January 26, 2012
It started in Britain last year, and we hope it’ll be in your neighborhood this April. It’s being called World Book Night and constitutes one of the most ambitious and adventurous attempts to spread a passion for books and reading around the globe.
Conceived by an independent English publisher, the aim is to recruit thousands of book lovers to fan out across their communities and hand out free books to people who might otherwise not have the chance to read a lot, enough, or at all. You may remember news footage of the throngs who filled London’s Trafalgar Square last April marking the first World Book Night with performances and readings by leading authors. Now, publishers, authors, and booksellers in the United States have joined together to promote an American version on April 23 (which is also Shakespeare’s birthday).
The goal in the United States is to recruit 50,000 volunteers representing all 50 states to give away 20 paperback books each—a total of one million books. Here’s how it works:
Each volunteer goes to the website (http://www.us.worldbooknight.org/) to learn more about World Book Night’s mission and to review the 30 titles being offered this year (including favorites such as Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun, and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, to name a few).
Each volunteer chooses one title and designates a place in the community—a school, military base, hospital, senior citizens center, or other local spot—to hand out the books. Boxes of books will be shipped to local distribution sites—such as Politics and Prose—where volunteers will pick up the copies they selected.
An enormous undertaking, World Book Night has become possible thanks to the commitment and generosity of many publishers, wholesalers, authors, booksellers, libraries, paper companies, and book industry organizations. At P&P, we’re excited to be playing a role, and we encourage our customers and community neighbors to get involved as well. The deadline for individuals to sign up as book givers is February 1.
Many of our booksellers will be among those handing out books, and our store, in addition to serving as a distribution point, will host a party for volunteers in our area. We hope that through these collective efforts, we can share the joy of books and reading with many others in our community.
Brad and Lissa
This being a presidential election year, we’re off to an early start at Politics and Prose with events featuring talented political writers. And many others are slated for the weeks ahead, as our shelves fill with an expanding inventory of political titles.
The biggest splash so far this month has come with the release of Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas. Kantor, a New York Times reporter, has presented a detailed and layered examination of the complicated political and personal roles of the president and first lady as they have adjusted to life in the White House and the strains of leading the country. Although Kantor interviewed several dozen current and former White House staffers, numerous close friends and colleagues of the first couple, and the Obamas themselves, initial reaction to the book focused on her accounts of friction between Michelle and senior presidential aides. This even led the first lady (who said she hadn’t read the book) to question the way she was portrayed. While the controversy has helped spur sales of the book, it suggests that well-researched attempts at nuanced political portraiture are more likely to be picked apart for sensational tidbits than appreciated for the broader understanding of political leadership they provide careful readers.
For a close look at the leading Republican contender, there’s the just-released The Real Romney by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two Boston Globe investigative reporters. Also out this month are several books seeking to explain the political and economic landscape against which the presidential race is transpiring. Harper’s columnist Thomas Frank, for instance, recounts in Pity the Billionaire how the Right, whose notions of laissez-faire capitalism and economic free play seemed to have been discredited several years ago by the financial crisis and recessionary plunge, has managed to resurrect itself.
In The Swing Vote, Linda Killian looks at the still-sizeable group of independent voters who have grown increasingly frustrated with the heightened bi-polarity of American politics. And in The Age of Austerity, veteran journalist Thomas Byrne Edsall explores the federal government’s continuing inability to resolve its budget crisis and adequately address the nation’s other pressing economic problems. “The two major political parties,” Edsall writes, “are enmeshed in a death struggle to protect the benefits and goods that flow to their respective bases, each attempting to expropriate the resources of the other.”
Coming next month are more critical assessments of the country’s institutional failures and its fractious, bitterly divided political scene. These include The Obama Hate Machine by Bill Press, While America Sleeps by former senator Russ Feingold, The Fox Effect by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Hayt, and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson.
Experienced journalists are offering more behind-the-scene accounts of the Obama presidency—notably, The Escape Artists by Noam Scheiber, and Showdown: The Inside Story of Obama’s Fight to Save His Presidency by David Corn. Plus, in June, one of the most anticipated biographies of the president, Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss.
And this list takes us only to the middle of 2012!
-- Brad and Lissa
The technological revolution continues to re-shape many aspects of our daily lives, offering conveniences we could not have dreamed of a few decades ago, but also creating distances of time and space that often reduce human interaction and enjoyment. At Politics & Prose we know that, for booklovers, no website or Tweet can ever fully replicate the experience of browsing the bookstore’s shelves, consulting with a bookseller, or listening to an author’s reading.
On the upside, new technologies enable customers to stay in touch with the store and engage with us in new ways. And we’ve been excited over the past six months to begin to expand our social media efforts, particularly Facebook and Twitter, and to explore improvements to our website. Several of our talented staff -- savvy booksellers and experts in digital media -- are using their skills and creativity to broaden and enliven the ways in which we engage customers and “followers” electronically. Today, customers can enjoy Tweets and links to blogs by going to our website (www.politics-prose.com) and clicking on our Twitter and Facebook icons at the top right of the home page. (You don’t have to have your own Facebook page or Twitter account to follow P&P. All you have to do is click on the icons on our page.)
In addition to reminders about our daily author events and our rotating staff picks, our social media sites offer book news, essays, lists, gossip, facts, as well as humorous and clever asides from P&P booksellers. We also schedule live chats on Facebook that enable customers to ask questions directly of our staff (and occasionally the owners) and enjoy conversations with each other.
And, of course, customers can always order books directly from our website, and download ebooks to most e-readers (except the Kindle or Kindle Touch), no matter the time of day or day of the week.
While we hope that each of you has the opportunity to come to the store and experience P&P first-hand, we will also remain committed to offering thoughtful, interesting, and innovative ways to keep you connected to us through digital media. Hopefully, this will give you the best of both worlds.
-- Brad and Lissa