Thursday, January 31, 2013

Pg. 99: Mark Di Vincenzo's "Buy Shoes on Wednesday and Tweet at 4:00"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Buy Shoes on Wednesday and Tweet at 4:00: More of the Best Times to Buy This, Do That and Go There by Mark Di Vincenzo.

About the book, from the publisher:
Are you thinking that you might have gotten a better deal on a purchase if only you'd known the right moment to buy? Do you wonder if your workout would be more effective at another time of day? Have you worried that your tropical vacation plans might land you on an island paradise just in time for monsoon season?

Mark Di Vincenzo's eye-opening, phenomenally useful New York Times bestseller, Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon, captured the attention of consumers across the country—and saved readers time, money and trouble. Now he's back with hundreds of brand-new timing tips! Do you know:
(1) The best month to buy a cell phone?
(2) The best day of the week to take your car in for repairs?
(3) The best week of the year to visit Mexico City?
(4) The best time to confront someone who "unfriended" you on Facebook?

Get more for your money, maximize your time, take better care of your health and be savvier about your career—simply by changing the time you do certain things. Timing truly is everything!
Learn more about the book and author at Mark Di Vincenzo's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: Buy Shoes on Wednesday and Tweet at 4:00.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen E. Bender's "A Town of Empty Rooms," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: A Town of Empty Rooms by Karen E. Bender.

The entry begins:
For Rabbi Golden, the complicated rabbi who divides his congregation, the perfect choice would be Jeremy Piven. Watching Piven become the explosive-yet-sentimental agent Ari Gold on Entourage helped me imagine the rabbi in my book. Piven could bring Ari’s frenetic style to his portrayal of the rabbi; I can just see him standing on the bima in the temple, all of the congregants looking up at him and hoping he will lead them.

For Serena Hirsch, I’d want an actress around who can project aggrieved, hopeful, and maybe a little naive. Julianne Margulies comes to mind, or, in a surprising and daring career move...[read on]
Learn more about the book and author at Karen Bender's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Town of Empty Rooms.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jenny Milchman reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Jenny Milchman, author of Cover of Snow.

Her entry begins:
First I should say that it is a shock (to me anyway) that I am reading fiction now at all. That’s because I am in the throes of writing a new novel, and when I write a first draft, I usually don’t read fiction. For a few reasons: fear of my voice getting clogged or diluted; the feeling that if deprived of fiction, that frustration winds up as energy in my own story. But mostly this practice of avoiding fiction is due to a superstitious belief that it is somehow important to my process. So when an opportunity arose that compelled me to read not just some fiction, but a lot of it, I decided to challenge my tendencies to knock on wood, throw salt over my shoulder, and…not read fiction.

Well, when I challenge a superstition, I really challenge a superstition. I’m not just reading one novel, dipping my toes into the fictive waters as I write. Instead I’ve read or considered almost 300 over the past couple of months. Yes, I am judging a contest. Clearly, I can’t say much about this, but I will describe one book that stands out in my mind. Breed by Chase Novak made me cry out loud. COL. (You know, instead of LOL?)

In some ways this is a book...[read on]
About Cover of Snow, from the publisher:
Jenny Milchman’s Cover of Snow is a remarkable debut, a gripping tale of suspense in the tradition of Gillian Flynn, Chris Bohjalian, and Nancy Pickard.

Waking up one wintry morning in her old farmhouse nestled in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, Nora Hamilton instantly knows that something is wrong. When her fog of sleep clears, she finds her world is suddenly, irretrievably shattered: Her husband, Brendan, has committed suicide.

The first few hours following Nora’s devastating discovery pass for her in a blur of numbness and disbelief. Then, a disturbing awareness slowly settles in: Brendan left no note and gave no indication that he was contemplating taking his own life. Why would a rock-solid police officer with unwavering affection for his wife, job, and quaint hometown suddenly choose to end it all? Having spent a lifetime avoiding hard truths, Nora must now start facing them.

Unraveling her late husband’s final days, Nora searches for an explanation—but finds a bewildering resistance from Brendan’s best friend and partner, his fellow police officers, and his brittle mother. It quickly becomes clear to Nora that she is asking questions no one wants to answer. For beneath the soft cover of snow lies a powerful conspiracy that will stop at nothing to keep its presence unknown ... and its darkest secrets hidden.
Learn more about the book and author at Jenny Milchman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Cover of Snow.

The Page 69 Test: Cover of Snow.

Writers Read: Jenny Milchman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kira Peikoff's "Living Proof"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Living Proof by Kira Peikoff.

About the book, from the publisher:
In 2027, destroying an embryo is considered first-degree murder. Fertility clinics still exist, giving hope and new life to thousands of infertile families, but they have to pass rigorous inspections by the United States Department of Embryo Preservation. Fail an inspection, and you will be prosecuted.

Brilliant young doctor Arianna Drake seems to be thriving in the spotlight: her small clinic surpasses every government requirement, and its popularity has spiked—a sudden, rapid growth that leaves the DEP chief mystified. When he discovers Arianna’s radical past as a supporter of an infamous scientist, he sends undercover agent Trent Rowe to investigate her for possible illegal activity.

As Trent is pulled into Arianna’s enigmatic world, his own begins to unravel. The secret he finally uncovers will deeply move him—and jeopardize them both. With the clock ticking her life away, he finds himself questioning everything he knows to be true, and then must summon the courage to take the greatest risk of all. Nothing less than human life—and a major scientific breakthrough—hang in the balance.

A thought-provoking thriller by debut author Kira Peikoff, Living Proof is a celebration of love and life that cuts to the core of a major cultural debate of our time.
Learn more about the book and author at Kira Peikoff's website.

The Page 69 Test: Living Proof.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine illustrious houses in fiction

Elizabeth Wilhide is the author of the novel Ashenden, whose title "character" is also a house. Ashenden Park is based on Basildon Park, the Berkshire stately home that featured as Netherfield Hall in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

For The Daily Beast, Wilhide came up with nine illustrious houses in fiction, including:
West Egg

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Gatsby’s ostentatious pile in West Egg is “a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.” Like Gatsby, the mansion has a bogus, fictional past. It’s also a lure with which to tempt Daisy, who lives with her husband Tom Buchanan across the bay in a red-and-white Colonial house that speaks of old money and taste.
Learn about another entry on the list.

The Great Gatsby appears among Suzette Field's top ten literary party hosts, Robert McCrums's ten best closing lines in literature, Molly Driscoll's ten best literary lessons about love, Jim Lehrer's six favorite 20th century novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature and ten of the best misdirected messages, Tad Friend's seven best novels about WASPs, Kate Atkinson's top ten novels, Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition, Robert McCrum's top ten books for Obama officials, Jackie Collins' six best books, and John Krasinski's six best books, and is on the American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Pg. 99: Michael Williams's " Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism: The Rise of Hollywood's Gods by Michael Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:
Since the golden era of silent movies stars have been described as screen gods, goddesses and idols. But why did Hollywood, that most modernity industry, first look back to antiquity as it built its stars? This book presents a unique insight into the origins of screen stardom in the 1910s and 20s to explore how the myth and iconography of ancient Greece and Rome was deployed to create modern Apollo and Venuses of the screen. Drawing from extensive research into studio production files, fan-magazines and the popular reception of stars in America and Britain, this study explores how the sculptural gods of the past enabled the flickering shadows on the screen to seem more present and alive. Classicism permitted films to encode different sexualities for their audience, and present stars who embodied traditions of the Grand Tour for a post-war context where the ruins of past civilisations had become strangely resonant. The book presents detailed discussion of leading players such as Ramon Novarro, Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino, and major films such as Ben-Hur and Flesh and the Devil to show how classicism enabled star discourse to transform actors into icons. This is the story of how Olympus moved to Hollywood to divinise stars as icons for a modern age and defined a model of stardom that is still with us today.
Learn more about  Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Roberta Gately reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Roberta Gately, author of The Bracelet.

Her entry begins:
I am currently reading The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan. The main character, at 22 years old, is both a newlywed and a widow, and as the story opens, we find that she is also on trial for her life. Set in 1914, The Lifeboat tells the story of a shipwreck and the band of diverse and not so merry survivors crowded into a single lifeboat. It is an emotionally gripping and intense tale of the will to live and the fight to survive even if others must die. Rogan's prose pulses with the authenticity of her tale, and the plot...[read on]
About The Bracelet, from the publisher:
Newly heartbroken and searching for purpose in her life, Abby Monroe is determined to make her mark as a UN worker in one of the world’s most unstable cities: Peshawar, Pakistan. But after witnessing the brutal murder of a woman thrown from a building, she is haunted by the memory of an intricate and sparkling bracelet that adorned the victim’s wrist.

At a local women’s shelter, Abby meets former sex slaves who have miraculously escaped their captors. As she gains the girls’ trust and documents their horrifying accounts of unspeakable pain and betrayal, she joins forces with a dashing New York Times reporter who believes he can incriminate the shadowy leader of the vicious human trafficking ring. Inspired by the women’s remarkable bravery—and the mysterious reappearance of the bracelet— the duo traces evidence that spreads from remote villages of South Asia to the most powerful corners of the West, risking their lives to offer a voice to the countless innocents in bondage.
Learn more about the book and author at Roberta Gately's website, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.

Gately has served as a nurse and humanitarian aid worker in war zones ranging from Afghanistan to Africa, about which she wrote a series of articles for the BBC World News Online. She is also the author of the novel Lipstick in Afghanistan.

Writers Read: Roberta Gately (November 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Lipstick in Afghanistan.

My Book, The Movie: Lipstick in Afghanistan.

My Book, The Movie: The Bracelet.

Writers Read: Roberta Gately.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Maryka Biaggio's "Parlor Games"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio.

About the book, from the publisher:
A sweeping historical novel about a beautiful con artist whose turn-of-the-century escapades take her around the world as she's doggedly pursued by a Pinkerton Agency detective

The novel opens in 1917 with our cunning protagonist, May Dugas, standing trial for extortion. As the trial unfolds, May tells her version of events.

In 1887, at the tender age of eighteen, May ventures to Chicago in hopes of earning enough money to support her family. Circumstances force her to take up residence at the city’s most infamous bordello, but May soon learns to employ her considerable feminine wiles to extract not only sidelong looks but also large sums of money from the men she encounters. Insinuating herself into Chicago’s high society, May lands a well-to-do fiancé—until, that is, a Pinkerton Agency detective named Reed Doherty intervenes and summarily foils the engagement.

Unflappable May quickly rebounds, elevating seduction and social climbing to an art form as she travels the world, eventually marrying a wealthy Dutch Baron. Unfortunately, Reed Doherty is never far behind and continues to track May in a delicious cat-and-mouse game as the newly-minted Baroness’s misadventures take her from San Francisco to Shanghai to London and points in between.

The Pinkerton Agency really did dub May the “Most Dangerous Woman,” branding her a crafty blackmailer and ruthless seductress. To many, though, she was the most glamorous woman to grace high society. Was the real May Dugas a cold-hearted swindler or simply a resourceful provider for her poor family?

As the narrative bounces back and forth between the trial taking place in 1917 and May’s devious but undeniably entertaining path to the courtroom—hoodwinking and waltzing her way through the gilded age and into the twentieth century—we're left to ponder her guilt as we move closer to finding out what fate ultimately has in store for our irresistible adventuress.
Learn more about the book and author at Maryka Biaggio's website.

My Book, The Movie: Parlor Games.

The Page 69 Test: Parlor Games.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top football books

Christian Science Monitor contributor Ben Frederick came up with a list of ten of the best football books, including:
"Undefeated" by Mike Freeman

The 1972 Miami Dolphins are the only team in NFL history to have a perfect season – a feat that has never been matched. Coach Don Shula resurrected a dying franchise, and made it into one of the greatest success stories of all time.
Read about another book on the list.

Also see: five top books about the Super Bowl and five top books about football (and its dark side).

--Marshal Zeringue

Carl Rollyson's "Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews by Carl Rollyson.

The entry begins:
I've had many talks with Susan Andrews about who should play her father in a movie. Here is what she wrote to me: "Lately, I’ve been watching the new hit TV series Mad Men. The lead character reminds me in some ways of my father. He’s got this secret past and all the trappings of success: the wife, the children, the home in the burbs, and yet he’s strangely dislocated. Reviewers have called him an existential hero.” Jon Hamm, playing Don Draper has Dana's tightly-wound affect, and that understated style that made Dana's performances in Laura, Fallen Angel, and Where the Sidewalk Ends so compelling.

Secret past? Well, my biography explains that. Dana said relatively little about his growing up in Texas, and what Susan knew turned out to be a myth. She had always heard that her father was a poor preacher's boy who had run away from home when his sweetheart's family rejected him, thinking that this young kid with stars in his eyes would never make it in Hollywood. Well, as I began to research my biography I discovered that the preacher was...[read on]
View the video trailer for Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, and learn more about the book and author at Carl Rollyson's website, blog, and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Free book: "Pukka's Promise"

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs by Ted Kerasote.

HOW TO ENTER: (1) send an email to this address:


(2) In the subject line, type Pukka's Promise. (3) Include your name (or alias or whatever you wish to be called if I email you to tell you you've won the book) in the body of the email.

[I will not sell or share your email address; nor will I be in touch with you unless it is to tell you you have won the book.  I promise.]

Contest closes on Thursday, February 28th.

Only one entry per person, please.

Winner must have a US mailing address.

Learn more about Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs.

Visit Ted Kerasote's website, check out his book tour schedule, and follow him on Facebook.

Read--The Page 69 Test: Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jennifer Kloester's "Georgette Heyer"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester.

About the book, from the publisher:
Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international bestseller, read and loved by generations of readers and extolled by bestselling authors. Despite her enormous popularity she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Jennifer Kloester, Heyer’s official biographer, spent ten years researching Georgette Heyer, during which time she had unlimited access to Heyer’s notebooks, private papers and family records. Engaging and authoritative, this comprehensive, official biography offers new insights into the life and writing of a remarkable and ferociously private woman.
Learn more about the book and author at Jennifer Kloester's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Georgette Heyer.

The Page 99 Test: Georgette Heyer.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Kate Watterson reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Kate Watterson, author of Frozen.

Her entry begins:
Well, don’t faint with surprise, but I'm reading John Sandford’s Storm Prey. I was born in Minnesota and grew up vacationing in Wisconsin, so his stories always draw me. I’m a huge fan. Lucas Davenport is an interesting hero, too. The imperfections in his character are very realistic and human, and what I really admire about Sandford in general is his ability to be very gritty but in a way that does not keep me awake at night.

Part of the reason I do not watch the evening news if...[read on]
About the book, from the publisher:
In Kate Watterson's thrilling suspense novel Frozen, Bryce Grantham wants a quiet vacation at his family’s cabin. On his first night in town, he meets a lovely girl at a bar and gives her a ride home. The next day, he finds her cell phone in his car. When he tries to return it, Bryce discovers that the young woman has vanished, leaving behind only a bloody shoe.

Suddenly Bryce Grantham is the primary suspect in a murder investigation.

Detective Ellie MacIntosch has a serial killer on her hands, but without a body, she has few leads and the stalled investigation has her on edge. Bryce Grantham seems to be the perfect suspect.

Eighteen months have gone by without a clue, and yet Grantham starts reporting stumbling across the bodies of the missing women with unbelievable frequency. The evidence against him is almost irrefutable…but Ellie’s gut tells her the case is not so cut and dry.

Before Ellie compromises the investigation, her career, and possibly her life in order to prove Bryce’s innocence, she must determine whether he is a manipulative, cold-blooded killer…or the victim of a madman playing a sickening game.
Learn more about the book and author at Kate Watterson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Frozen.

The Page 69 Test: Frozen.

Writers Read: Kate Watterson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 fictional best friends that would make good real best friends

Panayiota Kuvetakis is a student at UC Berkeley studying comparative literature and theater. For Writer's Bloq, she named a top ten list of fictional best friends we'd like to have as nonfictional best friends, including:
Sancho Panza – Don Quijote

Talk about patience. This guy deals with a friend who’s convinced windmills are
ravenous monsters. Panza leaves his family just to road trip with his buddy, and then ends up having to save his friend from all the shenanigans he gets into, with nothing but a mule to as a means of transportation. He doesn’t even get a cool side-kick-mobile. He is Quijote’s rock.
Read about another entry at on the list.

Don Quixote was the second most popular book among prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. It is on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best literary women dressed as men and ten of the best books written in prison.

Paul Auster always returns to Don Quixote; Claire Messud hasn't read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jenny Milchman's "Cover of Snow"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman.

About the book, from the publisher:
Jenny Milchman’s Cover of Snow is a remarkable debut, a gripping tale of suspense in the tradition of Gillian Flynn, Chris Bohjalian, and Nancy Pickard.

Waking up one wintry morning in her old farmhouse nestled in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, Nora Hamilton instantly knows that something is wrong. When her fog of sleep clears, she finds her world is suddenly, irretrievably shattered: Her husband, Brendan, has committed suicide.

The first few hours following Nora’s devastating discovery pass for her in a blur of numbness and disbelief. Then, a disturbing awareness slowly settles in: Brendan left no note and gave no indication that he was contemplating taking his own life. Why would a rock-solid police officer with unwavering affection for his wife, job, and quaint hometown suddenly choose to end it all? Having spent a lifetime avoiding hard truths, Nora must now start facing them.

Unraveling her late husband’s final days, Nora searches for an explanation—but finds a bewildering resistance from Brendan’s best friend and partner, his fellow police officers, and his brittle mother. It quickly becomes clear to Nora that she is asking questions no one wants to answer. For beneath the soft cover of snow lies a powerful conspiracy that will stop at nothing to keep its presence unknown ... and its darkest secrets hidden.
Learn more about the book and author at Jenny Milchman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Cover of Snow.

The Page 69 Test: Cover of Snow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, January 28, 2013

Dispatches from Sundance 2013: 5

Ray Taras regularly reviews world literature for the Campaign for the American Reader and has represented the site at the Sundance Film Festival since 2008.

Taras's fifth report from Sundance 2013 (read Dispatches from Sundance 2013: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4):

Depending on one’s perspective, Sundance 2013 will be remembered for any of a number of things. Celebrities intent on getting in some quality skiing while in Park City enjoyed ideal snow conditions when the festival opened and when it ended. In between the weather warmed up, so catching the sun on Main Street became the activity of choice. The blizzard on the final day was a hardcore skier’s dream but it also delayed flight departures for some visitors.

A British newspaper seemed to believe many of this year’s Sundance films shifted into the realm of erotica. “Sundance or ‘Porndance?’” The Guardian headlined, and Katey Rich’s first line of the story was “Sex sells.” Two decades on from the 1989 breakthrough film sex, lies and videotape, more indie filmmakers recognize the importance of commercial success, and sex as the means to achieve it.

The Look of Love, a British film about the porn industry pioneer and tycoon Paul Raymond, may constitute Exhibit A for Porndance adherents. But in today’s world it hardly attains soft porn status, and The Guardian’s citing of a couple of conservative Utah lawmakers arguing that state funding for the festival should be terminated is unrepresentative of generally favorable local opinion for what Sundance screens.

Another perspective on this year’s festival is that women had finally secured a long-term presence in independent filmmaking. A Sundance Institute and Women in Film study found that 30% of the top jobs in films – director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor – that had screened at Sundance between 2002 and 2012 were held by women. Astoundingly, women comprised just 4.4% of such jobs in the top 100 box-office films over the same ten-year period. At Sundance 2013, eight of sixteen directors in the U.S. dramatic competition were women. Men still control film industry money, a panel on women in film noted, and that is why the more commercial a film is, the more likely it is a nearly exclusive male undertaking.

Stacie Passon
Stacie Passon’s Concussion is an indicator of how successful female directors are at the festival. It relates how a forty-something woman in a marriage with a woman is drawn into the lesbian escort business. Lisa Schwarzbaum writes in Entertainment Weekly that “You’ve never seen so many beautiful women-who-love-women, and such fine fashion choices” as in this film. It is a tour-de-force of “same-sex sexytime.” Passon is an extraordinarily insightful and intelligent director familiar with critical theory. She presented us with a sophisticated explanation for why this film is important in understanding the need for personal rediscovery of someone who is otherwise happy, affluent, and resourceful. Still, highly-intelligent directors can make dumbed down cinematic texts far removed from the narratives related by directors.

Films about rock music have become standard at Sundance. They are good at bridging indie values with market awareness. This year’s trove included two on recording studios: Muscle Shoals and Sound City. A third, Twenty Feet from Stardom, explored the obscure world of backup singer while a fourth was a documentary about History of the Eagles Part 1. Such films bring rock stars to perform at Park City and this year it was Dave Grohl [photo left] of the Foo Fighters, who directed Sound City, who topped the festival’s musical headliners.

Award winners are typically films with a conscience, not a lucrative distribution contract. Fruitvale won several awards for writer-director Ryan Coogler for his affecting recreation of the killing of a black man at a BART station in Oakland on December 31, 2008. In turn Steve Hoover’s Blood Brother won a pair of Sundance awards for its poignant story of an American who remains in the south of India to treat children with HIV and AIDS.

The biggest sales of film rights at Sundance 2013 had different subject matter. The Way, Way Back is a light comedy about an introverted fourteen-year-old boy who works at a water park one summer. Fox Searchlight paid $10 million for rights to this Little Miss Sunshine knockoff, a figure not heard of at the festival since the recession began. Fox Searchlight had already picked up espionage thriller The East and the family drama Stoker for princely sums.

The eternal tension between independent filmmaking and market success shapes Sundance each year. I suggest then the following thought experiment. Let us imagine Park City on the second Saturday evening of Sundance. The annual awards ceremony is in progress where nearly everyone is high. The “Short Film Audience Award presented by YouTube” and the “Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for U.S. Dramatic” have already been announced. The pressure rises and the Master of Ceremonies finally turns to what all indie filmmakers have been waiting for.

The MC reports that the “Never Mind the Bollocks Award” is being given to the film director who is most blithely unaware of or brazenly flouts the commercial aspects of filmmaking. The 2013 winner is Soldate Jeannette directed by Daniel Hoesl.

Austria is known for its feel-bad cinema, Hoesl told us, so he decided to make a good feel-bad film. Vienna is known for being the European capital of techno, which Hoesl didn’t tell us except through the soundtrack he used for his film (it was actually nominated for the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize).

There are 0ther reasons for the “Never Mind the Bullocks Award” for this film. Hoesl argued that it had a “reverse director,” that is, the film directed the film maker. There was a cast before there was a screenplay. Its protagonist, Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg, spent much of her life in castles she owned before taking to deadpan acting; Soldate Jeannette was her feature film debut. She acts her aristocratic role impeccably and shows all the chutzpah becoming to a castle-owning woman.

But Hoesl says the main message of his film is how farming entails hard work in Austria. He singles out a scene in the film showing a herd of cows walking through a pasture as his favorite. Another scene shows stacks of 10,000-euro notes being burnt. “We can burn money in Europe, unlike the U.S. where you can’t,” he informs us. Then he adds: “Marx destroyed God but he didn’t destroy money.” The film budget was 65,000 euros.

Fredrik Bond
Honorable mention for “Never Mind the Bullocks Award” nominees must be given to The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman. Director Fredrik Bond decided to shoot the film in Bucharest, Europe’s least chic capital, on impulse. It is not an attractive picture. The title alone merits consideration for this award. But Matt Drake’s screenwriting scorns commercial formulae and gives Charlie Countryman as many leases on life as Rasputin had: Charlie is pummeled and kicked, his body hung upside down oozing blood, he is shot in the chest by the love of his life, then he is released into a raging river below. Charlie surfaces as John Hurt’s voiceover says how love trumps everything.

Indie films continue to flourish at Sundance – the legacy of the 2013 festival.--Ray Taras

Ray Taras is professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans where he also directed its World Literature Program until Hurricane Katrina forced its closure. Comparative literature and world cinema have been teaching and research interests of his for many years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Gene Allen Smith's "The Slaves’ Gamble"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Slaves' Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 by Gene Allen Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:
Images of American slavery conjure up cotton plantations and African American slaves locked in bondage until the Civil War. Yet early on in the nineteenth century the state of slavery was very different, and the political vicissitudes of the young nation offered diverse possibilities to slaves. In the century’s first two decades, the nation waged war against Britain, Spain, and various Indian tribes. Slaves played a role in the military operations, and the different sides viewed them as a potential source of manpower. While surprising numbers did assist the Americans, the wars created opportunities for slaves to find freedom among the Redcoats, the Spaniards, or the Indians. Author Gene Smith draws on a decade of original research and his curatorial work at the Fort Worth Museum in this fascinating and original narrative history. The way the young nation responded sealed the fate of slaves for the next half century until the Civil War. This drama sheds light on an extraordinary yet little known chapter in the dark saga of American history.
Learn more about The Slaves' Gamble at the Palgrave Macmillan website.

The Page 99 Test: The Slaves' Gamble.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Mitchell Scott Lewis reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Mitchell Scott Lewis, author of Death in the 12th House: Where Neptune Rules.

His entry begins:
I just recently read Fever Dream by Dennis Palumbo, a fellow Poisoned Pen Press author and psychologist who adds the element of the workings of the mind perfectly into his mystery novels. I am currently reading Sixkill, the last Spenser book written by Robert B. Parker shortly before his death. I always enjoy...[read on]
About Death in the 12th House, from the publisher:
Someone is bumping off rock’s wrinkled royalty. After the death of the third aging rock star, fifty eight year old Freddie Finger, lead singer for multi-platinum Rocket Fire, astrologer detective David Lowell is brought into the case. Freddie wasn’t well liked, and Lowell has more than his hands full with suspects. Was it Freddie’s ex-wives, who seem more intent on killing each other than anyone else? His disgruntled band members, angry because Freddie’s solo career was threatening the band’s future? His greedy manager, busy promoting the death of a rock star? Or was it the musician whose career Freddie sabotaged many years ago? Freddie’s daughter, movie actress Vivian Younger, has retained Lowell’s services to help catch her father’s killer. She seems intrigued with this unusual man and his bizarre career. As they search for the truth, is there romance in the air for our stoic detective?

With the help of his staff: vivacious red-head assistant, Sarah, master hacker and psychic, Mort, and his driver and bodyguard, Andy, Lowell sifts through the birth charts of the characters and follows the clues to a surprising ending.
Learn more about the book and author at Mitchell Scott Lewis's website.

My Book, The Movie: Death in the 12th House.

The Page 69 Test: Death in the 12th House.

Writers Read: Mitchell Scott Lewis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stanley McChrystal's 6 favorite books

Stanley McChrystal retired in July 2010 as a four-star general in the U.S. Army. His last assignment was as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force and as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He had previously served as the direc­tor of the Joint Staff and as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. He is currently a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the cofounder of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm.

McChrystal's new book is My Share of the Task: A Memoir.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:
Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant

In a race against throat cancer, Grant wrote what would become the paragon for a general's memoir. Reading it in the West Point library, I was drawn to his candor, plain leadership lessons, and humility. Grant's tenacity and a lifetime of writing clear orders are evident in his lean phrases, while his bedrock humanity produces rich portraits of a gruesome war.
Read about another book on McChrystal's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Kloester's "Georgette Heyer," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester.

The entry begins:
Georgette Heyer was a highly intelligent, feisty woman with a great sense of humour and I can think of no one better to play her in a movie about her life than Helena Bonham Carter. As her husband, Ronald Rougier, I'd love to see Gerard Butler in the role.

My biography of Heyer takes us from the Edwardian era and the Great War right through the 1930s and 1940s, the Second World War, and the massive social upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s so there'd be lots of opportunities to create parts for some wonderful actors. I'd love to see Liam Neeson and Colin...[read on]
About Georgette Heyer, from the publisher:
Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international bestseller, read and loved by generations of readers and extolled by bestselling authors. Despite her enormous popularity she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Jennifer Kloester, Heyer’s official biographer, spent ten years researching Georgette Heyer, during which time she had unlimited access to Heyer’s notebooks, private papers and family records. Engaging and authoritative, this comprehensive, official biography offers new insights into the life and writing of a remarkable and ferociously private woman.
Learn more about the book and author at Jennifer Kloester's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Georgette Heyer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: C. Joseph Greaves's "Hard Twisted"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Hard Twisted by C. Joseph Greaves.

About the book, from the publisher:
In May of 1934, outside of Hugo, Oklahoma, a homeless man and his thirteen-year-old daughter are befriended by a charismatic drifter, newly released from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The drifter, Clint Palmer, lures father and daughter to Texas, where the father, Dillard Garrett, mysteriously disappears, and where his daughter Lucile begins a one-year ordeal as Palmer's captive on a crime spree-culminating in the notorious Greenville, Texas "skeleton murder" trial of 1935.

C. Joseph Greaves weaves a chilling tale of survival and redemption, encompassing iconic landscapes, historic figures, America's last Indian uprising, and one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the Public Enemy era, all rooted in the intensely personal story of a young girl's coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.
Learn more about the book and author at C. Joseph Greaves's website.

Greaves's debut novel Hush Money, a legal mystery, was honored by SouthWest Writers as the Best Mystery/ Suspense/ Thriller/ Adventure Novel of 2010, and was awarded SWW’s highest honor, their grand-prize Storyteller Award for 2010.

The Page 69 Test: Hard Twisted.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Pg. 99: Emily Raboteau's "Searching for Zion"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau.

About the book, from the publisher:
A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman’s quest for a place to call “home” and an investigation into a people’s search for the Promised Land, this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.

At twenty-three, Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau couldn’t say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she’d never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of Zion as a place black people yearned to be. She’d heard about it on Bob Marley’s Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. In Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that had left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is the same she asks herself: have you found the home you’re looking for?

On her journey back in time and across the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau visits Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Katrina transplants from her own family—people who have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit.

With Searching for Zion, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus.
Learn more about the book and author at Emily Raboteau's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: Searching for Zion.

The Page 99 Test: Searching for Zion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on guerrillas

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present.

One of his five best books about guerrillas, as told to the Wall Street Journal:
Lawrence of Arabia
by Jeremy Wilson (1989)

Few guerrillas have been more famous or more mysterious than T.E. Lawrence. Jeremy Wilson does much to demystify him in this exhaustively researched text, which is a surprisingly brisk read despite its 1,188 pages. Lawrence's story was extraordinary: He went from working as an obscure archaeologist in Syria to acting as the key adviser to the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire from 1916 to 1918. After the war, he became famous as "Lawrence of Arabia" (an appellation coined by a Chicago newspaperman), wrote a classic book ("Seven Pillars of Wisdom"), and as an adviser to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office helped redraw the map of the Middle East. But, recoiling from his fame, he enlisted under an assumed name in the Royal Air Force and then the Royal Tank Corps. Like all great romantic heroes, he died young (at 46), in a motorcycle accident. Controversy about him has raged ever since: Was he gay? Was he mad? Was he a compulsive liar? Wilson offers as definitive an answer to these questions as we are likely to get.
Read about another book on Boot's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Melanie Benjamin reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Melanie Benjamin, author of The Aviator's Wife.

Her entry begins:
I’ve long been a fan of quintessentially British novels, particularly those written between the wars, such as The Provincial Lady series, and the Mapp and Lucia novels. There’s something so dry and witty and comforting about those novels, to me; I just lose myself in them, perhaps because they’re so different than the novels I write. And when I’m writing, I do tend to read novels that are completely different and restful; “comfort food,” in a way. So imagine my delight when I recently discovered a charming series of these British novels, reissued under the umbrella of The Bloomsbury Group, all with matching, colorful covers. I’ve bought them all, and am in the midst of devouring them: Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, Miss...[read on]
About The Aviator's Wife, from the publisher:
In the spirit of Loving Frank and The Paris Wife, acclaimed novelist Melanie Benjamin pulls back the curtain on the marriage of one of America’s most extraordinary couples: Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

For much of her life, Anne Morrow, the shy daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has stood in the shadows of those around her, including her millionaire father and vibrant older sister, who often steals the spotlight. Then Anne, a college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels to Mexico City to spend Christmas with her family. There she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his celebrated 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Enthralled by Charles’s assurance and fame, Anne is certain the celebrated aviator has scarcely noticed her. But she is wrong.

Charles sees in Anne a kindred spirit, a fellow adventurer, and her world will be changed forever. The two marry in a headline-making wedding. Hounded by adoring crowds and hunted by an insatiable press, Charles shields himself and his new bride from prying eyes, leaving Anne to feel her life falling back into the shadows. In the years that follow, despite her own major achievements—she becomes the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States—Anne is viewed merely as the aviator’s wife. The fairy-tale life she once longed for will bring heartbreak and hardships, ultimately pushing her to reconcile her need for love and her desire for independence, and to embrace, at last, life’s infinite possibilities for change and happiness.

Drawing on the rich history of the twentieth century—from the late twenties to the mid-sixties—and featuring cameos from such notable characters as Joseph Kennedy and Amelia Earhart, The Aviator’s Wife is a vividly imagined novel of a complicated marriage—revealing both its dizzying highs and its devastating lows. With stunning power and grace, Melanie Benjamin provides new insight into what made this remarkable relationship endure.
Learn more about the book and author at Melanie Benjamin's website. 

Alice I Have Been is Melanie Benjamin's first historical novel; The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb is her second.

The Page 69 Test: Alice I Have Been.

The Page 69 Test: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.

My Book, The Movie: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.

Writers Read: Melanie Benjamin (August 2011).

The Page 69 Test: The Aviator's Wife.

Writers Read: Melanie Benjamin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Dispatches from Sundance 2013: 4

Ray Taras regularly reviews world literature for the Campaign for the American Reader and has represented the site at the Sundance Film Festival since 2008.

Taras's fourth report from Sundance 2013 (read Dispatches from Sundance 2013: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3):

Four Documentaries: The Stories We Tell; The Stuart Hall Project; Narco Cultura; We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

“I’ve always liked documentaries more than fictional narrative film,” says Canadian film director Sarah Polley. “I can sit through any documentary and it will be educational even if it’s terrible, but a bad feature film can make me want to die.” Let’s review four 2013 Sundance documentaries to gauge how valid such a claim is.

Polley has been coming to Sundance since 1999, when she was just nineteen, in support of films she has been cast in as well as the shorts, drama, and documentary she has directed. Her earlier dramatic feature, Away From Her, was based on a story by fellow Canadian Alice Munro and she is at work on her next one, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. But at this year’s festival she showcased Stories We Tell, a critically-acclaimed documentary that hit the major autumn film festivals in Venice, Toronto, and Telluride. It is in the Sundance Spotlight program which offers a “tribute to the cinema we love.”

After its screening this week Polley noted how essential it is to create narratives about our lives. The documentary comprises stories told by members of her family and their close friends about her parents. It leads to the discovery that Polley’s biological father is a Montreal writer. This fact (99.3% probability in the paternity test) in no way alters her loving relationship with her English-born stepfather – “Dad” she always calls him in the film.

Stories We Tell, then, is less about the art of storytelling (in which Alice Munro may be unrivalled) and more about how memory serves people in different ways. What the documentary has in common with Away From Her, which portrays an older man’s responses to his wife’s progressing Alzheimer’s, is a woman out of reach to nearly everybody (Polley’s frolicking mother in Stories We Tell) and a man elegantly responding to hurt (as Polley put it in a question-and-answer session).

Stories We Tell is not a pathos-drenched film, as you would expect from an animated, self-deprecating film director like Polley. “The word ‘celebrity’ wouldn’t even apply to what I am in Canada.” Summing up her week at Sundance, she cautions: “How destructive is it to sit for days on end and speak to people only about yourself, and not ask them any questions in return?” It can lead to becoming a total narcissist, she adds.
*   *   *
If my memory serves me right, it was about 1972 that I developed a new course, Film and Politics, which I taught at a university in the West Midlands. Watching The Stuart Hall Project made me realize why I had been drawn into the emerging field of communications studies (a second course I taught at that time was a History of the BBC): Stuart Hall was making a mark at the University of Birmingham with pioneering work in the new field of cultural studies.

But director John Akomfrah’s documentary focuses less on Jamaican-born Hall’s academic work, which hatched such vibrant fields today as migration studies, critical theory, and film studies,
John Akomfrah
as his radical politics embodied in the British intellectual journal New Left Review.

I asked what the catalyst had been for making the movie. Akomfrah told the story of listening to the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs on which Hall had stressed the importance of Miles Davis’s radical music to his life. The documentary’s powerful sound track features excerpts of Miles’ music from the 1950s through the 1980s.

“Stuart saw the film last week and was thrilled,” Akomfrah told us. As a social history of Britain spanning the period from the arrival of the first large groups of immigrants from the Commonwealth to the hyper-diversity the U.K. exhibits today, this informative documentary also succeeds in chronicling the provocative writings, media work, and times of Stuart Hall.
*   *   *
Shaul Schwarz
One of the most courageous of the documentary filmmakers this year has to be Shaul Schwarz, a former photojournalist. His Narco Cultura offers a first-hand look at Mexico’s powerful drug cartel originating in Culiacán, capital of the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The town’s garish, ever-expanding cemetery, which Schwarz and his crew were able to visit in vans provided by narco bosses, is a symbol of how much wealth drug trafficking has brought to this previously unremarkable part of Mexico – and how much death.

Much of the film is shot in the strategic trafficking city of Ciudad Juarez which the Culiacán cartel has terrorized. Home to a business estimated to be worth more than $40 billion, close to 4,000 homicides took place in Juaraz in 2010 alone, a toll higher than all American combat deaths in Afghanistan since 2001. Fifty yards across the bridge in El Paso, five murders were committed that year making the city the safest in the United States.

Emphasizing his main theme of Americans’ studious obliviousness to Mexico’s drug wars, Schwarz put it this way: “No one wants to know what’s going on across the border.” To support this argument, the documentary explores the rising popularity of narcocorrido music in the United States.

Singing the praises of cartel heads and thugs who torture, maim, and behead, the best known of the Mexican-American bands tour and sell out performances from Los Angeles to North Carolina, and places in between. The film shows fans – young men and women - chanting lyrics about killing. Banned in Mexico itself, the drug ballads of the Movimiento Alterado, endorsed and embraced by the Sinaloa cartel, can be bought in a Walmart in the U.S.

Let’s set aside the familiar arguments about the U.S. as creating the demand for drugs and as supplying the weapons for drug wars in Mexico. Narco Cultura tells us that narco values and cultural practices have become cool in the U.S. They aid and abet Mexico’s drug wars while insidiously poisoning some of America’s most fundamental values.
*   *   *
“We steal secrets” is a phrase uttered by Stephen Hadley, former U.S. National Security advisor, to describe what American intelligence agencies do. So in the documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, the two principal foci of Alex Gibney’s film, have done nothing that the U.S. government doesn’t officially do.

Alex Gibney
It is Manning about whom we learn much new information, from his childhood to his life in the army where he expressed a desire to change gender identity even as he accessed and passed on secret U.S. cables from around the world. Why none of Manning’s superiors has been held responsible for allowing a troubled but computer savvy young man to steal from the stealers is a key question raised by Gibney. Manning’s introspection about his gender identity and sexual orientation largely makes us sympathetic to his actions – not his principles against unjust war and occupation.

 The documentary treats Assange differently. Covering not much new ground about the world’s best known hacker, through a series of interviews with people he has worked we observe how he becomes steadily abandoned and isolated. From Mick Jagger star power at the height of his fame, “Assange has become little more than a paranoid hermit hiding out at the Ecuadorian embassy in England,” writes Eric Hynes this week about his interview with Gibney for the official Sundance daily report.

Assange has pointed out that googling the word “rape” will produce hundreds of thousands of hits about him even though he has never even been charged with this crime. Gibney’s original contribution to the Assange case is an interview in Sweden with his principal accuser Anna A. From his initial assumption that the criminal investigation of Assange was a “stunt,” Gibney has now concluded that “this isn’t a ridiculous case.”

In her interview the accuser asserts that she cannot discuss the Assange case as it is under legal review. All we have, then, are her style and tone which seem cocksure and intimidating. Some may be reminded of past interviews with Lance Armstrong. Gibney does himself no good in striving to tell the WikiLeaks story by interviewing a woman who is emphatic that Manning and WikiLeaks are topics separate from Assange.

To examine secrets in Sweden, Gibney would do well to learn from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy with its presumption of a powerful Stockholm political establishment which spawns a corrupt underworld. This is a subject skillfully and repeatedly treated in earlier fictional explorations of corruption in this country. Plausible explanations for why Assange ran aground in Sweden may be found, then, in fictional narrative film (and literature) about Sweden. It is not always the case, as Sarah Polley has suggested, that documentaries invariably are more informational than fiction.--Ray Taras

Ray Taras is professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans where he also directed its World Literature Program until Hurricane Katrina forced its closure. Comparative literature and world cinema have been teaching and research interests of his for many years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Robertson's "The Original Compromise"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Original Compromise: What the Constitution's Framers Were Really Thinking by David Robertson.

About the book, from the publisher:
What were the Founding Fathers really thinking when they gathered in the Pennsylvania State House to draft the United States Constitution? When answering this question, most have relied on The Federalist Papers, which was first published in book form after the close of the Convention, in 1788. To this day, the book's status is sacrosanct for most Americans. Yet as David Brian Robertson shows, the Papers represented one side of the debate and does not fully capture the political sensibilities that produced the U.S. Constitution. Robertson, drawing from the full range of contemporary sources and not just the Papers, provides a truly authoritative account of the founders' collective political reasoning during the Convention.

Organized thematically, each chapter covers a crucial Constitutional issue: the respective roles of the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature; the balance between the federal government and the states; slavery; and war and peace. In virtually every instance, the process was decidedly political, fractious, and piecemeal. As much as they wanted to design the government that would best serve their people, the Founders struggled to balance their broad ideals with self-interested policies and procedures. Robertson's boldly revisionist account of the political horse-trading that dominated the Convention not only greatly enriches our understanding of the nation's founding; it also elucidates why the government they created has proven so difficult to use.
Learn more about The Original Compromise at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Original Compromise.

--Marshal Zeringue