Tuesday, May 31, 2011

On My Radar (Tuesday Edition)

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
by Alan Jacobs
Oxford University Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. 
In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. 
Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.


Monday, May 30, 2011

On My Radar (Monday Edition)

Nobody's Perfect: Two Men, One Call, and a Game for Baseball History
by Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce with Daniel Paisner
Grove/Atlantic
Hardcover


From the publisher website:

The perfect game is one of the rarest accomplishments in sports. No hits, no walks, no men reaching base. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in more than 130 years of Major League Baseball, it has only happened twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball’s twenty-first perfect game. Except that’s not how it entered the record books.

That’s because Jim Joyce, a veteran umpire with more than twenty years of big league experience, the man voted the best umpire in the game in 2010 by baseball’s players, missed the call on the final out at first base. “No, I did not get the call correct,” Joyce said after seeing a replay. But rather than throw a tantrum, Galarraga simply turned and smiled, went back to the mound and took care of business. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said later in the locker room.
In Nobody’s Perfect, Galarraga and Joyce come together to tell the personal story of a remarkable game that will live forever in baseball lore, and to trace their fascinating lives in sports up until this pivotal moment. It is an absorbing insider’s look at two lives in baseball, a tremendous achievement, and an enduring moment of sportsmanship.
 Cleveland.com


Shelf Awareness

Friday, May 27, 2011

On My Radar (Friday Edition)

Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN
by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
Little, Brown & Company/Hachette Book Group
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

It began, in 1979, as a mad idea of starting a cable channel to televise local sporting events throughout the state of Connecticut. The handful of founders called their modest venture "Entertainment and Sports Programming Network." Today, ESPN is arguably the most successful network in modern television history, spanning eight channels in the United States and around the world. Online or mobile, in HD, 3D, or print, it is an unprecedented media empire. Presidents have applauded it, parents have named children after it, and some of its personalities have become more celebrated than the superstar athletes they cover. But the inside story of its rise has never been fully told-until now. Drawing upon over five hundred interviews with the greatest names in ESPN's history-among them Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, Chris Berman, Bob Ley, Linda Cohn, Tony Kornheiser, Robin Roberts, Bill Simmons, Jim Rome, Erin Andrews, Lou Holtz, Barry Melrose, Tom Jackson, and Dick Vitale-and an all-star collection of some of the world's finest athletes, bestselling authors James Miller and Tom Shales take us behind the cameras, into the locker rooms, and deep inside the ESPN "campus" in Bristol, Connecticut. Here, in their own words, the men and women who made ESPN great reveal the secrets behind its success-as well as the many scandals, rivalries, off-screen battles, and triumphs that have accompanied that ascent. From the unknown producers and business visionaries to the most famous faces on television, it's all here.





Monday, May 23, 2011

On My Radar (Monday Edition)

The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies and a Company Called Dreamworks
by Nicole LaPorte
Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Books
Trade paperback

From the publisher website:

For sixty years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged.Then came Hollywood’s Circus Maximus—created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King—an entertainment empire called DreamWorks. Now Nicole LaPorte,who covered the company for Variety, goes behind the hype to reveal for the first time the delicious truth of what happened.
Readers will feel they are part of the creative calamities of moviemaking as LaPorte’s fly-on-the-wall detail shows us Hollywood’s bizarre rules of business.We see the clashes between the often otherworldly Spielberg’s troops and Katzenberg’s warriors, the debacles and disasters, but also the Oscar-winning triumphs, including Saving Private Ryan.We watch as the studio burns through billions, its rich owners get richer, and everybody else suffers.We see Geffen seducing investors likeMicrosoft’s Paul Allen, showing his steel against CAA’s Michael Ovitz, and staging fireworks during negotiations with Paramount and Disney. Here is Hollywood, up close, glamorous, and gritty.
Los Angeles Times Review

Friday, May 20, 2011

On My Radar (Tennis Edition)

My favorite sport to watch is NFL football.  But my favorite sport to play is tennis.  My formative tennis years happened to coincide with the emergence of John McEnroe on the world stage.  While may people loathe Johnny Mac for his antics on the court, I always understood.  Any temper I have lies dormant for the most part but has been known to erupt from time-to-time usually with a connection to the aforementioned two sports.

I won't back down. I admire John McEnroe.  He is anti-authority.  His politics are liberal.  He is known as a good famiy man and father.  He expects a lot of himself and others.  He often oversteps the bounds of proper public behavior, but only on the tennis court.  I won't defend him when he's wrong, but at least he's himself.

There are two recent books celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the tennis season where the rivalry of John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg was born.

First up is EPIC: John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, and the Greatest Tennis Season Ever by Matthew Cronin, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.  I finished this book recently and it brought back a lot of memories for me from (sigh) 30 years ago.  In addition to rekindling good thoughts of great times, the book provided a wealth of inside information about the rivalries and friendships as well as the personalities of the tennis professionals and coaches of that era.

If you or someone you love is into tennis this is a great addition to their Summer reads.  It serves as  mini biographies of the great Borg and Mcenroe and clearly describes the difference in the two men which ultimately resulted in mutual respect and admiration between them. Sadly, the Borg/McEnroe rivalry ended too soon, leaving fans with feelings of what could have been.

I am still reading HIGH STRUNG:  Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry, written by Stephen Tignor and published by Harper/Harper Collins.  While the two books share subject matter, they both come from different angles.  The Cronin book focuses primarily on the revolution the two men were part of for the sport of tennis, while Tignor seems to aim his attention on the two men themselves.

I will write more about HIGH STRUNG after I have finished it, but there is nothing so far to keep me from recommending it to any sports fan looking to complete their education about two of the most enigmatic tennis players ever.

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St. Martins Press has graciously provided a First Edition hardcover copy of Gilbert Gottfried's "memoir" RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUORAnd, it comes with an autographed bookplate.

To be entered to win all you have to do is add me on twitter (@book_dude) or tweet the following:


Add @book_dude or RT to enter to win Gilbert Gottfried's RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUOR from @StMartinsPress http://bookspin.blogspot.com

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Tidbits

Last November, I promoted the hardcover release of Adam Carolla's IN FIFTY YEARS WE'LL ALL BE CHICKS.  It is out in paperback this week.
- - - - - - - - - -
St. Martins Press has graciously provided a First Edition hardcover copy of Gilbert Gottfried's "memoir" RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUORAnd, it comes with an autographed bookplate.

To be entered to win all you have to do is add me on twitter (@book_dude) or tweet the following:


Add @book_dude or RT to enter to win Gilbert Gottfried's RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUOR from @StMartinsPress http://bookspin.blogspot.com
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I am currently reading STATES OF CONFUSION: My 19.000-Mile Detour to Find Direction by Paul Jury from Adams Media.  I will have a review up soon.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

BookSpin Giveaway: Rubber Balls and Liquor by Gilbert Gottfried

It's time for a new giveaway!




St. Martins Press has graciously provided a First Edition hardcover copy of Gilbert Gottfried's "memoir" RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUORAnd, it comes with an autographed bookplate.

To be entered to win all you have to do is add me on twitter (@book_dude) or tweet the following:


Add @book_dude or RT to enter to win Gilbert Gottfried's RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUOR from @StMartinsPress http://bookspin.blogspot.com

Good luck!

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

So, this book is fiction and non-fiction at the same time?  I had to double check and make sure it wasn't by James Frey.


Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction
by Jake Silverstein
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Fact and fiction vie to tell the story of a young journalist bedeviled by the devil and seeking greater truth.
The timing couldn't be better-as scandals erupt over journalists and memoirists who've cooked their books-for a work that explores our difficulty in separating fact and fiction, while explicitly demonstrating how they differ and what they share.

In prose so fine and wry it makes the back of your neck prickle, Jake Silverstein narrates a journey he undertook through the American Southwest and Mexico, looking to become a journalist. His picaresque travels are filled with beguiling and hilarious characters: nineteenth-century author Ambrose Bierce; an unknown group of famous poets; a twenty-first-century treasure hunter in the Gulf of Mexico; an ex-Nazi mechanic shepherding an old Mexican road race; a stenographer who records every passing moment; and various incarnations of the trickster devil.

As bold, ambitious, and funny as it is unconventional, Nothing Happened and Then It Did is a deep and lasting pleasure.
Author website


Interview with the author


Review from the Dallas Morning News

Monday, May 16, 2011

On My Radar (Monday Edition)

What would you do if someone close to you wrote a book about their lives and trashed your reputation in the process?  What if that someone were your child? 

It happened to Margaret Robison not once, but twice, and her reaction was to write her own book:


The Long Journey Home: A Memoir
by Margaret Robison
Spiegel & Grau/Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher website:
First introduced to the world in her sons’ now-classic memoirs—Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye --Margaret Robison now tells her own haunting and lyrical story. A poet and teacher by profession, Robison describes her Southern Gothic childhood, her marriage to a handsome, brilliant man who became a split-personality alcoholic and abusive husband, the challenges she faced raising two children while having psychotic breakdowns of her own, and her struggle to regain her sanity.
Robison grew up in southern Georgia, where the façade of 1950s propriety masked all sorts of demons, including alcoholism, misogyny, repressed homosexuality, and suicide. She met her husband, John Robison, in college, and together they moved up north, where John embarked upon a successful academic career and Margaret brought up the children and worked on her art and poetry. Yet her husband’s alcoholism and her collapse into psychosis, and the eventual disintegration of their marriage, took a tremendous toll on their family: Her older son, John Elder, moved out of the house when he was a teenager, and her younger son, Chris (who later renamed himself Augusten), never completed high school. When Margaret met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, the therapist who was treating her husband, she felt understood for the first time and quickly fell under his idiosyncratic and, eventually, harmful influence.
Robison writes movingly and honestly about her mental illness, her shortcomings as a parent, her difficult marriage, her traumatic relationship with Dr. Turcotte, and her two now-famous children, Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, who have each written bestselling memoirs about their family. She also writes inspiringly about her hard-earned journey to sanity and clarity. An astonishing and enduring story, The Long Journey Home is a remarkable and ultimately uplifting account of a complicated, afflicted twentieth-century family.
Author website

Thursday, May 12, 2011

On My Radar (Thursday Edition)

I have stated my admiration for Christopher Hitchens many times on this blog.  Ironically,  just as he publishes an article on losing his voice in Vanity Fair magazine, a new book of Hitchen's quotes is published.


Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism - The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
Edited by Windsor Mann
Da Capo Press/Perseus Book Group
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Over the past few decades, the bestselling author of Hitch-22 has crisscrossed the globe debating religious scholars, Catholic clergy, rabbis, and devout Christians on the existence of God--appearances that have attracted thousands of people on both sides of the issue. He has been invited to talk shows and events to discuss everything from the death of Jerry Falwell to the sainthood of Mother Teresa, from U.S. policy in the Middle East to the dangers of religious fundamentalism and beyond. And he is always armed with pithy discourse that is as intelligent as it is quotable.The Quotable Hitchens gathers for the first time the eminent journalist, public intellectual, and all-around provocateur Christopher Hitchen's most scathing, inflammatory, hilarious, and clear-cut commentary from the course of his storied career. Drawn from his many TV appearances, debates, lectures, interviews, articles, and books, the quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject--from atheism and alcoholism to George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, from Islamofascism and Iraq to smoking and sex.
Windsor Mann's twitter feed


hitchensweb.com

dailyhitchens.com

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

On My Radar (Tuesday Edition)

The Lies Of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story About Her Relentless Quest for Power
by Geoffrey Dunn
St. Martins Press/ Macmillan
Hardcover

(Coming in at a whopping 464 pages, it's still hard to believe all of her lies are in this book.)

From the publisher website:

In The Lies of Sarah Palin, Geoffrey Dunn provides the first full-scale and in-depth political biography of the controversial Republican vice-presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska.
Based on more than two-hundred interviews---many of them with Republican colleagues and one-time political allies of Palin’s---and more than forty-thousand pages of uncovered documents, Dunn chronicles Palin’s troubling penchant for duplicity in grim detail, from her dysfunctional childhood in Wasilla through her contentious run for mayor and her failed governorship of Alaska. He also provides the shocking inside story of her betrayal of running mate John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign and her self-serving resignation as governor in July of the following year. Dunn deftly places Palin in the American tradition of right-wing demagogues---from Huey Long to Joe McCarthy---and details her troubling obsession with Barack Obama as it fuels her own political ambitions and a potential run for the presidency in 2012.
The Lies of Sarah Palin is a journalistic tour de force that vividly reveals the Queen of the Tea Party movement as a vengeful and manipulative empress without clothes. This is the definitive book on Sarah Palin.
Q & A with the author

Geoffrey Dunn on huffingtonpost.com

Monday, May 9, 2011

On My Radar (Monday Edition)

Innocent Spouse
by Carol Ross Joynt
Crown Publishing/Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

What would you do if, just weeks after your spouse's sudden death, you found out he was keeping secrets? Big secrets. Secrets that could cost you millions of dollars—and brand you as a criminal. Innocent Spouse is an eye-opening memoir that asks a provocative and disturbing question: Is it possible to really know and trust someone, even your spouse?

Carol Ross Joynt was a successful television producer in Washington, D.C.  Her husband, Howard, owned Nathans, a legendary restaurant in Georgetown. From an outsider’s perspective, Carol and Howard lived a fairy-tale life—spending weekends at their Chesapeake Bay estate, rubbing shoulders with New York’s and Washington’s elite, and raising their beloved son, Spencer. But everything changed with Howard’s sudden death when Spencer was only five years old.

Like any widow, Carol was devastated because she lost the love of her life and her son’s father. But soon Carol had much more to cope with than her grief and new life as a single parent. As she was forced to take over her family’s legal and financial responsibilities, as well as run Howard’s restaurant on her own, Carol discovered that her husband had secrets, and one of them, an almost $3 million debt to the IRS, threatened to derail her entire life. And even though Carol didn’t know anything about the tax fraud—finances had always been Howard's department—no one cared. As his surviving spouse, legally, Carol was responsible.

As Carol picks up the pieces of her fractured life and copes with her sadness and anger, she learns to become something she’d never been before: self-sufficient. Poignant, eye-opening, and at times heartbreaking, Innocent Spouse is ultimately an inspiring story of strength and newfound independence in the face of loss and betrayal.
Washington Post review

Author blog

Author's  twitter

Friday, May 6, 2011

On My Radar (Simon & Schuster Edition)

Last Man Out: The True Story of America's Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam
by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
Free Press/Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

The monsoon winds swirling up from the South China Sea had doubled in magnitude as Marine Staff Sergeant Mike Sullivan stood on the roof of the American Embassy, watching North Vietnamese artillery pound Saigon's airport. It was late in the afternoon of April 29, 1975, and for the past eight days the airstrip had been the busiest in the world as flight after flight of United States cargo planes ferried Vietnamese refugees, American civilians, and soldiers of both countries to safety while 150,000 North Vietnamese troops marched on the city. With Saigon now encircled and the airport bombed out, thousands were trapped.
Last Men Out tells the remarkable story of the drama that unfolded over the next twenty-four hours: the final, heroic chapter of the Vietnam War as improvised by a small unit of Marines, a vast fleet of helicopter pilots flying nonstop missions beyond regulation, and a Marine general who vowed to arrest any officer who ordered his choppers grounded while his men were still on the ground. It would become the largest-scale evacuation ever carried out—what many would call an American Dunkirk.
In a gripping, moment-by-moment narrative based on a wealth of recently declassified documents and indepth interviews, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin focus on the story of the eleven young Marines who were the last men to leave, rescued from the Embassy roof just moments before capture, having voted to make an Alamo-like last stand. As politicians in Washington struggled to put the best face on disaster and the American ambassador refused to acknowledge that the end had come and to evacuate, these courageous men held their ground and helped save thousands of lives. They and their fellow troops on the ground and in the air had no room for error as frenzy broke out in the streets and lashing rains and enemy fire began to pelt the city. One Marine pilot, Captain Gerry Berry, flew for eighteen straight hours and had to physically force the American ambassador onto his helicopter.
Drury and Clavin gained unprecedented access to the survivors, to the declassified "After-Action reports" of the operation, and to the transmissions among helicopter pilots, their officers, and officials in Saigon secretly recorded by the National Security Agency. They deliver a taut and stirring account of a turning point in American history which unfolds with the heart-stopping urgency of the best thrillers—a riveting true story finally told, in full, by those who lived it.
Q & A with the authors

Publishers Weekly





Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century
by Michael Hiltzik
Free Press/Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

As breathtaking today as the day it was completed, Hoover Dam not only shaped the American West but helped launch the American century. In the depths of the Great Depression it became a symbol of American resilience and ingenuity in the face of crisis, putting thousands of men to work in a remote desert canyon and bringing unruly nature to heel.

 Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Michael Hiltzik uses the saga of the dam's conception, design, and construction to tell the broader story of America's efforts to come to grips with titanic social, economic, and natural forces. For embodied in the dam's striking machine-age form is the fundamental transformation the Depression wrought in the nation's very culture—the shift from the concept of rugged individualism rooted in the frontier days of the nineteenth century to the principle of shared enterprise and communal support that would build the America we know today. In the process, the unprecedented effort to corral the raging Colorado River evolved from a regional construction project launched by a Republican president into the New Deal's outstanding—and enduring—symbol of national pride. 

Yet the story of Hoover Dam has a darker side. Its construction was a gargantuan engineering feat achieved at great human cost, its progress marred by the abuse of a desperate labor force. The water and power it made available spurred the development of such great western metropolises as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and San Diego, but the vision of unlimited growth held dear by its designers and builders is fast turning into a mirage. 

In Hiltzik's hands, the players in this epic historical tale spring vividly to life: President Theodore Roosevelt, who conceived the project; William Mulholland, Southern California's great builder of water works, who urged the dam upon a reluctant Congress; Herbert Hoover, who gave the dam his name though he initially opposed its construction; Frank Crowe, the dam's renowned master builder, who pushed his men mercilessly to raise the beautiful concrete rampart in an inhospitable desert gorge. Finally there is Franklin Roosevelt, who presided over the ultimate completion of the project and claimed the credit for it. Hiltzik combines exhaustive research, trenchant observation, and unforgettable storytelling to shed new light on a major turning point of twentieth-century history.
Review from oregonlive.com

Review from Cleveland.com

Review from Washingtonpost.com

Thursday, May 5, 2011

On My Radar (Thursday Edition)

 
I am not against love.  But I am increasingly against marriage.  I have never been married but I have been in love many, many times.  I expect married folks will not agree with me -- that is to be expected.  Humans protect their own interests.

We all have heard the statistics:  half of all marriages end in divorce.  Even if you look at if from the glass-half-full perspective, "half of all marriages never end in divorce," it still doesn't sound great, does it? 

In my day job I help people in what is sometimes bad financial shape -- often worse than bad.  It is my experience that a majority of the problems these people have stem from the fact that they have legally tied their financial lives to another person and therefore are to some extent at the mercy of other people's whims and decisions. 

Listen, I have no issue with people who decide to marry...good luck to you all.  I sincerely wish nothing but happiness and love for you for the rest of your lives.  But I'm playing the odds here.  I state for the record that the only way I will ever marry is if I am overcome by the insanity of medical intervention late in life while in the care of an old folks home.

But, really....good luck to you.  You'll need it.




Which brings me today's featured book:


Love Shrinks: A Memoir of a Marriage Counselor's Divorce
by Sharyn Wolf
Soho Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

For twenty years, Sharyn Wolf, a practicing psychotherapist and "relationship expert," helped revitalize the marriages of countless couples. But while she was being interviewed on Oprah and 48 Hours about her nationally bestselling books on how to flirt, find mates, and "stay lovers for life," she was going home every night to a disastrous marriage of her own.

How bad does it have to get before you leave? In fifteen years of marriage, Sharyn and her husband had sex twice. Despite the fact that she was a national bestselling self-help author, her husband couldn't bring himself to read a single one of her books. Communication between them had failed so utterly that the simple domestic activity of buying a couch together escalated to disastrous proportions. Yet through it all, they stay together. In an effort to explain why, Sharyn ends each chapter with a story about her husband that shows why she couldn't bear to leave this man who made her so unhappy.

Painted against the backdrop of her psycotherapy practice, real-life patients, and the wacky story of her career trajectory, Sharyn turns her analytical eye on herself and her husband and deftly depicts a marriage on its long last legs. The result is a beautiful and sad tapestry of a hidden and omnipresent human condition. You will not be able to put her book down.
Author website

Excerpt on scribd.com


Interview with the author


Wednesday, May 4, 2011

On My Radar (Wednesday Edition)

Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob (and Sex)
by Peter Bart
Weinstein Books
Hardcover

In 1967, Peter Bart, then a young family man and rising reporter for the New York Times, decided to upend his life and enter into the dizzying world of motion pictures. Infamous Players is the story of Bart's whirlwind journey at Paramount, his role in its triumph and failures, and how a new kind of filmmaking emerged during that time.When Bart was lured to Paramount by his friend and fellow newcomer, the legendary Robert Evans, the studio languished, its slate riddled with movies that were out of touch with the dynamic sixties. By the time Bart had left Paramount in 1975, the studio had completed a remarkable run with such films as The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, Harold and Maude, Love Story, Chinatown, Paper Moon, and True Grit. But this new golden era at Paramount was also fraught with chaos and company turmoil. Drugs, sex, runaway budgets, management infighting, and even the Mafia started finding their way onto the Paramount backlot, making it surely one of the worst-run studios in the history of the movie industry.As Peter reflects on the New Hollywood era at Paramount with behind-the-scenes details and insightful analysis, here too are his fascinating recollections of the icons from that era: Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, and Frank Sinatra among others.For over five decades, first on the inside as a studio executive, and later as the longtime editor-in-chief of Variety, Peter Bart has viewed Hollywood from an incomparable vantage point. The stories he tells and the lessons we learn from Infamous Players are essential for anyone who loves movies.
Google books


Peter Bart's column in Variety


Liz Smith

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

On My Radar (Penguin Edition)

A Father's Love: One Man's Unrelenting Battle to Bring His Abducted Son Home
by David Goldman
Viking/Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

David Goldman and his Brazilian wife, Bruna Bianchi, led what appeared to be a happy life in New Jersey. But in June 2004, Bianchi took their four-year-old son, Sean, to Brazil for what she said would be a two- week vacation. Once there, she informed Goldman that she was staying in Brazil-and keeping Sean, setting in motion an international controversy that would eventually reach the highest levels of the U.S. and Brazilian governments. It would be almost five years before David saw Sean again.

What kept David Goldman going when everything looked so hopeless? In A Father's Love, Goldman recounts his extraordinary battle, despite overwhelming odds, to bring his abducted son back home. It is a riveting story full of peculiar ironies, unfathomable elements, threats, and legal twists and turns. Goldman describes in detail the wrenching emotions he went through and how he relentlessly rallied support behind the scenes from both high-level U.S. government officials and national media organizations. Father and son were finally reunited in December 2009, and Goldman writes about the challenges he is now facing as he works to rebuild his relationship with his son, and the advocacy work he is doing on behalf of other children in similar circumstances.

Goldman's unusual story movingly celebrates an ordinary man's incredible love for and loyalty to his son, and his ability to overcome the unimaginable to keep them together. It is a testament to how connected any father and son can be.
Author website


How Did You Get This Number: Essays
by Sloane Crosley
Riverhead Books/Penguin
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Sloane Crosley, the brilliantly funny "fountain of observations" (Boston Globe), now takes readers from a bear-infested wedding in Alaska to a run-in with clowns in Portugal in a new collection of essays about the messiest and most unexpected dilemmas life has to offer.
Author website

Review on avclub.com

usatoday.com on Sloane Crosley

Monday, May 2, 2011

On My Radar (Harper Collins Edition)

An Accidental Sportswriter:A Memoir
by Robert Lipsyte

Ecco/Harper Collins
Hardcover




Publisher website


BookBeast





Little Billy Letters: An Incorrigible Inner Child's Correspondence with the Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Bewildered 
by Bill Geerhart

William Morrow/Harper Collins
Hardcover




Publisher website


Review from deseretnews.com





Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success 
by Matthew Syed
Harper Books
Trade Paperback



Publisher website


Author website




Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir
by Steven Tyler

Ecco/Harper Collins
Hardcover


Publisher website



Author website