again in Nelson Aldrich's delightful collection of stories  and anecdotes  about George Plimpton, GEORGE, BEING GEORGE. Ms. Gray was born in the French Embassy in Warsaw, grew up in Paris, and as a young woman in Paris became part of the literary constellation surrounding the birth of the Paris Review. I think she must have possessed many of the same female charms as Madame de Stael, because she was courted by George, and the Review's first managing editor was said to be rendered paralyzed with love for her. Madame De Stael was said to possess such personal charms that she could lure any suitor into her den.  One of her earliest lovers after her unhappy, arranged marriage to a Swedish diplomat was Tallyrand. From then on, Mme. De Stael amassed a large circle of lovers, many introduced to her by previous lovers, and two of whom fathered her children. There were also many swains in her personal  entourage at the same time.  But despite her romantic conquests, Mme. De Stael's real interests were in French literary and political life. Her salon, the most brilliant in Paris, was attended by the finest minds, while in darker venues, her ceaseless political machinations earned the anger and enmity of Napoleon, who eventually exiled her. In exile she continued to hold her salons and to write both fiction and essays. Her life was so full, her character so forceful, and her literary goals so passionate, that it is easy to understand why Francine du Plessix Gray was attracted to her.

December 11th, 2008

During the last decade in which C-Span2's BookTV has been filming author talks at Politics and Prose, behind the camera has been C-SPAN videojournalist Richard Hall, who has Co-produced, with Simone Fary his own DVD, American Feud: A History of Conservatives and Liberals ($15; available at P&P).  Last week I took American Feud home to check it out and found it to be the perfect present for all the politicos on my holiday list.  The film includes interviews with a number of commentators and columnists, including Kevin Phillips, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Frank, Mona Charen, Michael Kazin, Michael Barone, and Howard Zinn.  Do they clarify the differences between a liberal and a conservative?  Partly, but they also succeed in raising a number of issues that stir up enough confusion in party labels that possibly the only solution is a third party.  Or perhaps they can't agree on definitions (i.e., what is a progessive?), or maybe the debate is occurring in different time zones, 19th century versus the 21st.  Whatever the answer is, American Feud offers an informative and entertaining ninty minutes of pondering where the differences lie, and it will be a unique gift for anyone on your list boning up on Democrats and Republicans in the American political landscape.

December 4th, 2008

The Friday night before Thanksgiving, Vernon Jordan came to speak to a packed store about his new book, MAKE IT PLAIN, a memoir of a dozen speeches he has given in the years 1971 to 2008.  For each of these speeches he supplies a gloss of the background events.  The last speech in this volume was delivered at Howard University in the Spring of 2008 and it superbly places the 2008 presidential campaign in historical context, a wonderful primer on the small steps which have added up to produce America's first black president.  Although he supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Jordan’s contributions to a changed and receptive political climate have been immeasurable. On a lighter side, in the question-and-answer period, one customer asked Jordan why he had never run for political office.  Jordan replied that once in high school he entered a race for the student council and lost.  Since then, he said, he knew he never wanted to have to give a concession speech again. Another asked Jordan what he thought of President-elect Obama's appointment of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff.  There was a long pause.  Then the answer: "Well, I support it but I think that when Rahm tells someone to go to hell, he needs to learn how to say that in a manner in which they think they will enjoy the trip."

November 19th, 2008

Last night we had a magical evening with Terry Tempest Williams, the environmental activist and passionate advocate for social justice, here to talk about her new book, FINDING BEAUTY IN A BROKEN WORLD. Terry first visited Politics and Prose 17 years ago with her first book, Refuge, and she has returned for every book since. On 9/11 she happened to be in Washington for a conference. Once the skies were shut down, she called Politics and Prose to ask if we could work up a forum with her, offering mutual solace to our community, and, of course, to herself. It turned into an incredible evening, one that both Terry and I vividly recalled last night, and in the audience were a number of customers who had been with us on that evening. Last night Terry brought with her Louis Gakuma, a young man who served as her translator while she was in Rwanda participating in building a monument to the genocide. Louis's parents asked Terry and her husband Brooke to bring Louie back to America, acting as his "developmental parents." Louie is now studying American politics at a community college in Salt Lake City and dreams of finding an internship in Washington, D.C. Immediately, a couple who are Politics and Prose members, offered him a room in their house if Louie succeeds in coming to Washington. The inauguration of President Barack Obama has made his dream even more appealing. Just as the Iraqi cab driver appeared in the store out of nowhere to reach across the divide on the night Terry was here after 9/11, two diplomats from the Embassy of Rwanda arrived to meet Louie and offer their support to his rapidly developing plans. Check back later and we'll let you know how he's faring in his trajectory from Rwanda to Salt Lake City and on to Washington, D.C. For more of Barbara’s Bylines, click here.

 

October 30, 2008

Twenty-four years ago I spent an evening with Tony Hillerman, who died yesterday, and his wife, when he was part of a mystery-author panel. Since then I've frequently retold a humorous anecdote he recounted that night about his interviewing a young candidate for a position in the English literature department at the University of New Mexico, where Tony Hillerman taught. The applicant, earnestly trying to make a good impression, spoke at length about how much he enjoyed the poetry of William Butler Yeetz (Yeats). By Hillerman's account, he patiently listened without interruption until the candidate had finished and then he said he had found his comments very interesting, but added, almost parenthetically, "Around here we call him "Yates." At that the young man replied, "And, oh, I love Kates (Keats) too."   For previous postings to Barbara’s Byline, click here.

 

October 8, 2008

Two or three times a year I get an email like this one, that came last week: “Why is it that liberals who claim to be "all inclusive" are the first to exclude anything and everything that doesn't jive with their own belief systems?  There have been thousands of wonderful books written by conservative authors as well. Books for both young and old. Open your minds, what are you afraid of? Or change the store name to Liberal Politics and Prose.” I wish I knew where people who frequent bookstores get these ideas. Yes, we let our liberal preferences be known quite frequently, but we’ve got plenty of books on our shelves that disagree, some quite stridently, with our preferences.  We have 55 titles, including THE CASE AGAINST BARACK OBAMA, from Regnery Publishing, a good conservative publisher right here in Washington, D.C.  Here’s what I replied to my correspondent.  If you should hear someone voicing the same sort of complaints about Politics and Prose, please refer them to me.   Thanks for sending on your thoughts, but I want you to know that we try to include all parts of the political spectrum here.  We had Jenna Bush speak at the store earlier this year and we had Ross Douthat last month, presenting his new book, THE GRAND NEW PARTY, which is also on display in the front of the store.  Also on prominent display there are William Buckley's THE REAGAN I KNEW, Pat Choate's DANGEROUS BUSINESS, and Andrew Bacevich's THE LIMITS OF POWER.  A couple of weeks ago in our weekly newsletter I wrote a long piece about Bacevich, a conservative, and how wonderful his book is.  You are absolutely right, that there have been thousands of wonderful books written by conservative authors, and we carry all the new conservative books and some of the older ones, the ones that still sell.  On that basis we are also carrying Jerome Corsi's extreme right wing OBAMA NATION.  We ordered 11 copies of that title, but we have only sold four in the last two months.  I hope we can do a better job at being your bookseller than you think we are.  Best, Barbara Meade

 

October 1, 2008

Last week Shelf-Awareness, an online daily newsletter for the book industry, carried this thoughtful list of titles providing deeper insight into what's in today's headlines:

As Wall Street waits for a rescue, booksellers and librarians are highlighting titles to help consumers understand how things could go so bad and how the mess might be cleaned up. Quite a few authors anticipated the current crisis. Among the highest-rated, gilt-edged titles:

THE NEW PARADIGM FOR FINANCIAL MARKETS: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, by George Soros (PublicAffairs, $22.95), published in May. Glen Robbe, trade book manager at the Stanford Bookstore, Stanford, Calif., said that the store has "done very well" with the book, which is "designed for lay people who are looking to learn more than what they're getting in newspapers."

THE TRILLION DOLLAR MELTDOWN: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, by Charles R. Morris (PublicAffairs, $22.95), published in March. Praveen Madan, co-owner of the Booksmith, San Francisco, Calif., noted that "with uncanny accuracy, Charles Morris predicted the current crisis and even estimated the magnitude of it. . . . Although the book does get a bit technical in some parts, most of it is written in such a way that even people without an advance finance degree can understand the basics."

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein (Picador, $16), published in paperback in June. Glen Robbe of the Stanford Bookstore called this title "prescient." He called the hardcover book trailer for the book "so compelling that you can't not want to read the book after seeing it."

FINANCIAL SHOCK: A 360-Degree Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis, by Mark Zandi (FT Press, $24.99), published in July.  Chief economist and co-founder of Moody's Economy.com, Zandi "called the mess before it happened," Maureen Montecchio, community relations manager at Barnes & Noble in Devon, Pa., said. "The book is written in layman's terms. As my sister the stockbroker put it to me, 'Even you could understand it.' "

THE SUBPRIME SOLUTION: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It, by Robert Shiller (Princeton University Press, $16.95 ), published in August. Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten of 800-CEO-READ, the business book part of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, commented: "Shiller's work on housing values is well-known and originally established in Irrational Exuberance. This book describes pretty clearly the mortgage crisis we are in and offers some solutions to get out."

I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt., by Addison Wiggin and Kate Incontrera (Wiley, $19.95), published  September 29. Carol Hill, owner of Book Mine, Leadville, Colo., said that this book, written as a companion book to the documentary of the same title released in August, is "very readable, with the obvious advantage that it also provides a picture of where we are today. As the blurb on the back notes, it is 'defiantly nonpartisan,' including interviews with Warren Buffet, Alice Rivlin, Robert Rubin, Ron Paul, Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan and Paul O'Neill among others."

BAD MONEY: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, by Kevin Phillips (Viking, $25.95), published  in April. By the author of American Theocracy and American Dynasty, Bad Money notes that 20% of the economy is based on finance and if it is in trouble, it will have a major effect on the rest of the economy. Oh yes.

BEYOND GREED AND FEAR: Understanding Behavioral Finance and the Psychology of Investing, by Hersh Shefrin (Oxford University Press, $19.95), published last year. This book explains "the behavioral factors that guide the decision-making processes of Wall Street professionals."

For some understanding of the outlook of the current Fed chairman and his predecessor:

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE: Adventures in a New World, by Alan Greenspan (Penguin, $17), published in paperback earlier this month. Robbe of the Stanford Bookstore said that the paperback edition with its new epilogue includes "more information" from the former Fed chairman and "has some important things to say."

Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten of 800-CEO-READ noted that "many are laying the blame [for the crisis] at Mr. Greenspan's feet" and that Greenspan's epilogue outlines "his thoughts on the current crisis."

ESSAYS ON THE GREAT DEPRESSION, by Ben Bernanke (Princeton University Press, $29.95), published in 2004, offers "insight into what the current Fed chairman is thinking" and "reading his perspective on the last event of this magnitude may help understand what he does in this one," Covert and Sattersten noted.

For an understanding of other similar crises:

WHEN GENIUS FAILED: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, by Roger Lowenstein (Random House, $14.95), which first appeared in 2001. Glen Robbe said this story of the 1998 collapse of the hedge fund and the bailout organized by the Fed "foreshadowed what's going on today" and has "a really good narrative."

In a review, Todd Sattersten said that Lowenstein shows "how blind arrogance brought down the company and almost the entire financial system" and offers "a case study for how markets defy formulaic explanation." He added, "this was peanuts compared to the current crisis."

THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (Portfolio, $16), first published in 2003. In a review, Jack Covert of 800-CEO-BOOK wrote with foresight that Enron's failure could happen again "when you have hubris at the CEO level, sales peoples' compensation based on short term success, upper level people totally focused on growth to satisfy short term Wall Street success, an accounting system that supports this concept, and finally an accounting firm that doesn't do a good job of oversight. Add to this a deregulated industry and watch what happens."

A look at how high finance affects people far from Wall Street:

THE BIG SQUEEZE: Tough Times for the American Worker, by Steven Greenhouse (Knopf, $25.95 ), an April book. Aaron Curtis, quartermaster of the buying office at Books & Books in Florida, said the book, which includes suggestions and examples for improving the lot of working-class America, is "not Wall Street specific but very relevant."

Some titles arriving soon will garner a lot more attention than anticipated even a month ago. Among them:

THE PARTNERSHIP: The Making of Goldman Sachs, by Charles D. Ellis (Penguin Press, $37.95), coming October 7. Ellis is an investment banker and longtime strategy consultant to the investment bank that just this week sold a $5 billion stake to legendary investor Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway. Speaking of whom . . .

THE SNOWBALL: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder (Bantam, $35), appeared on Monday. A former insurance industry analyst and managing director at Morgan Stanley, Schroeder had full access to Buffett.

FIXING GLOBAL FINANCE, by Martin Wolf (Johns Hopkins University Press, $24.95). The publisher is just shipping copies of this book, which is by the associate editor and chief economics commentator for the Financial Times.

THE ASCENT OF MONEY: A Financial History of the World, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, $29.95), will be published November 13. Nathan R. Maharaj, category manager at Indigo Books & Music in Canada, says that this and the following book by Michael Lewis "may be the best reading" until a year from now, when, at the earliest, we will begin to see "the best books about the current crisis--the ones that are fundamentally great reading experiences, not just extended newspaper articles."

 

PANIC: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, by Michael Lewis (Norton, $27.95),  will be published December 1. Covert and Sattersten said this book about five recent meltdowns--the crash of 1987, the Russian default, the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble and sub-prime mortgage disaster--is "bound to be brilliant." Lewis wrote Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and more.

BERNANKE’S TEST: Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and the Drama of the Central Banker, by Johan Van Overtveldt (Agate, $26), will be published in January. The book is by a Belgian economist who argues that the mess confronting the Fed chairman was created by his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, and that Bernanke is well prepared for the current crisis.

BAILOUT NATION: How Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, by Barry Ritholtz (McGraw-Hill, $24.95), will be published in January. The title says it all.

September 23, 2008

Last night Annette Gordon-Reed came to Politics and Prose to talk about her new book, THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO and for both the book and the store, it was an event with a history.  I had first met Annette Gordon-Reed in 2001 at a very fancy dinner in New York given by Peter Osnos, the publisher of PublicAffairs Books, to honor Vernon Jordan, Annette, and the new memoir Annette had helped Vernon with, Vernon Can Read.

Vernon stood to tell the story about how, several years before, he had wanted to publish a memoir and although Vernon could read, Vernon couldn’t write, and he decided he would need some professional help.   So one Sunday afternoon he came to Politics and Prose to browse the shelves of our African-American section to look for a potential collaborator, and he carried home with him Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.  Last night Annette resumed the story, relating a telephone call from a man who said his name was Vernon Jordan, V-E-R-N-O-N and he was a lawyer who needed some help in writing a memoir. He went on to tell her that he had just read her new book about Sally Hemings that he had bought at Politics and Prose and was convinced that she was the best possible person to help.  Somewhere along the way Vernon Jordan must have done a lot of sugar-talking because Annette was already knee-deep in and fairly obsessed with the research for her new book, yet she put that aside for a couple of years to work on Vernon Can Read.
 
Last night Annette told this personal story and I talked about what an historic marker I feel her book, The Hemingses of Monticello, has created.  In 1802 a journalist, James Callendar, publicly charged that Thomas Jefferson had kept a slave, Sally Hemings, as a “concubine” and had fathered children by her. Periodically for the next 200 years these same allegations appeared, and it became a full-time industry for the establishment of white male American History teachers to strike them down.  Dumas Malone, the most revered Jefferson scholar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his six-volume biography of Jefferson, staunchly maintained the impossibility of any sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings because it would be inconsistent with Jefferson’s  moral character. Joseph Ellis, whose biography of Jefferson, American Sphinx, was awarded the National Book Award, likewise summarily dismissed the allegations as having no basis in fact, “a tin can tied to Jefferson’s reputation.” In 1998 DNA testing confirmed the likelihood of Jefferson paternity of at least one of the Hemings children, and Joseph Ellis has since done a lot of backsliding.  There is even a quotation from Ellis on the jacket of The Hemingses of Monticello: “[Gordon-Reed] demonstrates conclusively that we must put aside Gone with the Wind forever and begin to study Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”  
 
 When I introduced Annette Gordon-Reed last night, I told the audience that I hoped they would recognize the accomplishment and courage of our author, who persisted in challenging a white male history establishment that for 200 years refused to even entertain the possibility of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and a slave, and who won awards and prizes for such a stance, while Annette’s earlier Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings received mostly scathing reviews from the male historians until the DNA discovery.  
 

September 18, 2008

A new biography of Roald Dahl, THE IRREGULARS, highlighting the wartime years he spent in Washington, is a wonderfully colorful accounting of an otherwise checkered life. Recruited by the famous Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, whose code name was Intrepid, Dahl charmed and seduced a flock of rich and/or beautiful and/or powerful young Washington figures, including Clare Booth Luce and Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, who was also having an affair with Ian Fleming. Part of Roald Dahl's spying mission was to report all such pillow talk as well as to manufacture useful rumors. Beyond the bedrooms, Dahl was a frequent guest of Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park and the White House and a regular guest at the dinner parties frequently given at Evelyn Walsh McLean's mansion, Friendship. Being a good spy, Dahl faithfully relayed to his superiors—including Isaiah Berlin—the political and diplomatic gossip from cocktail conversations with the power elite. Despite such shaky espionage operations, the intelligence network, officially known as British Security, succeeded in securing America's support in the British war effort.

Jennet Conant, the author of this new biography, has done all her homework well. While noting that spies are "notoriously unreliable narrators,” she has nevertheless had access to a treasure trove of papers. She has previously written about Alfred Loomis in Tuxedo Park and Robert Oppenheimer in 109 East Palace and both books have well showcased her research and writing skills.

August 28, 2008

I've so much enjoyed the poet Donald Hall's new memoir, UNPACKING THE BOXES (Houghton Mifflin, $24), but it's not for everyone.  I'm rating it PG-60.  Under that age you're much too young to appreciate such a richly lived life. Hall recounts his childhood on a New Hampshire dairy farm, moves through his first summer at Bread Loaf as a sixteen-year-old, where he met Robert Frost, and goes on to Harvard where he studied poetry with John Ciardi.  Two of his fellow students there were Edward Gorey and Frank O'Hara. About Ciardi, Hall says, "As his wealth increased so did his girth, while his poetry and his literary reputation lapsed downward."  Hall loves to gossip and his little asides contribute to the delight of this book. A year at Christ Church ("the party school”) in Oxford expanded his literary circle to include George Plimpton, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin.  In the later part of his life he married poet Jane Kenyon, some 20 years younger than he.  She died much too young, in her forties, of leukemia, and in  the latter part of his book he writes about grief with the same elegance and pathos that Joan Didion does in The Year of Magical Thinking. 

August 20, 2008

With September on the horizon, the fall books are just beginning to come in. Last week I grabbed a copy of a new book I had been waiting for, MS. HEMPEL CHRONICLES, out of a Harcourt box.  This is a new work of fiction by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum who was a National Book Award finalist for her earlier novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping.  Bynum teaches writing at the University of California, but nothing prepared me for how funny and endearing her portrait of Beatrice Hempel is.  If I tell you that Ms. Hempel is a middle school English teacher, please don't lose interest. You will never meet anyone so funny, so tough, and perhaps jaundiced as Ms. Hempel is in dealing with a classroom of adolescents. I frequently have a let-down feeling that a new book is less than it was cracked up to be, but in this case my expectations were surpassed.

I can't leave August without telling you about my great find, my nomination for the best summer sleeper,

TOUCHING HISTORY: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies over America on 9/11.  The book is written by Lynn Spencer, a first-time author, Duke graduate, and commercial pilot.  To call this book riveting would be an understatement. After I started reading it, I struggled to stop for meals and sleep.  It's awfully unsettling, too: the rumors and the chaos in the skies from lack of communication or inaccuracy of information are hard to fathom.  Those of us watching CNN that day knew more than the control towers and the FAA knew.  Lynn Spencer does a tremendous job of recreating the confusion of all the flight crews grasping to understand what was happening.  I'll be giving many copies of this as gifts at holiday time, the perfect book for those who are not necessarily good readers.

In the News:Shuja Nawaz,author of the recent book, CROSSED SWORDS: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, appeared the other  night on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, along with Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars, to talk about the implications of Musharref’s resignation.  Nawaz's book remains the best background reading available for Pakistan’s internal affairs.

 

Paul Theroux's pan-Asian journey, as recounted in GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR, provided him a preview of the trouble to come in Georgia.  Traveling through Tbilisi and Gori, Theroux describes the population as "Russiaphobic, mildly discontented, riven by dissent over the breakaway province of Abkhazia."  Whatever the hostility, it was well reciprocated by the Russians, who had recently cut off Georgia’s supply of natural gas during one of the severest winters in memory.  Paul Theroux will speak about Ghost Train to the Eastern Star on Tuesday, September 23, 7 p.m. at P&P.

August 13, 2008

This past weekend, I picked up a book from our front display shelves that looked just right for a short weekend—182 pages. Carla and I had selected the title to be put up front, faced out, when we placed the initial order, but that was back in June, and I have no recollection of this title or author because my attention now is focused on a steady stream of sales reps who are selling books that will not arrive until sometime between January and April 2009, when I also will probably have no recollection of having selected them. We are always operating in three time zones: the present, what we have on the shelves; the future, those books we’ve ordered and that will arrive when they are published; and the past, books that we ordered some time ago, in larger quantities than our customers wanted, and that we are now returning.

But I'm digressing.  My choice of a weekend book was not arbitrary. I was relying on some prescreening done by Henry Holt, a Mercedes-quality publisher with a long track record of top-quality books, both fiction and non-fiction. The title of this book that kept me reading, and rereading, over the weekend is THE LIMITS OF POWER,

subtitled, "The End of American Exceptionalism," and it's written by an author whom I have not previously been familiar with, although he came to Politics and Prose in 2005 to talk about his then-new book, The New American Militarism.  His name is Andrew J. Bacevich and he graduated from West Point, served in Vietnam in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. Currently he is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

At the close of every chapter I read, I put another name on my list of people  to give this book to—not to evangelize, not to politicize, but just to add another perspective on American History since the end of the Cold War.  His publisher describes him as a conservative but Bacevich doesn't pull any punches when evaluating the presidents since the Cold War, and Reagan and George W.  are the targets of his harshest shots.

The most mind-stretching part of Bacevich's fresh perspective on political, social, and military history since the '50s is his evocation of the work of Reinhold Neibuhr. Neibuhr was a prominent theologian and activist,  but, more importantly, he was a thoughtful and clear-headed social critic, writing in the ‘30s into the ‘70s.   As Bacevich writes, Neibuhr, a “prophet…warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history’—born of a peculiar combination of arrogance and narcissism—posed a potentially mortal threat to the United States."  Contrast this with a quote from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, which Bacevich describes as the prevailing view in the Bush adminstration after 9/11: "We have two choices.  Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live.  We choose the latter." 

Bacevich describes America currently as being in both political and military crisis, a situation stemming from a changed personal definition of liberty.  Freedom, he says,is now "just another word for many things left to buy."  Coupled with this is the "gross incompetence of those who preside over the federal apparatus, [which] is appalling and unacceptable.  Although our all-volunteer army carries with it the American public's choice, it removes service from public duty and just pays others to do it for us, like mowing the lawn.  The senior American military leadership has been woefully lacking since the end of the Cold War, most recently in Iraq."

Bacevich makes very clear that these problems have existed for the last five decades under both Democrats and Republicans, and he warns against the delusion of imagining that any presidential candidate will accomplish decisive action on any of the major crises addressed during the campaign.  It's a very sobering and cautious assessment of America's role in the world today, and it's not a pretty picture, but this is a book that will stimulate your thinking.

August 7, 2008

The grand master of travel writing, Paul Theroux, has a new account of an old journey. Thirty-three years ago Theroux traveled the classic trains of literature: the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian Express, the Mandalay Express, and many more, on an epic journey that he recounted in The Great Railway Bazaar. Some three decades later that book remains in print. GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR, his 13th volume of travel writing, recounts a journey in which Theroux had planned to retrace his Railway Bazaar steps, to see how the world had changed, and how he had changed, too.

Some of the most momentous changes were reflected as logistical problems: turmoil in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan prevented Theroux from repeating those legs of his journey. However, a massive engineering event, the excavation of the channel tunnel, allowed his train to transverse the English Channel in just 22 minutes.

For me, although he doesn't belabor the point, Theroux's appeal lies in his awareness of and reflection upon the parallels between our periodic geographical meanderings and our lifelong  journeys into our own interior. While he writes that so many writers have never revisited their past journeys,  he also writes of  "the way the unvisited past is always looping in your dreams."   In the end, he decides that he needs to understand the natural transformation of the earth, which he describes as decay, and the natural transformation within himself,  a journey of aging that will end in darkness but which has led him to the fourth-dimension insight that arrivals and departures are synonymous.

I enjoyed this book tremendously.  Whether Theroux is writing about local color, grousing about bores in the dining car, or incredulously describing a stroll through the  flourishing red-light district of Singapore, where the watchful government eye winks at alcohol, tobacco, and prostitution, very little escapes his radar.

July 30, 2008

Going on vacation? Traveling by car? If you're the one behind the wheel, you'll probably curse all the crazy drivers out there, but, surprise!—they may be cursing you, too. Recent studies have revealed that most drivers, when asked to compare themselves to "average drivers," inevitably answered that they were better than that. The reason for this imbalance in perceptions of driving proficiency may be the widespread condition called "metacognition," meaning we are incapable of realizing how unskilled we are.

I learned all this in a fascinating new book called TRAFFIC: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), written by a Brooklyn journalist with a 2001 Volvo, Tom Vanderbilt. He includes lots of little conversational bits, such as that in the New York of 1867, there were more pedestrians killed by horses (about four a week) than are killed by automobiles today. Or this: the legendary traffic commissioner of New York in the ‘60s, Henry Barnes, observed in his memoir that "traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a physical and mechanical one."

If you have started making a mental list in the last two minutes of all the bad drivers you know, into whose hands you can put this book, starting with your spouse and your children, go first to Chapter Two : Why You're Not as Good a Driver as You Think You Are. In a 2006 survey, significantly higher numbers of people believed that, "if I ruled the road, it would be a better place," than was the case in 1982. Vanderbilt cleverly discusses how most drivers fail to learn from their mistakes (tickets or accidents). The ticket is usually dismissed as bad luck or a bad cop, and the simple labeling of collisions as "accidents," implies blamelessness. You'll find lots of good information as well as lots of enjoyment in Traffic, and if Vanderbilt has succeeded in delivering his message, you'll reflect on it rather than urging it on all the bad drivers you know.

July 24, 2008

I'm almost finished reading Jane Mayer's superb new book, THE DARK SIDE, and on many pages I'm running into other authors who have already shared their books at Politics and Prose: Ron Suskind, Tyler Drumheller, Peter Bergen, Seymour Hersh, Michael Scheuer, Richard Clarke, and Steve Coll. Mayer is extremely well versed in all that has been written about Guantánamo detainees and adds a sordid mass of damning details to all that we've known before. If you are following this week's detainee military tribunal of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, you'll be interested to know that this high-profile, lead-off defendant was dismissed by the Bush Administration, according to The Dark Side, as "some two-bit driver for Bin Laden." Jane Mayer will be here to talk about her new book on Thursday evening and we should have a lively discussion in light of the military judge's ruling this week that confessions elicited with force and/or coercion will not be admitted into evidence.

 

 

July 17, 2008

Ethan Canin spoke Monday night, and read from his new book, AMERICA AMERICA. Although modest in manner, he is a tremendous speaker and reader. Ron Charles, writing in the Washington Post’s “Book World,” opined, “We’ve waited a long time for a worthy successor to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and it couldn’t have arrived at a more auspicious moment than this season of potentially epochal political change.” (To read more of this review, click here.) Canin unabashedly revealed that he had never read Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel, but that the review had aroused his curiosity sufficiently that he is reading it now.

I remarked in introducing Ethan Canin that Corey Sifter, the narrator in his new novel, reminded me of Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, a character made so haunting by Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. Again, and with good humor shared by all, Ethan Canin confessed he had neither read the book nor seen the movie. Nevertheless, even without all these possibilities of influence by other writers, I think his new novel, America America is stunning, the best fiction I’ve read this summer. We had the large audience that Canin deserves last night and I hope his book will find him new fans.

 

July 10, 2008

On June 25 we had a packed store to hear the Washington-based Pakistani journalist Shuja Nawaz talk about his new book, CROSSED SWORDS: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within. Widely praised as a definitive study, this book is absolutely essential in understanding domestic politics within Pakistan as well as Pakistan’s foreign relations, especially with the United States and Afghanistan. This newly published book is already number two on the bestseller list in India.

Barbara Crossette, the former South Asia Bureau Chief for the New York Times, says about Crossed Swords that "this exceptionally authoritative book, rich in insider history, could not have come at a better time as a key to understanding the underlying power structures of Pakistan as it struggles to find its place in the world." Another prominent Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, describes his colleague's book as the "most well-researched and lucidly written book of its kind." The Economist has already featured Crossed Swords (for the review, click here), and in the near future The New York Review of Books will carry a review by William Dalrymple, who has already praised the book for its timeliness and significance.

General Pervez Musharraf, Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto, they're all here among the dramatis personae who appear in this gripping historical narrative filled with conspiracies, deceptions, and assassinations. When I introduced Shuja Nawaz's talk here at the store, I said I thought this was a very important book, and each day when I read the newspaper, I sense its still-growing importance.

June 11, 2008

This past Saturday we had one of my favorite journalists writing about Islamic extremists, Ahmed Rashid, who came to talk about his new book, DESCENT INTO CHAOS: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Rashid, who lives and works in Lahore, has spent 30 years reporting on Central Asia, and what has always made his books so interesting is his direct witness to most of the events, and his interviews with key political players inside and outside the world of Muslim extremism. Rashid, who speaks passionately about his subjects and weeps at their untimely deaths, has obviously developed nerves of steel to report from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where warlords have their private fleets of tanks and warfare is stratified by generation. There are some elders on camels but most of the Afghan tribesmen and Taliban wage war in fleets of hundreds of pickup trucks or motorbikes. The amounts of money that change hands to pay for all this mechanized mayhem is unbelievably huge; Ismael Khan, an Afghan warlord, earned three to five million dollars a month in customs revenue from opium. In the course of this book, the CIA hands out hundreds of millions to fighters who seem to be extremely flexible, siding where the money is.

Rashid is passionate about how the United States in general, and the Bush administration in particular, has squandered every opportunity to dampen Muslim rage, and as a result, he reports, an immense hatred of America permeates every level of Pakistan society. Moreover, relations between the U.S. military and the Pakistan army, critical allies in the war on terror, are at their worst point since 9/11. Despite the bleakness of Central Asia that Rashid describes, this is an interesting and important book for all readers who want more understanding of the stakes in the war on terror.

June 5, 2008

Barbara Carpenter looks at former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan's memoir at Politics and Prose in Washington. (By Alex Wong -- Getty Images)

What a week we've had! Bush press secretary Scott McClellan's new exposé,
WHAT HAPPENED, was not supposed to go on sale until June 2, but a Politico journalist bought the embargoed book from a Washington bookstore (not us) and scooped it online last Wednesday, May 28. Immediately, we were inundated by calls from reporters trying to find a copy of the book. Until about noon we honored the embargo, but then a call came from Public Affairs, McClellan’s publisher, that they had dropped the embargo date and we could sell the book. For the next few days cameramen and reporters—everyone from Swiss TV to the Associated Press—were all over the place here. You may have seen the picture in the Washington Post showing the book on sale on our front table; the New York Times and National Public Radio also carried stories about the McClellan book’s sales at Politics and Prose. In the midst of all this frenzy, don't lose sight of Scott McClellan's author talk here, next Tuesday at 7 p.m.

In addition to selling McClellan this past week, we were also deeply involved with Benchgate, the firestorm caused by our plaintive email last week about the District inspector telling us that the 12-year-old bench was illegal and had to go. So many of our loyal customers rallied in support, calling us, calling the District Building, and attempting to email Advisory Neighborhood Comissioner Winstead.

There was one surprisingly bright spot, a telephone call from the District of Columbia explaining that we need to have a permit for the bench and detailing the steps we need to take to get that permit. Councilwoman Mary Cheh dropped by to offer her assistance in applying for a permit. And now, because we are in the permit process, THE BENCH IS BACK. Thanks to everybody who gave their support for an island of ambiance on Connecticut Avenue.

May 29, 2008

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, I started reading Elizabeth Strout's OLIVE KITTERIDGE, which was a huge mistake, as it tied up the rest of the holiday, but a magnificent pleasure, as it was a book I couldn't put down. It's not a novel, so there is no compelling plot to keep you turning pages. Rather, Olive Kitteridge is a character who appears in each of the 13 short stories and weaves them all together, and it was my fascination with Olive that kept me glued to the book. Olive, a woman in her seventies with a husband and grown son, lives in the Maine coastal town of Crosby, a small community where all the residents' lives tend to overlap; some of these figures pop up in several stories as bit players, just like neighbors wandering in from next door.

Olive is a good, crusty Maine stalwart who can always skip the pleasantries, and with world-weary and hard-won wisdom and/or cynicism, cut right to the chase. Her battlefields encompass adult children, in-laws, steps, plus errant members of the community of Crosby. It was a frequently recurring wonder of mine in reading Olive Kitteridge how Elizabeth Strout, who is barely fifty, knows so well the mostly unspoken, and often unspeakable, running opinions about the goings on in Crosby. But there is another side to Olive, an empathetic and compassionate self, one that hungers to be needed and has the capacity to experience hope.

Read it, you'll love it.

May 21, 2008

Last summer I had a marvelous trip visiting archeological sites around the Black Sea, accompanied by an engaging archeologist whose name was Fred Hiebert. Fred invited me to have dinner with him one night so that he could tell me all about the upcoming National Gallery exhibit and its companion book, AFGHANISTAN: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul. He was so knowledgeable and so enthusiastic that it seemed like there would never be enough time to hear all about these new discoveries. Now Fred Hiebert is going to be unveiling that exhibit next week, the amazing discovery of Silk Road treasures thought forever lost, and his book, published by National Geographic, has just come into the store. It's gorgeous, as well as humbling, to see the artifacts of the cultural riches of Afghanistan's ancient civilization.

One of the other travelers on this trip kept a journal of our daily activities, something I wish I had had the self-discipline to do. If you're interested in the details, click here.

May 14, 2008

Last week the Council on Foreign Relations awarded the silver medal of the prestigious Arthur Ross Book Award to Trita Parsi for TREACHEROUS ALLIANCE a book that I read and promoted last summer, a very readable and informed analysis of the secret dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. A few of our customers took me to task for what they felt was an anti-Israel position.  When I passed this by Trita Parsi, he said he felt confident that there was no anti-Israel bias, because the book carried a positive quote from Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s former foreign minister ("brilliant interpretation"). 

The gold medal went to Paul Collier's THE BOTTOM BILLION, a study of why the world's poorest fifty countries have failed to benefit from traditional development programs. The Council on Foreign Relations Ross Book Award is given each year to the most significant book on international affairs.

In Memoriam: A note in my mailbox this morning signals the end of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. From Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "As of now, Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary."  Oxford currently sells the 20 volumes for $995, but the entire set is available on a single CD from Oxford for $295.  Most likely, at some point the value of the existing print sets will increase, just like another cultural artifact, the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

April 30, 2008

William Warner, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his book  BEAUTIFUL SWIMMERS: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay, died this past week peacefully in his sleep. Willy, as we knew him, was a true bookman with an ever-present curiosity, who pursued good writing in both fiction and non-fiction.  Until the past year he had been a frequent customer at Politics and Prose; always, when he was here, he was immediately noticeable as the most dapper and gentlemanly customer in the store.  And along with his sartorial splendor, he was unfailingly friendly and polite with all the booksellers and consistently modest about all his achievements. At Christmastime, Willy would arrive with his two daughters, Alexandra and Georgie, to load up on books for the whole extended family, and then they would stay for a sandwich in our coffeehouse downstairs. Alexandra reports that her father maintained a high-quality standard of life right up until the time he died.  This last week he had gone to his weekly exercise class and had a picnic on the Canal with his grandchildren. 

My favorite of Willy's books is Into the Porcupine Cave and Other Odysseys: Adventures of an Occasional Naturalist. It's typical of Willy, whose love of nature permeated his entire life, to low-ball the title with "occasional naturalist."  I could hear Willy's voice in every sentence of these ten essays, rambling through varied adventures in his life.  Kirkus Reviews described them as "elegant, low-profile, life shaping events in the outdoors."  When the  book was published in 1999, we featured Willy for an event in the store, and then sold hundreds of copies at what we call "offsites," a charmless word for bookselling outside of the store.  It was impossible to read any part of his musings without thinking of yet another person to buy his book for.

Everyone here at Politics and Prose will miss him.  His family is scheduling a memorial service for later in May.

April 16, 2008

We had two “perfect storms” this past week, Steve Coll talking about
THE BIN LADENS the same week that he had the lead piece in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” and Cokie Roberts, two days after she had been honored at the Library of Congress as a Living Legend—one of nine, and the only woman, to receive that award.

Another thing I loved this past week was the family side of three of our events: Roger Mudd brought a son and grandchildren; Steve Coll came with his wife, Susan (the author of three novels that we have hosted her for at P&P), along with his children. Cokie brought along her mother, the always gracious Lindy Boggs, most recently our ambassador to the Vatican and, before that, a member of Congress from New Orleans after her husband Hale’s plane disappeared in Alaska. Lindy Boggs, as well as Cokie, is a direct descendant of one of the LADIES OF LIBERTY at the center of Cokie’s new book, Dolley Madison.

Today, Tuesday, Cokie, at the invitation of President and Mrs. Bush, will be riding with them on the trip out to Andrews Air Force Base to greet Pope Benedict. Lindy Boggs will meet with him later in his visit. One of the true pleasures of our time at Politics and Prose is the amount of “family” we have accumulated over the years, not only with our booksellers, but also with so many of our customers and authors.

Posted April 9th, 2008

We had a wonderful event for poet Jane Shore and her new collection, A YES-OR-NO ANSWER, on Saturday evening with many members of the local poetry community turning out. One little-known patch at Politics and Prose are the seven shelves downstairs filled with remaindered bargain poetry. There's a large range of poets, from Homer to Edward Hirsch, Donald Justice, Richard Wilbur, Jorie Graham, and many more. The hardcovers sell for around $5.98.

And while you are downstairs, take a look at the remaindered children's books.

There's Conn Iggulden's DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS on 3 CDs, originally priced at $24.95, now for sale at $11.98; Terry Pratchett's HAT FULL OF SKY, a hardcover book originally $16.99, now $7.98; and Sarah Weeks's JUMPING THE SCRATCH, a hardcover book originally selling for $15.99, now $4.98. Birthday parties, school libraries, camp trunks—I can think of many, many places where these reasonably priced and popular titles are perfect fits.

Posted April 2nd, 2008

Saturday we had an impressive talk by Charles Lane about his new book,
THE DAY FREEDOM DIED, the story of the Colfax Massacre, which took place on Easter Sunday in 1873.  The incident had all but disappeared from history until Lane started on lengthy research in order to write this book.  One of our booksellers here at Politics and Prose graduated from high school in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1970, and has no recollection of the massacre being taught in any American History course. Colfax is 15 minutes away from Alexandria. At least 80 black American men, former slaves, were brutally murdered in just a few hours by white vigilantes from Grant Parish, Louisiana.  Today there still stands a monument to the three white men killed that day :”the Heroes…Who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.”  I like to think of Charles Lane’s book as a tribute to all those who lost their lives not only in the massacre, but due to other brutalities that took place during “Reconstruction.”  One of the strengths of Lane’s book is how he weaves the narrative of events into the larger judicial and legislative fabric of the nation, ending in an almost complete eradication of any racial justice for African Americans throughout the Sout