Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
If you have never heard of Count Axel von Fersen, you are perhaps in the majority. While everyone can picture the tragic Marie Antoinette, who lost her head to the guillotine in the midst of the French Revolution, only the more thoroughgoing students of history know much about her lover—an influential Swedish nobleman in his [...]
Last week, as I was posting a roundup of books related to Osama bin Laden’s death, Irshad Manji’s Allah, Liberty, and Love: The Courage To Reconcile Faith and Freedom (Free Pr: S. & S. Jun. 2011. 272p. ISBN 9781451645200. $26) crossed my desk. The subtitle’s operative verb, to reconcile, struck me as just right for [...]
The New York Times Book Review calls it “a raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood.” In a guest review on Amazon, Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet), says it’s the sort of book “that alters the way we remember.” Smithsonian BookDragon blogger and LJ reviewer Terry Hong declares, “It’s one [...]
Back in the November 1, 2010, Prepub Alert, I predicted big things for Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom, the story of a mother gone missing on a Seoul subway station and subsequent vivid re-creation of her life. My reviewer, Smithsonian BookDragon blogger Terry Hong, proclaimed that Mom “should be one of this year’s most-deserving [...]
A few years back, while watching a National Geographic documentary on Siberian tigers, the preternaturally talented young writer Téa Obreht was struck by the image of a researcher’s wife calling sweetly to the tigers at a reserve. The great, fierce, ebony-striped beasts approached the woman and, as Obreht remembers, “became puddles around her.” That image sparked a story Obreht eventually set aside, but the tiger, its “most interesting character,” stayed with her and, in her imagination, began haunting a city.
Since January 25, all eyes have been on Egypt as citizens take to the streets to demand a new government and recognition of their rights. Hence, all eyes have been on Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, three-term director general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), emerging force in the protests, and possible presidential candidate. Coincidentally, ElBaradei’s The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, a memoir focusing on his work with the IAEA, was scheduled for release this spring from Henry Holt’s Metropolitan Books imprint. Given the book’s timeliness, publication has since been moved up from June to April. To see what The Age of Deception can tell us about ElBaradei and ongoing events in the Middle East, Prepub talked with Sara Bershtel, publisher of Metropolitan Books.
Tell us briefly about Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s forthcoming book and why you chose to sign it up.
It is about his 25 years in the center of the most explosive international conflicts and negotiations, from Iraq to North Korea to Iran. He has a unique vantage point on the world and has demonstrated again and again an extraordinary ability to maintain independence of mind under conditions of great pressure, just the qualities we’ve seen him display in Egypt today.
We signed this book up because it gives remarkable insight into what was going on behind the scenes during major world crises. Also, because he was an international diplomat, ElBaradei had never been able to speak out and so we’ve only had glimpses of him and his thinking in newspaper reports here and there.
I read the first page of Alice LaPlante’s debut novel, Turn of Mind and immediately knew I would make it a Prepub Pick. The set-up is interesting enough—retired orthopedic surgeon Jennifer White is slowly losing her mind to dementia and may in fact be responsible for the murder of her best friend—but what makes the narrative immediately arresting is the language itself. The book is told in the first person, in a voice at once tough and vulnerable, crotchety and abashed, and with a fragmented lyricism that seems to capture exactly the workings of a smart but failing mind. You can judge for yourself by the excerpt below, which opens the book. But first, Atlantic Monthly editor Elisabeth Schmitz discusses her latest find, which is already generating enthusiasm—it’s been sold to 11 countries.
Norton executive editor Jill Bialosky has published several books of poetry, including Paterson Poetry Prize finalist Intruder, and two beautifully crafted novels. Perhaps all this was merely laying the ground for what is clearly a momentous personal task: writing History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life (Atria. Feb. 2011. ISBN 978-1439101933. $24). Here, in quietly piercing language, she delivers a sure sense of a “beautiful girl” who took her own life at age 21 and of what it means to grieve such a death, burdened with an awful sense of responsibility that can’t easily be shared with others.
All the self-help titles Bialoksy has perused in the intervening years did not give her what they’d promised; as she said at a recent lunch, “In those books, I could not find my sister.”
With all the big books coming in May, it is still no surprise that Guy Fieri Food (Morrow. ISBN 9780061894558. $29.99), written with Ann Volkwein by the famed chef, restaurateur, and TV personality, is one of the biggest. (You can’t sneeze at a 250,000-copy first printing.) Cookbooks remain one of the thriving areas in publishing—and among the biggest circulators in public libraries—and Fieri is one of the top authors. To find out why, I talked with Cassie Jones, Fieri’s editor at Morrow.
With all the competition from the Internet, why are cookbooks still so hot?
You can easily find thousands of recipes on line, but a cookbook gives you something special–a window into a particular culinary vision. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the content out there,
Not long ago, the history shelves were dominated by books about the Civil War and World War II. But no more. From David McCullough’s 1776 to Joseph Ellis’s First Family: Abigail and John Adams to Ron Chernow’s Washington, the last decade has seen a flood of books about the American Revolution. Prominent among them are books by Gordon S. Wood, the Pulitzer and Bancroft award–winning historian, now Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University.
LJ Reviews Social Club