In My TBR Stack

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris
by David King
Broadway Books

Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld.  

The main suspect was Dr. Marcel Petiot, a handsome, charming physician with remarkable charisma.  He was the “People’s Doctor,” known for his many acts of kindness and generosity, not least in providing free medical care for the poor.  Petiot, however, would soon be charged with twenty-seven murders, though authorities suspected the total was considerably higher, perhaps even as many as 150.

Who was being slaughtered, and why?  Was Petiot a sexual sadist, as the press suggested, killing for thrills?  Was he allied with the Gestapo, or, on the contrary, the French Resistance?  Or did he work for no one other than himself?  Trying to solve the many mysteries of the case, Massu would unravel a plot of unspeakable deviousness. 
When Petiot was finally arrested, the French police hoped for answers.

But the trial soon became a circus.  Attempting to try all twenty-seven cases at once, the prosecution stumbled in its marathon cross-examinations, and Petiot, enjoying the spotlight, responded with astonishing ease.  His attorney, René Floriot, a rising star in the world of criminal defense, also effectively, if aggressively, countered the charges.  Soon, despite a team of prosecuting attorneys, dozens of witnesses, and over one ton of evidence, Petiot’s brilliance and wit threatened to win the day.

Drawing extensively on many new sources, including the massive, classified French police file on Dr. Petiot, Death in the City of Light is a brilliant evocation of Nazi-Occupied Paris and a harrowing exploration of murder, betrayal, and evil of staggering proportions.

On My Radar: 7/27/12

The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Reprint)

by Paul Theroux
Mariner Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

“A book to be plundered and raided.” — New York Times Book Review

“A portal into a world of timeless travel literature curated by one of the greatest travel writers of our day.” — USA Today

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that have shaped him as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel contains excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:

Vladimir Nabokov         Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh          James Baldwin
Charles Dickens         Pico Iyer
Henry David Thoreau         Anton Chekhov
Mark Twain         John McPhee
Freya Stark         Ernest Hemingway
Graham Greene         and many others

“Dazzling . . . Like someone panning for gold, Theroux reread hundreds of travel classics and modern works, shaking out the nuggets.” — San Francisco Chronicle

On My Radar

A Freudian Slip is When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother: 879 Funny, Funky, Hip and Hilarious Puns
by Gary Blake
Skyhorse Publishing
Hardcover


From the publisher website:

Everyone delights in wordplay! When there’s a sale on tennis balls, it’s first come, first serve. Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion. Why does the Pope travel so much? Because he’s a roamin’ Catholic. What is purple and 5,000 miles long? The Grape Wall of China! 

O-pun the door to 1,001 goodies that will have you howling or groaning, but certainly—like the surgery patient—in stitches.

Hotels, Hospitals and Jails by Anthony Swofford

I am currently in the middle of Anthony Swofford's tale of an ex-warrior coming to grips with an emotionally elusive father.  Let me say, Mr. Swofford knows how to write.  I did not read his previous memoir, Jarhead, nor see the movie, but this book has made me rethink that decision.

As someone who has strugged with the father-son dynamic for most of my life (as a son), I find this book revealing yet guarded and the words hit home more often than I expected.  Ex marine Swofford is traversing a minefield of a different sort in this book; one where he tries to avoid the explosive dangers his father has planted as well as the ones he wasn't trained to avoid by what every boy needs -- an involved dad.

Some people have wonderful parents who do everything right -- they are the one percent.  The rest of us claw through the tangled underbrush of pain and confusion, anger and hurt, gifted to us by parents who don't necessarily mean to do so. 

Where Anthony Swofford succeeds is in writing a story that could have been overly vitriolic and full of spitfire, but instead he keeps a controlled voice yet clearly expresses his anger.  In what could have been a difficult read, he instead provides us with the opposite: an honest, well-written, account of a man trying to make his way despite all the obstacles in his path.

They say to really write well, one must bleed on the page.  Thank goodness Swofford takes this advice.  It could easily have turned into a bloodbath, but instead is a steady trickle.  A bloodletting, if you will.

Highly recommended.

On My Radar

The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia
by Sal Polisi and Steve Dougherty

Gallery Books / Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

The Mob was the biggest, richest business in America—too dangerous and too deadly to fail. Until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime Family values.

And by guys like Sal Polisi.

He was born in Brooklyn—the same place that spawned Murder, Inc., Al Capone, and John Gotti, the future Mob godfather who became his friend. Polisi was raised on a family legacy that led him into the life he loved as a member of the Colombos, one of the New York Mob’s feared Five Families, and came of age when the Mafia was at the height of its vast wealth and power.

Known by his Mob name, Sally Ubatz (“Crazy Sally”), he ran an illegal after-hours gambling den, The Sinatra Club, that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters like Gotti and the three wiseguys immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas—Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Tommy DeSimone. For Polisi, the nonstop thrills of glory days spent robbing banks, hijacking trucks, pulling daring heists—and getting away with it all, thanks to cops and public servants corrupted by Mob money—were fleeting. When he was busted for drug trafficking, and already sickened by the bloodbath that engulfed the Mob as it teetered toward extinction, he flipped and became one of a breed he had loathed all his life—a rat.

In this riveting, pulse-pounding, and, at times, darkly hilarious first-person chronicle of his brazen crimes, wild sexual escapades, and personal tragedies, Polisi tells his story of life inside the New York Mob in a voice straight from the streets. With shocking candor, he draws on a hard-won knowledge of Mob history to paint a neverbefore- seen picture of the inner workings of the Mob and the larger-than-life characters who populated a once extensive and secret underworld that, thanks to guys like him, no longer exists.

***

I was always a street guy. I was into robbing and stealing and gambling and loan sharking. I wasn’t involved in the bigmoney sit-downs, the labor racketeering and construction company shakedowns, the Garment District and garbage and cement company kickbacks. . . . For guys like me and Fox, my blood brother and crime partner, the thing we loved about being in that life was the action, the excitement. . . .We were in it for the money, sure. But it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special.

A guy like John Gotti was different. He was far more ambitious than me and Fox. He wasn’t just in it for the rush and the riches. He wanted the power and the glory.

John Gotti’s tragedy, if you can call it that, was that he was born too late for the old-school gangster crown that he craved. He began his rise as the Mob was beginning to crumble; by the time he got to the top, the bottom had dropped out.

From the beginning, John was charismatic and smart. He just wasn’t cut out to be godfather. Once he became boss, he drove the bus right off the bridge. Or maybe it was the bus that drove him. Either way, I watched him go.

Here’s how it all happened.

On My Radar

It Could Have Been Yours: The Enlightened Person's Guide to the Year's Most Desirable Things
by Jolyon Fenwick & Marcus Husselby

Profile Books
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Things you never knew you wanted - even if you could afford them

From Silvio Berlusconi's bed to Casanova's memoirs (the most expensive manuscript in history), via the Statue of Liberty's nose and an X-ray of Marilyn Monroe's chest, here is a remarkable record of some of the quirkiest, most unexpected and sometimes bizarre possessions that have changed hands in the last year - some costing millions, some only pennies (or even nothing at all). Ranging from rare historical artefacts (such as Marie-Antoinette's pearls) to the weirdly iconic (Elvis's medicine cabinet, anyone?), by turns ingenious, intriguing and witty, this is a brilliant and teasing insight into the culture of our time, packed with extraordinary things to amuse, inspire or amaze.

- - - - - - 

What is "On My Radar"?

I have worked in book retail for much of my adult life.  I am pretty well-versed in the way the business works, at least at the store level.

One of the things that has always bothered me is that there are many new books that come in and get shelved with no publicity whatsoever.  A lot of books, whether they are by a popular author, or have received some pre-release critical buzz, get prime placement in stores through “co-op” deals.  These are deals where book publishers pay retail outlets to place certain books in prime locations to guarantee they will be seen.

But many books don’t have this sort of push behind them.  This is where BookSpin comes in.
I do my best to find under the radar books and publicize them on my humble little blog.  Sometimes the books that catch my eye are also “popular” releases, but my focus is normally the ones that could easily be lost in the crowd.

Look at this way:  if a new book comes in and has no co-op support, it could easily be shelved in its section with only the spine showing.  What are the odds this book will be found?  BookSpin strives to be an outlet for getting the word to readers about these under the radar books, and therefore the ironic “On My Radar” was born.

On My Radar also serves as notice to publishers that these are the type of titles I am interested in and would love to review (hint, hint).

Also, a little bit more honesty here….I am disappointed how infrequently the publisher twitter accounts utilize the “@connect” button to search the mentions of their twitter names.  A “retweet” from a publisher can result in new followers for those of us out here doing our best to get the word out for them.

What I'm Reading Now

Klonopin Lunch: A Memoir
by Jessica Dorfman Jones
Crown Publishing

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Gritty. Dirty. Hard-core. Transformative. Funny.  This is the real Sex and the City.

By her late twenties, Jessica Dorfman Jones had dutifully achieved everything she thought she was supposed to: marriage, law degree, high-paying job, nice apartment in Greenwich Village. But she was miserable and felt like she was living a life that wasn't hers. Desperate to change her status quo and figure out who she really was, Jessica went about the business of making a change by demolishing the life she knew. She threw her good-girl image aside and set out to unleash the very bad girl she had never before tried to be.

Embracing the deliciously debauched world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Jessica leaves behind her sweet and well-behaved husband for the ultimate bad-boy guitar player, starts her own band, and parties harder than she had ever thought possible. She starts a band, puts her job in jeopardy, and causes her friends and family no end of worry with her illicit behavior. And then, in the midst of her self-created chaos, the wildest thing of all happens. She figures out who she is, who she most definitely is not, and what might, if she's lucky, come next.

Klonopin Lunch is Jessica’s wickedly funny and uncensored journey down the rabbit hole and back out again, into a life that, at last, makes her truly happy.

Out This Week: American Gypsy

American Gypsy: A Memoir
by Oksana Marafioti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

A vivid and funny memoir about growing up Gypsy and becoming American
Fifteen-year-old Oksana Marafioti is a Gypsy. This means touring with the family band from the Mongolian deserts to the Siberian tundra. It means getting your hair cut in “the Lioness.” It also means enduring sneering racism from every segment of Soviet society. Her father is determined that his girls lead a better, freer life. In America! Also, he wants to play guitar with B. B. King. And cure cancer with his personal magnetism. All of this he confides to the woman at the American embassy, who inexplicably allows the family entry. Soon they are living on the sketchier side of Hollywood.

What little Oksana and her sister, Roxy, know of the United States they’ve learned from MTV, subcategory George Michael. It doesn’t quite prepare them for the challenges of immigration. Why are the glamorous Kraft Singles individually wrapped? Are the little soaps in the motels really free? How do you protect your nice new boyfriend from your opinionated father, who wants you to marry decently, within the clan?

In this affecting, hilarious memoir, Marafioti cracks open the secretive world of the Roma and brings the absurdities, miscommunications, and unpredictable victories of the immigrant experience to life. With unsentimentally perfect pitch, American Gypsy reveals how Marafioti adjusted to her new life in America, one slice of processed cheese at a time.

What I'm Reading Now 6/27/12

The Letter: My Journey Through Love, Loss & Life
by Marie Tillman
Grand Central Publishing

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In 2003, Pat Tillman, serving in the US Army, hastily wrote a "just in case" letter to his wife, Marie. When he returned on leave before his departure to Afghanistan, he placed the letter on top of their bedroom dresser. For months it sat there, sealed and ever-present, like a black hole through which Marie knew her stable life would be pulled if she ever had reason to open it. Then, in April 2004, Marie's worst nightmare came true. In the days following his death, it was Pat's letter that kept her going and, more than that, it was his words that would help her learn to navigate a world she could no longer share with her husband.

In THE LETTER, Marie's talks for the first time about her journey to remake her life after Pat's death. In it, she recalls meeting and falling in love with Pat when they were kids, his harrowing decision to join the army after 9/11, and the devastating day when she learned he'd been killed. She describes how she withdrew from the public spotlight to grieve, learning along the way the value of solitude, self-awareness and integrity in the healing process. And, finally, Marie recounts her work to rebuild her life, including founding The Pat Tillman Foundation, an organization established to carry forth Pat's legacy of leadership, and her decision to step back into the public eye in order to inspire people to live with meaning and purpose.

Filled with the lessons Marie learned and the wisdom she gained since Pat's death, THE LETTER is both a heartrending love story and an inspiring tale for anyone, young or old, whose life has taken an unexpected hard turn -- and who struggles to get back on the right path.

In My TBR Stack (also)

Due to twitter's crash yesterday, I did not have an opportunity to promote yesterday's blog post, so I have added what was planned for today and will just run a combined entry.  Have a great weekend! 

  
 X-Events: The Collapse of Everything
by John Casti 
William Morrow / Harper Collins

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

“I am an assiduous reader of John Casti’s books. He is a real scientific intellectual.”
 —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York Times bestselling author of Fooled by Randomness

“Casti is at his best in presenting difficult philosophical ideas enthusiastically and lucidly, and in presenting everyday examples to illustrate them.”
—New York Times Book Review

In his highly provocative and grippingly readable book, X-Events, author John Casti brilliantly argues that today’s advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that will ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards. Like Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan meets Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Casti’s book provides a much-needed wake-up call—sounding a fascinating and frightening warning about civilized society’s inability to recover from a global catastrophe— demonstrating how humankind could be blasted back into the Stone Age by a meteor strike, nuclear apocalypse, worldwide contagion, or any number of unforeseeable X-Events.

Book Description

 

An acclaimed theorist offers a provocative and chilling warning: today’s advanced societies have grown overcomplex and highly vulnerable to extreme events that could topple civilization.

The modern industrialized world is a complex system on a scale never before witnessed in the history of humankind. Technologically dependent, globally interconnected, it offers seemingly limitless conveniences, choices, and opportunities. Yet this same modern civilization may be as unstable as a house of cards, fear complexity scientists like John Casti. All it would take to "downsize" our way of life—to send us crashing back to the nineteenth century—is a nudge from what Casti calls an "X-event," an unpredictable occurrence with extreme, even dire, consequences. When an X-event strikes—and scientists believe it will—finance, communication, defense, and travel will stop dead in their tracks. The flow of food, electricity, medicine, and clean water will be disrupted for months, if not years. What will you do?

A renowned systems theorist, Casti shows how our world has become impossibly complicated, relying on ever more advanced technology that is developing at an exponential rate. Yet it is a fact of mathematical life that higher and higher levels of complexity lead to systems that are increasingly fragile and susceptible to sudden, spectacular collapse. Fascinating and chilling, X-Events provides a provocative tour of the catastrophic outlier scenarios that could quickly send us crashing back to the preindustrial age: global financial "black swans"; a worldwide crash of the Internet that would halt all communication; the end of oil; nuclear winter; "nanoplagues"; robot uprisings; electromagnetic pulses; pandemic viruses; and more. You won't ever look at the world the same way again.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Christopher Hayes
Crown Publishing / Random House

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy.

   Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another –  from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.

   How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.

   Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit – utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public's failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives.

   Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.

In My TBR Stack

The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone -- Especially Ourselves
by Dan Ariely
Harper Books / Harper Collins

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and the New York Times bestselling author of The Upside of Irrationality and Predictably Irrational, examines the contradictory forces that drive us to cheat and keep us honest, in this groundbreaking look at the way we behave: The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.  From ticket-fixing in our police departments to test-score scandals in our schools, from our elected leaders’ extra-marital affairs to the Ponzi schemes undermining our economy, cheating and dishonesty are ubiquitous parts of our national news cycle—and inescapable parts of the human condition. Drawing on original experiments and research, in the vein of Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, and Survival of the Sickest, Ariely reveals—honestly—what motivates these irrational, but entirely human, behaviors.

Book Description

The New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality returns with thought-provoking work to challenge our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves.

• Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat?
• How do companies pave the way for dishonesty?
• Does collaboration make us more honest or less so?
• Does religion improve our honesty?

Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat. From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's the white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning, bestselling author Dan Ariely turns his unique insight and innovative research to the question of dishonesty.

Generally, we assume that cheating, like most other decisions, is based on a rational cost-benefit analysis. But Ariely argues, and then demonstrates, that it's actually the irrational forces that we don't take into account that often determine whether we behave ethically or not. For every Enron or political bribe, there are countless puffed résumés, hidden commissions, and knockoff purses. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about; how getting caught matters less than we think; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards.

But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives. With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others.

Tuesday Wishlist

The Choke Artist: Confessions of a Chronic Underachiever

by David Yoo
Grand Central Publishing / Hachette Book Group
Trade Paperback


From the publisher website:

In this brutally honest collection of often cringe-inducing episodes, David Yoo perfectly captures the choke artist's cycle of failure and fear from childhood through adulthood. Whether he's wearing four layers of clothing to artificially beef up his slim frame, routinely testing highlighters against his forearm to see if he indeed has yellow skin, or preemptively sabotaging promising relationships in order to avoid comparison to former boyfriends, Yoo celebrates and skewers the insecurities of anxious people everywhere.

What I'm Reading Now 6/18/12

Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks & the Hidden Powers of the Mind
by Alex Stone
Harper Books / Harper Collins
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

From the back rooms of New York City’s age-old magic societies to cutting-edge psychology labs, three-card monte games on Canal Street to glossy Las Vegas casinos, Fooling Houdini recounts Alex Stone’s quest to join the ranks of master magicians. As he navigates this quirky and occasionally hilarious subculture populated by brilliant eccentrics, Stone pulls back the curtain on a community shrouded in secrecy, fueled by obsession and brilliance, and organized around one overriding need: to prove one’s worth by deceiving others. But his journey is more than a tale of tricks, gigs, and geeks. By investing some of the lesser-known corners of psychology, neuroscience, physics, history, and even crime, all through the lens of trickery and illusion, Fooling Houdini arrives at a host of startling revelations about how the mind works--and why, sometimes, it doesn’t.

Book Description

When Alex Stone was five years old, his father bought him a magic kit—a gift that would spark a lifelong love. Years later, while living in New York City, he discovered a vibrant underground magic scene exploding with creativity and innovation and populated by a fascinating cast of characters: from his gruff mentor, who holds court in the back of a rundown pizza shop, to one of the world's greatest card cheats, who also happens to be blind. Captivated, he plunged headlong into this mysterious world, eventually competing at the Magic Olympics and training with great magicians around the globe to perfect his craft.

From the back rooms of New York City's century-old magic societies to cutting-edge psychology labs; three-card monte on Canal Street to glossy Las Vegas casinos; Fooling Houdini recounts Stone's quest to join the ranks of master magicians. As he navigates this quirky and occasionally hilarious subculture, Stone pulls back the curtain on a community shrouded in secrecy, fueled by obsession and brilliance, and organized around a single overriding need: to prove one's worth by deceiving others.

But his journey is more than a tale of tricks, gigs, and geeks. In trying to understand how expert magicians manipulate our minds to create their astonishing illusions, Stone uncovers a wealth of insight into human nature and the nature of perception. Every turn leads to questions about how the mind perceives the world and processes everyday experiences. By investigating some of the lesser-known corners of psychology, neuroscience, physics, history, and even crime, all through the lens of trickery and illusion, Fooling Houdini arrives at a host of startling revelations about how the mind works—and why, sometimes, it doesn't.