What is Ann Cleeves reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Ann Cleeves, winner of the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award for best crime novel of 2006 for Raven Black, the first volume of her Shetland Quartet.

Her entry begins:

Well, I love European crime in translation. I've been asked to interview the Norwegian writer Karin Fossum at Crime Fest in Bristol in June, so I've been re-reading her backlist and catching up on her most recent titles. Her new book Broken isn't really crime fiction, but it is very creepy. It's about the process of imagination, I think. About how writers write. [read on]

The follow-up to Raven Black, White Nights, will be released this week in the UK and in September in the US.

Among the early praise for White Nights:

"In true Agatha Christie style, Cleeves once again pulls the wool over our eyes with cunning and conviction."
--Colin Dexter

"A most satisfying mystery set in an isolated and intriguing location."
--Peter Robinson

Visit Cleeves's website and read her online diary.

The Page 99 Test: Raven Black.

Writers Read: Ann Cleeves.

--Marshal Zeringue

Interview: Steve Hockensmith

Today at Author Interviews: the second of a two-part Q&A in which award-winning mystery writers, both with new novels in bookstores, quiz each other about their writing.

In part one, Steve Hockensmith (of the “Holmes on the Range” mystery series) interviewed Bill Crider (of the Dan Rhodes mystery series) about Crider’s new book, Of All Sad Words, and related subjects. In part two, Crider questions Hockensmith about his new book, The Black Dove.

Check out Big Red's blog to learn more about Steve Hockensmith and his writing.

Hockensmith's previous novels include Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track.

The Page 69 Test: On the Wrong Track.

My Book, The Movie: Holmes on the Range.

The Page 99 Test: The Black Dove.

* * *

Visit Bill Crider's website and his blog.

Read the Page 69 Test entries for Crider's A Mammoth Murder and Murder Among the OWLS as well as an excellent write-up about Dan Rhodes on the big screen at "My Book, The Movie."

The Page 69 Test: Of All Sad Words.

Author Interviews: Bill Crider.

Author Interviews: Steve Hockensmith.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Reed Farrel Coleman's "Empty Ever After"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Reed Farrel Coleman's Empty Ever After.

About the book, from the publisher:

There are no second acts for the dead…or are there?

For over twenty years, retired NYPD officer and PI Moe Prager, has been haunted by the secret that would eventually destroy his family. Now, two years after the fallout from the truth, more than secrets are haunting the Prager family. Moe Prager follows a trail of graverobbers from cemetery to cemetery, from ashes to ashes and back again in order to finally solve the enigma of his dead brother-in-law Patrick. He plunges deeper into the dark recesses of his past than ever before, revisiting all of his old cases, in order to uncover the twisted alchemy of vengeance and resurrection. Will Moe, at last, put his past to rest? Will he find the man who belongs in that vacant grave or will it remain empty, empty ever after?

Empty Ever After is the fifth of Coleman's Moe Prager novels.

Among the praise for the Moe Prager series:

"Reed Farrel Coleman makes claim to a unique corner of the private detective genre ... with great poignancy and passion he constructs a tale that fittingly underlines how we are all captives of the past. Moe Prager is my kind of private eye."
--Michael Connelly, author of The Narrows

"Moe Prager is the thinking man's PI. He's a reluctant but dogged investigator, a family man even when the family's irritating (or worse), and a straight-ahead ex-cop willing to spend some mental energy on questions of loyalty, love, and religion."
--S.J. Rozan, author of Absent Friends

"Moe Prager is a family man who can find the humanity in almost everyone he meets; he is a far from perfect hero, but an utterly appealing one. Let's hope that his soft heart and lively mind continue to lure him out of his wine shop for many, many more cases."
--Laura Lippman, author of Every Secret Thing

"The author makes us care about his characters and what happens to them, conveying a real sense of human absurdity and tragedy ... a first-rate mystery. Moe is a fine sleuth. Coleman is an excellent writer."
--Publishers Weekly

Learn more about the novel and author at Reed Farrel Coleman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Redemption Street.

The Page 69 Test: Empty Ever After.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ron Currie, Jr.'s "God Is Dead," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Ron Currie, Jr.'s God Is Dead.

Currie's entry begins:

When I was approached about contributing to MBTM, my first instinct was to try to dodge the specifics of the site’s premise—namely that I should choose the actor(s) I thought would best portray the book’s characters—because I couldn’t for the life of me think of who could play the titular character. God, in the book, is a young, slender Dinka woman on the run from marauding packs of Janjaweed militia. If the role were straight tragedy there are probably a dozen actresses who’d fit the bill, but the tone of the story requires a slight yet palpable element of humor from the character, one that would need to be conveyed subtly, without the aid of any dialogue cues, a challenge not many actors are equal to.

So instead I turned to a few of the book’s other characters. First to mind was Colin Powell, who dominates the first chapter. This is not the stern, measured soldier and statesman you see on the evening news, though—he’s a furious, foul-mouthed race warrior who obsessively watches Samuel Jackson movies to learn how to speak “black.” [read on]

Visit Ron Currie, Jr.'s MySpace page, and learn more about God Is Dead.

The Page 69 Test: God Is Dead.

My Book, The Movie: God Is Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Interview: Bill Crider

At Author Interviews today: the first of a two-part Q&A in which award-winning mystery scribes, both with new novels in bookstores, grill each other about their writing.

In part one, Steve Hockensmith (of the “Holmes on the Range” mystery series) interviews Bill Crider (of the Dan Rhodes mystery series) about Crider’s new book, Of All Sad Words. In part two (which will be posted tomorrow), Crider questions Hockensmith about his new book, The Black Dove.

Visit Bill Crider's website and his blog.

Read the Page 69 Test entries for Crider's A Mammoth Murder and Murder Among the OWLS as well as an excellent write-up about Dan Rhodes on the big screen at "My Book, The Movie."

The Page 69 Test: Of All Sad Words.

Check out Big Red's blog to learn more about Steve Hockensmith and his writing.

Hockensmith's novels include Holmes on the Range, On the Wrong Track, and The Black Dove.

The Page 69 Test: On the Wrong Track.

My Book, The Movie: Holmes on the Range.

The Page 99 Test: The Black Dove.

Author Interviews: Bill Crider.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Doree Lewak's “The Panic Years”

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Doree Lewak's The Panic Years: A Guide to Surviving Smug Married Friends, Bad Taffeta, and Life on the Wrong Side of 25 without a Ring.

About the book, from the publisher:

According to author Doree Lewak, the Panic Years mark the point (usually around your twenty-sixth birthday) when your dating agenda fundamentally changes—from dating for a fling to dating for a ring. Suddenly your newly married friends feel more like enemies, weddings become mocking reminders of your own single status, and you contemplate going on a reality TV show to find true love. What’s a girl to do?

In The Panic Years, Lewak delivers a hilarious and helpful road map for conquering the Panic and finding Mr. Right. As Lewak shows, you can win the race to the altar by changing your tactics from Panicked to Proactive—and keeping your sense of humor along the way. You will learn how to:

Cope with Panic by Proxy—pushy friends and parents.
Successfully hunt for PFs (Potential Fiancés).
Project hotness and desirability.
Set—and stick to—dating time lines.
Avoid being bitter at your friends’ weddings—and ruining all their pictures with that scowl on your face.
Get the ring and the proposal and seal the deal!

Packed with true-life stories from the Panic trenches as well as indispensable advice, The Panic Years is the ultimate guide for anyone who wants to survive her single years (with sanity intact), snag her perfect guy, and remain fabulous throughout it all.

Among the early praise for the book:

"The Panic Years brings cheeky humor, style, and insights to a sharp new set of ‘rules’ for single women. I loved it.”
—Dave Singleton, relationship columnist for MSN and Match.com, and author of Behind Every Woman There’s a Fabulous Gay Man

"[T]his book by twentysomething Newsday trend reporter Lewak serves as a "boot camp for brides-to-be." Lewak speaks to the bitterness many singles experience seeing happily married young couples and to their desperation at being still single. While she encourages the single female reader to enjoy her freedom, she devotes entire chapters to such topics as how to project hotness and desirability and when to start booking the caterers. The writing is sassy and humorous, and the quizzes and sidebars are fun."
—School Library Journal

Watch Doree Lewak introduce The Panic Years.

Read an excerpt from The Panic Years, and learn more about the book and author at The Panic Years website and MySpace page.

Doree Lewak's writing work has appeared in Glamour, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, NY Daily News, Metro, The Jerusalem Post and more.

The Page 99 Test: The Panic Years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about the search for Eden

Jonathan Rosen, the editorial director of Nextbook and author, most recently, of The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, picked the five best books about the search for Eden for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on his list:

Tristes Tropiques
By Claude Lévi-Strauss
1955

"I hate traveling and explorers," writes the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on the first page of "Tristes Tropiques," a memoir of travel and exploration. (It was ably translated for Penguin by John Weightman in 1992.) In 1935, Lévi-Strauss sailed from France to Brazil to search for primitive Amazon tribes, the ones most untouched by civilization. But civilization trails him everywhere -- to his disgust, he cannot get a Chopin nocturne out of his head as he wanders through the jungle. Indeed, it is the balance of contradictory elements -- the awareness of barbarism's rise in Europe under Hitler and the waning primitivism of the Amazon, the romantic yearning for an "unspoiled" world painstakingly recorded by a scientific eye -- that gives the book its power.

See which book topped Rosen's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Girl Who Stopped Swimming"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Laurel Gray Hawthorne hasn't seen a ghost in the thirteen years she and her husband have lived in the beautiful gated neighborhood of Victorianna. Keeping her head down, she's managed to make a good life for her beloved daughter and husband while working on her nationally acclaimed art quilts. But in the dog days of a Florida August, she wakes to find a dead girl standing by her bed. It's the ghost of her daughter's best friend, Molly, who leads the way to her own small body, floating lifelessly in the Hawthornes' backyard pool. Now, with police on her lawn and neighbors peeking over the fence, Laurel's carefully constructed existence cracks, and her past seeps through.

Laurel and her sister, Thalia, grew up in what appears to be a typical blue-collar home, but the Grays have long been hiding a very literal skeleton in their closet. While Laurel built her pretty, pleasing life in the suburbs, Thalia became an actress with a capital A, about as unconventional as they come. She's the walking definition of mess, and no longer fits in Laurel's tidy world. Yet Molly can't rest until someone learns her secrets, and she has opened a door to the past that Laurel can't close alone. She turns to her wild and estranged sister, though asking for Thalia's help is like jumping into a hot frying pan protected only by a thin layer of Crisco. Together they set out on a life-altering journey that will reveal their family's buried history, the true state of Laurel's perfect marriage, and what really happened to the girl who stopped swimming.

Among the early praise for the novel:

"Jackson matches effortless Southern storytelling with a keen eye for character and heart-stopping circumstances... What makes this novel shine are its revelations about the dark side of Southern society and Thalia and Laurel's finely honed relationship, which shows just how much thicker blood is than water."
--Publishers Weekly

"On the heels of the successful gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia - both #1 BookSense picks - Jackson again reinvents the GRITS (Girls Raised in the South) novel. Quilt artist Laurel, her game programmer husband, David, and their 13-year-old daughter, Shelby, lead a seemingly charmed life in a serene Florida suburb. But when the ghost of a drowned girl awakens Laurel, the veneer of that life seems ready to crack beyond repair. Can Laurel trust her flamboyant, outspoken sister, Thalia, to help as old family secrets emerge with dizzying speed? With the appearance of a ghost on the first page, you'll feel compelled to race to the end, but slow down for Jackson's great descriptions - you'll be rewarded for the effort. Jackson illuminates not just the complexities of family love as a source of safety and support but also the complexities of danger and death. The life-affirming epilog provides satisfying closure; libraries will want to own all three novels."
--Library Journal

"Joshilyn Jackson has done it again. With a storyteller's easy grace, she whisks readers between bourgeois Victorianna, where dirty laundry and family drunks are secured firmly behind a Sunbonnet Sue exterior, and the unfathomable poverty of DeLop, a town of single-wides, chained pitbulls and no way out - unless you're willing to sacrifice your very soul. Nothing is quite as it seems, and Jackson's skilful unraveling of family secrets and betrayal left me breathless. You must read this book!"
-- Sara Gruen, NYT Bestselling author of Water for Elephants and Riding Lessons

"In The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, Joshilyn Jackson tells a mysterious, mournful story, and adds to what is shaping up as her great strength as a novelist: a deep, empathetic understanding of the impoverished (in both the earthly and in spirit), and a genius for unveiling the complexities of the South. Even in a page-turner like this, where the 'who' and the 'how' compel the book and fascinate the reader, she never fails to be humane, or to turn a kind eye toward every condition."
--Haven Kimmel Author of The Solace of Leaving Early, A Girl Named Zippy, and The Used World

"Do you crave a novel that will cause you to skip work or miss meals or put off sleep in order to keep reading it? In that case, you will definitely want to get hold of Joshilyn Jackson's latest. The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is lushly southern, and just darn good story-telling. Laurel is one of the best characters to come out of a modern novel in a very long time. In fact, she's one of the best characters to come from anywhere in what seems forever! Joshilyn had me from the moment the drowned girl walked into Laurel's bedroom which, by the way, was in the first sentence!"
--Homer Hickam, author of October Sky and The Far Reaches

Read excerpts from The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, and learn more about the author and her books at Joshilyn Jackson's website.

Joshilyn Jackson's short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Her bestselling debut novel, gods in Alabama won SIBA's 2005 Novel of the year Award and was a #1 BookSense pick. Her second book, Between, Georgia, was also a #1 BookSense pick.

The Page 69 Test: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jeremi Suri reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Jeremi Suri, author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century and other books.

One title tagged in his entry:

Nicholas Carr's provocative book, The Big Switch. Carr analyzes how we are living through a second revolution in power comparable to the development of mass electrical utilities in the late nineteenth century. In our contemporary world, computing power is migrating to large utilities like Google. This democratization of computing power makes it cheaper, but also more open to monopoly and manipulation. Carr's book wonderfully mixes historical analysis with future prognostication. [read on]

For more on Carr's book, see: The Page 99 Test: The Big Switch.

Jeremi Suri is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. His publications include The Global Revolutions of 1968 and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente.

Learn more about Henry Kissinger and the American Century, and read an excerpt, at the Harvard University Press website.

Melvyn P. Leffler, author of A Preponderance of Power, on Henry Kissinger and the American Century:

Suri has provided a brilliant and balanced portrait of Henry Kissinger. Shaped by his childhood in Germany, his adolescence in New York, and his wartime experiences in the army, Kissinger was forever the outsider, indelibly influenced by his Jewishness, even as he became the consummate insider. Suri incisively analyzes the qualities that made Kissinger so attractive to patrons like Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, but also skillfully examines the flaws that will forever tarnish Kissinger's legacy.

The Page 99 Test: Henry Kissinger and the American Century.

Author Interviews: Jeremi Suri.

Writers Read: Jeremi Suri.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Nick Smith's "I Was Wrong"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Nick Smith's I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies.

About the book, from the publisher:

Apologies can be profoundly meaningful, yet many gestures of contrition - especially those in legal contexts - appear hollow and even deceptive. Discussing numerous examples from ancient and recent history, I Was Wrong argues that we suffer from considerable confusion about the moral meanings and social functions of these complex interactions. Rather than asking whether a speech act ‘is or is not’ an apology, Smith offers a highly nuanced theory of apologetic meaning. Smith leads us though a series of rich philosophical and interdisciplinary questions, explaining how apologies have evolved from a confluence of diverse cultural and religious practices that do not translate easily into secular discourse or gender stereotypes. After classifying several varieties of apologies between individuals, Smith turns to apologies from collectives. Although apologies from corporations, governments, and other groups can be quite meaningful in certain respects, we should be suspicious of those that supplant apologies from individual wrongdoers.

Listen to Nick Smith discuss his book on The Diane Rehm Show.

Read an excerpt from I Was Wrong, and learn more about the book from the Cambridge University Press website.

Nick Smith is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. Visit his faculty webpage and personal website.

The Page 99 Test: I Was Wrong.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jean-Michel Cousteau reading?

Underwater documentarian Jean-Michel Cousteau talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what he has been listening to and watching. And reading:

I'm reading the book that Ed Begley Jr., the actor, has produced [Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life]. He's on the cover and holding a light bulb. I know him – not well, but we've been at many events together. For example, he is telling us, and rightfully so, that if you have an electric car, you think you're doing the right thing. No you're not. Because you're plugging your electric car in a socket and that energy that is taking care of your batteries is coming from a power plant. And that power plant, in many instances, is powered by fuel, by oil. That's why, at least for now, hybrids are better because you create your own energy by driving.

Read about Cousteau's viewing and musical enthusiasms.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Hillary Jordan's "Mudbound"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Hillary Jordan's Mudbound.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.

The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."

Among the praise for Mudbound:

“[A] beautiful debut . . . A superbly rendered depiction of the fury and terror wrought by racism."
--Publishers Weekly

“[A] sophisticated, complex first novel.”
--Booklist, starred review

"[A] poignant and moving debut novel . . . Jordan faultlessly portrays the values of the 1940s as she builds to a stunning conclusion. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal, starred review

“Mudbound is a real page-turner—a tangle of history, tragedy, and romance powered by guilt, moral indignation, and a near chorus of unstoppable voices.”
--Stewart O’Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying and Last Night at the Lobster

“This is storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made as real as rain, as true as this minute. Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm. Her characters walked straight out of 1940's Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still.”
--Barbara Kingsolver

“[A] supremely readable debut novel . . . Fluidly narrated by engaging characters . . . Mudbound is packed with drama. Pick it up and pass it on."
--Michelle Green, People, Critics Choice, 4-star review

Read an excerpt from Mudbound, and learn more about the author and her work at Hillary Jordan's website.

Hillary Jordan spent fifteen years working as an advertising copywriter before starting to write fiction. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including StoryQuarterly and The Carolina Quarterly.

The Page 69 Test: Mudbound.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Peter Corris reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Peter Corris, author of the acclaimed crime-fiction Cliff Hardy series as well as non-crime books such as The Journal of Fletcher Christian (2005).

One book among his recent reading:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.... I'm about half way through the Larsson. Scandinavian crime writers are all the rage at the moment. They have the bleakness of the climate on their side -- crime writing requiring an element of bleakness. I'm enjoying the story but I have feeling, at over 500 pages, that the book is a bit padded. [read on]

Learn more about the full Cliff Hardy series and Peter Corris's other fiction and non-fiction at his website.

Read The Page 99 Test: Appeal Denied.

See what Corris thinks about the work of Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Walter Mosley, and James Elroy in this 2003 profile in The Age.

View the Peter Corris plaque, Circular Quay, Sydney (via Matilda).

Writers Read: Peter Corris.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Paarlberg's "Starved for Science"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Robert Paarlberg's Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa.

About the book, from the publisher:

Heading upcountry in Africa to visit small farms is absolutely exhilarating given the dramatic beauty of big skies, red soil, and arid vistas, but eventually the two-lane tarmac narrows to rutted dirt, and the journey must continue on foot. The farmers you eventually meet are mostly women, hardworking but visibly poor. They have no improved seeds, no chemical fertilizers, no irrigation, and with their meager crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Many are malnourished.

Nearly two-thirds of Africans are employed in agriculture, yet on a per-capita basis they produce roughly 20 percent less than they did in 1970. Although modern agricultural science was the key to reducing rural poverty in Asia, modern farm science—including biotechnology—has recently been kept out of Africa.

In Starved for Science Robert Paarlberg explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought. He traces this obstacle to the current opposition to farm science in prosperous countries. Having embraced agricultural science to become well-fed themselves, those in wealthy countries are now instructing Africans—on the most dubious grounds—not to do the same.

In a book sure to generate intense debate, Paarlberg details how this cultural turn against agricultural science among affluent societies is now being exported, inappropriately, to Africa. Those who are opposed to the use of agricultural technologies are telling African farmers that, in effect, it would be just as well for them to remain poor.

Among the pre-publication recognition for the book:

"Except for South Africa, no African state has legalized the planting of GMOs for production and consumption. While citizens of rich countries have the luxury of deciding what kinds of foods--organic, nonorganic, GMO, non-GMO--to eat, droughts and insect infestations continue to wipe out crops, and rural African children die because they have no choices. Bringing another perspective to the GMO debate [is] Paarlberg's provocative argument."
--Joshua Lambert, Library Journal

Norman Borlaug, Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M University and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Jimmy Carter wrote the foreword to Starved for Science.

Read an excerpt from Starved for Science, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Robert Paarlberg is the Betty Freyhof Johnson Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College.

The Page 99 Test: Starved for Science.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Declan Hughes' "The Price of Blood"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes.

About the book, from the publisher's website:

What's in a name? Apparently everything for Ed Loy, because that's the only information Father Vincent Tyrrell, brother of prominent racehorse trainer F. X. Tyrrell, offers when he asks for Ed's help in finding a missing person. Even the best private eye needs more than just a name, but hard times and a dwindling bank account make it difficult for Loy to say no.

He is not without luck, however. While working another case, Loy discovers a phone number that seems linked to F.X. found on an unidentified body. Thinking it more than a coincidence, he begins digging into the history of the Tyrrells—a history consumed with trading and dealing, gambling and horse breeding—and soon realizes there is more to the family than meets the eye, a suspicion confirmed when two more people with connections to the Tyrrells are killed.

On the eve of one of Ireland's most anticipated sporting events, the four-day Leopardstown Race-course Christmas Festival, all bets are off as Loy pursues a twisted killer on the final leg of a reckless master plan.

In The Price of Blood, Declan Hughes once again paints an arresting portrait of an Ireland not found in any guidebooks. Deadly passions beget dark secrets in a chilling story that will have readers on edge right up to its shocking conclusion.

Among the early praise for The Price of Blood:

"Hired by Father Vincent Tyrrell to find Patrick Hutton, a jockey missing for 10 years, Ed Loy quickly finds himself investigating not one but two grisly murders in playwright Hughes's stellar third novel to feature the Dublin PI (after 2007's The Color of Blood). At the same time, Loy must stay on his guard against members of the Halligan family, who blame him for the incarceration of one of their own. An innocent fling with the mysterious Miranda Hart leads Loy ever deeper into the heart of a complex drama that spans decades and involves several members of the powerful Tyrrell family. At least one murder turns out not to be what it seems. Beaten up, warned off and yet undaunted, Loy uncovers a horrible series of secrets, leading to a violent and labyrinthine conclusion at a famous Irish horse-racing festival. This intelligent, often brutal thriller will have readers' hearts racing from start to finish."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Hughes, a former playwright, is a veteran at establishing mood, pace and tone at an early stage, and the Christmas period during which the events swiftly unfold is as much a player in this story as any of its flesh-and-blood characters. He’s also very good at weaving together a number of diverse sub-plots, and here touches on a number of hot-topic issues of recent Irish history: corruption in Irish horseracing; neglect and abuse in Church-run industrial schools; the declining influence of the Church when juxtaposed with the inexorable rise of Mammon; the infiltration of all levels of Irish society by illegally amassed wealth. The style, which is of the tough, hardboiled variety, owes as much to Raymond Chandler as it does Ross Macdonald, with Hughes showcasing a deft hand at leavening the grim tone with flashes of mordant wit: 'Neither had been a jockey; the plasterer sounded amused at the suggestion, the solicitor mysteriously outraged, as if I’d accused him of being a sex criminal, or a DJ.'"
--Declan Burke

"Hughes's abilities to craft a 'Dublin noir' crime novel and to expand the character of Ed Loy combine to make this a welcome addition to an eminently readable new series. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal

“Tough, ironically self-aware, loyal, Ed [Loy] is the perfect Chandleresque hero. But the book’s various twists, including rumours of Catholic abuse at a now-closed home for boys, wrap themselves around a dense core of Irish authenticity, all the voices pitch-perfect, all the developments dark,”
--P.G. Koch, Houston Chronicle

"This dark mystery manges to be quintessentially, unsentimentally Irish - and as twisty and nasty as The Big Sleep and Chinatown ... atmospheric and tough, with a lot of excellently described drinking."
--Booklist

Learn more about Declan Hughes and his books at the publisher's website, his website, and his blog. Read Kevin Burton Smith's June 2007 interview with Hughes at January Magazine.

Hughes has worked for more than twenty years in the theater in Dublin as director and playwright. In 1984, he co-founded Rough Magic, Ireland's leading independent theater company. He has been writer in association with the Abbey Theatre and remains an artistic associate of Rough Magic. His novels include The Wrong Kind of Blood and The Color of Blood.

The Page 69 Test: The Price of Blood.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Katherine Ashenburg reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.

Two books mentioned in her entry:

a guide to Stockholm, where I am going for Easter weekend, and a new Spanish mystery, given to me by my publishers [in London], Profile. It's called Tattoo, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and will be published this year. The detective, based in Barcelona, has a taste for good food, and Amsterdam, two favourites of mine. [read on]

Katherine Ashenburg is the prize-winning author of three non-fiction books and hundreds of articles on subjects that range from travel to mourning customs to architecture.

From the New York Times Style Magazine, on The Dirt on Clean:

"Utterly engaging as guided tours of human history as seen through the lens of a single idea ... Ashenburg, for her part, operates within a more literary frame of reference, mining 'The Romance of Flamenca,' Madame de Sevigne's letters, Thackeray's novels and others over the course of a lively account in which we learn that: Napoleon spent two hours in a steaming bathtub every morning while an assistant read him newspapers and telegrams; Louis XIV had halitosis; Caucasians possess merocrine sweat glands 'in profusion,' while Asians have few or none; and Kotex were first manufactured by a Wisconsin company during World War I as absorbent bandages for Army hospitals in France."

Read more about The Dirt on Clean, and visit Katherine Ashenburg's website.

Writers Read: Katherine Ashenburg.

--Marshal Zeringue

Critic's chart: books on Northern Ireland

George Brock, the Saturday Editor of the (London) Times, has reported from Northern Ireland for the Times and the Observer.

He named six top books on Ulster for the Times. Number One on his list:

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 by Paul Bew

If you want to understand what has happened, what may yet and why, this is the place to start.

Read about another book to make the chart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Samantha Hunt's "The Invention of Everything Else"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lives out his last days

From the moment she first catches sight of the Hotel New Yorker’s most famous resident on New Year’s Day 1943, Louisa -- obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the guests -- is determined to befriend this strange man. As Louisa discovers their shared affinity for pigeons, she also begins to piece together Tesla’s extraordinary story of life as an immigrant, a genius, and a halfhearted capitalist. Meanwhile, Louisa — faced with her father’s imminent departure in a time machine to reunite with his late wife, and pleasantly unsettled by the arrival in her life of a mysterious mechanic (perhaps from the future) named Arthur -- begins to suspect that she has understood something about the relationship of love and invention that Tesla, for all his brilliance, never did.

The Invention of Everything Else luminously resurrects one of the greatest scientists of all time, Nikola Tesla, while magically transporting us -- à la Steven Millhauser and Michael Chabon -- to an early twentieth-century New York City thrumming with energy, wonder, and possibility.

Among the wide acclaim for the novel:

“Hunt weaves history and imagination to create a seductively original world…”
--Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment

"An engaging portrait...and a poignant one of Tesla... There’s much food for thought here and some very beautiful prose."
--Kirkus Reviews

“Hunt (The Seas) delivers a breathtaking novel that is both difficult to classify and impossible to ignore."
--Library Journal

"Hunt's magical new novel is a love letter to one of the world's most remarkable inventors…For a moment…everything seems possible."
--Washington Post

“[Hunt] puts her considerable talents to work…Tesla's story…is crafted with an intensity...that makes the heart beat faster.”
--Los Angeles Times

Read an excerpt from The Invention of Everything Else, and learn more about the book and its author at Samantha Hunt's website.

Samantha Hunt is the author of the acclaimed first novel The Seas, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s and on This American Life.

The Page 99 Test: The Invention of Everything Else.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gayle Brandeis's "Self Storage," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Gayle Brandeis's Self Storage.

Brandeis's entry opens:

The day after I received the email asking me to participate in this blog, I received an email from a producer asking if my novel Self Storage had been optioned yet. The timing still makes me smile—it's almost as if the invitation to cast my book ushered in the possibility of a real movie. I know the film world is just as unpredictable and uncertain as the publishing world, if not more so, so who knows if an adaptation will actually come to light, but it's great fun to dream about the potential cast.

The main character of Self Storage is Flan Parker, a young mother who goes to self storage auctions and sells the winnings at yard sales in her family student housing community at the University of California in Riverside. Flan is a searcher, guided by Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and a bit of a daydreamer. Her life is forever altered when her path collides with Sodaba's, her Afghan neighbor who wears a full burqa. I promised my friend Dewi Faulkner (doesn't she have the greatest name?) the role of Flan if the book were ever to make it to the screen, but in the event that Dewi is unavailable, I can easily picture a couple of other actors as Flan: Maggie Gyllenhaal would bring a wonderful wistfulness to the role, and Mary Lynn Rajskub would capture both Flan's humor and her frustration. As young mothers themselves (in Mary Lynn Rajskub's case, a young mother-to-be), I think they would connect with Flan's heart. [read on]

Read an excerpt from Self Storage.

Among the early praise for Self Storage:

“A novel of passion and consequence, identity and accountability. I love the narrator, her children, her wild ride, and this truly American story of getting mad and getting wise.”
–Barbara Kingsolver

“If you doubt that a deadly serious thread – also somehow all but laugh-out-loud funny – can connect the pillage of metal storage units, the fierce devotion of family, the rape of human sensibility, and the pursuit of art, read Self Storage by Gayle Brandeis. Or better yet, just take the hand of its greathearted and deeply bewildered heroine, Flan, and hang on for the ride.”
–Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Cage of Stars

Learn more about Gayle Brandeis and Self Storage at her website, at her blog, or at one of her MySpace pages or the other.

The Page 69 Test: Self Storage.

My Book, The Movie: Self Storage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: James Morrow's "The Philosopher’s Apprentice"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: James Morrow's The Philosopher’s Apprentice.

About the book, from the publisher:

A brilliant philosopher with a talent for self-destruction, Mason Ambrose has torpedoed a promising academic career and now faces a dead-end future. Before joining the ranks of the unemployed, however, he's approached by a representative of billionaire geneticist Dr. Edwina Sabacthani, who makes him an offer no starving ethicist could refuse. Born and bred on Isla de Sangre, a private island off the Florida coast, Edwina's beautiful and intelligent adolescent daughter, Londa, has recently survived a freak accident that destroyed both her memory and her sense of right and wrong. Londa's soul, in short, is an empty vessel—and it will be Mason's job to fill it.

Exploring his new surroundings, our hero encounters a lush Eden abounding in bizarre animals and strange vegetation engineered by Edwina and her misanthropic collaborator, Dr. Vincent Charnock. And Londa, though totally lacking a conscience, proves a vivacious young woman who quickly captivates her new teacher as he attempts to recalibrate her moral compass with the help of Western civilization's greatest ethical thinkers, living and dead.

But there's trouble in this tropical paradise. Mason soon learns that he isn't the only private tutor on Isla de Sangre, nor is Londa the only child in residence whose conscience is a blank slate. How many daughters does Edwina Sabacthani really have, and how did she bring them into being?

Undaunted by these mysteries, Mason continues to instruct Londa, hoping that she can lead a normal life when she eventually ventures forth into human society. His apprentice, however, has a different agenda. Her head crammed with lofty ideals, her heart brimming with fearsome benevolence, and her bank account filled to bursting, Londa undertakes to remake our fallen world in her own image — by any and all means necessary.

Among the early praise for The Philosopher’s Apprentice:

"With a talking iguana, a tree with a heart and an army of clones created from aborted fetuses, Morrow's latest is a treat for readers willing to take an imaginative leap ... Strong characters, shots of humor and an unpredictable narrative make this a winner."
--Publishers Weekly

"Arch-satirist Morrow ... turns in a tumultuous take on humanity, philosophy and ethics that is as hilarious as it is outlandish ... Hurtling towards his destiny aboard a resurrected Titanic, Mason must choose between consummation and annihilation of his first love. “Try withholding your judgment till you’ve grasped the broader picture,” Londa advises him. A salutary caution for readers of this wildly ambitious morality play, a shrewd amalgamation of the sacred and the profane ... Tips its hat with style to Mary Shelley and George Bernard Shaw."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Aristotle is referred to so often in this brilliant comedy of manners as to seem to be alive. Also present are Plato, Lawrence Kohlberg, Kant, Sartre, Heidegger, Gadamer, Rawls, Piaget, Captain Kangaroo, and Mister Rogers. How can a novel so loaded with ideas be so funny and consistently engrossing? ... The premise is not new: a philosopher-tutor is given the opportunity to impress ethical ideas on a first-class mind that is, in matters of morality, a blank slate. But Morrow (The Last Witchfinder) is an inventive writer possessing a fine comic sensibility; the story is infused with wit and brio. And that brings one more name into the mix—Diderot. Morrow may not mention Diderot, but in many ways Morrow is a successor to that finest of Enlightenment thinkers, a man who believed that literature and philosophy marched hand in hand and who was not afraid to discuss serious matters in a comic tone."
--Library Journal (starred review)

"Morrow is a good as anybody at dramatizing the notion that ideas can both kill us and save us, and The Philosopher’s Apprentice may well offer about as many provocative ideas per chapter as we’ll see in any novel this year."
--Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

"Morrow’s world is one where ideas matter so much they come lurching to life as intellectual Frankenstein creatures. In The Philosopher’s Apprentice, they are wickedly hilarious – and then they can break our hearts and scare us silly."
--Denver Post

"Morrow addresses controversial topics without being heavy-handed and infuses the narrative with a wit that pragmatists and idealists alike will appreciate."
--Entertainment Weekly

Read an excerpt from The Philosopher's Apprentice, and learn more about the author and his work at James Morrow's website and his blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Philosopher’s Apprentice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about chess

Gabriel Schoenfeld, the managing editor of Commentary and a chess columnist for the New York Sun, named a five best list of books about chess for the Wall Street Journal.

One book on the list:

Tal-Botvinnik, 1960
By Mikhail Tal
Russell Enterprises, 1970

How exactly do grandmasters think? Mikhail Tal's account of his struggle for the world championship title nearly a half-century ago is not merely an analysis of 21 thrilling games. It is an intimate view of the chessboard fantasies of a supreme tactical genius. Tal (1936-92) was pitted against Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-95), the world's foremost "scientific" player, the defending title-holder and the dean of the Soviet school of chess. In the resulting clash of styles, Tal prevailed by a convincing margin. His victory was a vindication of unfettered imagination and a demonstration that chess can be scientific only in the way that Soviet socialism was scientific, which is to say not at all.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nathaniel Rich reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Nathaniel Rich, senior editor at The Paris Review and author of the soon-to-be released novel, The Mayor's Tongue.

His entry opens:

A friend just sent me Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 prose poem, The Wild Party, which tells the story of a bunch of floozies and broken-nosed wiseguys who get together for a drunken orgy. The book was banned at the time of its publication, but reclaimed from obscurity by Art Spiegelman, who illustrated a new edition that Pantheon published in 1999. (Spiegelman seems to have particularly relished the chance to draw the character of Queenie, a sexed-up blond vaudeville dancer who appears naked, in numerous poses, throughout the book). March’s schoolboy rhymes give the sordid subject matter a strangely pleasant menace.... [read on]

Colum McCann, author of Zoli and This Side of Brightness, wrote of Rich's debut novel: "The Mayor's Tongue reminds me of Peter Carey's early work-the highest possible praise. It presents a young writer of deep ambition and imagination working with a kind of unnerving maturity. It's clear from the very first pages that Nathaniel Rich can really write, and he proceeds to unfurl a fascinating möbius strip of a novel, its dual narratives swerving and twisting until they've come together in a way that seems all at once impossible and endlessly elegant."

Read more about The Mayor's Tongue at Nathaniel Rich's website.

Rich has published essays and criticism in The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and Slate.

Writers Read: Nathaniel Rich.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Greg Mitchell's "So Wrong for So Long"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Greg Mitchell's So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--And the President--Failed on Iraq.

About the book, from the publisher:

In early 2003, Greg Mitchell was one of the few mainstream journalists to seriously question the stated reasons for invading Iraq. In the years since, he has repeatedly challenged the media to probe the conduct of the war and its toll on our troops. Now, after five years of war, he traces the conflict -- from the “runup” to the “surge” -- and the media’s coverage of it, in this important collection of commentaries with significant new additions: an original introduction and dozens of pages of fresh material that unify the essays.

If a free press is the watchdog of democracy, then Greg Mitchell must be the watchdog of the watchdogs, tracking the performance of the media at Editor & Publisher, the influential magazine of the newspaper industry. Over the past five years, in his widely read column, “Pressing Issues,” he has repeatedly been ahead of the curve in intensely scrutinizing both the president and the press—and the controversies swirling around Donald Rumsfeld, Pat Tillman, “Scooter” Libby, Ann Coulter and numerous other figures.

His book is a unique history of the entire war—and as topical as today’s headlines. Whether writing early warnings that anticipated a long and bloody war, analyzing Stephen Colbert’s in-his-face mockery of George W. Bush, or imagining the president confessing his sins to Oprah Winfrey, Greg Mitchell explores how we got into the war in Iraq—and why we just can’t seem to get out. With tens of thousands of American troops still in Iraq, debate over the war continues to rage on TV news and across editorial pages. Against this backdrop of controversy, Greg Mitchell is the rare journalist who has seen it all with clear eyes. In So Wrong for So Long, he can finally tell the whole story.

Among the early praise for the book:

“The profound failure of the American press with regard to the Iraq War may very well be the most significant political story of this generation. Greg Mitchell has established himself as one of our country's most perceptive media critics, and here he provides invaluable insight into how massive journalistic failures enabled the greatest strategic disaster in the nation's history.”
—Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com columnist and author of A Tragic Legacy and How Would a Patriot Act?

"Greg Mitchell has given us a razor-sharp critique of how the media and the government connived in one of the great blunders of American foreign policy. Every aspiring journalist, every veteran, every pundit—and every citizen who cares about the difference between illusion and reality, propaganda and the truth, and looks to the press to help keep them separate—should read this book. Twice."
—Bill Moyers

"With the tragic war in Iraq dragging on, and the drumbeat for new conflicts growing louder, this is more than a five-year history of the biggest foreign policy debacle of our times—it's a cautionary tale that is as relevant as this morning's headlines. Greg Mitchell makes it clear that Iraq is a case study in bad judgment, from the misguided moves of an administration blinded by its zealotry to a complacent media that too often acted as an extension of the White House press office. Read it and weep; read it and get enraged; read it and make sure it doesn't happen again."
—Arianna Huffington

"[W]orthy of shelving alongside the best of the Iraq books to date."
—Kirkus

"Mitchell is a gift to his profession, and these columns are rich, rich reads. As an account of the failures of most journalists, it’s damning. A few shine throughout the years, Knight-Ridder’s Washington Bureau probably the most. But Mitchell isn’t just covering the press covering the administration and the war; there is real original thought and reporting going on in these columns as well, as he will often seek out the story behind the story—the parent behind the flag-draped coffin, for example. As a record of the times, this volume is a real gem of a reference book as well. The introductions to the columns each month are among the best quick sketches of the order of events I’ve run across. But more than that, despite the sorry performance of the press throughout the 21st century, there is a glimmer of hope that writers such as Mitchell and those he highlights continue to work in the media. This is a record, in many ways, of a shameful time when the national media drastically failed the American people. But it’s also a record of the few voices who objected, who reported and who tried to keep the truth in the forefront."
—DailyKos

Read an excerpt from So Wrong for So Long at Salon, and learn more about Greg Mitchell at his blog.

Greg Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher, the journal of the newspaper business which has won several major awards for its coverage of Iraq and the media. His books include Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton) and The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, and his articles have appeared in dozens of leading newspapers and magazines.

The Page 99 Test: So Wrong for So Long.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Mario Acevedo's "The Undead Kama Sutra"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Mario Acevedo's The Undead Kama Sutra.

About the book, from the publisher:

Felix Gomez returned from the war in Iraq a changed man — once a soldier, now forever a vampire. So the undead underworld put his skills to work as a private detective, specializing in the sordid, the sexy, and the supernatural.

After surviving aliens, nymphomaniacs, and x-rated bloodsuckers, it's high time for a vacation. Now the aliens are back in a fiendish conspiracy with the U.S. government, and only Felix stands between them and the Earth women they covet. But when an army hit man attacks Felix and the bodacious vampire sexpert, Carmen, not even the astonishing erotic powers of the Kama Sutra for the Undead may be able to save them.

Among the early praise for the novel:

"Vampire P.I. Felix Gomez is irresistibly entertaining."
--Rick Riordan, Edgar Award winning author of Mission Road

"Latino vampire detective Felix Gomez slips back into action in this third installment of Mario Acevedo's paperback original series. The Undead Kama Sutra is a tightly fitting sequel to The Nymphos of Rocky Flats and X-Rated Bloodsuckers. For this case, Gomez will need more than sharp fangs and inbred savvy. Only one thing can protect against a savage attack by an army hit man: The erotic powers of the undead Kama Sutra need to be unleashed!"
--Barnes & Noble

"Fast plots, strange occurrences, and conspiracy theories are par for the course with any Acevedo title, when you combine that with his twisted sense of humor, you end up with a pretty great paranormal PI series that I highly recommend."
--Becky Lejeune, BookBitch

Read an excerpt from The Undead Kama Sutra and learn more about the author and his work at Mario Acevedo's website and his blog.

View the book trailer for the Felix Gomez series.

Mario Acevedo is the author of two previous books in the Felix Gomez series, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats and X-Rated Blood Suckers.

The Page 69 Test: The Nymphos of Rocky Flats.

The Page 69 Test: The Undead Kama Sutra.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best last lines from novels

American Book Review picked the 100 best last lines from novels. Numbers 6 through 10 on the list:

6. “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” –Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

7. He loved Big Brother. –George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

8. ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ –Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

9. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. –Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

10. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. –Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

Read the top 5 on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Tony Robbins reading?

Self-help writer and professional speaker Tony Robbins talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what he has been listening to and watching. And reading:

I'm always reading six or seven books simultaneously and dipping in and out of them. So, in the last couple of weeks I've been reading everything from Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat, to Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World by Ken Wilbur. I am rereading, for the second time, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I am in the midst of A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter, whom I had the privilege of meeting recently.

Read more about what Tony Robbins has been listening to and watching.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Connelly's "Fatal Misconception"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake humanity by policing national borders and breeding better people. As the population of the world doubled once, and then again, well-meaning people concluded that only population control could preserve the "quality of life." This movement eventually spanned the globe and carried out a series of astonishing experiments, from banning Asian immigration to paying poor people to be sterilized.

Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. But it had to contend with the Catholic Church's ban on contraception and nationalist leaders who warned of "race suicide." The ensuing struggle caused untold suffering for those caught in the middle--particularly women and children. It culminated in the horrors of sterilization camps in India and the one-child policy in China.

Matthew Connelly offers the first global history of a movement that changed how people regard their children and ultimately the face of humankind. It was the most ambitious social engineering project of the twentieth century, one that continues to alarm the global community. Though promoted as a way to lift people out of poverty--perhaps even to save the earth--family planning became a means to plan other people's families.

With its transnational scope and exhaustive research into such archives as Planned Parenthood and the newly opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly's withering critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.

Among the early acclaim for the book:

"Passionate and troubling...Connelly tells the story of the 20th-century international movement to control population, which he sees as an oppressive movement that failed to deliver the promised economic and environmental results...Ambitious, exhaustively researched and clearly written, this is a highly important book."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This is history written from the heart. The story it tells is of misplaced benevolence at best and biological totalitarianism at worst. Deeply researched and elegantly written, it is a disturbing, angry, combative, and important book, one which raises issues we ignore at our peril."
--Jay Winter, Yale University

"Matthew Connelly bravely and eloquently explores the dark underside of world population policies. It is a clarion call to respect individuals' freedom to make their own reproductive choices."
--William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

"One of the most gifted historians of his generation has given us an exciting and thought-provoking new way to understand the making of the ever-globalizing world of today."
--Akira Iriye, author of Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World

"Connelly raises the most profound political, social, and moral questions. His history reveals that the difference between population control and birth control is indeed that between coercion and choice."
--Mahmood Mamdani, author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

Read an excerpt from Fatal Misconception and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Matthew Connelly is an associate professor of history at Columbia University. His other publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002) and research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Review française d’histoire d’Outre-mer, and Past & Present. He has also published commentary on international affairs in The Atlantic Monthly and The National Interest.

Visit Matthew Connelly's website.

The Page 99 Test: Fatal Misconception.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Elizabeth Becka's "Unknown Means"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Elizabeth Becka's Unknown Means.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Elizabeth Becka’s latest highly suspenseful novel, forensic scientist Evelyn James returns to investigate a harrowing series of crimes—only to find that no one is safe.

Evelyn James is a forensic specialist in the Cleveland Medical Examiner’s office who’s juggling a demanding workload, a teenage daughter from a failed marriage, and a homicide detective boyfriend. And somehow she always happens to be involved in some of the twistiest, most challenging crime scenes imaginable.

This time around she’s called in to investigate what appears to be a locked-room mystery: A wealthy woman is murdered in the penthouse suite of a luxurious, high-security building. The building’s intricate surveillance system didn’t pick up anything, the entrance wasn’t forced, and the victim’s husband has an airtight alibi. Cases like this, Evelyn knows, can turn on the most microscopic piece of evidence—if she can find any. Things look even trickier when another victim turns up in another penthouse suite. Then Evelyn’s best friend is attacked—and things get personal. And when a third person is found dead, Evelyn realizes that the killer’s choice of victim is anything but random...

Among the early praise for the novel:

"Forensic scientist Evelyn James of the Cleveland Medical Examiner's office returns for this welcome second novel, following Becka's debut, Trace Evidence.... Becka, a Cape Coral, Fla., forensic scientist formerly with the Cleveland coroner's office, keeps the details of this gripping procedural vivid all the way up to the harrowing finale. Fans of Patricia Cornwell's prickly Kay Scarpetta will find Evelyn a complementary contrast."
--Publishers Weekly

"This is grab-you-by-the-throat suspense, written by someone who has actually walked the disturbing walk of an investigator."
--Tess Gerritsen, author of Body Double

"Elizabeth Becka isn't just an expert in her field of forensic science, she's a fine storyteller. Characters you'll care about, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and fascinating details that never slow the action--just a few of the reasons you're going to love the Evelyn James series."
--Jan Burke, author of Bloodlines

"The combination of a credible, likable hero and a bizarre, chilling story is rare in crime fiction, but Elizabeth Becka makes the tumblers click perfectly. Evelyn James wins over the reader from the opening page."
--Jeremiah Healy, author of Invasion of Privacy and The Only Good Lawyer

Learn more about Unknown Means and its author at Elizabeth Becka's website.

Becka's novel, Trace Evidence, the first in a series featuring Forensic Scientist Evelyn James, deals with a set of bizarre deaths in the Cuyahoga River, a rookie homicide detective, the mayor of Cleveland, a local mobster, and her own teenage daughter.

The Page 69 Test: Unknown Means.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Robert Bryce reading?

The latest featured contributor to Writers Read: Robert Bryce, author of Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence.”

One paragraph from his entry:

Books that I’ve just begun include Rashid Khalidi’s Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, and Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. Khalidi’s book is important because it’s really about oil politics. I bought Kurlansky’s book because salt is the mineral commodity which, for millennia, was the modern-day equivalent of oil. America’s laws governing mineral rights were shaped, in large part, by laws governing salt deposits. [read on]

Robert Bryce has written for dozens of publications including Atlantic Monthly, Slate, New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation and The American Conservative.

In a recent review of Gusher of Lies, William Grimes of the New York Times calls Bryce “hard-nosed” and “an equal-opportunity smiter” of energy myths. Grimes goes on to say that Bryce “reveals himself in the end as something of a visionary and perhaps even a revolutionary.”

Bryce's first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. His second book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate, was published 2004. Bryce spent 12 years writing for the Austin Chronicle and now works as the managing editor of Energy Tribune, a Houston-based newsletter.

Writers Read: Robert Bryce.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10: books about boredom

Lee Rourke, the editor of the literary magazine Scarecrow and co-editor at 3AM Magazine, is the author of a debut collection of short stories, Everyday, published by Social Disease Publishing.

He named his top 10 books about boredom for the Guardian.

One book to make the list:

Whatever by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's debut - originally published as Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994 - is a bitterly sarcastic tale of boredom in the technological and information generation. Houellebecq's thirty-year-old narrator is content in his boredom, allowing the quagmire of everyday working life to wash over him, writing strange tales about cows in his spare time. His life changes when he joins a colleague to train provincial civil servants to use a new computer program. Drifting from day to day, from encounter to encounter he slowly drowns in the meaninglessness of the information that surrounds him.

Read more about Rourke's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Marcia Preston's "Trudy's Promise"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Marcia Preston's Trudy's Promise.

About the book, from the publisher:

An act of desperation divides a mother and her child. Only an act of faith can reunite them.

Trudy Hulst has no idea if her husband survived his attempted escape past the newly constructed Berlin Wall. But she knows too well the consequences of his actions. Now branded the wife of a defector, she faces a life in prison. With no real choice, she is forced to follow, praying she can find a way to claim their child once she's in West Berlin.

Trudy survives a harrowing break for freedom...only to learn her husband was shot during his escape. Terribly alone, she wanders the wall like a ghost, living for brief glimpses of her son, now out of reach behind barbed wire and armed soldiers. Desperate to regain her child, Trudy begins a journey that leads her to America, where she continues an odyssey of hope to find her son.

Read an excerpt from Trudy's Promise, and watch a brief video about the background of the novel.

Learn more about the novel and author at Marcia Preston's website.

Marcia Preston's novels include The Butterfly House and The Piano Man. Writing as M.K. Preston, she is also the author of a mystery series featuring Chantalene Morrell, daughter of a Gypsy mother and a redneck father. Song of the Bones won the 2004 Mary Higgins Clark Award for suspense fiction and the 2004 Oklahoma Book Award in fiction. The first book in the series, Perhaps She'll Die, was nominated for the 2002 Mary Higgins Clark Award, and for Macavity and Barry awards in the Best First Mystery division.

The Page 99 Test: Trudy's Promise.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Matt Haig's "The Labrador Pact"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Matt Haig's The Labrador Pact.

About the book, from the author's website:

The Last Family in England is published in the UK by Vintage. It is called The Labrador Pact in America and is published by Viking/Penguin....

Here's the original blurb:

Meet Prince, the canine narrator of this tragi-comic tale of family life. As with all Labradors, he has devoted his entire existence to preserving the happiness and security of his human masters. Not that his human masters realise this, of course.

After all, when the Hunter family rescued him, they had no idea that they were the ones who were really being saved. But as events unfold Prince realises he’s got his work cut out. The trouble is that while he has no problem in remembering his duty, the Hunters themselves seem to have greater difficulty remembering theirs.

Of particular concern is Adam Hunter, who forgets his responsibilities as a father and husband when he becomes sexually attracted to a young and flirtatious aromatherapist.

Then there’s Kate, Adam’s wife. As Prince watches her increasingly neurotic behaviour he detects something is wrong and decides to sniff out the source of the trouble. What he eventually discovers is a treacherous secret which could tear Adam, Kate and their two children apart.

The Last Family in England explores the hidden dangers of family life from the perspective of the only family member who gets to see everything – the knee-high, four-legged observer in the corner of the room. Through Prince’s eyes (and nose) we come to realise the secrets which hold families together and which, once dug up, can lead to their destruction.

Among the praise for the novel:

"Normally, if a book makes me sad, I chuck it immediately. But this book is so brilliant, I broke my own rule."
--Julie Burchill

"I love this book. It's fabulous and moving and funny and strange. It will go
down among the great animal books."
--Jeanette Winterson

"This debut novel is a winner from page one . . . A subtle, dog's-eye view of the frailty of human relationships, it is perceptive, enchanting and destined to be this summer's must-read."
--Mail on Sunday

"Hard on the heels of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, this clever, funny and oddly dark novel is clearly destined to become a cult hit. I only wish my dog had thought of it first."
--Carla McKay, Daily Mail

"[A] wry, serio-comic family tail, er, tale, for our serio-comic times."
--Washington Post

Read an excerpt from The Labrador Pact, and learn more about the book and author at The Labrador Pact website.

Matt Haig’s writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Independent, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Last year he contributed Page 69 Test and My Book, The Movie entries for The Dead Fathers Club, his American debut novel. Visit Matt Haig at MySpace or his official website.

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Fathers Club.

My Book, The Movie: The Dead Fathers Club.

The Page 69 Test: The Labrador Pact.

--Marshal Zeringue

Critic's Chart: ship books

Naval historian David Cordingly, author of Cochrane the Dauntless: The Life and Adventures of Thomas Cochrane and other books, named a "critic's chart" of ship books for the London Times.

One book to make the list:

The Warship Mary Rose by David Childs

The construction, life and times, and the excavation of Henry VIII's flagship.

Read about another book on Cordingly's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

January Magazine's "Author Snapshot"

When Linda L. Richards is not writing highly acclaimed novels and contributing to crime fiction's estimable The Rap Sheet, she edits January Magazine, now home to a regular feature called "Author Snapshots."

The snapshots tell us a little about the author and his or her work, and the writer responds to a set of questions and commands, including: What inspires you? What are you working on now? Tell us about your process....

Cornelia Read, Edward Hardy, and others have already appeared for snapshots. Check out all the entries at January Magazine's "Author Snapshots."

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Brian Fagan's "The Great Warming"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Brian Fagan's The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the earth’s previous global warming phase, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, reshaped human societies from the Arctic to the Sahara — a wide-ranging history with sobering lessons for our own time.

From the tenth to the fifteenth centuries the earth experienced a rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide — a preview of today’s global warming. In some areas, including Western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were able to settle the remotest islands on earth. But in many parts of the world, the warm centuries brought drought and famine. Elaborate societies in western and central America collapsed, and the vast building complexes of Chaco Canyon and the Mayan Yucatan were left empty.

As he did in his bestselling The Little Ice Age, anthropologist and historian Brian Fagan reveals how subtle changes in the environment had far-reaching effects on human life, in a narrative that sweeps from the Arctic ice cap to the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that we may yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives today — and our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the “silent elephant in the room.”

Among the early acclaim for The Great Warming:

“This is not only World History at its best, sweeping across all of humankind with a coherent vision, but also a feat of imagination and massive research. If Fagan has given the medieval period throughout the globe a new dimension, he has at the same time issued an irrefutable warning about climate change that is deeply troubling.”
—Professor Theodore Raab, Princeton University

"Global warming is hardly new; in fact, the very long-term trend began about 12,000 years ago with the end of the Ice Age. Anthropologist Fagan (The Little Ice Age) focuses on the medieval warming period (ca. 800-1300), which helped Europe produce larger harvests; the surpluses helped fund the great cathedrals. But in many other parts of the world, says Fagan, changing water and air currents led to drought and malnutrition, for instance among the Native Americans of Northern California, whose key acorn harvests largely failed. Long-term drought contributed to the collapse of the Mayan civilization, and fluctuations in temperature contributed to, and inhibited, Mongol incursions into Europe. Fagan reveals how new research methods like ice borings, satellite observations and computer modeling have sharpened our understanding of meteorological trends in prehistorical times and preliterate cultures. Finally, he notes how times of intense, sustained global warming can have particularly dire consequences; for example, “by 2025, an estimated 2.8 billion of us will live in areas with increasingly scarce water resources.” Looking backward, Fagan presents a well-documented warning to those who choose to look forward."
—Publishers Weekly

"A prequel to the author's fascinating The Little Ice Age (2001), a history of climate's influence on civilization from 1300 to 1850, Fagan's work queries the response of societies to the warm period of 800 to 1300. Encompassing the inhabited globe, Fagan's breadth balances with his power to synthesize a range of scientific and archaeological evidence with historical imagination, achieving a global perspective on the medieval warm period, as scholars title the time. Each chapter about a geographical area evocatively depicts its farmers or hunters in the backbreaking task of wresting food from their environment before presenting locally specific weather events of these centuries. (Sidebars explain how scientists determine ancient weather.) Stressing climatic volatility even within a planet-wide warm-up, Fagan delineates the precarious relationship between societies outgrowing their resources. Bountiful to Europe, the warm period was a disastrous drought to more southerly civilizations in Asia, Central America, and southwest North America. Superbly integrating the human and climatological past, Fagan's expertise wears easily in a fine popular treatment relevant to contemporary debate about climate."
—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

"An alarm bell ringing out from a distant time."
—Kirkus

“Climate has been making history for a very long time, though historians have rarely paid much attention to it. But as it turns out, a few less inches of rain, a change in temperature of just a degree or two can make all the difference in how human events unfold. The Great Warming demonstrates that although human beings make history, they very definitely do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing.”
—Ted Steinberg, author of Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History and American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn

Read excerpts from The Great Warming and learn more about the author and his work at Brian Fagan's website and his blog.

Brian Fagan was born in England and trained in archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge University. After seven years carrying out fieldwork in Central and East Africa, he went to the United States in 1966. He was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for 36 years. He retired in 2003 and is now a full-time writer and lecturer on archaeology, climate change, history, and other subjects.

The Page 99 Test: The Great Warming.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ben Smith reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Ben Smith, who writes a blog about the candidates for the 2008 Democratic nomination for Politico.

One paragraph from his entry:

I have had a lot of fun lately reading Charles McCarry, the American cold war spy novelist (and spy) who's having a bit of a revival at the moment. The Tears of Autumn, his classic conspiracy-theory version of the Kennedy assassination, is weirdly compelling -- it involves, basically, retribution for American meddling in Vietnam. Until recently, his books were very hard to find -- a 25-cent paperback would be up to a few hundred dollars on Alibris. But Overlook Press, which must have noticed the demand, is bringing them all out again, along with some new ones, which is great. [read on]

Ben Smith grew up on New York's Upper West Side when President Reagan was regularly depicted as Satan in that section of the city, and now lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn. He followed a straight line from childhood to Politico, charting a course that included a summa cum laude degree in linguistics from Yale College; a summer covering cops at the Indianapolis Star; and two years living in Riga, Latvia as a correspondent for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal.

More recently, he covered New York's City Hall for the New York Sun and politics for the New York Observer. In 2006, he was a political columnist for the New York Daily News and in 2005 and 2006 started three of New York City's leading political blogs, The Politicker, The Daily Politics, and Room Eight, for which he still writes occasionally about the New York scene.

Read Ben Smith's blog at Politico.

Writers Read: Ben Smith.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Stephanie Grant's "Map of Ireland"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Stephanie Grant's Map of Ireland.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In 1974, when Ann Ahern begins her junior year of high school, South Boston is in crisis -- Catholic mothers are blockading buses to keep Black children from the public schools, and teenagers are raising havoc in the streets. Ann, an outsider in her own Irish-American community, is infatuated with her beautiful French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugénie, who hails from Paris but is of African descent. Spurred by her adoration for Eugénie, Ann embarks on a journey that leads her beyond South Boston, through the fringes of the Black Power movement, toward love, and ultimately to the truth about herself.

In this ambitious and arresting novel, Stephanie Grant's searing prose, powerful storytelling, and richly drawn characters bring tumultuous moment in American history into perfect focus.

Among the early acclaim for the novel:

"Stephanie Grant's fast-paced but beautifully turned new novel brings to troubled life once more the South Boston of the 1970s. It also brings to life Ann Ahern, a bright, wisecracking teenager who is part Huck Finn and part Holden Caulfield -- as well as a maturing young woman with sexual longings for certain people who are both the 'wrong' race and the 'wrong' gender. Ann's freckled face, she's told, is a map of Ireland -- but it's also a mask that Stephanie Grant strips to reveal a funny, sad, deeply sympathetic character."
--Mary Jo Salter, author of Open Shutters and Sunday Skaters

"Winged words, new words: arrondissement. Nostalgie. Pyromaniac. Penance and confession. Language is Ann Ahern's and Map of Ireland's magic charm. Making all new vocabulary that comes her way her own, including Irish-rooted hyperbole, this remarkable heroine defines herself through the words she acquires and 'becomes.' Drawing on foundational American myths about race and identity, Grant has written an unusual hybrid: a coming-of-age novel of ideas. This is smart work."
--Pearl Abraham, author of The Seventh Beggar

"In Map of Ireland, Stephanie Grant has written a novel of hard times that is a jagged jewel of perfection. With Ann Ahern, she has created a protagonist of fierce individuality, daunting irony, and always surprising courage -- it is as if Charles Dickens had written a tomboy."
--Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter

"Stephanie Grant's Map of Ireland is an openhearted, funny, and brave novel about the complexities of growing up in working-class Boston in the seventies. In Ann Ahern, she may have created the best tough-girl character since Scout Finch."
--Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document

"Map of Ireland is one of those novels that unexpectedly fell into my lap and I was immediately hooked. I could not put this book down. Riveting, clear-eyed, brutally honest, Grant's story draws us into the Boston racial crisis brought to a head during the busing campaigns in the seventies. In the midst of this struggle, out steps Ann Ahern -- one of the most disarming, haunted, and gorgeously conflicted narrators to come along in years. You will love this girl. Ann Ahern will charm you; disarm you. She will enrage you, but she will never let you go."
-- Alison Smith, author of Name All the Animals

Read an excerpt from Map of Ireland, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

Stephanie Grant is an award-winning writer whose first novel, The Passion of Alice, was longlisted for Britain's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She has taught creative writing at Ohio State University and Mount Holyoke College and is currently Visiting Writer at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.

The Page 69 Test: Map of Ireland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alice Waters' most important books

Alice Waters is the founder of Chez Panisse and author or co-author of several books, including Chez Panisse Vegetables, Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook, Fanny at Chez Panisse, a storybook and cookbook for children, and most recently, The Art of Simple Food.

She told Newsweek about her five most important books. And answered a couple of related questions:

A much-recommended book you haven't read:

Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation, a book about the disgraceful inequalities in our public-education system. I have yet to steel myself.

A book you hope parents will read to their children:

Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson's Chew on This, an accessible and engaging book that will make kids understand why not to reach for the Happy Meal.

Read more about Alice Waters' most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Corey Redekop's "Shelf Monkey," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Shelf Monkey by Corey Redekop.

In October 2007, Corey Redekop applied the Page 99 Test to his novel, Shelf Monkey.

Now he's shared some thoughts on a film adaptation of the novel. His entry opens:

Shelf Monkey is about obsession and the perils inherent in becoming too emotionally attached to any one point of view. Any cast member would have to have that certain mania which accompanies that extreme viewpoint of everything I believe in is right, and everything you believe in is wrong.

The lead character Thomas at one point opines on who should portray him in the eventual movie, laying out Jake Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor as his favored candidates. Nice try, but Thomas as a personality does not have that kind of Hollywood heft, and should not get played by a personality that would overwhelm the character (although Ewan would be a good choice in any event). He’s kind of a sarcastic milquetoast, and Paul Rudd would be a fine choice, if possibly a little too old (sorry Paul). In a few years, Michael Cera would be absolutely perfect. And seriously, how good is Cera anyway? I can’t get enough of the guy. Also, he’s Canadian, and as Shelf Monkey is a shaggy little Canadian novel, it would be nice to get an actor with that je ne c’est quoi sensibility. Or Topher Grace. [read on]

Read more about the novel and author at the Shelf Monkey blog and listen to podcasts of two excerpts.

The Page 99 Test: Shelf Monkey.

My Book, The Movie: Shelf Monkey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Seth Harwood's "Jack Wakes Up"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Seth Harwood's Jack Wakes Up.

About the book, from the publisher:

Four years ago, when his first action movie, Shake ‘Em Down, came out, Jack Palms had everything he could want. But after his wife brought him up on false charges of assault, then filed for a divorce, he bottomed out on drugs and his sequel got scrapped. No one in Hollywood would return Jack’s calls.

Since then, in the three years since Jack went clean—no drugs, no drinking, no life—he’s added seventeen pounds of muscle, read 83 books, and played it straight down the line. Now he’s bored, has gone through most of his money and doesn’t know what comes next, but wants to leave his self-imposed exile.

When an old friend offers him a chance to work one big score, a single drug trade that’s going to set them up for life, he finds himself introduced to a trio of Eastern Europeans looking to score enough coke to settle down and start their own business. All Jack has to do is keep them entertained and get them through their purchase. But when people start turning up dead, and an old nemesis on the police starts calling, Jack finds himself in danger. With the cop giving him just 24 hours to find San Francisco’s biggest drug supplier or face charges that will put him behind bars, Jack has to find out quickly which side of acting and action he’s really on.

Ad libbing his way through a minefield of Colombian drug men, San Francisco gangsters and ex-KGB agents, Jack comes to see that the only way to know exactly what’s real—who’s doing the killing, what’s actually going on, and where he’s headed with the beautiful bartender who brought him home—is to see this thing through to its end, no matter what. He’s waking up to a whole new version of his life… however long it’s going to last.

Among the early praise for Jack Wakes Up:

"Seth Harwood has created a thrilling noir story that pulls the listener into the dark world of Jack Palms."
--Spinetingler Magazine

“Harwood sucker-punches crime fiction. It’s not a fair fight…”
--Scott Sigler, bestselling author of Ancestor and Infected

“A supercool cocktail of chicks, Czechs, cars and coke, Jack Wakes Up is an immaculately paced thrill-ride by a writer to watch.”
--Allan Guthrie, author of Savage Night

"Thumbs up. It's a firecracker of a novel, powered by jet fuel. Never lets up. And this Palms fellow, he's an interesting guy--hang around him for five minutes, and trouble will find you both, no doubt. Makes for a fun vacation."
--Anthony Neil Smith

Read an excerpt from Jack Wakes Up at Spinetingler Magazine, and learn more about the book and its author at Seth Harwood's website, his blog, and his MySpace page.

Seth Harwood teaches writing and literature at the City College of San Francisco and Chabot College. In July 2006, he began the Jack Palms Crime Podcast Series.

Read more the Palm/Palms Sunday Jack Wakes Up sales chart offensive at The Rap Sheet or at Harwood's blog.

The Page 99 Test: Jack Wakes Up.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Will Lavender's "Obedience"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Will Lavender's Obedience.

About the book, from the author's website:

When the students in Winchester University’s Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered.

At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: Is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous? The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between the classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurred — and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.

Among the praise for Obedience:

“[Lavender] gets his hooks in deep with this arresting debut… An inspired thriller about cognitive dissonance, conjectural misdirection and the conspicuous dichotomy between academia and the real world.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A devilishly inventive debut that reads like a house of mirrors. Nothing is what it seems, right up to the devastating finale.”
—Brian Freeman, author of Stripped and Immoral

“It’s a genuine, if slightly perverse, kick to follow every byzantine clue in this bizarre game. If you solve this one without peeking at the last chapter, it’s an automatic A.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Obedience draws you in and never lets go—-and what a ride!”
—David Baldacci

“In his dream-like and labyrinthine debut, Will Lavender delivers a clever, intricate page-turner... A gripping exploration of human nature and all its foibles told in Lavender's fresh and original voice...”
—Lisa Unger

“Obedience is a very scary story set on the border where good meets evil, located in this case in that scariest of places, academia. Taut, twisty, and highly original: the pages turned themselves.”
—Peter Abrahams

“A taut and timely thriller that explores the dark side of academia, where classrooms are dangerous and paranoia abounds...”
—Karin Slaughter

“[E]vidence that crime fiction is hardly a played-out genre…A mystery as ambitious as one could imagine.”
—Wall Street Journal

Read an excerpt from Obedience, and learn more about the author and his work at Will Lavender's website.

The Page 69 Test: Obedience.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about ambition

Novelist, short story writer and playwright Warren Adler tagged five "favorite works about ambition, political and otherwise" for the Wall Street Journal.

One book on the list:

Dutch
by Edmund Morris
Random House, 1999

Edmund Morris, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for his life of Theodore Roosevelt, was for his next book given unusual access to Ronald Reagan. Morris later admitted that he was baffled by the president, and the result was this somewhat bizarre "biography." Reagan, I believe, was far more nuanced and subtle than the media ever grasped. Although Morris might have glimpsed the power and ambition behind the mask, I suspect that he knew he couldn't quite harvest the man's essence. Thus he attempted to get at the Reagan story in an unusual way, creating a kind of Greek chorus and introducing himself as a fictional character in the narrative. He was naturally excoriated by critics and the Reagan family, but even though "Dutch" may be dubious as a nonfiction work, it is insightful and deeply compelling.

Read about the oldest title on Adler's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Pamela Erens reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Pamela Erens, author of the novel, The Understory, which won the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction.

Erens's short fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Boston Review, The Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Upstreet, Skidrow Penthouse and Redivider. She will be featured in the short-story anthology Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008).

One book mentioned in her entry:

Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, written in 1959. I’d already read the sequel to this book, the longer Mr. Bridge, and I think Mrs. B is even better. The novel is constructed as a series of very short chapters about an upper-middle-class, Midwestern family between the 1920s and the early 1940s. The effect is that of a mosaic, although the progression is linear, beginning with Mrs. Bridge’s marriage, moving through the childhood and adolescence of her three children, and ending when everyone has flown the coop. What’s astonishing about the Bridge books is that the Bridges and their neighbors live such ordinary, even stultifying, lives, and yet reading about them is completely absorbing. Connell’s success here is partly due to his gift for compression, but it also has to do with his compassion for his characters, his sly humor, and his ability to plug into deep and universal currents of feeling that his characters can hardly name, much less freely acknowledge. The bewilderment and loneliness that Mrs. Bridge so often experiences in the midst of her very proper life is somehow also mine, living though I do decades later and within a completely different set of circumstances. I read this short book quickly and with delight but when I was done I felt a terrible grief. [read on]

Visit Pamela Erens's website to read more about The Understory and her short stories, essays, and journalism.

Writers Read: Pamela Erens.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement by Sally McMillen.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, over the course of two days in July, 1848, a small group of women and men, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, held a convention that would launch the woman's rights movement and change the course of history. The implications of that remarkable convention would be felt around the world and indeed are still being felt today.

In Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Woman's Rights Movement, the latest contribution to Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments in American History series, Sally McMillen unpacks, for the first time, the full significance of that revolutionary convention and the enormous changes it produced. The book covers 50 years of women's activism, from 1840-1890, focusing on four extraordinary figures--Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. McMillen tells the stories of their lives, how they came to take up the cause of women's rights, the astonishing advances they made during their lifetimes, and the lasting and transformative effects of the work they did. At the convention they asserted full equality with men, argued for greater legal rights, greater professional and education opportunities, and the right to vote--ideas considered wildly radical at the time. Indeed, looking back at the convention two years later, Anthony called it "the grandest and greatest reform of all time--and destined to be thus regarded by the future historian." In this lively and warmly written study, Sally McMillen may well be the future historian Anthony was hoping to find.

A vibrant portrait of a major turning point in American women's history, and in human history, this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to fully understand the origins of the woman's rights movement.

Among the early acclaim for the book:

"Sally McMillen offers the most complete discussion yet of the origins and the impact of this event that started the American women's movement and would change the world."
--Marjorie Julian Spruill, The University of South Carolina

"McMillen deftly demonstrates how ordinary women transformed their lives and America's future by rejecting the pedestal to join the rough and tumble of nineteenth century reform politics. Her achievement is to make this transformation accessible yet complex, commonplace yet extraordinary."
--Catherine Clinton, Queen's University-Belfast

"McMillen...presents a fine history of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention ... a well-written and cogent synthesis accessible to the general reader while remaining firmly grounded in primary sources."
--Publishers Weekly

"Sally McMillen weaves together compelling biographies of colorful leaders with an engaging analysis of the broader reform movements that transformed the texture and trajectory of American society. It is an extraordinary story of ideals and energies that continue to shape American life. In short, McMillen offers a learned and lucid overview of a movement that still moves us."
--David Emory Shi, President of Furman University; author of Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1900

"Tracing the developments that led up to and away from the Woman's Rights Convention of 1848, the volume makes a major contribution to women's history and to American history."
--Nancy A. Hewitt, Rutgers University

"This book provides a compulsively readable history of nineteenth-century American feminism--its origins, struggles, achievements, and legacies. I know of no more insightful account of the birth and evolution of the movement to overcome gender inequality."
--Steven Mintz, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, University of Houston

Read more about Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement at the Oxford University Press website.

Sally McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock Professor of History and Department Chair at Davidson College. She specializes in Southern and women's history, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. Among her publications are Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, and To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865-1915.

The Page 99 Test: Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10: books about civil war

Michael Symmons Roberts has published four highly acclaimed volumes of poetry to date. He won the 2004 Whitbread poetry prize for his collection Corpus. He is currently working on a project for Welsh National Opera with composer James Macmillan, and his second novel, Breath.

For the Guardian, he compiled a top 10 list of books about civil war, with particular attention to "books that explored the particular challenge of peace in the aftermath."

One novel on his list:

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

A remarkable novel set in post-apartheid South Africa. Not directly addressing civil war, but it is a vivid exploration of the aftermath of civil conflict, the sheer difficulty of reconciliation and healing.

Read about the book that topped Michael Symmons Roberts's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jefferson Bass' "The Devil's Bones"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Devil's Bones by Jefferson Bass.

About the book, from the publisher:

In two previous New York Times bestselling novels, Jefferson Bass enthralled readers with ripped-from-the-headlines forensic cases, memorable characters, and plots that "rival Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Drawing on research at the Body Farm—three acres of land in the backwoods of Tennessee, where bodies are left to the elements to illuminate human decomposition—Bass has moved fiction to a fascinating new realm, with forensics expertise drawn from his five decades of work as the world's leading forensic anthropologist. But this latest novel cements Jefferson Bass as one of the finest writers of suspense working today, and in a work of drama, cunning, and heartbreak, thrills the reader with fiction that feels all too real.

A woman's charred body has been found inside a burned car perched atop a hill in Knoxville. Is it accidental death, or murder followed by arson? Forensic anthropologist Bill Brockton's quest for answers prompts an experiment straight from Dante's Inferno: In the dark of night, he puts bodies to the torch, researching how fire consumes flesh and bone.

In the meantime, Brockton is sent a mysterious package—a set of cremated remains that looks entirely unreal. With the help of a local crematorium, he investigates and discovers a truth too horrifying to believe: A facility in another state has not been disposing of bodies properly, instead scattering them all around the grounds.

Little does Brockton know that his research is about to collide with reality—with the force of a lit match meeting spilled gasoline. En route to trial, his nemesis, medical examiner Garland Hamilton, has escaped from custody. What follows is a deadly game of cat and mouse, played for the ultimate stakes: Brockton's own life. With help from his loyal graduate assistant, Miranda, and ace criminalist Art Bohanan, Brockton eventually tracks Hamilton, but when the police arrive, they find only a smoldering ruin. Sifting through the ashes, Brockton finds the incinerated remains of Hamilton ... or does he? The answer—along with Brockton's ultimate test—comes in a searing moment of truth.

Among the novel's early reviews:

"As this third thriller (after Carved in Bone and Flesh and Bone) by the pseudonymous Bass (the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass, forensic anthropologist and founder of University of Tennessee's Body Farm, and science writer Jon Jefferson) opens, Bill Brockton is back at work on the Body Farm after the recent murder of his lover and an attempt on his own life. The killer, Garland Hamilton, nurses a fanatical grudge against Brockton. Before his trial begins, Hamilton escapes and is presumed to have died in a mountain cabin fire. In the meantime, Brockton uses his skills and those of his graduate student Miranda in various unrelated cases, including that of a Georgia crematorium stacking bodies in the woods and providing fake ashes to the families. The authors juggle several quickly moving narratives until the final confrontation between Brockton and his nemesis. Buy wherever forensic fiction is popular, and be aware of several graphic scenes and descriptions."
—A.J. Wright, School Library Journal

A "page-turning, nail-biting thriller ... you'll want to burn the midnight oil reading it!"
—Douglas R. Cobb, BestsellersWorld.com

Read an excerpt from The Devil's Bones.

Jefferson Bass is the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility -- the Body Farm -- a quarter-century ago. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker.

For more about the authors and their work, including video footage of the real-life Body Farm, visit JeffersonBass.com.

The Page 69 Test: The Devil's Bones.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ann Wilson reading?

Ann Wilson, the lead singer of Heart, talked to the Christian Science Monitor about the movies she's been watching, the reunion concert she saw before Christmas, and what's on her iPod.

And what she's been reading:

The last book I read was called Sway [a novel by Zachary Lazar]. It was a very dark, very interesting, intense book. I just started reading The Dangerous Book for Dogs. It's a take-off on The Dangerous Book for Boys. So far I think it's hilarious. It's just really lighthearted. My dogs lie there on the bed and I laugh about it.

Read more about what Ann Wilson has been watching and listening to.

Check out the Page 69 Test: Zachary Lazar's Sway.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kim Harrison's "The Outlaw Demon Wails"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Kim Harrison's The Outlaw Demon Wails.

About the book, from the publisher:

To save the lives of her friends, Rachel did the unthinkable: she willingly trafficked in forbidden demon magic. And now her sins are coming home to haunt her.

As Rachel searches for the truth behind a terrifying murder, an even greater menace threatens, for the demon Algaliarept will stop at nothing to claim her, and the discovery of a shocking family secret throws Rachel's entire life into question. If she is ever to live free, Rachel must first walk willingly into the demonic ever-after in search of long-lost ancient knowledge.

But when you dance with demons, you lay your soul on the line ... and there are some lines that should never be crossed.

Among the early praise for The Outlaw Demon Wails:

"Red-headed witch Rachel Morgan has a demon after her, but that's just one of her many troubles in this action-packed sixth installment of Harrison's Hollows series (after 2007's For a Few Demons More). A nice guy might be moving into Rachel's town and life, but she's still getting over her last boyfriend, whose murder she has yet to solve. Elf politician Trent Kalamack wants her to go to the ever-after on a dangerous mission. Rynn Cormel, Cincinnati's new master vampire and ex-leader of the free world, is interfering in her life. Her friend, former demon familiar Ceri, is unexpectedly pregnant, by an unexpected partner. On top of all this, Rachel worries she may have had a too close encounter with a vampire and soon becomes concerned about her own abilities with demon magic. With the help of her feisty mother, Alice, and her pixy partner, Jenks, Rachel boldly tackles every challenge amid a cascade of plot twists that will delight Harrison's fans."
--Publishers Weekly

"Her work can read like a smoldering combination of Alice Waters and Ozzy Osbourne."
--New York Times Book Review

"Harrison makes Rachel’s conflicts real and poignant without turning them into melodramatic slush. .. Harrison devotees should find ample emotional revelations and plot resolution, with enough loose ends to have them eagerly awaiting the next installment."
--Kirkus

"The Outlaw Demon Wails is the sixth book in the Rachel Morgan series. Rachel’s talents have continued to grow and with it the danger she attracts has grown as well.... While the ending in the previous installment was shocking, readers will be surprised to find that the climax in The Outlaw Demon Wails will take the heroine’s future in a whole new direction that will have fans counting down to the next release."
--Darque Reviews

Browse inside The Outlaw Demon Wails, and learn more about the author and her work at Kim Harrison's website.

Harrison's other works include the New York Times bestselling For a Few Demons More.

The Page 99 Test: The Outlaw Demon Wails.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Marcus du Sautoy's "Symmetry"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Marcus du Sautoy's Symmetry: A Journey Into the Patterns of Nature (Finding Moonshine, UK title).

About the book, from the publisher:

Symmetry is all around us. Our eyes and minds are drawn to symmetrical objects, from the pyramid to the pentagon. Of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world, this unique, pervasive phenomenon indicates a dynamic relationship between objects. In chemistry and physics, the concept of symmetry explains the structure of crystals or the theory of fundamental particles; in evolutionary biology, the natural world exploits symmetry in the fight for survival; and symmetry—and the breaking of it—is central to ideas in art, architecture, and music.

Combining a rich historical narrative with his own personal journey as a mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy takes a unique look into the mathematical mind as he explores deep conjectures about symmetry and brings us face-to-face with the oddball mathematicians, both past and present, who have battled to understand symmetry's elusive qualities. He explores what is perhaps the most exciting discovery to date—the summit of mathematicians' mastery in the field—the Monster, a huge snowflake that exists in 196,883-dimensional space with more symmetries than there are atoms in the sun.

What is it like to solve an ancient mathematical problem in a flash of inspiration? What is it like to be shown, ten minutes later, that you've made a mistake? What is it like to see the world in mathematical terms, and what can that tell us about life itself? In Symmetry, Marcus du Sautoy investigates these questions and shows mathematical novices what it feels like to grapple with some of the most complex ideas the human mind can comprehend.

Among the praise for Symmetry:

"Du Sautoy… is not your typical nerdy mathematician. If you have seen him lecture in the flesh, or perhaps watched his fabulous 2006 Royal Institution Christmas lectures on Channel 5, you will know that he looks a bit like the lead singer from Radiohead, plays the trumpet (and footy in a Sunday league) and that he is articulate, fluent, funny and personable. He is also absolutely passionate about mathematics, with a burning desire to make the rest of us as excited as he is about its problems, its patterns and its beauty... He captures for us with brilliant vividness the excitement of the pursuit of a solution to a difficult problem, the extraordinary optimism and patience that modern mathematics requires, when such solutions often involve years of painstaking compilation of partial solutions that might eventually contribute to a successful final outcome. We experience the thrill of a step made towards uncovering ultimate mathematical beauty and share his sense of wonder at the intricacies and patterns that the search reveals. We are drawn into the curious lives of virtuosi from the past, whose brilliant discoveries continue to underpin modern mathematics.”
--Sunday Times

“A fascinating account of the long quest to unearth the mathematics of symmetry… an illuminating account of the life of a mathematician… FINDING MOONSHINE is full of insight into the nature of symmetry and the people who study it. It makes for a fascinating and absorbing read.”
--The Economist

“Idiosyncratic but illuminating…Even if you understand little of the mathematics involved, it’s a fascinating tale… Non-mathematicians will be awestruck by this account of the kind of minds capable of conceiving the Monster and all its symmetries.”
--Financial Times

"Even if the thought of sitting down to a quintic equation makes you want to cry, it would still be hard to resist Moonshine's cocktail of anecdote, swashbuckling potted history and haphazard self-revelation... However, it's the moments of autobiographical intimacy that bring the book to life. Ever wondered what mathematicians do all day? Du Sautoy potters about listening to Strauss and knocks off in time to pick the kids up from school; his colleagues play a lot of backgammon. It sounds like a racket. But perhaps you were curious to learn how du Sautoy and his wife came to adopt those kids? Or which of those colleagues most probably has Asperger's? Or how the author, somnambulant, once tried to strangle his PhD supervisor? These indiscretions transform the book. Without them, it would be a superlatively interesting lecture. With them, it's a joy.”
-- Sunday Telegraph

"A monster hit for the maths world… At the book's core is the mathematical story, which du Sautoy tells with the narrative flair and storyteller's sense of detail, development and suspense also exhibited in his first book, THE MUSIC OF THE PRIMES… FINDING MOONSHINE is one of the few popular first-person accounts - I'd be hard-pressed to name a single other - from the frontiers of modern mathematics. Moving from the highs of illumination leading to new discoveries, to the lows of professional rivalries and peregrinations in intellectual labyrinths, it gives an inspiring testimony of what it is like to be a research mathematician."
--The Independent

"A marvellous account of a 4,000-year obsession with symmetry and the secret language of nature."

--The Guardian

“FINDING MOONSHINE is a superlative mathematical entertainment; not pretty to the purist eye, but oh, so effective”
--The Independent on Sunday

Read more about the book and its author at Marcus Du Sautoy's website and the Finding Moonshine blog.

Marcus du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. He is also The Music of the Primes. He is Senior Media Fellow at the EPSRC. He has been named by the Independent on Sunday as one of the UK's leading scientists. In 2001 he won the prestigious Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research made by a mathematician under 40. In 2004 Esquire Magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential people under 40 in Britain and in 2008 he was included in the prestigious directory Who’s Who. He is author of numerous academic articles and books on mathematics.

The Page 69 Test: Symmetry.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Mark Harris reading?

The latest featured contributor to Writers Read: Mark Harris, a writer and editor covering movies, television and books for Entertainment Weekly, and the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.

His entry begins:

How do you write about a relationship you never witnessed between two people you never met when those two people seem to have left almost no written trace of their history together? Judith Freeman sets that steep challenge for herself in The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, in which she tries to explain -- to herself as much as to us -- the thirty-year marriage of the alcoholic, philandering, possibly bisexual Chandler to a woman eighteen years his senior. It's an act of biographical speculation in some ways, but it's speculation of a very thoughtful and responsible order, and Freeman goes about her task in a completely original way: The Chandlers, for reasons that remain as elusive as their relationship, never stopped moving, and Freeman retraces their path to and from the nearly three dozen houses and apartments in and around Los Angeles where they lived. [read on]

Read more about Mark Harris and his work at the Pictures at a Revolution website.

Among the praise for Pictures at a Revolution:

"An exhilarating read for anyone who cares about the myriad ways movies can shape popular and political culture. I loved it."
—Christine Vachon, producer, author of Shooting to Kill

"While one might think that the films discussed in this book have been thoroughly plumbed (The Graduate; Bonnie and Clyde; In the Heat of the Night; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?), Entertainment Weekly writer Harris offers his take in this thorough and engaging narrative. Instead of simply retelling old war stories about the production of these five Best Picture nominees at the 1968 Oscars, Harris tells a much wider story. Hollywood was on the brink of obsolescence throughout the 1960s as it faced artistic competition from European art films and financial implosion due to an outdated production system and rising budgets. Harris doesn't shy away from complexity in favor of easy answers, and the personalities that he profiles — among them Sidney Poitier, Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty and Richard Zanuck — are certainly worthy of the three dimensional approach. Harris also peppers his narrative with moments that capture the rising cultural tide that broke in the late '60s: chipping away at the moralistic Production Code, and Hollywood's inconsistent engagement with the Civil Rights movement are continuous sources of interest throughout this fascinating book."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Pictures at a Revolution is exactly what its title promises: an in-depth, up-close view of the films and filmmakers that transformed American cinema during an extraordinary period of innovation and insurrection. What we have here is a clash of the titans — Old Hollywood versus the New — with the entire enterprise of American filmmaking hanging in the balance. Like a skilled novelist, Mark Harris keeps us turning the pages, with heroes to root for, villains to hiss, and plenty of intrigue along the way — all set against the psychedelic backdrop of the turbulent 1960s. A remarkable reconstruction of perhaps the most significant artistic moment in the history of American film."
—William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger

Writers Read: Mark Harris.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Perlmutter's "Blogwars"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: David Perlmutter's Blogwars: The New Political Battleground.

About the book, from the publisher:

Political blogs have grown astronomically in the last half-decade. In just one month in 2005, for example, popular blog DailyKos received more unique visitors than the population of Iowa and New Hampshire combined. But how much political impact do bloggers really have?

In Blogwars, David D. Perlmutter examines this rapidly burgeoning phenomenon, exploring the degree to which blogs influence -- or fail to influence -- American political life. Challenging the hype, Perlmutter points out that blogs are not that powerful by traditional political measures: while bloggers can offer cogent and convincing arguments and bring before their readers information not readily available elsewhere, they have no financial, moral, social, or cultural leverage to compel readers to engage in any particular political behavior. Indeed, blogs have scored mixed results in their past political crusades. But in the end, Perlmutter argues that blogs, in their wide dissemination of information and opinions, actually serve to improve democracy and enrich political culture. He highlights a number of the particularly noteworthy blogs from the specialty to the superblog-including popular sites such as Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, Powerlineblog, Instapundit, and Talking Points Memo -- and shows how blogs are becoming part of the tool kit of political professionals, from presidential candidates to advertising consultants. While the political future may be uncertain, it will not be unblogged.

For many Internet users, blogs are the news and editorial sites of record, replacing traditional newspapers, magazines, and television news programs. Blogwars offers the first full examination of this new and controversial force on America's political landscape.

Among the praise for Blogwars:

"David Perlmutter brings the analytical bent of a scholar on the phenomenon of blogging. As a lover of news as well as the new, he also brings a fan's passion to the subject. I am most grateful for both the scholarly perspective and the fan's passion."
--Scott. W. Johnson, powerlineblog.com

"Would blogs really matter that much, and if so would they alter the American political system for the better or worse? David Perlmutter, a professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, has plunged into cyberspace as both a researcher and blogger to look for answers...For readers unfamiliar with the political-blogging terrain, his book serves as a worthy introduction."
--Boston Globe

"David Perlmutter 'gets' the blogosphere in a way that few outside observers do, going beyond the tired arguments about whether bloggers are damaging the civil debate by their partisanship and volume, about whether nonprofessional journalists and pundits should have a say in that debate, and about whether the phenomenon is just a flash in the pan. Perlmutter recognizes what these new media-blogs, YouTube, social networking sites-bring to the table: a reinvigoration of the public side of the public debate, a real and profound demonstration of the political process."
--Joan McCarter (mcjoan), Contributing Editor, DailyKos

"Perlmutter's Blogwars is an impressive primer on the politics and political implications of the blogs and the blogosphere."
--Kathleen Jamieson, University of Pennsylvania

"Books on blogs by bloggers vastly overstate their case and overpromote their cause. David Perlmutter, however, puts blogs in the proper perspective, giving an insightful and highly useful account of how blogs actually are changing American politics as a new tool in a growing arsenal of weapons for political operatives and pundits."
--Erick-Woods Erickson, Editor, RedState.com

Read more about Blogwars at the Oxford University Press website.

David D. Perlmutter is professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research at the William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications, University of Kansas.

Learn more about David Perlmutter and his work at his faculty webpage, at PolicyByBlog, and at the blog of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, which he edits.

The Page 99 Test: Blogwars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Hodkinson's favorite rock music in fiction

Mark Hodkinson, author of The Last Mad Surge of Youth, a forthcoming book about the music industry, named a critic's chart of rock music in fiction for the (London) Times.

One title on the list:

The Harder They Come by Michael Thelwell

Local (Jamaican) boy from woodsmoke-logged village makes good.

Read about Number One on Hodkinson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Laura Lippman's "Another Thing to Fall"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Laura Lippman's Another Thing to Fall.

About the book, from the publisher:

The California dream weavers have invaded Charm City with their cameras, their stars, and their controversy....

When private investigator Tess Monaghan literally runs into the crew of the fledgling TV series Mann of Steel while sculling, she expects sharp words and evil looks, not an assignment. But the company has been plagued by a series of disturbing incidents since its arrival on location in Baltimore: bad press, union threats, and small, costly on-set "accidents" that have wreaked havoc with its shooting schedule. As a result, Mann's creator, Flip Tumulty, the son of a Hollywood legend, is worried for the safety of his young female lead, Selene Waites, and asks Tess to serve as her bodyguard/babysitter. Tumulty's concern may be well founded. Not long ago a Baltimore man was discovered dead in his own home, surrounded by photos of the beautiful, difficult superstar-in-the-making.

In the past, Tess has had enough trouble guarding her own body. Keeping a spoiled movie princess under wraps may be more than she can handle — even with the help of Tess's icily unflappable friend Whitney — since Selene is not as naive as everyone seems to think, and far more devious than she initially appears to be. This is not Tess's world. And these are not her kind of people, with their vanities, their self-serving agendas and invented personas, and their remarkably skewed visions of reality — from the series' aging, shallow, former pretty-boy leading man to its resentful, always-on-the-make cowriter to the officious young assistant who may be too hungry for her own good.

But the fish-out-of-water P.I. is abruptly pulled back in by an occurrence she's all too familiar with — murder. Suddenly the wall of secrets around Mann of Steel is in danger of toppling, leaving shattered dreams, careers, and lives scattered among the ruins — a catastrophe that threatens the people Tess cares about ... and the city she loves.

Among the early praise for Another Thing to Fall:

"An early morning rowing accident lands Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan (No Good Deeds, 2006, etc.) what may be the worst job of her life. When a film crew's motorboat upends her scull into the Patapsco, Tess Monaghan gets more than a good dunking. She also gets the untempting offer of a job as bodyguard to Selene Waites, bratty young star of the TV show Mann of Steel, the saga of a steelworker who time-travels in order to woo 18th-century Baltimore belle Betsy Patterson. Anorexic Selene doesn't have much body to guard, and the stalker who took creepy pictures of her killed himself. The only reason Tess even considers head writer Flip Tumulty's proposition is the hope of snagging some work on the show for Floyd Jupiter, a former street kid who, absent gainful employment, is fast reverting to his evil ways. Even when Floyd is stuck with the job of unpaid intern and a womanizing writer calls Tess an asshole, the work still seems worth her while-at least until whoever's pulling a series of annoying pranks, like putting hair remover in the male lead's face cream, takes it a step too far, and a production assistant ends up dead. Like lunch at Atwater's, Tess's latest leaves you fully satisfied but looking forward to next time."
--Kirkus

"Tess’s latest case builds up a thrilling momentum, and packs a surprise you won’t easily find on TV."
--Amy Plitt, Time Out New York

"Laura Lippman knows Charm City, inside and out. Her mysteries are as much about the complexities of Baltimore as they are about crime, who commits it and why. Another Thing to Fall, the former Sun reporter's 10th novel featuring P.I. Tess Monaghan, reveals yet another side to Charm City. And perhaps its seamiest yet.... Lippman is incapable of writing an un-compelling mystery."
--Victoria Bronworth, Baltimore Sun

"Another Thing to Fall is a fun (and occasionally funny), entertaining mystery. Drawing on her knowledge of the television industry, Lippman has Monaghan working as a bodyguard for a spoiled young Hollywood diva who's in town to film a TV show. The mystery plot is fine, the Hollywood satire is excellent, and Tess is a joy as always."
--David J. Montgomery

Read more about Another Thing to Fall and the author at Laura Lippman's website.

Lippman's 2007 novel, What the Dead Know, was a New York Times bestseller. Her Tess Monaghan books — By a Spider's Thread, The Last Place, The Sugar House, Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butchers Hill, In Big Trouble, and No Good Deeds — have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony, and Nero Wolfe awards, and In a Strange City was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Lippman is also the author of the critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Every Secret Thing.

The Page 69 Test: Another Thing to Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Most important books: Russell Banks

Russell Banks, whose many books include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, and the newly-released The Reserve, recently told Newsweek about his five most important books.

And answered a couple of related questions:

A book you always return to:

Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. It makes the reader feel young again.

A book you hope parents will read to their children:

Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a fable about the two questions that all children ask: why are we here and why must we leave?

Read about Banks' most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Walter Hixson's "The Myth of American Diplomacy"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Pg. 99: Walter Hixson's The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this major reconceptualization of the history of U.S. foreign policy, Walter Hixson engages with the entire sweep of that history, from its Puritan beginnings to the twenty-first century’s war on terror. He contends that a mythical national identity, which includes the notion of American moral superiority and the duty to protect all of humanity, has had remarkable continuity through the centuries, repeatedly propelling America into war against an endless series of external enemies. As this myth has supported violence, violence in turn has supported the myth.

The Myth of American Diplomacy shows the deep connections between American foreign policy and the domestic culture from which it springs. Hixson investigates the national narratives that help to explain ethnic cleansing of Indians, nineteenth-century imperial thrusts in Mexico and the Philippines, the two World Wars, the Cold War, the Iraq War, and today’s war on terror. He examines the discourses within America that have continuously inspired what he calls our “pathologically violent foreign policy.” The presumption that, as an exceptionally virtuous nation, the United States possesses a special right to exert power only encourages violence, Hixson concludes, and he suggests some fruitful ways to redirect foreign policy toward a more just and peaceful world.

Among the early praise for the book:

“Hixson offers a provocative and comprehensive interpretation of the history of U.S. foreign affairs. It is about time that a radically different perspective on the Myth of America was presented.”
—Akira Iriye, Harvard University

“Hixson wants the country to understand the extent to which its nationalism depends on war and violence for sustenance. His may be the first thoroughly ‘culturalist’ reading of the entire history of American foreign policy.”
—Andrew M. Johnston,Carleton University, Ottawa

“Reminiscent of William A. Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, but with all the tools of current scholarship, The Myth of American Diplomacy makes a sweeping case that Americans' sense of their national destiny, more than threats from others, account for their long record of war, conquest, and expansion. It's an important rebuttal to other scholars and a timely warning to other Americans.”
—Michael Sherry, Northwestern University

“Emphasizing cultural construction and hegemony, Walter Hixson presents a spirited and provocative new interpretive history of U.S. diplomacy.”
—Emily S. Rosenberg, author of Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930

"The Myth of American Diplomacy is a much-needed, highly innovative, and deeply enthralling synthesis of the cultural turn in diplomatic history. It is destined to become a standard, indispensable work for historians of American foreign relations."
—Andrew Preston, Cambridge University

Learn more about The Myth of American Diplomacy at the Yale University Press website, and visit Walter Hixson's faculty webpage.

Walter Hixson is professor and chair of the Department of History, University of Akron. He has published numerous books and articles on the history of U.S. foreign policy, including the prize-winning George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast.

The Page 99 Test: The Myth of American Diplomacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Roy Foster reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Roy Foster, author, most recently, of Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970.

Two books from his entry:

God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill [Penguin] and Talleyrand: Betrayer and Saviour of France by Robin Harris [John Murray], because I'm a judge of a prize for literary biography & have to produce a shortlist in a week or so.... [read on]

Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History, an endowed Chair founded in 1991 and attached to Hertford College, University of Oxford. He is the author of many books on the political, social, cultural and literary history of Ireland, and the two-volume authorized biography of W.B.Yeats.

His most recent work, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970, concerns social and political change in Ireland in the late twentieth century.

Read more about Luck and the Irish at the Oxford University Press website.

Learn more about Roy Foster's research and other publications at his Oxford faculty webpage.

Writers Read: Roy Foster.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tara McKelvey's "Monstering," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War by Tara McKelvey.

Her entry opens:

My book Monstering is about Abu Ghraib, which is not a topic that an American moviegoing audience would naturally gravitate toward. But Abu Ghraib, and the use of so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques, is an important subject, and I think Americans should have a chance to talk about these issues In fact, it seems that Americans are ready to examine the subject of torture and to look at this dark chapter in our history, especially since a documentary film on the subject, Taxi to the Dark Side, has just won an Academy Award. [read on]

Read more about Monstering, including excerpts, reviews, and interviews, at Tara McKelvey's website.

McKelvey is a senior editor at The American Prospect and a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and a contributing writer for Marie Claire. She is also a research fellow at New York University School of Law’s Center on Law and Security. She has edited a collection about female soldiers and torturers called One of the Guys.

The Page 69 Test: Monstering.

My Book, The Movie: Monstering.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kelly Simmons' "Standing Still"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Standing Still by Kelly Simmons.

About the book, from the publisher:

Journalist and suburban mom Claire Cooper suffers from panic disorder. Most of her anxieties seem irrational, nothing that can't be fixed with the help of some Xanax. But late one stormy summer night, when her husband, Sam, is away on one of his frequent business trips, Claire's fears come to life. She discovers an intruder has broken into her young daughter's bedroom. She watches helplessly as he picks up her sleeping child from her bed. Desperate to protect her family, Claire puts herself in the line of fire and utters the plea that will undo her: "Take me instead."

As she drives away in the kidnapper's car, Claire fears for her children, but not for herself. And she can't help noticing the reversal in her marriage -- for the first time in ten years, Sam will not know where she is.

For the next week, Claire is tied to a bed in a strange motel room, the intruder her only companion. She is forced to lie still and contemplate the reasons for this assault on her family. Is this just a random crime, or something more sinister? Has the shadowy past that she tried so hard to leave behind finally caught up with her? Day after day, she goes deeper into herself, reevaluating her marriage and her role as a mother, and unburying the source of her crippling anxiety. In seven days she will step out to the very brink of her soul -- perhaps never to return.

A riveting debut novel that will appeal to fans of Sue Miller and Janet Fitch, Standing Still is a powerful exploration of the darker side of mother-hood and marriage.

Among the early acclaim for Standing Still:

"Invigorating prose. Like Midnight Run with a female Charles Grodin."
--Entertainment Weekly, B+

"What mother wouldn't sacrifice herself for her child? In Simmons's electrifying debut, the answer is delivered through the harrowing ordeal of a mother held for ransom by an anonymous kidnapper. A former globetrotting journalist now working for a Midwest TV station, Claire has a comfortable life with her husband, Sam, a successful co-owner of a PR/marketing firm, and their three young daughters, but she's unhappy with Sam and struggles with a secret past. On one of the frequent nights Sam isn't home, an intruder crashes through the skylight of the couple's newly renovated house. The man planned to kidnap their oldest girl, but Claire persuades him to take her instead. An intense bond develops between Claire and her abductor, a widower mourning the loss of his wife, during the eerie seven-day odyssey that follows. As Claire waits for the ransom to be paid, she faces some hard truths about the choices everyone makes that sometimes require lies to endure. The perfect read for a stormy night, Simmons's suspenseful tale contains nary a wasted word."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

Read an excerpt or watch the trailer at Kelly Simmons' website.

Kelly Simmons is a former journalist and current novelist/advertising creative director. Standing Still is her first novel.

The Page 69 Test: Standing Still.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about gambling

Sports Illustrated's Richard Hoffer is the author of Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck and A Savage Business: The Comeback and Comedown of Mike Tyson.

For the Wall Street Journal, he tagged five "books about gambling [that] hit the jackpot."

One book on Hoffer's list:

Bringing Down the House
By Ben Mezrich
Free Press, 2002

Here a half-dozen MIT students put their considerable minds to the game of blackjack and, in a series of carefully orchestrated raids on casinos in Las Vegas, Connecticut and the Gulf Coast, score duffel bags full of cash. The crew is counting cards -- a practice that casinos deplore, even though it is a memory feat and not "cheating" in the word's normal sense. As writer Ben Mezrich notes in his account of their exploits, these geniuses are smart enough to realize, even as they revel in winning more than $3 million, that they won't be able to extract something from nothing indefinitely. With a casino security team tracking their movements and intimidating them, the card-counters fold their operation and, presumably, return full time to engineering something other than blackjacks.

Read about the book that topped Hoffer's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Maine's "Monster, 1959"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: David Maine's Monster, 1959.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the critically acclaimed author of The Preservationist and The Book of Samson, Monster, 1959 is an extraordinary tale of 1950s America -- flawed, conflicted, and poised to enter the most culturally upended decade of the century.

The United States government has been testing the long-term effects of high-level radiation on a few select islands in the South Pacific. Their efforts have produced killer plants, mole people, and a forty-foot creature named K. Covered in fur and feathers, gifted with unusable butterfly wings and the mental capacity of a goldfish, K. is an evolutionary experiment gone very awry. Although he has no real understanding of his world, he knows when he’s hungry, and he knows to follow the drumbeats that lead him, every time, to the tree where a woman is offered to him as a sacrifice by the natives. When a group of American hunters stumble across the island, it’s bound to get interesting, especially when the natives offer up the guide’s beautiful wife to K. Not to be outdone, the Americans manage to capture him. Back in the States, they start a traveling show. The main attraction: K.

Among the early praise for Monster, 1959:

"The monster of the title, known only as "K," is an amalgam of Hollywood clichés: shaggy fur, antennae, feathers, scales, butterfly wings. He lives on an island of nuclear-test mutants, worshipped by the natives and relatively at peace, until he falls afoul of a central-casting blonde and her lantern-jawed beau in a scene from the outtakes of King Kong. It's not long before he's trussed up and carried across the ocean to be exhibited on tour for the masses. What makes this story interesting, though, is where it departs from formula. Betty (the blonde) and Johnny (the beau) have a relationship nearly as twisted as K's features. Billy, their friend and K's impresario, has a thing for money that goes far beyond mere greed. Each of the five years the novel spans is introduced with a montage of world events, focusing on the questionable foreign policies of Western leaders. Clearly, Maine (The Preservationist) intends us to ask whether the vegetarian K is the real monster. Recommended for most fiction collections."
—Karl G. Siewert, Library Journal

"Maine's achievement is to revisit an American myth with fresh eyes, creating an affecting parable for troubled times."
--O, The Oprah Magazine

Read more about Monster, 1959 -- and learn more about the author and his work -- at David Maine's blog, The Party Never Stops.

David Maine is the author of The Preservationist, Fallen, and The Book of Samson.

The Page 99 Test: Monster, 1959.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Maile Meloy reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Maile Meloy, author of the story collection Half in Love and the novel Liars and Saints, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Last year, Meloy applied the "Page 99 Test" to her third book, A Family Daughter.

Her entry opens:

I’ve been reading the Aubrey and Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian, the series that begins with Master and Commander. For those who don’t already know and love them, the books are set during the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and follow the adventures of Jack Aubrey, a captain in the Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalonian ship’s surgeon and naturalist. Aubrey is brave, skillful, and lucky at sea, and easy prey for swindlers on land. Maturin is a brilliant linguist and spy, and an occasional addict, who can’t tell starboard from larboard and tends to fall into the water. Aubrey is wholehearted and bearish, Maturin sharp-tongued and secretive and reflective. But that’s simplifying the appeal of their twenty-book friendship. I have no particular interest in the sailing or fighting of square-rigged ships, but I’ve never been so attached to any fictional characters in my life. [read on]

Visit Maile Meloy's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Family Daughter.

Writers Read: Maile Meloy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Brian Freeman's "Stalked"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Brian Freeman's Stalked.

About the novel, from the author's website:

OBSESSION. BLACKMAIL. MURDER. IN ZERO DEGREES.

Lieutenant Jonathan Stride knows his partner Maggie Bei is in trouble when she reports a deadly crime on a bitter winter night. She's obviously hiding a terrible secret. And her silence only feeds suspicion.

Maggie isn't the only one keeping secrets in Duluth. A seductive young woman has disappeared, leaving behind a stash of lurid fantasies and a cryptic message. I know who it is.

Following a twisted trail, Stride uncovers a sordid web of violence and voyeurism that someone is willing to kill to keep hidden. Stride isn't alone. His lover Serena Dial – a homicide cop turned private investigator – is chasing a blackmailer who knows all the city's dirty secrets. Even Maggie's.

But as Stride and Serena hunt for a killer, a predator with a vicious past is hunting them – with a terrifying plan for revenge. Now every step they take to expose the truth brings them closer to a showdown amid the howling winds of a winter storm. Where survival in the blinding snow is measured in seconds. Where crimes can be buried forever.

Among the early praise for Stalked:

"Brian Freeman is a first-rate storyteller. Stalked is scary, fast-paced, and refreshingly well written. The characters are so sharply drawn and interesting, we can't wait to meet the next one in the story. Freeman has another winner.
A really great read."
—#1 bestselling author Nelson DeMille

"Freeman just keeps outdoing himself with each book….a striking display of skilled storytelling that will have readers surprised more than once well before the shocking ending."
—Library Journal

"Chilling….a strong narrative crammed with twists and studded with sex and violence; a mysterious, even mystical, sense of place; and a well-crafted set of characters and relationships."
—Publishers Weekly

"Freeman's latest should be on the to-read list of anyone who enjoys novels by authors like Harlan Coben, David Baldacci and Jeff Abbott — a perfect blend of psychological suspense and crime fiction."
—Chicago Tribune

"Freeman delivers a swift plot packed with satisfying twists."
—Booklist

Read an excerpt from Stalked, and learn more about the book and author at Brian Freeman's website and his blog.

Brian Freeman is the international bestselling author of psychological suspense novels featuring detectives Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial. Immoral, his debut thriller, won the Macavity Award for Best First Novel and was a finalist for the Edgar, Dagger, Anthony, and Barry Awards. His second novel, Stripped, was named among the top 10 mysteries of 2006 by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The Page 69 Test: Stripped.

My Book, The Movie: Stripped.

The Page 69 Test: Stalked.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julia Alvarez's most important books

Julia Alvarez grew up in the Dominican Republic before emigrating to the United States at the age of 10. She is the award-winning author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, ¡Yo!, Once Upon a Quinceañera, and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, In the Time of the Butterflies.

She named her five most important books for Newsweek, and addressed a couple of related questions:

A classic book that, upon revisiting, disappointed:

The Arabian Nights, I'm sorry to say. There are too many dull stories, plus all the kowtowing to the male ego is enough to make your hair curl.

A book that you always return to:

T. S. Eliot's The Four Quartets, a long, mystical poem that reboots my spirit.

Read about Alvarez's most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Allen C. Guelzo's "Lincoln and Douglas"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln was known as a successful Illinois lawyer who had achieved some prominence in state politics as a leader in the new Republican Party. Two years later, he was elected president and was on his way to becoming the greatest chief executive in American history.

What carried this one-term congressman from obscurity to fame was the campaign he mounted for the United States Senate against the country's most formidable politician, Stephen A. Douglas, in the summer and fall of 1858. Lincoln challenged Douglas directly in one of his greatest speeches -- "A house divided against itself cannot stand" -- and confronted Douglas on the questions of slavery and the inviolability of the Union in seven fierce debates. As this brilliant narrative by the prize-winning Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo dramatizes, Lincoln would emerge a predominant national figure, the leader of his party, the man who would bear the burden of the national confrontation.

Of course, the great issue between Lincoln and Douglas was slavery. Douglas was the champion of "popular sovereignty," of letting states and territories decide for themselves whether to legalize slavery. Lincoln drew a moral line, arguing that slavery was a violation both of natural law and of the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. No majority could ever make slavery right, he argued.

Lincoln lost that Senate race to Douglas, though he came close to toppling the "Little Giant," whom almost everyone thought was unbeatable. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas brings alive their debates and this whole year of campaigns and underscores their centrality in the greatest conflict in American history.

The encounters between Lincoln and Douglas engage a key question in American political life: What is democracy's purpose? Is it to satisfy the desires of the majority? Or is it to achieve a just and moral public order? These were the real questions in 1858 that led to the Civil War. They remain questions for Americans today.

Among the early acclaim for the book:

"Guelzo (Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America) gives us an astute, gracefully written account of the celebrated Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858. These seven debates between two powerful attorneys and statesmen, Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, starkly defined the stakes between sharply different positions on slavery and union on the eve of civil war and offered examples of serious, deeply reasoned exchanges of views rarely seen in American politics. As Guelzo wisely shows, the debates did not stand alone but were part of a larger Illinois senatorial campaign. Douglas won re-election that year, but Lincoln gained national recognition despite losing and then defeated Douglas three years later for the presidency. Perhaps more important, the views that Lincoln enunciated in 1858—that the government, heeding the majority's will, should halt slavery's further spread—laid the foundation for emancipation and a new era in the nation's history. Guelzo's smoothly narrated history of this segment of Lincoln's career, packed full of illustrative quotes from primary sources, will become a standard."
--Publishers Weekly

"In his searching and illuminating “Lincoln and Douglas” the eminent Lincoln historian Allen C. Guelzo does the great service of bringing the debates back down to earth, placing them in the context of a brutal four-month senatorial campaign."
--William Grimes, New York Times

"This year marks the sesquicentennial of the great debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, which transformed a contest for a Senate seat into a battle for the future of the republic. Allen C. Guelzo, already in the front rank of Lincoln historians and author of the best book about the Emancipation Proclamation, has now written an important one about this legendary campaign."
--Michael F. Bishop, Washington Post

Learn more about Lincoln and Douglas at the publisher's website, and read Guelzo's short essay, "Lincoln-Douglas: The Real Thing."

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, where he also directs the Civil War Era Studies Program and The Gettysburg Semester. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004), both of which won the Lincoln Prize. He has written essays and reviews for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Journal of American History, and many other publications.

The Page 99 Test: Lincoln and Douglas.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rachel Cline's "My Liar"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: My Liar by Rachel Cline.

About the book, from the publisher:

Rachel Cline’s debut novel, What to Keep, was praised as “striking ... lovely” (Entertainment Weekly), “tangibly real” (Los Angeles Times), and “eminently readable” (Salon). Set in 1990s Hollywood, My Liar portrays the complex connection between two talented women, each striving to realize her own vision of success in work and in love.

Annabeth Jensen, thirty-three, is a film editor. A native Minnesotan, she is most comfortable playing nice and working behind the scenes, even after ten years in Los Angeles. Then she crosses paths with up-and-coming director Laura Katz. Self-confident, assertive, and alluring, Laura seems to be the perfect mentor and the ideal best friend – especially after she hires Annabeth to edit her new film, Trouble Doll.

Yet as Annabeth cuts and recuts the film that both women hope will assure their futures, she finds herself wanting creative control almost as badly as she craves Laura’s approval. Meanwhile, Laura, who trusts almost no one (certainly not her slippery producer, her brittle screenwriter, or her wayward husband), finds herself increasingly reliant on Annabeth. And when Trouble Doll emerges from their collaboration, uncomfortable truths about both women’s lives are forced into the light.

Rachel Cline illuminates the world of moviemaking with keen insight and wry wit. But My Liar looks far beyond the HOLLYWOOD sign. Its real subject is self-deception–in friendship, art, and life–and the enmeshed nature of communication and competition between women.

Among the early praise for the novel:

“A seductive charmer of a novel–funny, knowing, poignant, inclusively hip and gratifylingly adult at the same time. It is impossible not to be drawn in immediately by the various dramas at the book's center, including the main character's adolescent crush of a friendship with the glamorous and tough-as-nails director she works for. This is one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in an age.”
--Daphne Merkin, author of Enchantment

“Looking with an outsider's fresh eye on that elusive place where Hollywood and Los Angeles–dreams and reality–intersect, Rachel Cline gives us an entirely new story of female friendships and careers in the movie business. This books shines as an architectural, literary, and cinematic discovery.”
--Carolyn See, author of There Will Never Be Another You

“A rueful tale of complicated people in a complicated city. Cline's characters are wonderfully real, and through them she makes a case for kindness, self-forgiveness, and artistic integrity. That would be impressive enough, but the book contains a secret treat: its gorgeous and precise descriptions of Los Angeles make the city itself seem like a living being. A terrific read. I finished it in one day, and I had other things to do.”
--Martha Moody, author of Best Friends and The Office of Desire

“Funny and tragic, satiric and deeply sympathetic, often in the same breath. With assured and compelling insight into the world of filmmaking–and into the fickleness of the human heart–Cline has written a beautifully balanced work, at once deftly entertaining and deeply felt..”
--Katharine Noel, author of Halfway House

Read an excerpt from My Liar and learn more the author and her work at Rachel Cline's website.

Brooklyn native Rachel Cline lived in Los Angeles from 1990 to 1999. During that time she wrote screenplays and teleplays, designed interactive media, and taught screenwriting at USC. Her first novel, What to Keep, was published in 2004.

The Page 69 Test: My Liar.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Michael Novacek reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Michael Novacek, Senior Vice-President and Provost of Science at the American Museum of Natural History and author of Time Traveler, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, and the recently released Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem--and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk.

Neil Shubin wrote of Novacek's new book: "Terra is one of the important books of our time—and it will change the way you think about the world around you. Novacek’s coup is that he not only brings the past to life but shows how it holds the keys to our future. The extraordinary breadth of his accomplishments as a scientist gives his book a powerful combination of authority, wit, and humanity. Reading Terra, it is hard not to feel humbled being a steward of a planet so ancient, wondrous, and fragile as our own."

One book mentioned in his entry:

I just finished reading Tim Krabbé’s novel The Rider, a spare, gut-wrenching, first-person description, meter-by-meter, of the hundred-and thirty-seven kilometer Tour de Mont Aigoul. This sinuous course through frigid mountain passes, terrifying hairpin downhills, and sun-scorched plateaus is reputedly the most grueling stage of the Tour de France. Krabbé, famous for his disturbing story of psychological horror in The Vanishing, shows he is also good for drama and suspense when comes to exhausting hill climbs, tire blowouts, cycle crashes, and the combination of relentless drive, arrogance, and race savvy it takes to win, or even finish. The pages, like the bikes, fly by. I was a good way through this 160-pager by the time my delayed flight at LaGuardia got to the head of the queue for takeoff. [read on]

Read more about Terra at the publisher's website, and listen to Novacek discuss the book on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Learn more about Michael Novacek's research and many publications.

Writers Read: Michael Novacek.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: C.J. Lyons' "Lifelines"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: C.J. Lyons' Lifelines.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping behind-the-scenes drama of four women who face life and death every day

On her first day at Pittsburgh's Angels of Mercy Medical Center, L.A.-transplant Lydia Fiore, the new ER attending physician, loses a patient: the Chief of Surgery's son. Now, to save her career, Lydia must discover the truth behind her patient's death, even as it leads her into unfamiliar-and risky-territory.

At least she's not alone. There's med student Amanda, a sweet Southern belle with problems of her own; Gina, a resident with a chip on her shoulder; and Nora, the no-nonsense charge nurse with a cool head but a fiery temper. Not to mention the paramedic who'd like to try out his bedside manner on Lydia.

Among the early acclaim for Lifelines:

"A spot-on debut....Lyons delivers a breathtakingly fast-paced medical thriller."
--Publishers Weekly

"Pittsburgh's Angel of Mercy Hospital comes brilliantly alive in Lyons' debut novel. This enthralling medical mystery offers an intimate view of the personal and professional lives of its characters. It's a winner." Top Pick, 4 1/2 Stars
--Romantic Times Book Reviews

"If you're looking for tense, whip-smart medical scenes, look no further. Lifelines takes you into the E.R. for a gripping view of doctors at work, and doctors in crisis. CJ Lyons knows her medicine -- and she knows how to bring it to vivid life on the page."
--Tess Gerritsen, NYT-bestselling author of The Bone Garden

"A pulse-pounding adrenaline rush! Loved the pacing, loved the characters, loved the whirlwind action scenes and top notch medical details. Reminds me of ER back in the days of George Clooney and Julianna Margulies."
--Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author of Hide

"Prepare to be swept away on a pulse-pounding adventure. My favorite kind of medical thriller -- harrowing, emotional, action-packed and brilliantly realized. CJ Lyons writes with the authority only a trained physician can bring to a story, blending suspense, passion and friendship into an irresistible read."
--New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs

"Packed with adrenalin. I can't recall a hospital novel that so thrilled me."
--David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of First Blood and Creepers

"CJ Lyons' debut medical thriller is a fantastic and wild journey through the fast-paced world of a big-city ER. With rich, fascinating and complex characters and a thoroughly compelling mystery, Lifelines is an adrenalin rush and an all-around great read."
--New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan

"Readers who prefer their medical thrillers to have characters with beating hearts and three dimensions are well advised to pick up this series debut by Lyons, a veteran of trauma centers and pediatric emergency medicine... Lyons captures the frenetic setting of the ER with a smooth style that demands the reader move forward to keep up with the piece, but she also creates winning portraits of the supporting players set to anchor the series."
--Sarah Weinman

Read an excerpt from Lifelines, and learn more about the author and her work at C.J. Lyons' website and her blog, Vital Signs.

C.J. Lyons is a physician trained in Pediatric Emergency Medicine. Lifelines is her first novel.

Read C.J. Lyons' story of how she went from doctor to novelist, in January Magazine.

The Page 99 Test: Lifelines.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Wagner James Au's "The Making of Second Life"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World.

About the book, from the publisher:

The wholly virtual world known as Second Life has attracted more than a million active users, millions of dollars, and created its own—very real—economy.

The Making of Second Life is the behind-the-scenes story of the Web 2.0 revolution's most improbable enterprise: the creation of a virtual 3-D world with its own industries, culture, and social systems. Now the toast of the Internet economy, and the subject of countless news articles, profiles, and television shows, Second Life is usually known for the wealth of real-world companies (Reuters, Pontiac, IBM) that have created "virtual offices" within it, and the number of users ("avatars") who have become wealthy through their user-created content.

What sets Second Life apart from other online worlds, and what has made it such a success (one million-plus monthly users and growing) is its simple user-centered philosophy. Instead of attempting to control the activities of those who enter it, the creators of Second Life turned them loose: users (also known as Residents) own the rights to the intellectual content they create in-world, and the in-world currency of Linden Dollars is freely exchangeable for U.S. currency. Residents have responded by generating millions of dollars of economic activity through their in-world designs and purchases—currently, the Second Life economy averages more than one million U.S. dollars in transactions every day, while dozens of real-world companies and projects have evolved and developed around content originated in Second Life.

Wagner James Au explores the long, implausible road behind that success, and looks at the road ahead, where many believe that user-created worlds like Second Life will become the Net's next generation and the fulcrum for a revolution in the way we shop, work, and interact. Au's story is narrated from both within the corporate offices of Linden Lab, Second Life's creator, and from within Second Life itself, revealing all the fascinating, outrageous, brilliant, and aggravating personalities who make Second Life a very real place­—and an illuminating mirror on the real (physical) world. Au writes about the wars they fought (sometimes literally), the transformations they underwent, the empires of land and commerce they developed, and above all, the collaborative creativity that makes their society an imperfect utopia, better in some ways than the one beyond their computer screens.

Among the early praise for The Making of Second Life:

"Au’s book is full of rich details about some of Second Life’s most important people."
—New York Post

"[Au] presents a comprehensive account that shows why Second Life may be the next great frontier and why it is so appealing to individuals and enterprises worldwide."
—Library Journal

"Even while you sleep, Second Life continues to grow. Since its 2003 launch, the three-dimensional Internet virtual world has become a veritable expanding alternate universe for millions of registered users. No one is better qualified to make sense of the headline-making SL phenomenon than Wagner James Au, the world's first embedded Internet journalist. The extensive time that Au spent inside SL's Linden Lab enable him to plot the seemingly implausible rise of this relatively new vortex of web activity. Vivid snapshots of where the 3D action is."
—Barnes & Noble

"Linden Labs gave Au, a highly accomplished technology journalist, the opportunity to describe the growth, from launch, of its highly popular virtual 3-D product Second Life.... Au has drawn on his own extensive Second Life experience, including online interviews with avatars and offline interviews with the persons behind them. He presents a comprehensive account that shows why Second Life may be the next great frontier and why it is so appealing to individuals and enterprises worldwide. Au also discusses the interaction between real life and this online world, the many ethical and policymaking issues Linden Labs has encountered, and the future of Second Life."
—Caroline Geck, School Library Journal

Wagner James Au is the online games editor for GigaOM.com, and for the last five years, has been writing about the user-created online virtual world Second Life, first as an embedded journalist with the company that started it, and now on his own blog, New World Notes.

The Page 69 Test: The Making of Second Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about composers' lives

James Penrose writes about music for The New Criterion. For the Wall Street Journal, he tagged a five best list of books about composers' lives.

One title on Penrose's list:

Evening in the Palace of Reason
By James R. Gaines
Fourth Estate, 2005

There is no requirement that a good biography be exhaustive. A narrowly gauged approach may also capture the essence of the subject. James Gaines's "Evening in the Palace of Reason" does just this in its portrait of J.S. Bach (1685-1750). The point of departure is a meeting between Bach and Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1747. As an elaborate joke (or snub) Frederick summoned "Old Bach" to his Potsdam palace and commanded the greatest improviser of his age to improvise a fugue on a special theme, one designed to be "counterpoint proof." When Bach nevertheless extemporized a three-part fugue (complete with ornaments in Frederick's affected style -- Bach's own little gibe), the emperor petulantly demanded one in six voices, at which point Bach excused himself and then produced one of his greatest works, "A Musical Offering." Mr. Gaines gives us the parallel lives of the devout and mystical Bach, who believed that the principles of music were rooted in the divine, and the rationalist Frederick, who oozed contempt at everything not based in empiricism and reason -- a struggle as timely then as it is now.

Read about another book on Penrose's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Ha-Joon Chang's "Bad Samaritans"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

About the book, from the publisher:

A rising young star in the field of economics attacks the free-trade orthodoxy of The World Is Flat head-on — a crisp, contrarian history of global capitalism.

One economist has called Ha-Joon Chang “the most exciting thinker our profession has turned out in the past fifteen years.” With Bad Samaritans, this provocative scholar bursts into the debate on globalization and economic justice.

Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the “World Is Flat” orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today’s economic superpowers — from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea — all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and — via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization — ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world.

Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct — but developed our own industries by studiously copying others’ technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth — but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that are struggling to follow in our footsteps.

Among the early acclaim for Bad Samaritans:

"In the 1950s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, suffering the aftereffects of decades of brutal Japanese colonialism and war with its northern counterpart. During his childhood, Chang (Kicking Away the Ladder), a respected economist at the University of Cambridge, witnessed the beginnings of Korea's postwar economic miracle as Gen. Park Chung-Hee's dictatorship (despite its corrupt machinations) set the economic groundwork that would lift Korea out of poverty. Though Korea's strategies are heretical to first world, free-market economists, Chang argues that the world's wealthiest nations historically relied on the same heavy-handed protectionist approaches in their quests for economic hegemony. These wealthy, first world economies, which preach free market and free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and to pre-empt the emergence of possible competitors are Chang's bad Samaritans. Chang builds his outsider stance through a history of capitalism and globalization and stories of other struggling countries' economic transformations. The resulting polemic about the shortcomings of neoliberal economic theory's belief in unlimited free-market competition and its effect on the developing world is provocative and may hold the key to similar miracles for some of the world's most troubled economies."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"the best riposte from the critics that I have seen...Readers who are leery of open-market orthodoxy will rejoice at the cogency of Bad Samaritans. Ha-Joon Chang has the credentials -- he's on the economics faculty at Cambridge University -- and the storytelling skill to make a well-informed, engaging case against the dogma propagated by globalization's cheerleaders. Believers in free trade will find that the book forces them to recalibrate and maybe even backpedal a bit….Chang's book deserves a wide readership for illuminating the need for humility about the virtues of private markets and free trade, especially in the developing world.”

—Paul Blustein, Washington Post

“a lively addition to the protectionist side of the debate…well written and far more serious than most anti-globalization gibberish.”

— New York Sun

“A smart, lively, and provocative book that offers us compelling new ways of looking at globalization.”

—Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, 2001

“I recommend this book to people who have any interest in these issues—i.e. everyone.”
—Bob Geldof

“Every orthodoxy needs effective critics. Ha-Joon Chang is probably the world’s most effective critic of globalization. He does not deny the benefits to developing countries of integration into the world economy. But he draws on the lessons of history to argue that they must be allowed to integrate on their own terms.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times, author of Why Globalization Works

Read an excerpt from Bad Samaritans, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Watch a video of Ha-Joon Chang discussing his book.

Ha-Joon Chang is Reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about his research and publications at his Cambridge webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Bad Samaritans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deanna Raybourn's "Silent in the Grave," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Deanna Raybourn's Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary, the first two installments of the Lady Julia Grey series.

Raybourn's entry opens:

The funny thing about imagining the late Victorian Julia Grey series as a movie is that nobody ever picks anybody to play Lady Julia Grey, the aristocratic amateur sleuth. I blame Nicholas Brisbane. He’s Julia’s partner in detection and more, a mysterious private inquiry agent, tall, dark, handsome, and enigmatic — a devastating combination. Women like to cast his role endlessly, and they have very strong opinions on the matter. Just this week I got an e-mail from an Australian reader who included a picture of “local boy Hugh Jackman” as her pick. (Not that I would have any say whatsoever in casting, but it was nice to have a little eye candy at my desk.) The top choices to play Nicholas are — in no particular order because otherwise there would be a serious catfight — Hugh Jackman...[read on]

Learn more about Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary at the publisher's website.

Visit Deanna Raybourn's website, Blog A Go-Go.

My Book, The Movie: Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Juliet Lapidos reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Juliet Lapidos, a writer and editorial assistant at Slate.

One book tagged in her entry:

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), Stendhal’s masterpiece about French society during the end days of the Restoration. His protagonist is Julien Sorel, an ambitious carpenter’s son who idolizes Napoleon, but who realizes that the path to power is no longer through the army (as during Napoleon’s time), but through the Church. He’s good at acting the part of a young priest in training (he even memorizes the gospels in Latin) but he has no innate sense of devotion or traditional moral compass. [read on]

Among the issues Lapidos has cleared up for Slate readers: Does Hitchcock get too much credit?, Can a Man Become a Magnet?, How they count tigers in the wild, and Why Is Florida God's Waiting Room?.

Read more Slate articles by Juliet Lapidos.

Writers Read: Juliet Lapidos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Wendy Walker's "Four Wives"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Wendy Walker's Four Wives.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Wendy Walker’s brilliant debut, the lives of four wives and mothers intertwine and collide in a tale of suburban angst among outrageous wealth.

On the outside, it appears as though Love Welsh, Marie Passetti, Gayle Beck and Janie Kirk lead enviable lives, with marriages to handsome, successful men; bright, happy children; and homes right out of Architectural Digest. But in the wealthy suburb of Hunting Ridge, appearances mask a deeper truth: These four wives are anything but perfect. As they try to maintain a façade of bliss, behind closed doors they each face their own crises — infidelity, dissatisfaction, self-doubt. As springtime draws to an end, doors are both opened and closed and the women come face to face with the most difficult and heartbreaking challenge of their lives — to reconcile their innermost desires with the lives that each of them has chosen.

Among the early praise for Four Wives:

"Walker's first novel is a treat. It's well written and features great characters, lots of humor, and dead-on analysis of friendship, marriage, and motherhood."
–Library Journal

“Four Wives is a brilliantly clever and accurate study in domestic discontentment. Acutely well-observed and suspenseful, it's a stunning reflection of life in an affluent American suburb, where the women seem to have everything...except happiness. A great read.”
–Jane Green, author of Swapping Lives

“A cleverly woven, sexy debut that is a fascinating peek inside the gilded cages of suburban matrimony....A true page-turner treat.”
–Jill Kargman, author of Momzillas and co-author of The Right Address

“A fascinating read. Wendy Walker delivers a blistering dissection of modern suburban marriage. I couldn't put it down.”
–Danielle Ganek, author of Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him

Read an excerpt from Four Wives, and learn more about the author and her novel at Wendy Walker's website.

Wendy Walker is a former commercial litigator turned stay-at-home-mom turned fiction writer. Four Wives is her first novel.

The Page 69 Test: Four Wives.

--Marshal Zeringue

An exchange on "Forgiveness"

Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration by Charles L. Griswold, Jr. is now available in paperback.

Last year I was lucky enough to learn more about this book from two contributions to the CftAR sites by the author.

Griswold contributed an entry to the Page 69 Test for Forgiveness.

Then he participated in an interview conducted by the political philosopher Eduardo Velásquez.

Now I've learned of a fascinating exchange in Tikkun between Griswold and Father William Meninger, a Trappist monk at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, who is himself an authority on the subject of forgiveness.

At one point, Meninger writes:

As for Professor Griswold’s concern with unconditional forgiveness condoning or excusing harmful activity, I cannot answer him philosophically but only practically. Is there anyone who would say that the Amish community condoned or excused the murder of their children when they forgave him?

Can you guess what Griswold's answer is to the question?

Read the Griswold-Meninger exchange.

Read the complete Velásquez-Griswold interview.

Read an excerpt from Forgiveness and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website. Also see the Page 69 Test: Forgiveness.

Charles Griswold is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Steve Hockensmith's "The Black Dove"

This weekend's feature at the Page 99 Test: Steve Hockensmith's The Black Dove.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the summer of 1893, Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer and his brother Otto (a.k.a. “Big Red”) find themselves down and out in San Francisco. Though cowpokes by training, the brothers are devotees of the late, great Sherlock Holmes and his trademark method of “deducifying.” But when they set out to land jobs as professional detectives, they land themselves in hot water, instead.

First their friend Dr. Chan mysteriously takes a potshot at them, fatally wounding Big Red’s new hat. Then a secretive young woman from their past pops up and convinces them that Chan’s in trouble -- and they’re just the men to get him out of it. Unfortunately, they’re too late: By the time they track Chan down again, he’s dead. The police call it a suicide. Old Red calls that a lie. When he and his brother set out to prove it, they put themselves on a collision course with shady S.F.P.D. cops, brutal Barbary Coast hoodlums and the deadly Chinatown tongs.

Before long, all sides are in a race to uncover the secret that could rock the city. And their only clue to what’s actually going on is the enigmatic, exotic and extremely difficult to find “Black Dove.”

Among the early praise for The Black Dove:

"[Big Red’s] foot-in-a-bucket narration will keep the reader snorting with laughter... Hockensmith has been nominated for the Edgar Award, and if he keeps writing like this, he'll win one soon."
--Library Journal (starred review)

"Don’t mistake this for just Sherlock Holmes dressed up in spurs and six-guns: Hockensmith’s creations earn a genuine depth of character, and the mystery can be a delight to untangle."
--Booklist

"Rollicking... Readers will delight in the hilarious climactic ‘Mandarin standoff’ between Chinatown's underworld and Frisco's hapless police force."
--Publishers Weekly

"Buoyant and consistently entertaining."
--Kirkus Reviews

The Black Dove was one of Pierce's Picks at January Magazine as well as a Book of the Week at David Montgomery's Crime Fiction Dossier.

Read an excerpt from The Black Dove, and visit Big Red's blog to learn more about Steve Hockensmith and his writing.

Hockensmith's previous novels include Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track. Holmes on the Range, the first novel featuring Big Red and Old Red, was a finalist for the Edgar, the Anthony, the Shamus and the Dilys Award.

The Page 69 Test: On the Wrong Track.

My Book, The Movie: Holmes on the Range.

The Page 99 Test: The Black Dove.

--Marshal Zeringue